Lounge for 09 Jun 2012

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

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Saturday, June 9, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 23

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

SEX SELLS Squeezed out by the changing nature of the trade and roller­coaster redevelopment, commercial sex workers begin their departure from India’s largest red­light district. >Pages 10­12

THE GLAMOUR GAMES >Page 7

THE KINGDOM OF QUEEN MARY The world’s best amateur woman boxer wants to end her career with a final flourish—a medal at the 2012 London Games >Page 8

DESIGN IN ITS DNA? Calling this city of 10 million the ‘world design capital’ isn’t hollow branding, but telling insight into what makes this metropolis tick >Page 13

A popular photograph of Kamathipura in the 1970s.

The grills were installed on ground­floor brothels for safety but were often mistaken as an attempt to create exhibition spaces.

REPLY TO ALL

THE GOOD LIFE

AAKAR PATEL

URDU’S MOST UNDERRATED POETS

I

had finished writing a book review and was going through it once when I stopped at a line I had written. I had written that the great poets of Urdu were four: Mir, Ghalib, Iqbal, Faiz. This is the accepted wisdom and I had accepted it. The quartet of Mir-Ghalib-Iqbal-Faiz is seen indisputably as the high watermark of Urdu poetry. But why? This was the question that struck me when I was re-reading my line. Here I stopped, because it was immediately clear that two men exist who are the most underrated writers of Urdu. More about them later. >Page 4

GAME THEORY

SHOBA NARAYAN

USING SCENTS TO TELL STORIES

P

erfumer Serge Lutens and I are sitting in a suite in the Ritz Paris hotel, discussing scents and their origins. An interpreter sits between us, translating between his French and my English. “The raw materials for most perfumes came from India,” Lutens says.

“Indian and Arab cultures have a deep-rooted tradition of perfume.” Seventy-year-old Lutens is the founder of an eponymous line of perfumes that has an “extraordinarily devoted cult following”... >Page 4

ROHIT BRIJNATH

WHY WE DON’T GET VISHY’S GENIUS

S

habana Azmi, the actor, interprets tales elegantly and tells intriguing ones too.

In Rohtak, she recently recounted, she was set to perform an English version of Girish Karnad’s Broken Images, when an organizer noted that a majority of the audience did not comprehend the language.

Whereupon she, the only actor on stage, translated the entire play in her head and performed her dialogues in Hindi. The sheer ingenuity of it, the calm, the... >Page 5

ART’S WORLD CUP Four South Asian artists will participate in dOCUMENTA (13), contemporary art circuit’s most coveted platform, which opens in Germany today >Page 17

About the book...

The New Age Entrepreneurs is a collection of vignettes of thirty successful entrepreneurs from the southern states who made their own rules and set standards for the rest of the industry to follow. These trailblazers delved into diverse industries, ranging from information technology to luxury hotels and Indian sweets.

The entrepreneurs were selected from a shortlist of a few hundred that was vetted by audit firm Grant Thorton by a panel comprising of distinguished luminaries.

The book has snappy, insightful, and motivating tales, interspersed with interviews and vivid profiles.

The book is also the result of a collaboration between the southern region office of the Confederation of Indian Industry, catalysed by Sequoia Capital.

Available at all leading book stores across India

HOME PAGE L3

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEW | GALAXY S III

FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

T

he Samsung Galaxy S III is the latest Android phone on the market, and many would also call it the best. It faces stiff competition from HTC’s flagship phone, the One X, but there is little else in the market that even comes close to the S III. The phone has a 4.8-inch display, a quad-core 1.4GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, 16 GB internal storage, a microSD slot, a removable 2100mAh battery, and weighs 133g. It has an 8 MP camera that is very similar to the iPhone 4S’, but the software has been modified for the S III. Premium Android phones such as the HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S III sound great on paper, but there are actually few apps that make use of the hardware. For the most part, having a quad-core device like this one won’t improve your experience with the phone.

Games are one area where these high-end phones really shine, along with full HD video playback. If these are things that interest you, then a phone like the S III is worth considering.

The good stuff The S III has one of the best screens around—the colours are rich, deep, and despite its huge size, it runs at 306ppi (Apple’s benchmark for retina display). Critics say the Pentile technology results in poorer images, but users will likely disagree.

The phone has a removable battery and memory card, unlike other premium devices, and this adds flexibility for users. You can charge a second battery in case you’re planning on long stretches away from a charger, and if 16 GB isn’t enough for you, you can add up to 64 GB extra memory.

At the same time, a full charge lasts over 24 hours with calls, gaming, photography and dictation, and the phone also comes with 50 GB of free Dropbox storage.

The camera is excellent, taking pictures in less than a second, with a burst mode and a lot of other extra filters and features. It is only outperformed in low light by the HTC One X, but for Facebook and Instagram, it’s more than competent. There’s also Buddy Photo Share—face recognition that matches contacts to the photos you take, which are automatically tagged to upload to Facebook. The photo can also be mailed to everyone in the shot.

There’s a host of other smart features too. S Voice is Samsung’s version of Siri, and while it was a little better at understanding my accent, it has almost the same features. Smart Stay keeps the screen active for as long as you’re looking at it, so it doesn’t blank out when you’re reading a book or a Web page.

D­DAY IS HERE

T

hese days the husband and I squabble about only one topic: Babyjaan.

I believe motherhood has softened most of my hard edges (even if my colleagues and family haven’t noticed), and much to my surprise, I am the more easy-going of Babyjaan’s parents. There’s an odd mismatch in the discipline genes of Susegad (him) vs South Bombay (me).

We’re constantly PARENTING debating the issue. I say he’s too strict, he says our precocious toddler is taking me for a ride.

For the first time in my life, I even used the Hinduism card. The scriptures advise there’s no point trying too hard to discipline a child until she turns 5, I said (although they were talking about corporal punishment, I know).

So when we were drinking with a friend recently we asked him how he and his wife divvy up parental power.

“Oh, she sets the rules, I execute them,” he said.

Hmm. Not that easy to do when you’re married to a man who has the ability to cook gourmet food for the baby and you every day, right?

And who is as good a mother as you will ever be.

Another friend suggested we try the All American Time Out approach.

That good old “I’m counting to three and I want you to do it before I complete” strategy. Babyjaan is obviously made of sterner stuff. “1, 2...,” I said.

“3,” she completed happily.

Of course millions of experts have debated toddler discipline and come up with extremely helpful tips such as take charge, set limits. I have my own mantra to add to the garbage of generalities. “Be nice,” I tell Baby-

jaan. I even bought her a T-shirt with that slogan.

I think the husband and me have finally reached an uneasy truce. We calmly announce that she will be punished, then, if she persists, we take her to the nearest room and firmly shut the door. One minute for a one-yearold, 2 minutes for a two-year-old, the friend who recommended the Time Out approach instructed. Babyjaan just turned 2 but thus far, I’ve only managed to grip the door handle tightly for 40 seconds before my heart explodes in response to her plaintive Mama-Papa, Mama-Papa chant.

Yes I know she’s conning me, but the way I figure, this country already has more than its share of disciplined women. I’d rather my daughter grow up knowing exactly how to stir things up.

Write to me at lounge@livemint.com

S WI P EF ORC L ARI T Y

The not­so­good The phone is made of plastic and doesn’t feel as solid as other premium devices. The Lumia 900, One X and iPhone 4S all feel much more reassuring to hold than the S III. The phone is also a little too big to hold and operate comfortably with one hand. Making a call or sending a text is not a great experience on a phone this size. Some users are also reporting problems with voice quality—though I personally didn’t have any problems.

The automatic brightness adjustments are jarring, and leave the screen dimmer than it should be—I had to change brightness setting to manual within just an hour of use. Smart Stay is a great feature, when it works. But it only works if the lighting is good, and the phone is held at the proper angle to get your face in front of the camera, so it’s hit or miss. Also, while S Voice is better at picking up my accent than Siri, it’s a lot slower, in my experience.

Talk plastic The phone is available for `43,180 from Samsung stores. However, online sites such as Seventymm.com and Tradus.in are already offering it for `38,900.

Gopal Sathe ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: NIK WHEELER/SYGMA/CORBIS CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “Our cool idea is your cool idea”, 2 June, founder, managing director and chairman Nikhil Contractor owns ad agency Ment Element Multimedia Pvt. Ltd, the holding company of Idea Vigilante, and Mathew D’Souza, chief operating officer at Idea Vigilante, is manager, operations, at Ment Element.

TheMi nti Phonea pp Av ai l abl eont he

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Mir, Ghalib, Iqbal, Faiz. The list isn’t complete

I

AFP

had finished writing a book review and was going

through it once when I stopped at a line I had written.

I had written that the great poets of Urdu were four: Mir, Ghalib, Iqbal, Faiz. This is the accepted wisdom and I had accepted it. The quartet of Mir-Ghalib-

Iqbal-Faiz is seen indisputably as the high watermark of Urdu poetry.

But why? This was the question that struck me when I was re-reading my line.

Here I stopped, because it was immediately clear that two men exist who are the most underrated writers of Urdu. More about them later.

First, let’s look at Iqbal. His greatness rests on the fact that he gave India’s Muslims direction. His poetry urged them to modernize by recreating the past. His most famous work is Shikwa (Complaint) which has this line: Kalma padhtay they ham chaaon mein talwaaron ki (We recited “La ilaha il Allah Muhammad-ur-Rasul Allah” in the shade of our swords).

This is stirring poetry. I cannot deny that whenever I listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sing Shikwa after having a few, I want to mount my horse and charge at the infidels.

This is the thought that produced Pakistan. Would Iqbal today himself want authorship of Pakistan? I’m not sure he would want his byline on that.

Like Iqbal, Faiz was an ideological poet. In his writing the problem lay with the nature of the state or the tyranny of the ruler.

He may have lived long enough (he died in 1984) to see that the problem on the subcontinent lay in the people and not the system, but his work rarely reflected that.

Both Iqbal and Faiz are seen by their fans as being great because of their content as much as for their style. After I commented about how difficult a Faiz recitation by Zia Mohyeddin was, he wrote to me. Here’s what Mohyeddin said about Faiz’s content and language: Faiz Sahib is a romantic poet—period.

His idealistic and his ‘committed’ poetry is soaked in romanticism. The remark I made was “Some people are under the impression that Faiz Sahib’s poetry is entirely political or ‘reformistic’ (samaj sudhar), but he was a poet as well!”

Faiz Sahib (I keep saying Sahib because my upbringing forbids me to say Faiz. Had I not known him and known him well, I would have referred to him as Faiz) is not a difficult poet—not at all. Of all the major Urdu poets of the 20th century, he is the one most easily understood. A few cognoscente hold it against him. The Persian vocabulary that he employs has been the common currency of Urdu poets from Sauda to Ghalib to Dagh. Of course, people not used to listening to Urdu would find it difficult. Three fourths of the poems I chose did not have a single word of Persian. Ah well!

But it is true that Indians will find Faiz difficult because Urdu poets indulge in far too much Persian.

Ghalib is accused by Bahadur Shah Zafar’s courtiers in Gulzar’s serial of writing lines nobody could follow. Like

Revolutionary road: Even his fan Dilip Kumar once said that Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry can be difficult to understand.

this one: Naqsh-e-faryadi hai kis ki shokhi-e tehreer ka. Sarfaraz Niazi (Love Sonnets of Ghalib) battles with it and comes up with: “Against whose playful writing are the words complainants?”

I found this translation, which claimed to be simple, online. “Of whose mischievous liberty is the mirror a plaintiff?”

Naqsh-e-Faryadi, incidentally, is the title of Faiz’s first published compilation.

Let us see what Dilip Kumar, who cannot be accused of being unfamiliar with Urdu, has to say in a television interview after struggling to read a Faiz couplet: “Khas taur pe, Faiz sahab ke chahnaywalon mein kitne log aise hain jo kahein ke kuch koshish se samjha aur

kuch samajh mein nahin aaya. Un mein ek main bhi hoon” (Faiz’s admirers include many who say: “I made an effort and understood some lines but other lines not at all.” I’m among them).

That programme, a special on Faiz, also featured Shabana Azmi.

She admits what Gulzar told me once: that she cannot read Urdu—the daughter of Kaifi Azmi and wife of Javed Akhtar!

Shabana says (speaking in English) Faiz is “my most favourite poet in the world.

And this includes Keats, Shakespeare and Ghalib.”

This comes from her upbringing in a severely socialist atmosphere. Her father and mother lived in the famous Andheri commune of the Communist Party. Shabana loves the idea of what Faiz stands for more than the words he has actually written. She proves this by saying in an embarrassed fashion that she tried to recount two of his poems to Faiz, but he told her what she had recited was Mir and Zafar.

Faiz was a poet of revolution. He wrote to inspire people to it. The people who loved him most were socialists, like his British translator Victor Kiernan. The number of socialist revolutions Faiz’s poetry inspired is zero.

Shabana should consider instead a writer of more effective poetry, whose lines have been deployed by grateful, inarticulate men in their successful seduction of tens of millions of Indian and Pakistani women.

She should turn to look at the man sleeping next to her instead.

I think Akhtar and Gulzar are two great poets who are underrated. This is not because of the quality of their work, but where it is used and that is unfair to them.

Indian poetry is different from Western poetry in one key respect. European poetry is read. Indian poetry is recited.

The most popular lines of Ghalib are not those people have read themselves, but those they’ve heard.

How much of Iqbal and Faiz has been heard? Indeed, how much of it has ever been recited or sung? A little here by Noor Jahan, a little there by Abida Parveen. Gulzar and Akhtar have been enjoyed a thousand-fold, even a million-fold more. More need not be said about the quality of their work because we are all familiar with it.

Each one of us has experienced the sensation of lying on cool, white bedsheets, observing the stars from the terrace on a summer night. These descriptions of India make Dil dhoondta hai phir wahi, fursat kay raat din by Gulzar as good a poem as anything in the classical canon of Urdu.

Akhtar’s Yeh kahan aa gaye hum is to my mind the finest love song ever written by an Indian.

And so I thought I’d correct that mistake I made in the review. With your permission I’m revising the quartet to a sextet: Mir-Ghalib-Iqbal-Faiz-Gulzar-Akhtar.

Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist.

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

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Using scents to tell stories

P

erfumer Serge Lutens and I are sitting in a suite in the Ritz Paris hotel, discussing scents and their origins. An interpreter sits between us, translating between his French and my English. “The raw materials for most perfumes

came from India,” Lutens says. “Indian and Arab cultures have a deep-rooted tradition of perfume.”

Seventy-year-old Lutens is the founder of an eponymous line of perfumes that has an “extraordinarily devoted cult following”, according to perfume blog Now Smell This (www.nstperfume.com). His life has been just as extraordinary. After growing up in the north of France (Lille), Lutens trained as a hairdresser and moved to Paris. Vogue magazine hired him as a stylist and make-up artiste.

During the 1960s, he collaborated with celebrated photographers such as Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. In 1967, Christian Dior hired him to design their make-up line. He also created photographs and documentaries that were shown at the Guggenheim and Cannes Film Festival, respectively. In 1980, he signed on with Japanese cosmetic firm Shiseido to create his line of perfumes. A few FiFi Awards for original concept later, the French government gave him the title of the “Commandeur” of the Order of Arts and Letters. Like the late Yves St Laurent and Pierre Bergé before him, Lutens moved to Marrakesh and lives there now.

I had read about Lutens in fashion glossies when I walked into his swanky shop at the Palais Royal, near Musée du Louvre. I didn’t know that perfume blogs breathlessly dissected his perfumes; or that scent cognoscenti heralded new releases with near-feverish anticipation.

The dim-lit room has tester bottles of the 50-odd scents that Lutens has created. Each bears a poetic name, written in the Latin botanical style, with the first word in capital and the second, not. Ambre sultan is a best-seller; El attarine has oud; Tubéreuse criminelle smells as potent as it sounds; De profundis uses chrysanthemum, a rarely used flower that signifies death in many cultures. It is the one I end up buying.

After an entrancing hour of being engulfed by myrrh and sandalwood iris and mandarin, lilies and musk, I ask the shop attendant if I can meet the creator.

I know Mr Lutens lives in Marrakesh, I say. I just wondered if he might visit Paris in the next few days.

As it turns out, he is visiting Paris to launch a new perfume: Santal majuscule, based—serendipitously— on Indian sandalwood. I ask for an appointment. A few days later, I am ushered into a suite at the Ritz by his

attendants. Since Lutens speaks only French and I don’t, there is an interpreter at hand.

Frail and birdlike, with an aquiline face and sharp features, Lutens is a compact man with the bright eyes of a sparrow. He walks in and greets us with a polite “Enchanté”, and talks in poetic sweeps about scents and identities.

Later, when prodded, he discusses sandalwood, the scent of his new fragrance. Sandalwood trees are like vampires, he says with a mischievous grin. “Their roots spread out over 30ft,” he says. I describe the protected sandalwood tree on a street in Bangalore. Policemen come to check its status frequently, I say. Nobody is allowed to cut it.

Lutens loves “Inde”, or India. He doesn’t travel much but is incredibly curious about other cultures. His friends go on voyages, he says, and bring back souvenirs or memories. He stores them all in his mind where they become fodder for the stories he tells through perfume. “Writers use words to tell stories. I use scents,” he says.

Psychologists say that of all our senses, smell is the most intangible. It plumbs deepest into our hearts and souls. Try articulating how something smells and you’ll confront—very quickly—the limits of language. The language of perfume is the language of the soul; of memories; of gestures and heart. It takes us back to our deepest selves; to our childhood; to the storehouse of sensations. Lutens thinks that we store 550,000 sensual memories—of taste and smell—by the time we are 7. The reason we are

FRANCESCO BRIGIDA

Fragrance king: Serge Lutens’ latest perfume is based on sandalwood. drawn to different scents is because they evoke memories from our past.

“The earth is the original perfumer,” he says. “Through wind and rain; through rivers and water; through trees and flowers, nature reveals her scents and secrets. Man just translates. If you are good, you create a scent that causes good vibrations; you create something sacred.”

Indians are naturally drawn towards perfume. They inhabit our most ancient texts where heroes and heroines adorned themselves with fragrant champak and jasmine flowers; cooled their bodies with sandal paste; massaged oil infused with musk into their hair; and chewed on cardamom and clove before kissing their lovers. Perfume is part of

our original sin, and we were adept at blending essential oils to evoke different moods: incense for spirituality; tuberose garlands on the “first night” after marriage; floating marigolds for beauty and harmony; and scented jasmine strings in the hair.

Lutens thinks blending perfumes is like creating stories. “It is like a new language with a different syntax and colour,” he says. “It is how we connect with our past.”

This is why he has little use for today’s fashion. Suddenly, he gets up and does a hilarious imitation of fashion models strutting around the room with “stark bodies and cold faces”. He thinks fashion, beauty and art ought to be anchored with our past—both personal and cultural. “Indians and Arabs still have that connection,” he says. “Your saris are so chic, so elegant. It tells the world who you are. In Europe, we’ve lost that connection to our identity. It is all about luxury brands and marketing.

We’ve lost our identity; our soul.”

What touches your soul, dear reader?

Sari or shift dress? Bandhgala or Hugo Boss? Airy dhotis or tight denims?

Sandalwood or Sisley? In your answer lies India’s fashion destiny.

Sandalwood is all very well but the smell that touches Shoba Narayan’s soul has to do with hot lemon rasam and strong filter coffee. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

COLUMNS L5

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ROHIT BRIJNATH GAME THEORY

Why we don’t understand Vishy’s genius

S

KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP

habana Azmi, the actor, interprets tales elegantly and tells intriguing ones too. In Rohtak, she recently recounted, she was set to perform an English version of Girish Karnad’s Broken Images, when an organizer noted that a majority

of the audience did not comprehend the language. Whereupon she, the only actor on stage, translated the entire play in her head and performed her dialogues in Hindi. The sheer ingenuity of it, the calm, the confidence, is staggering, and when she dissected her craft after a performance in Singapore, it was like she was briefly stripping away the epidermis of her art and taking us deeper inside what makes her an actor.

It is what world chess champion Viswanathan Anand has to do. Not through an interview, or conversation, but a book. Because the tragedy that stalks this remarkable man is that most of us—those who think the Sicilian Rossolimo is an Italian spaghetti dish (it’s apparently a variation on a famous defence) and that ELO is an old rock band (actually a chess rating system)—have a limited idea of his greatness.

He is genius hidden behind a buttoned-down demeanour; he is brilliance locked away. Think of it like this: Eventually it took a supercomputer, in a second attempt, to defeat Garry Kasparov, which suggests only the astonishing computing power men like Anand own. Yet, while we see him win, and we celebrate his win, many of us, who thought Kolkata’s Alekhine Chess Club was a hideaway only for gaggles of geeks, don’t know how, or why, he wins.

He is a champion we don’t understand and thus cannot entirely appreciate.

The issue isn’t Anand, it’s just chess. As a sport, it’s a wonderful but opaque and internal activity. While concentration of this type requires physical reserves, it is the essential sitting-still combat. Two men huddled over a board like wartime generals over a miniature battlefield of 64 squares which offer unlimited permutations, yet cling-filmed in mystery.

No one moves, only pieces. Even then, only after a while, and there is, presumably, a pleasure in the waiting, in the anticipation, in the expected or unexpected launch of an idea. But we miss this beauty because we’re unsure of the activity in his head, the calculation,

the clarity, the jumble of theories, the reaching into memory, the creation of bluff, the studied face, the tiny fidgets (do they read body language? Surely, yes).

What he does know—and we don’t, really—is how incredibly hard it is. With the swinging cricket ball or the hockey dribble we feel a sense of familiarity, for at least we’ve been there, we’ve bowled a ball and wielded a stick. More tellingly, these sports—unlike chess—own a visual appeal, a muscle, an athleticism, an aesthetic, an evident geometry, which allows us to be fulfilled even without complete understanding. You don’t need to be a Jonathan Wilson-like tactical guru to appreciate football, or figure out the complex plays in the US’ National Football League to be charmed by the quarterback’s balanced vision and accuracy. Even rowing, a slightly obscure sport, has an obvious effort, a clear symmetry, a sense of boat knifing water.

Yet it would take David Halberstam to write The Amateurs for me to journey deeper into its mechanics, to be offered insight into the rower’s psyche and their almost masochistic wearing of pain.

Anand needs to take us on this journey.

His sport has its own specific beauty but we’re blind and deaf to it. In his moves there must be a music we can’t hear and a dance of pieces we can’t see; there must be a creativeness we fail to applaud and a brutality we don’t feel (Nigel Short apparently once said, “Chess is ruthless, you’ve got to be prepared to kill people”).

It is, one presumes, alive with vanity, filled with subterfuge, thick with intimidation but all veiled from us. We understand the concept of pressure, but cannot relate it specifically to chess, cannot know precisely what Boris Spassky meant when he told Kasparov about the gradual application of pressure, even if his words were well chosen. Kasparov wrote in his book How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves—From the Board to the Boardroom: “‘Squeeze his balls’, Spassky told me unforgettably, ‘but just squeeze one, not both’.”

If I know a little of this, it is from

Mind game: We don’t celebrate the genius of our most consistent individual champ because we can’t hear the music in his moves. scattered reading; from occasional long-ago interviews with Anand where he pried open the game and showed me part of its entrails; from a small excerpt taken from Stefan Zweig’s novella, The Royal Game: “Children can learn its simple rules, duffers succumb to its temptations, yet within this immutable tight square it creates a particular species of master not to be compared with any other—persons destined for chess alone, specific geniuses in whom patience, vision and technique are operative through a distribution no less precisely ordained than in mathematics, poets, composers, but merely united on a different level.”

This species of master Anand, a mathematician and composer in his own right, is what befuddles us, is beyond the normal curve of writers like me. He has memory, but in chess we’re uncertain how it works; is it a general photographic recall, is it something more nuanced?

He’ll tell us about homework and I can only imagine him, and his seconds, poring over a computer, a board, but beyond that it’s hard to tell. Novak Djokovic at practice can be broken down easily, but not Vishy. A repertoire of

forehands can be examined, but what of chess openings?

Anand speaks, as he must to us, in generalities, of Boris Gelfand frustrating him and coping with it, or critics sniping at his age and motivation and swallowing it. He seems to wear it with a calm, but even Vishy must rage, must fret, must conquer his own self, imprison his emotions, and it would be something to comprehend. What words and formulas quiver in his brain, what gets him out of bed—does he dream of ideas and leap out of the sheets with one?

We need to know because we are over-celebrators of cricketers to the point of a childish obsequiousness. Yet the most consistent individual champion among us is, alas, the man we least know. He won the world title in 2000 and now for the fifth time and no Indian, barring Mary Kom (do we know her art either?), has married talent to time so tellingly. But he must have aged as a player, not slipped but changed, and been forced to reinvent parts of himself, which we can see with Roger Federer, or even Sachin Tendulkar, this ability to stay relevant and alter strokes and tactics. Yet

with Anand this eludes us.

I know Vishy is special, but I, chess ignorant mostly, am also frustrated by my inability to recognize how special he is. It’s why he needs a writer who knows sufficient chess but writes with him a book that dives deeper than moving knights and attacking bishops. A book which peels him back, reveals his genius, charts his development, unravels his complexity, explains his strengths. A book that tells us what makes him great.

But let’s not leave it just to him. Let’s do our bit, too. Let’s open a chess book and learn the game and try a little to appreciate at least 3% of what makes him Vishy. It could be the best compliment we could give him.

Rohit Brijnath is a senior correspondent with The Straits Times, Singapore.

Write to Rohit at gametheory@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Rohit’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/rohit­brijnath

THINKSTOCK

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

LOVE IS A GROWING UP

M

y brain is saying go to sleep,” says Naseem, “but my heart wants to do colouring.”

“Whaaaa,” I say. “Can you say that again?”

“My heart is not listening to my brain. It wants to do colouring.”

It is late at night. We are speaking in whispers. I had just settled on the floor with my laptop, after the family had gone to sleep around me. Naseem is three years old, our youngest child. She has climbed out of bed to share her inner conflict with me. This is urgent.

We get a box of crayons and a white sheet of paper. We settle down again. Naseem draws circles and lines. She chooses her colours. Artists must listen to their heart. Particularly when they are in the middle of summer vacation.

I feel tired. My feet hurt. I fall off to sleep at unlikely hours, in unexpected places. Holding my bag like a pillow in my lap, snug in the women’s compartment of

the Delhi Metro. Sitting with my eyes shut, in the dentist’s waiting room, to avoid watching the evening news on the wall-mounted TV. Someone nudges me awake. I think it’s your turn.

“You do too much,” my mother will say. “Get some rest.

Learn to say no to some things.

Send the children to me for a couple of days.”

“You do too little,” says the voice in my head. “You are lazy and inefficient.” This voice also sounds uncannily like that of my parents. Now playing in a loop inside me.

Growing up means listening to everyone. Growing up means listening to everyone and then not listening to anyone. Let your sleep catch up with you wherever it finds you.

Sometimes I wake up with my jaw drooping. Fix the jaw, laugh at yourself and gather your wits again. Smile at strangers. You’re a grown-up. It’s safe.

Recovery: As children grow, you go from power naps to powering down.

My husband leans over my shoulder to read as I type.

“Go away,” I say, putting the screen down.

“Why, why, why?” he says.

“Please, I just started,” I say.

“It’s terrible right now, like vomit.”

“So,” he says, smiling. “You’re talking as if I haven’t seen your vomit before.”

Oh well. A rush of memories distracts me. Love is

remembering the times you threw up on your lover. Love is letting him read your first draft.

Hoping his phone will ring and take him away.

Naseem and I are sitting at the dining table. It is past 3 in the afternoon. The older children have settled with their books in their cool corners of the home.

Naseem didn’t eat lunch with the rest of us. She demands her own rhythm and the parent in me is

both patient enough and too tired to resist. It’s the youngest child syndrome. By now I feel that all the hard work that has gone into the fixing, moulding and reshaping of the older children was no particular favour to them.

“Mama, why do you scold me?” Naseem says. Her mouth shaped like a baby bird.

“I scold you?” I say.

“Oho, don’t you scold me sometimes?” she says.

“When?”

“When I do bad things.”

“You do bad things?” I say, my eyes doing most of the talking.

“Yes. When I beat my sisters, remember?”

“You beat your sisters?” I say, looking mildly horrified.

“Yes, don’t you know, I wear my chappals in my hands and run after them.”

“Really?” I say.

“Yes.” She laughs. She is looking embarrassed now. “Then you scold me.”

“Should I not scold you then?” I say.

“You should,” she says. She goes back to finishing her lunch.

Sometimes it startles me, how each child has brought out a completely different parent in us.

This summer vacation, our children have grown up. They don’t depend on me so much. I

can depend on them. I’m sure they feel I have grown up too.

When an afternoon lasts too long, I crawl into their circle and curl up into a nap.

I don’t call them power naps any more. I power down.

Why was this time so difficult? Why did we grouse, moan, whine, whimper so much? When I look back later, I may not remember. Or maybe there will be shining clarity.

Recovery is not a full stop. We are always recovering.

We are in the car, driving to my parents’ home. Old Hindi film songs surround us. Naseem is sitting in my lap.

“When I grow up, Mamma, I will read your articles,” she says, turning to look at me.

“Whaaaa,” I say. All over again.

On both sides of the road, summer trees, their branches flushed with flowers, rush past us.

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

Write to Natasha at mydaughtersmum@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Natasha’s previous columns at www.livemint.com/natasha­badhwar

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SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

The monk and the mango An Indian twist— with everyone’s favourite dark rum and mangoes—to a British dessert

PHOTOGRAPHS

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trifle is more a loose set of guidelines than a set recipe; as long as you have booze-soaked sponge, custard, thick cream and fruit, you have a trifle. It is basically a fruity British version of tiramisu, although in most people’s minds the latter seems to have a much higher glamour rating. In Britain most people have their own family favourite formula; ours was deeply inauthentic, cribbed from a 1970s Milk Marketing Board pamphlet, and consisted of a sliced up chocolate Swiss roll, doused in the juice from a tin of mandarin oranges, topped with the orange segments, Angel Delight, fresh cream and decorated with chocolate sprinkles. Naff, but there’s something special about the trifle you grew up with and I’m not sure it isn’t still my all-time favourite.

However, for my grown-up Indian version I decided mangoes and Old Monk were called for. The mangoes were easy to come by but the nation’s favourite tipple turned out to be harder to track down. Are we in the midst of a full-blown Old Monk crisis? None of the wine

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Trifle on the odd side: (clockwise from above, left) Make the batter at home; soak the sponge in Old Monk; and finish with pomegranate seeds. shops near my house had any in stock and I ended up having to raid a friend’s drinks cabinet.

Although a perfectly respectable trifle can be made with shop-bought trifle sponges and Bird’s instant custard, I thought it would be nice to make an orangey cake and fresh vanilla custard. I chose an old-fashioned English pound cake, so-called because they used to be made from a pound each of eggs, butter, sugar and flour. This involves a bit more work but the cake and custard can both be made a day ahead and the extra effort results in layer upon layer of cakey, boozy, fruity, custardy, creamy delight. Definitely one to give tiramisu a run for its money.

Mango and Old Monk Trifle Serves 6-8 Ingredients For the pound cake (alternatively, use a good-quality bought Madeira cake or a pack of trifle sponges) Separate three eggs and weigh them. Whatever the combined weight of yolks and whites is

(mine were 150g), use the same amount of caster sugar, unsalted butter and refined flour A pinch of salt Grated zest of 1 orange 3 tbsp orange juice For the custard 250ml cream 250ml milk K vanilla pod, split in half and seeds scraped out 5 egg yolks 2 level tsp cornflour 50g caster sugar For the trifle 2 mangoes, chopped 75-100ml Old Monk rum—if you find yourself in the midst of an Old Monk crisis, try sweet dessert wine 300ml whipping cream, whisked till thick Seeds from half a pomegranate

Method To make the pound cake: Melt the butter and leave to cool. Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius.

Grease a small loaf tin, approximately 9x21cm. Crack open the eggs and put the yolks and whites in separate bowls.

In a large bowl, whisk the egg whites until they form firm peaks.

In another bowl, whisk the egg

yolks and sugar until pale and creamy, then beat in the cooled butter. Fold in the flour and salt, then stir in the grated zest and juice. Very gently fold in the egg whites. Pour the cake batter into the loaf tin and bake for about 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until the cake is well risen and browned on top and a skewer comes out clean.

Turn the cake out on to a rack and leave to cool.

To make the custard: Heat the cream and milk in a small pan with the vanilla seeds. In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks, sugar and cornflour together. When the cream is hot take it off the heat and whisk it into the egg mixture.

Pour the mixture back into the pan and on a very low heat, cook the custard until thick. Take off the heat and leave to cool.

Both the cake and custard can be made a day before you want to make your trifle.

To assemble the trifle: Cut thick slices of cake to line a glass bowl (you’ll be left with a few

slices—cook’s treat!), then spoon over a few tablespoons of the rum.

Pile on the chopped mango, then cover with the cooled custard. Top with the whipped cream, then leave in the fridge for at least a couple of hours—although it’s difficult to hold back from sneaking a spoonful “to see if it’s ready”. Add the pomegranate seeds just before serving.

Note: The Old Monk really packs a punch in this recipe. If you prefer your rum hit a little more subtle, I would heat 100ml of Old Monk and let it bubble for a minute or two. Then stir in the juice of half an orange, left after making the cake. Drizzle this mixture over the sponge before proceeding with layers of fruit, custard, etc.

Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at Eatanddust.com Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com

www.livemint.com For a slide show on how to make Mango and Old Monk Trifle, visit www.livemint.com/monktrifle.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

HUNGRY PLANET | GARY RHODES

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

The great thing about the British A food ambassador spills on updating British classics and how he marries biryani with risotto B Y S HREYA R AY shreya.r@livemint.com

···························· e has six Michelin stars and an army of restaurants popularizing British cuisine across the world, but what makes chef-restaurateur-author Gary Rhodes the perfect ambassador for his country is his Brit wit. Brought in by the British high commission here as part of its GREAT campaign (to mark two special occasions on the UK calendar—the London Olympics and Queen Elizabeth’s 60th jubilee), Rhodes was at the Hyatt Regency Delhi from 23-27 May to popularize British cuisine. He makes for us the classic bread and butter pudding—turns it into a work of art—and shares secrets he has picked up from Indian kitchens.

Edited excerpts:

H

You have reintroduced Britain

to British cuisine...

For the first 8-10 years of my career, I only cooked French cuisine—through my training, and then in early professional life.

While at The Castle hotel (in Taunton, UK), where I was heading the kitchen, I realized we had such phenomenal local produce, and all of it should be utilized. I started on a mission: I read up on old British cookbooks, revisiting classics I’d grown up with. I wanted to introduce an elegance to the dishes that had become over-heavy. Over the two world wars, people started to cook as cheaply, and make food that lasted. This is when the cuisine became largely potato-and-flour-based.

How did you reinvent the British classics?

For instance, take the mashed potato. The potatoes you’re supposed to use are the Maris Piper variety, they have great texture, they’re fluffy, and versatile. When you add milk/cream/butter to it, it shows off its texture, rather than making it leathery. You are supposed to add cold butter and work it into the potato, instead of melted butter (mixing the butter in liquid form makes the potato oily and

heavy). Then there’s caramelized onion—slice them super thin, fry them at the lowest temperature possible and let its water release, so that its natural sugars naturally make it caramelize. People add sugar to caramelize onion. The idea should be to take a simple thing like that and show off the natural flavours it has to offer.

You said you’re “fussy” about where your bread and butter pudding is served, so it’s only in two of your restaurants around the world, and in only 20 portions. Why? When I was growing up, the thought of eating bread and butter pudding made me miserable. It was always an excuse for using up stale bread. When I decided to revisit English classics, this had to be one of my projects. The recipe relies on simplicity and accuracy of flavour—the bread should be about two-three days old (too fresh or too stale won’t give the right texture), and needs a rich freshly cooked vanilla custard; it’s caramelized on top rather than all over. I’m fussy because I want it just right. Just two places, one in Dubai and one in London, is where the chefs can do it perfect.

You travelled to India as part of your food show for the BBC, to

Detail therapy: Gary Rhodes (right) at the Hyatt Regency Delhi; and his bread and butter pudding. discover its culinary secrets.

Have you used any of them?

In 2005, I visited India for the first time, and that’s when I discovered the depth of flavours in the spices and how to use them. I have used some of this.

For instance, I have a brasserie in London which has a international menu, and we serve a Biryani Risotto there. The spices are roasted, like a traditional Indian kitchen, but instead of being slow-cooked, the biryani is cooked fast, like a risotto.

Gary Rhodes’ Signature Bread and Butter Pudding Serves 6-8 Ingredients 12 slices white bread, crusts removed and buttered on one side

50g unsalted butter, softened 8 egg yolks 175g caster sugar 1 vanilla pod, or 3-5 drops vanilla essence 300ml milk 300ml double cream 25 sultanas 25g raisins Caster sugar, a sprinkling, Method Grease a 1.7-litre pudding basin with butter. To make custard, whisk the egg yolks and caster sugar. Split the vanilla pod and place in a pan with the milk and cream. Bring the milk and cream to a simmer and then sieve the mixture on to the egg yolks, stirring all the time.

Arrange the bread in layers in the prepared basin, sprinkling

the sultanas and raisins in between layers. Finish with a final layer of bread without any fruit on top as this tends to burn.

Pour the warm egg mixture over the bread. Cook straightaway, or soak for 20 minutes before cooking—it allows the bread to take on a new texture and have the flavours all the way through.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Put the dish in a roasting tray three-quarters filled with warm water and place in the oven. Cook for 20-30 minutes, till it begins to set.

We’re not aiming for a thick custard here. When ready, remove from the water bath, sprinkle liberally with caster sugar to cover and glaze under the grill on medium heat, until the sugar caramelizes.

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SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012

L7

Style

LOUNGE TREND

The glamour Games are here This season, a bunch of athletic­inspired collections lets everyone look like a champ

B Y D ARRELL H ARTMAN ···························· ummer Olympics mania has arrived. It tends to do that every four years. But this time around there’s a difference: Fashion is really feeling it.

Traditionally, designers have hesitated to engage in an event that’s more about sweaty physical challenges than looking chic. Is it any surprise that when it came to clothing, the original Olympic athletes literally had no use for it?

But those days are ancient history. Today’s Games come with abundant commercial opportunities for clothing brands. This summer, for the first time in many years, the host city can legitimately lay claim to a sizeable fashion industry. And coincidence or not, this season’s collections are full of sporty looks. The

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Play on: (from above, left) The Calvin Klein Collection; Ruffian; Tommy Hilfiger; Akris; and Dries Van Noten.

bottom line? Designers are catering to athletes, fans and trend-following types who don’t know the difference between a marathon and a medley relay.

Unsurprisingly, the sports trend first burgeoned on the runways for spring. Prada’s collection for men embraced the wackiness of the golf course, right down to a branded collection of clubs. At Isabel Marant, models stalked the catwalk in sexed-up mesh tops and retro football jerseys, while Alexander Wang drew from the worlds of motocross and Nascar racing for tough women’s looks, and even turned stadium seating maps into prints.

On the streets of London, the sports-and-fashion synergy is showing: Trendsetting houses such as Rag & Bone and Opening Ceremony are (or seem to be) timing new London stores and pop-ups to coincide with the Olympics, which probably won’t be the case in Sochi, Russia, for the 2014 Winter Games. Established UK brands have also been eager to set up shop. Adidas by Stella McCartney—who is designing the uniforms for Team Great Britain—opened its first stand-alone

store last month and Burberry is putting the finishing touches on its Regent Street flagship, due to open this summer.

Nor do smaller labels, especially British ones, plan on missing out. Among the many examples: a limited-edition Olympics jacket from Katherine Hooker, a Kate Middleton favourite; Oliver Spencer’s backpack collaboration with German outfitters Seil Marschall; and men’s swim trunks from Orlebar Brown that come printed with images of javelin throwers, divers and other Olympic athletes.

One influential pusher of sport-inspired fashion has been Italo Zucchelli, menswear designer for the Calvin Klein Collection, whose latest spring offering reflects the sports field more than usual. “I wanted to convey the idea of movement, of sportiness, of athleticism,” Zucchelli says. That he did, with laser-cut fabrics that add a shimmery sense of motion, and zippered track pants. Zucchelli also developed an oversize weave he referred to as “piqué on steroids”, a typically progressive touch that tennis aficionados might read as a comment on the

way tennis has evolved since the René Lacoste era.

Aristocratic pastimes have always exerted considerable pull in menswear, and nowhere was it as evident this season as at Moncler Gamme Bleu, where Thom Browne built an entire collection around fencing. With slim breeches, groin straps, jackets that incorporated off-centre fastenings and even gloves and wire masks, Browne took the concept—executed mostly in pristine white—to a typically playful and thought-provoking extreme. The designer, however, claims the sport served as more of a guiding idea than a template. “It’s not as though I did any literal comparison with actual fencing uniforms,” he wrote by email.

In today’s menswear, the sports element often comes with a dose of nostalgia. The lightweight-flannel drawstring trousers in E. Tautz’s spring collection—a “luxury track pant”, as designer Patrick Grant described them—look like something the heroes of Chariots of Fire might want to warm up in. In this mission to bring back tailored sportswear in the age of Dri-Fit and Under Armour, Grant has aligned himself with designers as diverse as Michael Bastian and Dries Van Noten.

Similarly, Coach Men’s released a limited collection of wallets made from recycled baseball mitts recently (according to a spokesperson, the 200 pieces sold out in two weeks). The New Yorkbased company also turned out

leather gym bags based on an archival design and enlisted an American manufacturer to create a baseball using its own caramelcoloured saddle leather.

Just as Browne’s jackets will not be used for swordplay, it’s doubtful anyone who buys Coach’s luxury baseball will take a bat to it.

Like Browne, only more overtly, Band of Outsiders designer Scott Sternberg has turned sports into the stuff of affectionate satire. His fledgling line, This Is Not A Polo Shirt, has expanded from “a meditation on the polo shirt” (in which a breast pocket is sewn on the inside, for example, to emphasize its pointlessness) to a commentary on the aspirational element inherent in items like the track suit and the ski jacket.

“I love this feeling of leisure that somehow involves a Scotch and a cigar, with a sport in the background,” Sternberg says, adding that his armchair looks often evoke 1970s suburbia.

But at women’s labels, contemporary (as opposed to retro) sport seems to be playing a more prevalent role. At Versus, Donatella Versace and Christopher Kane

WSJ

channelled basketball and ultramodern training regimes with dresses made of high-shine jersey and prints inspired by machinegenerated cardio readings.

According to Marcus Wainwright, co-founder of Rag & Bone, it’s not the full-on athletic look that’s in, but mixing sporty elements with something unconventional: a spandex blazer, say, or pairing a silky warm-up pant with a tailored top. “People are so familiar at this point with seeing girls who have just left the gym in head-to-toe Lululemon. But there’s a yearning, a gap in the market, for more fashion-inspired athletic wear,” he says.

Few have tapped into it as successfully as Lisa Marie Fernandez.

The designer’s neoprene swimsuits hit a sweet spot when she launched her label in 2008. “It sculpts the body and moulds to it, and it gives great support and great cleavage,” she said. Her swimwear pieces for Peter Pilotto enhanced the sporty vibe of a collection that might have been designed for chic mermaids surfacing for a cocktail party in the South Pacific. “There’s no separation between church and state any more,” Fernandez says.

“Sport is fashion.”

It’s no surprise, then, that indemand designers are partnering with apparel giants like never before. Opening Ceremony has also teamed up with Adidas for a sports-themed collection that includes padded shorts inspired

by BMX biking. And with Nike’s blessing, emerging Londonbased designer Thomas Tait somewhat pointedly paired his youthful spring runway looks with customized versions of the sportswear titan’s popular Free running shoe.

“High fashion does not just cater to the lady who lunches or the rich daddy’s girl any more,” Tait says. “A lot of the women who buy my work, and some of the brands I admire and respect, are women who have worked hard (and) live active lives.”

Stella McCartney is hardly the only fashion designer dressing athletes for London. Ralph Lauren is outfitting the US Olympic and Paralympic teams for the opening and closing ceremonies and Giorgio Armani unveiled his official kit for Team Italy last month while the country’s sailing team will be wearing Prada.

Indeed, in the contest to outfit athletes, Italian labels seem to be the front-runners. Gucci announced in March that it would continue designing equestrian outfits for Charlotte Casiraghi, the world’s most glamorous show jumper. Moreover, Dolce & Gabbana’s (D&G’s) leap into the ring has coincided rather noticeably with triumphant results: Milano Thunder won this year’s World Series Boxing title and the Chelsea soccer club were crowned champs of the prestigious Champions League—both in uniforms designed by the Italian house.

With plenty of gold on the line this summer, what athlete (or fashion fan) wouldn’t want a little of D&G’s Midas touch?

Write to wsj@livemint.com

L8

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SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012

Play

LOUNGE

BOXING

The kingdom of Queen Mary The world’s best amateur woman boxer wants to end her career with a final flourish—a medal at the 2012 London Games

Every fortnight we focus on an athlete or a discipline for an inside look at their efforts to secure an Olympic medal in London 2012.

LOUNGE SERIES

B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com

···························· he strides in with an imperious air of ownership, haughty yet calm, and stops to survey the room. A hush descends on the boxing hall at the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports in Patiala. The 30-odd women boxers in the room all stop doing whatever they are doing to look at Mangte Chungneijang Merykom, better known as Mary Kom, standing in the doorway. They offer their respect with small nods of the head before resuming practice.

In this kingdom, Kom is the all-conquering supreme power—Queen Mary, the invincible. The only woman in the world to have won medals in six editions of the Aiba Women’s World Boxing Championships on the trot. The only woman to have won the championship five times. And now the only Indian to have qualified for the inaugural women’s boxing event at the 2012 London Olympics starting next month.

“It’s my final battle, the last challenge left for me,” Kom says.

“And then it’s finished, I’m done.”

But right now, she is only just b e g i n n i n g . T h e road to the Olympics is longer and harder than any she has walked before, and it has come late in her life, almost at the end of her wildly successful career.

“For 10 years I’ve thought about it, obsessed about it, dreamt about it,” Kom says. “I don’t care if it has come late, I’m just happy that I have the chance.

Am I thinking I’ve lost my touch, that I’m slower or weaker than before? No.” She puts on her helmet, slides in her mouthguard, checks the fit of her gloves and steps into the ring. Then it begins: 2 hours of incessant ducking, weaving, bouncing, drifting, punching—sharp, stinging jabs; lightning combinations; big, pure, swinging blows, thick slugs to the body. Her training partners flinch visibly at the onslaught, her coaches ask her to bring her tempo down. Kom is oblivious—she is lost in her world

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of precision ferocity.

“If you are in the ring with me, I hate you,” she says.

For most boxers, this kind of hostility is just a mind game, a charade to be used as a psycheout tactic against opponents. But Kom’s aggression runs deeper—it’s real, she nurtures it.

It feeds from a bitter ocean of struggle that has endured throughout her career. For example, you would think the world’s best female boxer, and one of the brightest Olympic medal hopes in medal-starved India, would be given every facility in the lead-up to the 2012 Games—but no, Kom says she spent all of 2011 in a state of despair, because her coach had made no specific plans for her training. “We did the same old things, rotting in the SAI (Sports Authority of India) centre in Bhopal which lacks even the most basic facilities,” she says. “There was no attention paid to my diet.” It was only in late 2011 that Kom was shifted to the swank and well-equipped Patiala complex where her male counterparts train. In January, the SAI cleared a foreign coach for her after Olympic Gold Quest, a private body working with India’s Olympic athletes, intervened on her behalf. “So now I’m training properly.”

Struggle shadows Kom. She was at home in Imphal, Manipur, with her husband and four-yearold twins when the 121-day economic blockade paralysed life in the state late last year. She was running out of food and fuel.

She and her husband were forced to collect firewood to cook. “It was like I was a child again,” she says. “When my father used to scrape together wood from the forest to cook our

in the newspapers, and her parents got to know what she was up to. Her father ordered her to give it up immediately. She refused.

Her father grudgingly relented.

“You have to support yourself, and you have to get money for us,” he told her.

In 2001, she won her first medal at the World Championships, a silver. For the first time in her life, she had money, and lots of it. She bought land for her parents, opened fixed deposits for her siblings, and bought herself a scooter. Next year, she won her first gold at the World Championships, beginning an unbeaten spree that would go on till 2010.

She married a man of her choice, K. Onler Kom, a former footballer.

Her father asked her to give up boxing for the sake of her marriage. “I hate it,” she says, “this culture of becoming a housewife after marriage. I hope I will be an example to women of someone who was even more successful after her marriage.” Onler stood by all her decisions, taking over the responsibility of the house, bringing up their children, as well as managing her financial affairs.

“You can’t find a man like him.”

Together, they now run a boxing academy from their house in Imphal, which provides free training, food and lodging to 10 girls and 20 boys in their teens.

Kom is done with her training, and unlike the other boxers, she feels no need to mingle. She sits apart on a bench in the corner of the hall furthest from the rings.

Despite her affable and accommodating demeanour, she is unrelentingly combative. When she finds out that I’ll be interviewing Sarita Devi, one of India’s best boxers and a childhood friend of Kom’s, with whom she shared a hostel room for years, she tells me with a grin, “Ask Sarita why she is scared of me.” Her wide smile drops cold to a blank and deadly stare. “Every boxer here is scared of me.”

Now, she needs to muster a lifetime of adamantine conflict and channel that into ruthless boxing skills. Because she almost did not make it to the Olympics.

She fought all her life in the 46-48kg category, but when

D R E A M C A T C H E R S meals.” Or ask her about a favourite childhood memory. “When I was around 17, a rickshaw-wallah in Imphal tried to molest me. I punched him so hard in the face that he fell down bleeding. Then he ran away.” Kom doubles up with laughter.

Kom’s upbringing might have been plucked from the pages of boxing folklore. She was born the eldest of three sisters and a brother, to parents eking out a desperate living as hired farmhands. Kom worked in the fields alongside her parents since she was 7. In 1999, when she was 16, she decided to leave home to reduce the burden on her parents and find a way to make a living through sports, in which she had shown promise in school. She walked into the SAI centre in Imphal and was hooked instantly, she says, to the measured violence of boxing.

She did not tell her parents that she had joined boxing because it wasn’t a socially acceptable sport for girls. She ate lunch and dinner at the centre, but had no money to buy herself breakfast. “As long as I had a place to sleep at night, I had no worries,” Kom says.

A year after picking up the sport, Kom won the state championship. Her picture appeared

women’s boxing was included in the Olympics, it offered only three weight divisions—51kg, 60kg and 75kg. This meant that in 2010, Kom had to push her weight up, and then work to get her power and speed to match the extra heft.

In her debut appearance in the new weight division, she lost in the semi-finals at the 2010 Asian Games to Ren Cancan of China, the World No.1 in 51kg. “As usual, everyone said I’m finished. Too old,” she says. “My parents always want me to give up boxing, so even they said it. I was very upset.

I stayed quiet.”

She went back into training to tighten her guard and work on her close-in fighting, because her competitors in the new category were taller. She asked for male training partners to ensure that she would be pushed to the limit.

In March, she won her first gold in 51kg, beating Cancan in the final of the Asian Championships.

But there was still one last hurdle, the single qualifying event for women boxers for the Olympics—the 2012 World Championships. And it’s here that she stumbled. The defending champion lost to World No. 2 Nicola Adams of England in the quarter-finals.

The woman Aiba openly credited as one of the reasons why women’s boxing was included in the Olympics, who they refer to as “Magnificent Mary”, was a hair’s breadth from watching her dreams shatter. “I felt so disappointed, so edgy,” she says. “I was in rage, I could hardly speak.”

But she made it—the catch was that Adams had to win the semi-final for Kom to also qualify, and that’s exactly what happened. “It’s finally here,” she says. “What will I do at the Olympics? I don’t know. All I know is that all my skills, my strength, my thoughts, they all have to click together when the time comes. I might look calm outside, but I’m burning up inside—I want to hit, I want to win, I want to knock people down.” www.livemint.com To read our previous stories in the Dream Catchers series, visit www.livemint.com/dreamcatchers

Rage: Rage: Mary Kom is driven by a lifetime of hardship and discontent.

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

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SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012

L9

Spotlight

LOUNGE SOCIETY

Willing and able A new website addresses a global gap in talking about sexuality and people with disabilities

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

·································· ver so often, Nidhi Garima Goyal’s parents will meet someone who says, “Oh, your daughter is blind? I know this boy who’s also blind. Let’s get them married!” The couple, always supportive of their visually impaired daughter, a writer and researcher in Mumbai, ignore this, Goyal says. Someone who says she’s never seen herself as “less than anyone else”, Goyal does not typically let these things matter.

But she finds herself analysing social expectations like these more often these days. Goyal is one of the main writers and interviewers who’ve put together Sexuality and Disability (Sexualityanddisability.org), a new resource for and about women with disabilities which discusses relationships, dating, sex and sexuality. “I was already kind of 90% there, as an individual, because I’ve always had confidence and my family’s always been supportive,” she says. “But I’ve started to analyse how this stuff works across communities in India.”

“My parents are okay with you,” a male friend used to tell her. “They won’t let other girls visit or call at all hours, but you can come over any time.” Goyal never really wondered why an orthodox family, which policed their son’s contact with women, was “okay” with her meeting or talking to him whenever she liked, until it dawned on her that it had to do with her disability.

“I simply wasn’t seen as a ‘prospect’,” she says. “The idea was always, ‘this girl is safe’. He’s never going to go out with her. They’re never going to date.”

Sexuality and Disability is a collaboration between Point of View, a Mumbai-based non-profit organisation that works with representations of women in art, culture and the media, and Crea, a feminist human rights organization based in Delhi. “As you can see, the domain name was readily available,” says Bishakha Datta of Point of View wryly.

Datta and her team began to work on the site last September, after she and her colleagues realized how little there was, online or offline, that spoke directly to women with disabilities about sex and sexuality-related issues.

A 2007 World Bank report states that the number of people with disabilities in India could range between 40-90 million; as women typically account for half or slightly more than half of disabled populations worldwide, by the most conservative estimate, Indian women with disabilities are likely to number at least 20 million.

In the mainstream, both these categories of experience generally exist in separate spheres. Disability rights activism doesn’t often focus on gender-specific needs. Talk about sexuality, straight or queer, is almost always about people who are not disabled.

Online, sites offer advice for things like wheelchair sex and stimulation that doesn’t begin and end with heterosexual, penetrative intercourse. Plenty of bloggers with disabilities write about dating, sex and relationships. These communities are a vibrant global resource, but they can be scattered, and are often about particular kinds of disability, or particular sexualities.

“The tale you find activists in this area telling, whether they are in India, UK, US or Nigeria, is that many in the

E

disability movement have regarded sexuality as an irrelevant issue,” says Janet Price, UK-based disability rights activist and consultant on the Sexuality and Disability project. “The argument goes that it is important to address practical issues regarding jobs, income, housing and other such concerns first.”

Once they decided to make it their focus, the Sexuality and Disability team found themselves working with other organizations, counsellors and activists like Price (who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the 1990s) to develop something that would cover disabilities across the spectrum, talk directly to women with disabilities rather than their caregivers or allies, and find common ground on which they could talk about sex and related issues.

“Emotional issues are difficult to bifurcate,” says Jyotti Savla, a clinical psychologist whom Goyal interviewed for the website. “It’s easy to see someone with a certain physical attribute and think of them as ‘handicapped’, but certain human behaviours are common to all of us.”

In spite of Savla’s point of view, mental illness and psychosocial or intellectual/cognitive disabilities are often particularly pathologized when it comes to sexuality. “When you’re diagnosed with a mental illness, everything you say or do or think becomes a symptom,” says Reshma Valliappan.

“As far as sex is concerned, if you’re an Indian or Asian woman, you’re going to be suppressed, even if you’re a straight woman with a disability.”

Valliappan, a queer woman with schizophrenia, paints, writes, and is a shadow report-writer for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She runs the Red Door project online, a site that aims to be “a doorway into a space that explores the idea that every human being is normal, or conversely, every human being is mad in their own unique way”.

“I live without medication and psychiatrists don’t like it,” she laughs. Among other things, psychiatric drugs can complicate sex and sexuality related-issues, she points out: Many of them come with side effects that can affect sexual function and desire.

“You’re caught in the four-wall problem,” she says. “Whether you’re in an institution, at home, in a support group—but if you don’t get out, you don’t know what you are.”

Over the last four or five years, Price says, things have begun to change.

“WHO (World Health Organization) has produced a guidance note on approaches to planning sexual and reproductive healthcare for people with disabilities, and they have begun to undertake slightly more extended research globally around the issues.

But even then, the understanding of ‘sexual’ is largely limited to the aspects of human behaviour linked to reproduction, and to the negative such as sexual violence, with almost no attention paid to sexual desire, pleasure and identity.”

The starting points of many of those conversations are covered on the Sexuality and Disability website. Notably, in an area where most material, whether personal narratives, academic research or practical advice, comes from Western sources and primarily addresses Western needs. Sexuality and Disability comes from what Price calls “the majority world, that is, not in Europe, the US, etc.”

“Many of the issues or many of the questions that are asked on the website are questions that a lot of women may ask, regardless of whether they have a disability or not,” Datta says.

The site features questions like: “I am in love with a non-disabled person.

Can this work out?” but also things like “All my friends say that having a relationship is the most important thing in life. Is this true?”

Disability no bar: Let’s talk about sex.

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PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

PAL PILLAI/AFP

Postcards from the edge: (clockwise from extreme left) An auto­repair shop in Kamathipura; an aerial view of the red­light district and the changing cityscape beyond from a nearby skyscraper; a 2009 photo of sex workers waiting for clients; a zari workshop in one of the by­lanes; and a paan­beedi shop at the start of Gully 12.

NEW INDIA

KAMATHIPURA:

THE CIRCLE OF LIFE

New industrial units have rapidly gobbled up neighbourhood brothels over the past three years.

2010

BOUGHT AND SOLD Squeezed out by the changing nature of the sex trade and roller­coaster redevelopment, commercial sex workers begin their departure from India’s largest red­light district.

Kamathipura will soon cease to exist as it does today

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

···························· n Kamathipura Gully 14, in the second room on the ground floor, madam moti Moiratha is set to leave. In this, one of the last few lanes of what was once the largest sex district in Asia, and Mumbai’s most historic, Moiratha is seated on a bench in her doorway, combing her dishevelled black hair.

Behind her, two carpenters are breaking down the wide teak bed that has served her trade for the last 35 years. All her worldly possessions are wrapped in two cloth bundles. She has sold her flat and will leave for her “gaanv”, Dharwad, in Karnataka. “Now what is left here?” she asks.

“I had financial troubles. I owed people money. When the builder comes, the seths will get money, not us. So I sold now. I will start a new life in the village,” she says. She claims she does not know current property rates, adding she got “in the range of `40 lakh” for her 50 sq. ft room—she wouldn’t, however, produce any paperwork or receipt. That’s approximately `80,000 per sq. ft!

According to Sanjay Dutt, executive managing director, South Asia, for global real estate consultants Cushman & Wakefield: “The current rate here for a mediocre quality old structure should range

I

(from) `35,000-40,000 per sq. ft for retail and `15,000-25,000 per sq. ft for residential. Expect a 100-200% appreciation in five years for a premium project in its final phase of completion.”

Moiratha doesn’t seem to care what the market rate is. She looks at her son, less than a year old.

The “beemari” (HIV/AIDS) has spread everywhere. She needs money. Mumbai has become expensive. The trade is dead, she says. “Ye sab khatam hua (All this is over),” she says, gesturing with her comb outside her door.

That evening many of her relatives, hearing about her newfound fortune, showed up at her residence. By the next afternoon, Moiratha was gone.

The builders are moving in, buying out Kamathipura, unit by unit. On the ground, word is the purchase of tenancies has begun, seth by seth, madam by madam, and every day, someone quietly shifts. Nabil Patel, director, DB Realty, says: “We are working on it (redevelopment), but can’t share details at the moment.”

Priti Patkar, who runs the NGO Prerana within the sex district, has been systematically mapping Kamathipura, building by building, since 2010. “We estimated that by end 2012-13, Kamathipura would have gone. Builders have been buying out individual units and leasing them to small indus-

tries—bag makers, hat and mat makers—on 11-month leases,” she says. Her map lists everything from new paan-beedi shops to industrial units. It also marks the falling number of brothels: “Building 257: from 22 to 10.

Mothi Bohri Chawl: 18 to 13....”

Overall, the number of brothels is down from 583 to 535 in the period from January-March (see “Brothel bandh” on Page 12).

Unlike an overnight sale which clears out the area, the current redevelopment in Kamathipura is a process. Individual units are being bought and leased to small industries for 11 months. The new industrial units are noisy and spew fumes well into the night.

This disturbs the sex workers, business dips, and they too eventually look to sell and leave.

Kamathipura—with its gutters spewing into the streets, rows upon rows of cots, women too tired to walk by mid-morning, a Konkani-speaking Tina with a black eye emerging from a 30 sq. ft room beneath the stairs occupied by three others like her, Sushila, with her pink sari and matching flowers in her hair; pimps smoking beedis—is humbled against the towers encroaching the skyline around.

It was not always like this, Sushila says, sitting on her cot.

“Paise vaale aate the (The moneyed used to come here).” Now

there is no money flowing into the system. Migrant workers with a few rupees to spare drop by. It costs `150 for a session with a woman. “Low-budget, savingswallah...” Sushila laughs. It barely buys them a living.

A woman with a past The most expensive brothel at Kamathipura’s peak in the 1960s cost `13 and 80 annas for a sex act. Mumbai Police historian Deepak Rao says specific brothels—like No. 25 and No. 107—were on the “approved” list of in-bound sailors. “The pulling down of Bachuseth ki Wadi, and the Kebab House on Foras Road five years ago, where a tower now stands, marked the beating of the retreat,” he says.

The late Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, in a 1998 essay on the racial composition of the Bombay police force, highlights the nexus of power and influence that revolved around one of the most famous brothels of its time—No. 392 Falkland Road; Fritza’s brothel. Inspector Favel, recipient of the King’s Police Medal in 1917, the essay claims, colluded with the brothel keeper to ensure all new girls—“fresh arrivals”—went there. He provided protection to Mary Fooks, a Russian girl in the brothel, who was to later become an influential brothel keeper herself.

143

2011

132

2012

125

9

8

6

4

6 4

Cap manufacturing units

‘Zari’ embroidery units

20 14

10

Iron tar units

Bag-making units Source: NGO Prerana, Mumbai.

GRAPHIC

Pathans guarded the foyers of the brothels, and rights of admission were reserved.

Ashwini Tambe, in her paper Hierarchies of Subalternity: Managed Stratification in Bombay Brothels 1914-1930, documents: “Police ranked European brothels into three tiers according to how well conducted they were: The first class consisted solely of European women living in private houses; the second, of women who solicited in streets; and the third, of women who were grouped along with Japanese and Baghdadi women in Kamathipura. Indian women figure implicitly as the bottom rung in this hierarchy, although they are not named as such.”

There were distinct lanes for dance bar girls, mujrewalis and sex workers. No. 38 Foras Road was once a sprawling bungalow known as Spy House, on the radar of foreign intelligence agencies during the world wars.

“It is said men of the calibre of national statesmen came here. It was a hotbed of espionage,” Rao says. Entry was reserved for men who descended from horsedrawn carriages, wore shoes and,

preferably, a tie.

In the 1950s, when the then chief minister of the erstwhile state of Bombay, Morarji Desai, began his crackdown on social vices, he was reportedly advised that Kamathipura’s undisturbed existence was essential to the sanity of society. A “tolerated area”, it escaped the crackdown. References to the district abound in Hindi cinema, from Amar Prem (1972) to Chameli (2003) to the forthcoming Talaash by Reema Kagti, starring Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor. So far, only Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Namdeo Dhasal’s poetry have captured the streets in their raw, stark reality.

The burden of Lal Bazar Romanticizing the red-light area in popular culture has done it no favours. It has only embedded the onus of social immorality within this district. Svati Shah, assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, US, documents in her 2006 paper Producing the Spectacle of Kamathipura: The Politics of Red Light Visibility in Mumbai: “Although everyone living in

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

Kamathipura does not sell sex, almost anyone who lives, works or passes through Kamathipura is subject to the stigmas associated with prostitution.”

Today landlords, unable to deal with the complex mess of tenancies, are handing over “landlord rights” to builders.

They, much like the government and private developers, are not clear on whom the onus of rehabilitation must fall, and do not want to address it. Seth Jain, seated at Ambika Electricals and rumoured to own five buildings in which the sex trade continues, won’t speak. Merwan Kola, who owns building 56, Foras Road, is waiting to redevelop it. Landlords are fed up of being blamed for a trade spawned by subleases they could never control.

The Kathawala family has owned a 7,000 sq. m. gala (shed), located between lane 5 and lane 13 of Kamathipura, for the last six decades. Individual units within the gala were leased to around 230 small industries and residences. Patriarch Zuzar Kathawala says they have ruled out cluster, or collaborative, redevelopment: “It’s been a headache.

Rent was `3 and `5, so after municipal taxes, maintenance, etc it was a loss-making enterprise for us.” Kathawala is currently in the process of redeveloping his gala himself and, despite a recent goslow on government approvals, is thankful for the changed laws.

“Since we are a large space we are entitled to cluster development, but we opted for 33/7 (a government development rule which grants greater FSI). Earlier, these things were not clearly defined.

Today, tenants also know their options. We have been generous landlords, paying tenants well as we purchase plots back from them, so we have no problems now,” he says.

At first, all of Kamathipura had hoped for cluster redevelopment.

It would have transformed the area overnight. But in the toss-up between private and government, cluster and individual redevelopment, the sex workers proved nobody’s problem. Ironic, because it is this realization that has motivated sex workers to now cut deals and move on. “The aam sex worker knows now that whatever crores these buildings may be sold for, not a paisa is going to come to them,” Patkar says. Many locals have seen those few, whose buildings went under Mhada (Maharashtra Housing and Development Authority) redevelopment, languish in transit camps for near three decades now.

Mahendra Warbhuvan, chief executive officer of the Mhada repair board, says: “The government has priorities. India has many homeless people to be rehabilitated. This is under consideration and will take time.”

The Congress MLA for Nagpada, south Mumbai, Amin Patel, who has also been involved with the transformation of Bhendi Bazaar by the Saifee Burhani Upliftment project, says: “It being a charitable trust, many factors of dispute were resolved overnight. Here, in Kamathipura, so many issues come up—there TURN TO PAGE L12®

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COVER L11

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SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

PAL PILLAI/AFP

Postcards from the edge: (clockwise from extreme left) An auto­repair shop in Kamathipura; an aerial view of the red­light district and the changing cityscape beyond from a nearby skyscraper; a 2009 photo of sex workers waiting for clients; a zari workshop in one of the by­lanes; and a paan­beedi shop at the start of Gully 12.

NEW INDIA

KAMATHIPURA:

THE CIRCLE OF LIFE

New industrial units have rapidly gobbled up neighbourhood brothels over the past three years.

2010

BOUGHT AND SOLD Squeezed out by the changing nature of the sex trade and roller­coaster redevelopment, commercial sex workers begin their departure from India’s largest red­light district.

Kamathipura will soon cease to exist as it does today

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

···························· n Kamathipura Gully 14, in the second room on the ground floor, madam moti Moiratha is set to leave. In this, one of the last few lanes of what was once the largest sex district in Asia, and Mumbai’s most historic, Moiratha is seated on a bench in her doorway, combing her dishevelled black hair.

Behind her, two carpenters are breaking down the wide teak bed that has served her trade for the last 35 years. All her worldly possessions are wrapped in two cloth bundles. She has sold her flat and will leave for her “gaanv”, Dharwad, in Karnataka. “Now what is left here?” she asks.

“I had financial troubles. I owed people money. When the builder comes, the seths will get money, not us. So I sold now. I will start a new life in the village,” she says. She claims she does not know current property rates, adding she got “in the range of `40 lakh” for her 50 sq. ft room—she wouldn’t, however, produce any paperwork or receipt. That’s approximately `80,000 per sq. ft!

According to Sanjay Dutt, executive managing director, South Asia, for global real estate consultants Cushman & Wakefield: “The current rate here for a mediocre quality old structure should range

I

(from) `35,000-40,000 per sq. ft for retail and `15,000-25,000 per sq. ft for residential. Expect a 100-200% appreciation in five years for a premium project in its final phase of completion.”

Moiratha doesn’t seem to care what the market rate is. She looks at her son, less than a year old.

The “beemari” (HIV/AIDS) has spread everywhere. She needs money. Mumbai has become expensive. The trade is dead, she says. “Ye sab khatam hua (All this is over),” she says, gesturing with her comb outside her door.

That evening many of her relatives, hearing about her newfound fortune, showed up at her residence. By the next afternoon, Moiratha was gone.

The builders are moving in, buying out Kamathipura, unit by unit. On the ground, word is the purchase of tenancies has begun, seth by seth, madam by madam, and every day, someone quietly shifts. Nabil Patel, director, DB Realty, says: “We are working on it (redevelopment), but can’t share details at the moment.”

Priti Patkar, who runs the NGO Prerana within the sex district, has been systematically mapping Kamathipura, building by building, since 2010. “We estimated that by end 2012-13, Kamathipura would have gone. Builders have been buying out individual units and leasing them to small indus-

tries—bag makers, hat and mat makers—on 11-month leases,” she says. Her map lists everything from new paan-beedi shops to industrial units. It also marks the falling number of brothels: “Building 257: from 22 to 10.

Mothi Bohri Chawl: 18 to 13....”

Overall, the number of brothels is down from 583 to 535 in the period from January-March (see “Brothel bandh” on Page 12).

Unlike an overnight sale which clears out the area, the current redevelopment in Kamathipura is a process. Individual units are being bought and leased to small industries for 11 months. The new industrial units are noisy and spew fumes well into the night.

This disturbs the sex workers, business dips, and they too eventually look to sell and leave.

Kamathipura—with its gutters spewing into the streets, rows upon rows of cots, women too tired to walk by mid-morning, a Konkani-speaking Tina with a black eye emerging from a 30 sq. ft room beneath the stairs occupied by three others like her, Sushila, with her pink sari and matching flowers in her hair; pimps smoking beedis—is humbled against the towers encroaching the skyline around.

It was not always like this, Sushila says, sitting on her cot.

“Paise vaale aate the (The moneyed used to come here).” Now

there is no money flowing into the system. Migrant workers with a few rupees to spare drop by. It costs `150 for a session with a woman. “Low-budget, savingswallah...” Sushila laughs. It barely buys them a living.

A woman with a past The most expensive brothel at Kamathipura’s peak in the 1960s cost `13 and 80 annas for a sex act. Mumbai Police historian Deepak Rao says specific brothels—like No. 25 and No. 107—were on the “approved” list of in-bound sailors. “The pulling down of Bachuseth ki Wadi, and the Kebab House on Foras Road five years ago, where a tower now stands, marked the beating of the retreat,” he says.

The late Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, in a 1998 essay on the racial composition of the Bombay police force, highlights the nexus of power and influence that revolved around one of the most famous brothels of its time—No. 392 Falkland Road; Fritza’s brothel. Inspector Favel, recipient of the King’s Police Medal in 1917, the essay claims, colluded with the brothel keeper to ensure all new girls—“fresh arrivals”—went there. He provided protection to Mary Fooks, a Russian girl in the brothel, who was to later become an influential brothel keeper herself.

143

2011

132

2012

125

9

8

6

4

6 4

Cap manufacturing units

‘Zari’ embroidery units

20 14

10

Iron tar units

Bag-making units Source: NGO Prerana, Mumbai.

GRAPHIC

Pathans guarded the foyers of the brothels, and rights of admission were reserved.

Ashwini Tambe, in her paper Hierarchies of Subalternity: Managed Stratification in Bombay Brothels 1914-1930, documents: “Police ranked European brothels into three tiers according to how well conducted they were: The first class consisted solely of European women living in private houses; the second, of women who solicited in streets; and the third, of women who were grouped along with Japanese and Baghdadi women in Kamathipura. Indian women figure implicitly as the bottom rung in this hierarchy, although they are not named as such.”

There were distinct lanes for dance bar girls, mujrewalis and sex workers. No. 38 Foras Road was once a sprawling bungalow known as Spy House, on the radar of foreign intelligence agencies during the world wars.

“It is said men of the calibre of national statesmen came here. It was a hotbed of espionage,” Rao says. Entry was reserved for men who descended from horsedrawn carriages, wore shoes and,

preferably, a tie.

In the 1950s, when the then chief minister of the erstwhile state of Bombay, Morarji Desai, began his crackdown on social vices, he was reportedly advised that Kamathipura’s undisturbed existence was essential to the sanity of society. A “tolerated area”, it escaped the crackdown. References to the district abound in Hindi cinema, from Amar Prem (1972) to Chameli (2003) to the forthcoming Talaash by Reema Kagti, starring Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor. So far, only Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Namdeo Dhasal’s poetry have captured the streets in their raw, stark reality.

The burden of Lal Bazar Romanticizing the red-light area in popular culture has done it no favours. It has only embedded the onus of social immorality within this district. Svati Shah, assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, US, documents in her 2006 paper Producing the Spectacle of Kamathipura: The Politics of Red Light Visibility in Mumbai: “Although everyone living in

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

Kamathipura does not sell sex, almost anyone who lives, works or passes through Kamathipura is subject to the stigmas associated with prostitution.”

Today landlords, unable to deal with the complex mess of tenancies, are handing over “landlord rights” to builders.

They, much like the government and private developers, are not clear on whom the onus of rehabilitation must fall, and do not want to address it. Seth Jain, seated at Ambika Electricals and rumoured to own five buildings in which the sex trade continues, won’t speak. Merwan Kola, who owns building 56, Foras Road, is waiting to redevelop it. Landlords are fed up of being blamed for a trade spawned by subleases they could never control.

The Kathawala family has owned a 7,000 sq. m. gala (shed), located between lane 5 and lane 13 of Kamathipura, for the last six decades. Individual units within the gala were leased to around 230 small industries and residences. Patriarch Zuzar Kathawala says they have ruled out cluster, or collaborative, redevelopment: “It’s been a headache.

Rent was `3 and `5, so after municipal taxes, maintenance, etc it was a loss-making enterprise for us.” Kathawala is currently in the process of redeveloping his gala himself and, despite a recent goslow on government approvals, is thankful for the changed laws.

“Since we are a large space we are entitled to cluster development, but we opted for 33/7 (a government development rule which grants greater FSI). Earlier, these things were not clearly defined.

Today, tenants also know their options. We have been generous landlords, paying tenants well as we purchase plots back from them, so we have no problems now,” he says.

At first, all of Kamathipura had hoped for cluster redevelopment.

It would have transformed the area overnight. But in the toss-up between private and government, cluster and individual redevelopment, the sex workers proved nobody’s problem. Ironic, because it is this realization that has motivated sex workers to now cut deals and move on. “The aam sex worker knows now that whatever crores these buildings may be sold for, not a paisa is going to come to them,” Patkar says. Many locals have seen those few, whose buildings went under Mhada (Maharashtra Housing and Development Authority) redevelopment, languish in transit camps for near three decades now.

Mahendra Warbhuvan, chief executive officer of the Mhada repair board, says: “The government has priorities. India has many homeless people to be rehabilitated. This is under consideration and will take time.”

The Congress MLA for Nagpada, south Mumbai, Amin Patel, who has also been involved with the transformation of Bhendi Bazaar by the Saifee Burhani Upliftment project, says: “It being a charitable trust, many factors of dispute were resolved overnight. Here, in Kamathipura, so many issues come up—there TURN TO PAGE L12®

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SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP

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are family disputes within landlords’ families, tenancies and rehabilitation on humanitarian grounds. Each plot is not more than 50 sq. m. No one can buy it out—it is too small. All of Kamathipura is not a sex district, yet it has gained that reputation.

All such factors have made cluster redevelopment unviable.”

It seemed Kamathipura was stuck with the odds. Meanwhile, a McDonald’s came up next door, on Belasis Road. A mall next to that. In front, skyscrapers.

Resident delegations came to Patel to say “let this place change”. “Prices will go up, the stigma will be removed. We will have to rename the place. If a builder takes it on, the change will be good,” Patel says, still hoping its history can be systematically erased from public memory. The buyouts are all part of this slow erasure.

A bankrupt district This disintegration of the old city is symptomatic of the larger context of socio-urban change.

Architect Rahul Mehrotra, chair of the department of urban planning and design at Harvard University, says: “There is a corelation between urban form and the texture of life in the city.

A fine-grained urban form, like the amazingly robust one of Kamathipura, supports social interactions and synergies in ways that large-scale megastructures just don’t. This is being unsettled.”

Kamathipura’s process of redevelopment is not merely the bringing down of a few buildings, it is changing Mumbai as it occurs. “What we are allowing to happen in Mumbai, and which I find is an extremely dangerous trend, is the amalgamation of property. It alters the DNA of the city—not only its physical structure, but also its social structure and the varied relationships which evolve over time,” Mehrotra says, pointing out that Mumbai is blindly adopting the paradigm of cities like Shanghai, China, which have completely altered as cities. “It is expressive of the impatience of capital. Cities should ideally redevelop using the original form as framework, upgrading it for needs.”

Kamathipura is today teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

Its symbiotic economy has unravelled. Feeding off the sex district was a chain of supply to the brothel houses. Historian Rao explains: “Between 1965-75, Kamathipura was at its peak.

Taxis and Victoria hacks were parked at the docks so sailors could be brought directly to Sukhlaji Street and Falkland Road. When prohibition was relaxed, it took off even more.

Pimps would get commissions, but also beer was sold here at a premium. There were cabs, carriages, cigarettes, clothes, dressmakers, lipsticks, business, liquor, food. You paid 8 annas for services like hot water with Dettol, clean towels, and to a woman who supplied them.”

Even in today’s subdued economy, beediwallahs, attarwallahs, dry-cleaners, tea stalls, liquor and food survive off this. But the clientele that comes now is without money.

Pappu the pimp belongs to what is known here as “a good family”. His sister runs a fruit stall in the by-lanes. They live in the non-sex-district part of Kamathipura. He still “keeps girls”. He is candid about making money off it when he can: “This business will be done in three-five years.

After that you will not see us here.” Where are the girls going?

Nalasopara, Vikhroli, Vashi, Goregaon, Malad—the new suburbs with new needs.

Kamathipura then is merely a forgotten vestige of colonial rule falling off; a scab on a wound that has taken an unduly long time to heal.

Historically, Kamathipura was never an Indian construct. Yet,

Red signal: A 2008 photo of two sex workers preparing for a night of work in Kamathipura, Mumbai.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

BROTHEL BANDH

MUMBAI

The lanes and buildings in Kamathipura in which brothels shut down between January and March.

BANDRA WEST

Belasis Road

MAHIM

13th Lane

Total number of brothels and bungalows

TROMBAY

14th Lane

12th Lane

BYCULLA

BYCULLA

MADANPURA

11th Lane

KAMATHIPURA

KAMATHIPURA

Sukhlaji Road

2011

583

Parshuram Pupala Marg

Arabian Sea

MS Ali Road

2012

Sir JJ Road

535

COLABA

1st Lane New faces: The McDonald’s outlet on Belasis Road is a stone’s throw from Kamathipura Gully 14. its physical demise is not its existential end. The issues Kamathipura came to symbolize have always existed. Tambe, in her paper, says: “Indian brothel workers were far more dispersed across the city, and met with less public revulsion. There were no furious debates between police and residents over where to locate Indian prostitutes. The census figures for both 1864 and 1871 show high concentrations of prostitutes in parts of Bombay other than Kamathipura, and notably in neighbourhoods populated by working-class Indians, such as Market, Oomburkharee, Phunuswaree and Girgaon. Census figures for 1901 and 1921 also indicate that there were areas other than Kamathipura, such as Khetwadi, Phunuswaree, Girgaon and Tardeo, also workingclass areas, in which larger numbers of prostitutes lived. Yet none of these other areas were defined as red light zones. Kamathipura was not the only area with a concentration of prostitutes, but it was significantly the area where European prostitutes first resided, and then were allocated.

It was on the strength of this European dimension that Kamathipura was termed the ‘prostitutes’ zone’ by the administration (home department 1920, Police-A).”

Placed in that context, the imminent dissolution of Kamathipura is merely a city redirecting its sexual energies elsewhere.

The newer sex “The arranger” meets you at the McDonald’s opposite Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus station. She produces an album; two girls to a page. You only have to pay her `100 each way for the commute.

The girl will contact you. The rate is `1,500 onwards for a session.

She cannot be arrested, she says, because she has only asked you to reimburse her travel. There has been no money transaction through her. If a man and woman choose to sleep together and he happens to give her money, who is she, or the law, to interfere in a personal transaction that she knows nothing about? This is the nature of the new Mumbai sex trade.

These are the fault lines upon which Kamathipura is disintegrating.

“Some sex workers seek work in new districts, others have love marriages and go,” says Akhilesh Pandey, a Congress worker who has lived in the non-sex-district part of Kamathipura all his life.

The next generation—the children of the sex workers, pimps and landlords—have put their collective foot down. Rashid Multani, who has run a hotel here for the last 35 years, says: “The NGOs take away the children, send them to boarding schools, so when the children grow up, they don’t want to come back.” He points to a woman standing in Gully 10.

“Her daughter is a nurse. She won’t have anything to do with her now. There is no next generation of anything.”

Ansari Muhammad Asif, a drycleaner with a shop on Kamathipura Main Street and also a reporter for the area’s daily newspaper, the Tirchi Aankh, says: “We are blacklisted for loans, credit cards, our children in colleges are told ‘Kamathipura? No admission’.” Kamathipura is dying from within.

Shah, in her paper, explains what Asif and Rashid attempt to in their own street lingo: “The criminalization of prostitution through the Itpa (The Immoral Traffic [Prevention] Act, 1956)

11th Lane

Mothi Bori Chawl

Building No. 257

11

10

Taz Manjil No. 54

11

8

12th Lane

Mustafa Building

10

Bori Chawl No. 4

4

6

3

Building No. 101

7

3

Building No. 102

4

3

13th Lane

10

9

14th Lane

Mahalaxmi building

Building No. 103

2

7

Bori Chawl No. 99

4

10

Mustafa Chawl

3

Paperwala Chawl No. 63

5

2

Babu Musi Chawl No. 61

3

3

Marwadi Chawl

Mustafa Chawl No. 4

20 3

4

5

13th Lane

Bori Chawl

3

Taz Manjil No. 55

13

10

12

Choti Bori Chawl

18

22

MANDVI

SVP Road

2

2

Lokandi Chawl

12

16

10

Mathurabhavan

16

12

Source: NGO Prerana, Mumbai.

GRAPHIC

and the local Police Acts is experienced by residents of Kamathipura as routine raids, police sweeps, and extortion by representatives of the state for personal gain. Residents of Kamathipura are targeted because the sexual commerce there has been produced as a visible, factual, and therefore ‘known’ activity...the generalized sense throughout Mumbai that the district exists for the sole purpose of prostitution, residents have alter-

nately experienced severe statesponsored regulation, multiple levels of extortion, generalized indifference, and exoticized consumer interest.”

It is assumed that Kamathipura is Mumbai’s only sex district because it has been its most visible one.

Perhaps, when Kamathipura is physically destroyed, those who fight a daily battle against its roots hope, the real onslaught against sex trafficking, as

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

opposed to the raid-prone criminalization of sex workers under Itpa, can begin.

Perhaps this is what taxidriver Dalit activist and Marathi poet Namdeo Dhasal, court poet of the area once known as Golpitha, meant when he wrote: “O Kamatipura/Tucking all seasons under your armpit/ You squat in the mud here/I go beyond all pleasures and pains of whoring and wait/For your lotus to bloom.”

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L13

Travel

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KRISH RAGHAV

SEOUL

Design in its DNA? Calling this city of 10 million the ‘world design capital’ isn’t hollow branding, but telling insight into what makes this metropolis tick

TRIP PLANNER/SEOUL CHINA

NORTH KOREA

B Y K RISH R AGHAV ···························· n a chilly, grey afternoon in Seoul, I took a wrong turn and found myself in a hotel that wasn’t a hotel.

I’d spent the morning wandering about the South Korean capital’s hyperactive Gangnam-gu ward, a business and entertainment district south of the Han River. My entry point was the curiously named Teheran-ro or “Teheran Boulevard”, christened so after the mayor of the Iranian capital visited the city in 1977.

The catacombs of the Seolleung subway station that serves Teheran-ro led me to a “virtual supermarket”: Pictures of everything from milk to sex toys dot the station wall. Snap a picture of whatever you want with a free smartphone app, and your order will be delivered home within 24 hours.

The high-tech doesn’t ease up above ground. Teheran-ro is one of Seoul’s many business hubs, and here, the tallest buildings don’t belong to banks or financial institutions but to video-game companies such as NCsoft (which occupies a massive chequerboard building right in the heart of the street).

I must have taken a meandering route, and in the grand tradition of a peripatetic wanderer, somehow sauntered from the high-rise businesses of Samseong-dong (no relation to the company) to the boutiques and shopping streets of Seoul’s “Beverly Hills”: Apgujeong.

It was there, in one of Apgu-

O

jeong’s side streets, that I found The Second Hotel.

Being a curious pyramidal glass structure in a city of relentless grey and endless concrete, it’s impossible to ignore—like centrifugal force to a rotating traveller. Inside is a smorgasbord of clever design: tote bags made from recycled rice sacks, hip messenger bags, folding bicycles and the latest in Japanese minimalist kitchen accessories. The Second Hotel features a rotating cast of contemporary Korean designers who set up their wares.

But the Second Hotel isn’t just a quirky store. It’s also an answer to a question that’s been bothering me since I landed in South Korea.

When this city of 10 million people was declared the “World Design capital” and Unesco “City of Design” within the space of a few months in 2010, what exactly did that mean?

The title of “World Design Capital” (currently held by Helsinki) is bestowed biennially by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, an international NGO that promotes the industrial design profession. The award is more like being appointed brand ambassador than winning a rigorous competition—the choices are as political as they are analytical.

The cynics could argue, even justifiably, that this is just part of a new-found global rush to create “branded”, cosmopolitan “world cities” to attract foreign investment.

What better way to do that in the information age than to peg your

You’ll need a visa for South Korea. Contact the embassy of the Republic of Korea in Mumbai (www.ind-mumbai.mofat.go.kr) or Delhi (www.ind.mofat.go.kr). A single-entry visa will cost $30 (or around R1,680).

Myeongdong Seoul Tower

Seoul SOUTH KOREA

To airport Ha n Ri v e r

SEOUL

The Incheon International Airport is huge, clean and efficient. You can take the Airport Railroad Express train into Seoul (13,800 won, or around R650, per adult passenger) or a taxi (approximately 60,000 won). Seoul’s subway network may look like an illegible mess, but pore over the map and brave it—it’s the best and cheapest way to traverse the city.

Current advance return airfare to Seoul from Indian metros: Delhi Korean Air (code-share with Jet Airways, SkyTeam) R39,930

Mumbai R38,970

Bangalore R47,370

Thai (Star Alliance)

R51,180

R44,920

R43,300

Fares may change.

Stay

Buy

If you want no-frills comfort, the Ibis hotel in Myeongdong is your best option (59-5, Myeongdong, 1Ga, Jung-gu, Seoul; www.ibishotel.com/Koreal). For something a little more unusual, you can find home stays either through Jongno home stays (www.homestay.jongno.go.kr) or www.airbnb.com (filter for “Seoul”). Options start from $20 a night. Otherwise, you can book a cheap hostel either in the Myeongdong area (perfect if you intend to soak in the culture and sights) or the Mapo area (perfect if you want to drink and party). Prices average around 24,000 won. You will find plenty of options for both areas at www.hostelworld.com For some uniquely South Korean souvenirs, head to Insadong, which is full of craft shops and indie restaurants, and find the flagship store of cult stationery brand MMMG (short for “millimetre milligram”). It’s an important fixture on the Korean design circuit.

GRAPHIC

tent in the “design” camp?

Part of that may be true, but there’s something deeper here. A trawl through Seoul is a walk through the world of modern design in all its eclectic glory. Seoul, in a way, is full of Second Hotels—unexpected, fiercely creative interventions in the fabric of everyday life. Design is becoming a lifestyle here, an innate characteristic of the city’s persona.

Like any interesting persona, this one has wildly opposite extremes.

Less than a kilometre south of the Second Hotel is a building that looks like it’s carved into a tree. Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester’s Seoul store is covered in foliage, and

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

sprinkled with moss. The building is almost... organic, with its fluid circular shapes, bamboo borders and green facade.

North, across the Han River, is the other side of this design coin: large, governmentfunded attempts to graft design into Seoul’s DNA. The ambitious Dongdaemun Design Plaza & Park (by Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid) will be the commercial heart of the city’s new endeavours, with offices, studios, theatres, exhibitions and a permanent home for the annual Seoul Design Fair. It’s still not completely open to the public, but even unfinished it sits like an alien moth-

ership in the heart of Seoul. The nearby Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Itaewon is the classical arm, being a walk through Korean and global contemporary art history (don’t miss the giant spider sculpture on the front porch).

It’s there that you learn that Seoul always had a penchant for design.

In the 1390s, King Taejo, a former general who led a revolution and established the long-running Joseon dynasty, sent a group of advisers to scour the Korean countryside for a suitable spot to build a new capital city. The new capital would be a carefully designed one: both a statement of power by a fledgling new ruler and an experiment in structured urban layout.

Surrounded by mountains on three sides, and fed by the Han River on the south, Seoul was perfect in every way: The Geomancers who advised Taejo were convinced the site was “divinely blessed”.

The modern cornerstone of Seoul as “design city” can be found in the remarkable Cheonggyecheon stream: an 8km creek/public space running east to west in the heart of the city. Walking down its gardens and scenic bridges, it’s hard to believe it was a traffic-filled highway only 10 years earlier. The road was demolished in 2003 to make way for this “urban renewal” project, and the narrative of its transformation from a choked road to bustling plaza is an inspiration for urban planners the world over, ecological concerns notwithstanding—the amount of energy required to make the canal “flow” is reportedly huge; water has to be pumped from the Han River via underground channels into the head of the canal.

If you wander further eastward,

By design: (clockwise from above, left) The giant spider sculptures at the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art; the Cheonggyecheon stream; the ‘virtual’ supermarket below Teheran­ro; and an example of Korean design—a bathroom slipper in Insadong. you’ll find the latest embodiment of this new Seoul: a riotously multicoloured 105ft tower outside the Olympic Stadium, which was “constructed” in five days by 4,000 children. It’s the world’s tallest Lego tower, cobbled together with over half a million Lego bricks to commemorate the 80th birthday of the Danish company. As a landmark, it’s both an engineering marvel and a faintly ridiculous tribute. It may be a bit dubious as a permanent tourist attraction, but the Lego tower is a manifesto in plastic.

Seoul, a city founded on design, is now dreaming in it.

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Seoul’s full of gaming parlours for children and there’s always the gigantic Lotte World theme park.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

Seoul’s a fast, crowded city but the public transport network is designed to be senior­friendly.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

Homosexuality is legal. The Jongno­Gu or Itaewon areas are the hubs for much of the community.

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LOST WORLDS

Round the mountain with Modestine HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote for ‘Baedeker’ travel guides for a quick buck. We pick a few notes from his travelogues

B Y A ADISHT K HANNA ···························· y the time Queen Victoria was on the throne, Great Britain’s age of exploration was drawing to a close, and its age of tourism was beginning. There were few places left that a white (if not English) man (or woman) had not visited and written about. Meanwhile, travel agents and tour operators on both sides of the Atlantic were starting package tours for the middle classes, and the journal of exploration was beginning to give way to the guidebook. Germany’s Baedeker guides had the same status then that Lonely Planet or Rough Guide books have now—a higher status, possibly, for baedekering entered the slang of the time to describe a journey made purely to write a travelogue.

It was in this backdrop that Robert Louis Stevenson began to write. At the age of 29, he had only a few published short stories and a travelogue to his credit, and he needed money to get married. He baedekered, therefore, and went to the French Cévennes mountains to

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travel through them and write about it to raise money.

The age of tourism had started, but it hadn’t reached the Cévennes by 1879. The Cévennes had no hotels or stagecoaches, and it’s doubtful if Stevenson would have been able to afford them in any case—or to find a market for his travelogue if they did. In those circumstances, he slept in any house that would put him up, or in the open fields (and invented a crude sleeping bag in the process), and bought a she-donkey named Modestine to carry his luggage. Travelling light wasn’t an option for Stevenson, considering he had to drag his bedding along with him.

It seems the problem of lemons exists for pre-owned donkeys as well as used cars, for Modestine was a slow and stubborn beast of burden. Stevenson’s travelogue is filled with a mixture of frustration and regret that Modestine wouldn’t move unless he beat her. Stevenson and Modestine are locked in a mutual Stockholm Syndrome throughout the book—neither is able to agree on the objective, but when Ste-

venson’s journey ends, he’s miserable at parting with her.

When not complaining about Modestine, Stevenson devotes his attention to the history of the Cévennes, a Protestant stronghold in Catholic France. The mountains were too rugged for the Catholic nobility to root out the local Protestants as they had done the Huguenots, but their militias harassed the population wherever they could. When Stevenson visited, Catholics and Protestants lived in peace, but completely apart. As a Scotsman, Stevenson had a heritage of both Highlands and of being a Protestant minority—and the Cévennes were an excellent place for him to explore.

Stevenson became an adventure novelist a few years later when he published Treasure Island, but he never abandoned travelogues, writing them almost up to his death. The sickly child who had been confined to his bed grew up to explore the physical and the fantastical world in his books—and enriched us, his readers.

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Stevenson confesses that the reading public will not get the full deal Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it.

They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

Stevenson obtains a donkey Now, a horse is a fine lady among animals, flighty, timid, delicate in eating, of tender health; he is too valuable and too restive to be left alone, so that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow galley-slave; a dangerous road puts him out of his wits; in short, he’s an

uncertain and exacting ally, and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of the voyager. What I required was something cheap and small and hardy, and of a stolid and peaceful temper; and all these requisites pointed to a donkey. ........…

At length she passed into my service for the consideration of sixty-five francs and a glass of brandy.

The sack had already cost eighty francs and two glasses of beer; so that Modestine, as I instantly baptized her, was upon all accounts the cheaper article. Indeed, that was as it should be; for she was only an appurtenance of my mattress, or self-acting bedstead on four castors.

Modestine rejects the notion of speed We got across the ford without difficulty—there was no doubt about the matter, she was docility itself—and once on the

other bank, where the road begins to mount through pine-woods, I took in my right hand the unhallowed staff, and with a quaking spirit applied it to the donkey. Modestine brisked up her pace for perhaps three steps, and then relapsed into her former minuet. Another application had the same effect, and so with the third. I am worthy the name of an Englishman, and it goes against my conscience to lay my hand rudely on a female. I desisted, and looked her all over from head to foot; the poor brute’s knees were trembling and her breathing was distressed; it was plain that she could go no faster on a hill. God forbid, thought I, that I should brutalise this innocent creature; let her go at her own pace, and let me patiently follow.

What that pace was, there is no word mean enough to describe; it was something as much slower than a walk as a walk is slower than a run; it

The vagabond: (clockwise from top) R.L. Stevenson; the frontispiece of Travels With a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879); lime­ stone; and the Cevennes mountain range.

kept me hanging on each foot for an incredible length of time; in five minutes it exhausted the spirit and set up a fever in all the muscles of the leg. And yet I had to keep close at hand and measure my advance exactly upon hers; for if I dropped a few yards into the rear, or went on a few yards ahead,

Modestine came instantly to a halt and began to browse.

Stevenson disapproves of dogs I was much disturbed by the barking of a dog, an animal that I fear more than any wolf. A dog is vastly braver, and is besides supported by the sense of duty. If

you kill a wolf, you meet with encouragement and praise; but if you kill a dog, the sacred rights of property and the domestic affections come clamouring round you for redress.

At the end of a fagging day, the sharp cruel note of a dog’s bark is in itself a keen annoyance; and to a tramp like myself, he represents the sedentary and respectable world in its most hostile form.

There is something of the clergyman or the lawyer about this engaging animal; and if he were not amenable to stones, the boldest man would shrink from travelling afoot. I respect dogs much in the domestic circle; but on the highway, or sleeping afield, I both detest and fear them.

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Books

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POETRY OF THE TALIBAN | EDITED BY ALEX STRICK VON LINSCHOTEN & FELIX KUEHN

The drumbeats of war AHMAD JAMSHID/AP

A controversial new collection of poetry translates the Taliban’s own verses, with fascinating results

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

···························· n 2001, photographer Thomas Dworzak began to collect unusual keepsakes from the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

He ducked into photo studios around Kandahar and collected pictures of Afghan men, posed against electrifyingly colour-saturated backgrounds, sometimes in front of fake floral sprays, occasionally with an arm slung around a friend. Many of these were taken as passport photos, the only sort of portraiture permitted by the Taliban’s cultural edicts.

When Dworzak released these in a 2007 book, Taliban, Western audiences reacted with disquiet to the photographs of kohlwearing young fighters. The Taliban’s restrictions on art and music were so well-known around the world that they had formed a sort of casus belli in themselves. It was one thing to be indifferent to a government said to harbour the masterminds of the 11 September attacks on New York, quite another to be unmoved by the cultural havoc the Taliban had wrought in their country. Just as feminists could find themselves sympathetic to a war against repressors of female freedoms, liberals could understand a war fought to restore Afghanistan’s pluralism.

In the photographs in Taliban, this enemy gazed back, with dubious results. The faces peering out from under turbans and dark cloaks were discomfiting, titillating: “rather gay passport photos”, wrote one blogger disparagingly.

But an art form had mediated the fighters’ humanity, and that was discomfiting in itself. Art belonged to the rest of the world; art was supposed to be one of the founda-

I

Homeland: Afghanistan’s tradition of poetry, celebrating its landscape and its culture, long predates the Taliban’s crackdown on art and literature. tions of this enmity.

It’s unsurprising that Poetry of the Taliban, a new anthology which collects translated poems published over the last decade on the website of the Taliban, has also met with resistance. On its publication in the UK last month, Richard Kemp, a former commander of the British armed forces in Afghanistan, protested, “What we need to remember is that these are fascist, murdering thugs who suppress women and kill people without mercy if they do not agree with them, and of course (they) are killing our soldiers.”

One imagines Taliban commanders saying much the same thing about pirated DVDs of Hollywood movies. Having said that, the poems in this collection can, and will almost certainly, be read as salvos in an ongoing war of ideology. Its editors, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, stress the importance of engaging with the Taliban’s cultural output “ o n i t s o w n t e r ms”—unlike Dworzak’s photographs—“not for their novelty value, but as a way of understanding who the Taliban are”. Some of these poems were initially translated for an English website, AfghanWire, begun by Kuehn and Strick van Linschoten

to amplify voices in local Afghan media. The translators of the 235 poems in this volume, Mirwais Rahmany and Abdul Hamid Stanikzai, are based in Herat and Kabul, respectively.

To those coming to Afghan poetry for the first time, these poems, although they vary greatly in quality, will evoke several familiarities. Sometimes they are classically sonorous: “But lis-

Poetry of the Taliban: Hachette India, 284 pages, `450.

ten to this speech of mine and understand that/I am still standing even after my death,” ends an early poem, I Am Still Talking.

“Go and beautify the red blood,/ There are more flavours in its water than just honey,” writes Badar Bakhri in Neck.

“Majbur! Words are astonished by your imagination,” writes one of the poets, Majbur (the noms de plume may have to do with security, but are also in the South Asian tradition of the takhallus, or pen name). The poems in this book are calls to arms, as you might expect, but they also present diverse ways of looking at war, love, nationalism, freedom and religion. They remind us of a tradition of poetry which has predated, and survived, political turmoil in Afghanistan by hundreds of years, and still thrives, recorded in monotonal recitals, circulated via text messages, repeated at public gatherings, and, of course, published on websites.

War deadens the deep comfort taken in mountains, streams, birds in flight—a contradiction known, perhaps, to soldiers everywhere. The collection reveals a strange fluctuation between the rhythms of the hyperstylized, romantic aesthetic of the Persian

ghazal and the more modern contexts of nationalism, mechanized warfare and political radicalism that underscore the trench poetry, and the musings on religion. This, at least, will be familiar to post-colonial readers of poetry everywhere, especially in the South Asia of Muhammad Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and the Progressives.

The war is ever present, but so is its history. In a wonderful preface to the book, Faisal Devji writes about how present British colonialism is in the memory of these poems. My favourite, by “Janbaz”, is an invocation to Malalai of Maiwand, the heroine who rallied Afghan troops to war in the third Anglo-Afghan war in 1880. “It was our Afghan white, white widow/ the one who was martyred by the crusaders/it was Helmandi’s white, white bride.” In a book that otherwise reflects the basest patriarchal expectations of women (poets are often shocked that the delicate flowers of the Afghan nation can occasionally be found talking to strange men and dressing immodestly), Malalai’s ubiquity in the war poems is a complicated reassurance.

I’m not sure poems can help us understand who the Taliban are, since literature and anthropology

are not the same thing. The existence of this collection, however, may tell us something about who we, its readers, are, and our expectations. I do wish these translations had been undertaken by bilingual poets, since this book’s biggest flaw is that its language is far too stiff to give us any sense of the poems’ native music (who would really be moved by a line like “Where did he go? the historical battlefield figure”).

The great poems in this collection do work on their own terms, not because they are free of cant, but because they remind English speakers of the way in which every martial mythology relies on the same swinging rhythms, the same grand passions, the same cherished notions of home and nation.

“O homeland of beauty, be well!” writes an anonymous poet.

“You have mountains,/You have full seas./You have beautiful deserts,/You are a piece of paradise; be this paradise!” That’s as “sea to shining sea” as it gets.

Poetry of the Taliban was published in the UK by C Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd in May. The collection will be released in India

by Hachette India on 15 June.

SHIPS THAT PASS | SHASHI DESHPANDE

Family drama A new novella about failed marriages and a mysterious death in small­town India B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· t is the late 1900s, and Tara and Shaan, childhood sweethearts, have been married for well over a decade. When Tara’s much younger sister, Radhika, comes to their small-town home to visit them, she is worried by Tara’s apparently debilitating illness, baffled at how remote Tara and Shaan have grown from each other, and charmed, in spite of herself, by their friend, a doctor 17 years older than Radhika.

This difficult but by no means uncommon family drama stumbles to a halt,

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though, when Tara dies and Shaan is suspected of her murder. But Shashi Deshpande’s new novella, Ships That Pass, doesn’t really revolve around the murder or the likely murderer. As always with Deshpande, it is about familial relationships, female friendships and, to quote Madonna, what it feels like for a girl.

These have been the hallmarks of her work for much of her 40-year literary career.

Reading a Deshpande book is a blunt reminder of how confusing it can be to be a middle-class Indian woman. Her characters have been given emotional freedom, but not the social freedom

to act on these emotions; they have money but not enough to ignore other people’s expectations of them; an education, but not the career to match.

It can be awfully tempting to minimize these problems because they are relatively small—and Deshpande has addressed that, too, in novels like The Binding Vine, which explores the tragedies of women across classes without trying to put them in competition with each other.

This impeccable purpose does not detract from how boring Deshpande can sometimes be, though. She can be so relentless about the ordinariness of her people that she can make you wonder why they matter. Her judiciously evenkeeled style takes the piquancy out of her characters, flattening their personalities even when their houses are falling around their ears. Her style can be slack, cycling through the same crises not just from novel to

novel but sometimes from sentence to sentence (sample redundancy, from Ships That Pass’ first page: “The man seemed to shrug away the visitor’s enquiries, as if to say these things were of no importance.

‘Nothing to complain,’ he said.”). Sometimes these crises also recycle themselves with each new protagonist: failing marriages, the search for selfknowledge, grief over dead parents and dead children.

All of these occur in Ships That Pass, too; perhaps the worst thing I can say about this novella is that anyone who has read a Deshpande book before need not look for anything particularly new with this one (and, as it happens, the story originates from a serial Deshpande wrote in 1980 for the magazine Eve’s Weekly).

These complaints duly registered, there is enough about Ships That Pass to recommend it to first-time readers of Deshpande. As we are introduced to

Ships That Pass: Rain Tree/Rupa Publications, 134 pages, `295.

Radhika, our narrator, and her attempts to sort out her life by agreeing to an arranged marriage straight out of college, we feel a cosy despair at the utter familiarity with which the engagement occurs and begins to fray almost immediately. Nei-

ther Radhika nor her supporting characters are particularly likeable, but sometimes Deshpande’s unrelenting realism can bring them to life with quiet wit—these Agatha Christie-loving, train-travelling, two-roomapartment-dwelling people who, even when they quote Shakespeare, find the most obvious things to quote from him (“The ravell’d sleave of care”? Oh, Radhika).

Writers of literary fiction love the murder mystery because of the unspeakable things death can reveal about us. Deshpande uses murder to write about how unknowable life is. “I had thought of my life as a piece of clay I could mould into any shape I wanted,” Radhika says towards the end of the book.

“Now, I was understanding that it was actually the other way round: we are shaped by the things that happen to us.” If that seems like a satisfying resolution, then Ships That Pass will be a satisfying book to read too.

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012

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Culture

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NILS KLINGER

EXHIBITION

Art’s World Cup Four South Asian artists will participate in dOCUMENTA (13), contemporary art circuit’s most coveted platform, which opens in Germany today

B Y N ATASHA G INWALA ·································· s summer finally arrives in western Europe, three international art events are set to coincide this season. There’s Manifesta 9 (till 30 September) in Belgium; dOCUMENTA (13) (9 June-16 September) in Germany; and Art Basel (14-17 June) in Switzerland. Manifesta is held every two years, and Documenta every five. This year makes for a rare collision.

But those who have been looking forward to the latest edition of Documenta—international art world’s most significant event—have had little to work with.

In February 2010, dOCUMENTA (13)’s artistic director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, delivered a lecture titled, “The Dance

A

PHOTOGRAPHS

Was Very Frenetic—Notes Towards dOCUMENTA (13)”, at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. It was long-winded, beginning with the history of Documenta, founded in 1955 in war-ravaged Kassel, Germany, and illustrated with archival imagery and a flurry of anecdotes.

Yet, over two years later, and until a few days before the event, one still didn’t know any more about what to expect. We were only told that dOCUMENTA (13)—“The Dance Was Very Frenetic, Lively, Rattling, Clanging, Rolling, Contorted and Lasted For a Long Time”—will open to the public today for 100 days, with over 150 artists from 55 countries. It will be held at the Fridericianum museum, which, built in

COURTESY

Natasha Ginwala is an independent art critic and curator based in Amsterdam.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Delhi-based artist Amar Kanwar is participating in his third consecutive Documenta. “While the personality of the exhibition and its artistic vision are dramatically different for each edition, there are commonalities too, and it’s an honour that each of the artistic directors have found some relation to my work,” says Kanwar.

This “hat-trick” presence has previously been granted only to the German artist Joseph Beuys, who was part of five successive editions from 1968-1987, realizing legendary projects such as The Information Office (Documenta 5) and his 7000 Oaks Project (Documenta 7).

Kanwar will present The Sovereign Forest, a project that has been carrying on for several years. It began with Kanwar filming the resistance of local communities in Orissa to the industrial interventions taking place since 1999.

Closely following this “war against the people and their land”, he has consistently filmed in

contentious zones: mapping the industrialization of Niyamgiri Hills, the Posco steel plant complex as well as unsustainable mining in other ecologically fragile, tribal pockets.

The Sovereign Forest has varied avatars, continuously reincarnating as an artwork, an exhibition, a public trial, an open call for the collection of more “evidence”, a memorial, a classroom and a visual archive. It will be exhibited as a multi-part installation at dOCUMENTA (13) and will also be on display at Samadrusti, a grass-roots activist media organization in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, with which the artist has collaborated closely. An initial segment of this project was first exhibited in 2008 as part of 48°C Public.Art.Ecology, which was organized by Khoj International Artists’ Association, an independent arts organization, at Jantar Mantar in Delhi.

Another “chapter” was also part of the blockbuster exhibition Paris-Delhi-Bombay at Centre Pompidou in Paris last year.

PHOTOGRAPHS

PAYAL KAPADIA

COURTESY

TEJAL SHAH

Slice Slice of of life: life: Propositional Propositional collage collage for for Between Between the the Waves Waves,, aa five­channel five­channel video video installation. installation.

Into the light: Nalini Malani installing her new ‘video/ shadow play’.

into the present-day (mis)use of Gandhian ideas on non-violence, and their potential as political action alongside the radical propositions of Hannah Arendt, Malani’s drawings percolate the writing to compose a poignant image-text.

COURTESY BANI ABIDI

Self­portrait: A video still from Death At a 30 Degree Angle.

Amar Kanwar

Nalini Malani

Another significant contribution comes from Mumbai-based visual artist Nalini Malani, who will present her latest “video/shadow play” at dOCUMENTA (13). In Search of Vanished Blood is a massive site-responsive installation using reverse-painted mylar sheets on rotating cylinders that create a narrative video frieze. The work has taken two years to be completed, drawing inspiration from the 1984 novel, Cassandra

by Christa Wolf, Draupadi by Mahasweta Devi and an Urdu poem of Faiz Ahmad Faiz. It “stages” a provocative commentary on communal bloodletting, religious fundamentalism and gender violence.

In addition, dOCUMENTA (13) has invited Malani as one of three artists to produce an artist book. It includes indepth essays and interviews and is accompanied by a special film, the Payal Kapadia-directed Cassandra’s Gift, which explores the making of this project. As part of dOCUMENTA (13)’s publication series, 100 Notes—100 Thoughts, Malani has also co-authored with Arjun Appadurai a piece called The Morality of Refusal. While Appadurai’s text looks

1779, is one of the oldest public museums in Europe, and other venues in Kassel.

Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial model assembles critical voices from fields as disparate as philosophy, eco-architecture and cultural anthropology, as well as extends the life of the “exhibition”. This is not an entirely novel strategy: It was with the legendary Swiss curator Harald Szeeman’s Documenta 5 in 1972 that this international platform came to operate less as a “mega exhibition” and more as a culmination of events, process-oriented artistic

engagement, and performative gestures.

With the first Indian artist, Bhupen Khakhar, participating in Documenta 9 in 1992, subsequent editions have abandoned Eurocentrism for an increasing engagement with a larger part of the globe. In conversation with the four South Asian artists participating in dOCUMENTA (13), we get on the inside of their artistic process in the lead-up to the big opening day.

AMAR KANWAR

Battlefield: A still from The Scene of Crime, part of Amar Kanwar’s The Sovereign Forest.

ANSHUMAN POYREKAR/ HINDUSTAN TIMES

Art destination: The Frideri­ cianum museum has hosted Docu­ menta since 1955.

KRZYSZTOF ZIELINSKI

Bani Abidi Further afield, the Karachi-born, Delhibased Bani Abidi, who is currently an artist in residence at the DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm 2011/12, will also participate in dOCUMENTA (13).

She presents Death At a 30 Degree Angle, a film installation about the commission of a statue by a small-time politician. “Set within the atelier of 87-year-old Ram Sutar, who has been making monumental political statuaries for 60 years, the narrative reflects upon self-portraiture, megalomania and monumentality,” says Abidi. This work was commissioned as part of the Sharjah Art Foundation Production Grants 2010/11; other recipients include the Mumbai-based platform CAMP and photographer and film-maker Zarina Bhimji.

Death At a 30 Degree Angle is a unique addition to Abidi’s oeuvre—unlike earlier works that dwell upon public scenarios of security, bordercrossings and identity conflicts within which the artist herself remains inscribed—here, a sculptor’s studio becomes a site of semi-fictional articulations that contemplate a megalomaniacal political class.

Tejal Shah In Mumbai, Tejal Shah has been busy with producing new work for dOCUMENTA (13). Between the Waves is a multi-part installation composed of performative choreography, film, text, and the spacialization of sound. The work emerges through Shah’s recent interest in evolution models that present nonnormative complexities and excesses of species and nature, human and animal societies. She looks into the physicist Fritjof Capra’s description of the “Crisis of Perception” and investigates how diverse bodies, gender and sexuality are configured within such a crisis. The title, Between the Waves, is derived through “accidental misreadings” of a set of novels written by Virginia Woolf.

Shah activates a relational matrix between animal-human-machine-divine by drawing upon a cross-section of knowledge found in Buddhist philosophy, post-pornography, biological exuberance, interspecies and posthumanism. “The video will seek for its characters to be a polygendered species whose sexuality is multifarious and who are ‘impelled to metamorphosis’...” says Shah. By pursuing an affective methodology, eroticism percolates the very forms as well as artistic process of Between the Waves.

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SATURDAY, JUNE 9, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MUSIC

The boys are back in town Icons of Indian rock, Indus Creed return with a new album after 17 years. We track their evolution

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

···························· ne wishes that it wasn’t simply an accident that the opening song on Indus Creed’s first album in 17 years is a ballad with discernible echoes of Pretty Child—the song that made the then six-member rock ’n roll band the flag-bearer of Indian rock. In Fireflies, lead singer Uday Benegal’s voice soars rapturously to “sweep the skies” (as he sang in Pretty Child) and plunges into grief when the memory of loss sets in, reality’s sharp edge slicing through, much in the vein of the street urchin of the song from the past.

Titled Evolve, the new album spans a broader musical range than any of the band’s previous efforts. The all-new Indus Creed, with a new bassist in Rushad Mistry and a 26-year-old drummer, Jai Row Kavi, features three members from the 1995 line-up—Benegal, keyboardist Zubin Balaporia and guitarist Mahesh Tinaikar (the other three were Mark Selwyn, Jayesh Gandhi and Adrian Fernandes).

The years of ferment have paved the way for a mature sound—“still rock ’n roll with lots of energy but a lot of introspection,” says Tinaikar—ambient, atmospheric and experimental.

Benegal’s lyrics celebrate the camaraderie that tied the band together, perhaps most explicitly in Goodbye, the final track that raises a hat to the band members who had drifted away years ago, only to be brought back together by their enduring love for music and performance.

The disbanding happened in 1997, only two years after the newly renamed Indus Creed’s

O

Evolve:

By Indus Creed, Universal Music Group, `175. self-titled album released to a rousing response. MTV aired the music videos of Pretty Child, Trapped and Sleep relentlessly—catapulting the young band to stardom. But despite the success, the band members were discontented with the direction the music industry was taking: with Bollywood dominating the music channels and “music companies asking (them) to sing in Hindi”. “Also, I was getting sick of living in Bombay,” says Benegal. “The anti-Muslim riots in the city...a city I thought liberal and cohesive.”

“We never really split up or anything,” says Tinaikar. “It was a natural progression. We got bored.” And then, he adds after a long pause, “we just kind of stopped playing together”.

Benegal shifted to the US with Gandhi and established Alms for Shanti, a fusion band that began playing in the New York circuit.

Tinaikar and Balaporia stayed on

‘Indus Creed 2.0’: (from left) Jai Row Kavi, Mahesh Tinaikar, Uday Benegal, Zubin Balaporia and Rushad Mistry; and (above) a late 1980s photo of Rock Machine.

in Mumbai, composing jingles and music for television, a life that lay a hand’s breadth away from their first love.

After almost 13 years together, first as Rock Machine and then as Indus Creed, India’s most famous rock ’n roll band had stopped playing.

“We had been a bunch of lallus when we’d started out,” quips Benegal. “A bunch of guys from Bombay who think they’re, you know, hot stuff.”

Sporting long hair and tonnes of chutzpah, power chords bursting from Tinaikar’s guitar, they’d started with belting out covers of 1980s essentials such as Thin Lizzy, Rush and Steely Dan in 1985. They called themselves Rock Machine.

A far cry from the nostalgia that lies at the heart of Evolve, Rock Machine hopped from college to college with their hereand-now 1980s zeitgeist numbers, and soon began sliding in a few songs of their own into their sets. A scout from music company CBS noticed them, and in 1988 they recorded their first album, Rock ‘n’ Roll Renegade, followed in 1990 by The Second Coming. Executives from MTV—which had just come into the country post-liberalization—ran into Rock Machine while on the lookout for alternative local sounds. The band found a sponsor in Close-Up toothpaste, music video directors in Mumbai-based advertisers Subir Chatterjee and Namita Roy Ghose, and pulled Pretty Child out of obscurity for a video.

“Unlike most of the music that was being produced at the time, Indus Creed’s songs had a depth, a calibre to them,” recalls Chatterjee.

“They allowed you to get down and dirty making a film for them.” MTV put the black and white video on buzz rotation and declared it the ninth best video worldwide for 1993.

By May 1993, Rock Machine had changed its name to Indus Creed.

“We thought Rock Machine was too collegiate, too naïve,” explained Benegal in an interview to Asiaweek, soon after the name change. The change also ushered in an evolved sound, featuring sarangis, flutes and tablas. But it lasted all of two years.

Now, years later, the truncated evolutionary process appears to have resumed with the aptly titled Evolve. It all started with Benegal returning to Mumbai in 2008. He began jamming with Tinaikar and proceeded to create Whirling Kalapas, an acoustic band that played some old Indus Creed numbers. A friend recommended Kavi, who joined them as drummer. “I discovered the drumming animal within him,” says Benegal.

“I said to him, ‘What about plugging the guitar into the amplifier and beating the hell out of that drum set?’” After a lot of prodding, Balaporia also dove in, and in October 2010, the brand new Indus Creed headlined Harley Rock Riders at Hard Rock Café in Mumbai. Harley Rock Riders is an annual musical event organized

by Harley-Davidson in India.

The response was phenomenal. “Hard Rock had to shut its doors to stop people from coming in,” beams Tinaikar.

The band started recording the new album in April 2011. “The biggest mistake that an artiste can make is to try and recreate a hit from the past,” says Benegal. So Benegal’s “Indus Creed 2.0” is back with a new sound. What remains is the gravitas and gusto of the old, now wedded to a bunch of mature musical minds, with Kavi’s drums providing just the right amount of vibrancy to the album’s otherwise sagacious title, Evolve.

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

WHY SO SERIOUS?

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ife Is All Ha Ha Hee Hee could well have been an alternate title for Rowdy Rathore. The idea of justice is a joke in Rowdy Rathore, which updates the vigilante movie that infected the 1980s by adding comedy to the spectacle of violence. Rowdy Rathore is the kind of film that is so terrified that viewers will avert their gaze from the screen to update their BBM status or dig around for a piece of crisp popcorn that it tries to deliver a distraction every other second. It’s not hard to see why: There is nothing at stake in the movie. There is no great social problem to be addressed, no evil to be defeated. Like many other movies in its category, Rowdy Rathore has no villain worth the name since it has a superhero, that too in a double role.

The villain has become both the punching bag and punchline in the neo-vigilante cinema that is becoming so popular with film-makers and viewers. We are being invited to marvel at the superhuman abilities of the hero to the exclusion of most other characters. In fact, the leading man can’t even be called a mere hero any more. No ordinary hero would have survived stab wounds to his jugular and hard knocks to his skull despite not falling into a cauldron of magic potion as a baby and not being exposed to a radioactive substance in his adolescence. Hollywood’s superheroes haven’t stopped combating enemies who have the capacity to destroy whole cities and sometimes, the planet. In Bollywood, however, the re-emergence of the über-macho hero has taken place at the cost of the villain.

Superhuman: Akshay Kumar in the Rowdy Rathore poster.

It is, perhaps, only a coincidence that the supercop-superhero movies star ageing heroes who must resort to unconvincing displays of strength to remain relevant to an increasingly young and fidgety demographic. Dabangg’s villain was a small-town wrestler who was as scary as a tied-up Doberman. Rowdy Rathore’s shambolic cow-shed owner seems incapable of terrorizing even his own henchmen. By contrast, Agneepath, which released earlier this year, had a remorseless arch-villain who sucked the life out of the hero.

As the year reaches the half-way mark, the nastiest piece of work so far has been Bob Biswas, the chilling hitman from Kahaani. Biswas is paid to kill, but his job satisfaction makes him truly nasty.

Villains provide as much a measure of the times as do heroes.

The 1960s and 1970s had their smugglers and traitors, the 1980s and 1990s had their crooked politicians and land-grabbing industrialists. There is no shortage of real-life villains in the 2000s, but the nation doesn’t seem ready for catharsis yet. The rupee may be heading towards the ocean floor and the cost of getting from A to B may be nosing skywards, but the anxiety of life in present-day India seems far removed from the cinemas. Films with unusual subjects such as Paan Singh Tomar, Kahaani and Vicky Donor have confounded expectations and won handsome returns for their film-makers, but none of them challenges the status quo in any way. It is not their burden to carry, of course, but few film-makers seem to want to. Why so serious, everybody seems to be asking.

Well, why not?

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

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

INSTRUMENTAL WOMEN Founded in 1981, Yale University’s all­female a cappella group Whim ’n Rhythm draws 14 women musicians (seven sopranos, seven altos) from the graduating class to keep the tradition running. They span the gamut academically and take a four­ to six­week world tour in the summer. Imitating drums, saxophones, violins and trumpets with their voices, their repertoire draws on every genre from jazz standards to contemporary pop ballads. This year’s group, Whim 2012, began their world tour on 21 May in Los Angeles, US, travelling across southern California before heading for Japan—their first stop in Asia. They will be performing in India for the first time today.

“The most challenging part is staying in the same key, but we have been singing together for a year and know how to listen and tune to each other,” says Katey McDonald, the performance director for Whim 2012. The group’s album ‘Leap Year’ can be purchased at Whimnrhythm.com Whim ’n Rhythm will perform from 5­6pm on Saturday, and from 6­7pm on Sunday, at Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi.

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Anindita Ghose

Different strokes: The girls of Whim 2012.

T h eMi n t i P a da p p Ne ws , v i e wsa n da n a l y s i sf r o mMi n t ’ sa wa r d wi n n i n gj o u r n a l i s t s .

T h eMi n ta p pf e a t u r e sl i v es t o c kq u o t e s , b r e a k i n gn e ws , v i d e o r e p o r t sa n ds l i d e s h o wsb a c k e du pwi t hc o mme n t a r yt oh e l py o u ma k es e n s eo f t h ewo r l do f b u s i n e s sa n df i n a n c e .

Pr e s e nt e dby