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Saturday, February 11, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 6

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

HOW INDIA LOVES At a counsellor’s office or through online singles networks, in the Delhi Metro, in front of a football match broadcast or within a commune for the elderly—real love is not hard to find >Pages 718

SOUP BOY, YOU GO MAN! >Page 15

PUNCTURING A FABLE

Katherine Boo’s remarkable book about a Mumbai slum scrubs away the abstractions of urban poverty >Page 6

THE PECKING ORDER

The Hindi GEC space is exploding with love stories ‘with a difference’. But can Indian television really move on from kitchen dramas? >Page 17

WINGS OF A CITY Siddharth Mangharam, 37, cofounded Floh—a singles network in Bangalore—in May.

OUR DAILY BREAD

PIECE OF CAKE

SAMAR HALARNKAR

FOLLOWING THE SIGNS IN BERKELEY

THE GOOD LIFE

PAMELA TIMMS

TRUFFLES AND SWEET VALENTINE

or someone with a sweet tooth, I’m unusually restrained when it comes to chocolate. The previous two chocolate recipes, Choc Chip Cookies and Chocolate Éclairs, are pretty much how I like my chocolate baking, that is, as a highlight rather than a principal ingredient. If I’m honest, I usually find things like chocolate brownies and chocolate cake just too overpoweringly chocolatey; I like my chocolate in small doses. Occasionally, though, nothing but a full-on chocolate... >Page 4

SHOBA NARAYAN

Sudarshan Shetty’s ‘Flying Bus’ is a love song for Mumbai, reminding us of the city’s history and the need to adapt to new realities >Page 18

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

EARTH LAUGHS IN FLOWERS

am at a flower market in New Delhi en route to dinner at a colleague’s home. I want to take some flowers for my hostess, Anita, but everywhere I see, there are strings of bright yellow marigolds. Where are the cut, long-stemmed roses or Oriental lilies? I want a big bunch of yellow roses, I tell the vendor behind the wooden bench. In response, he lifts a string of marigold he is braiding. It is only after walking through six stalls with no rose to show for it that I pause and reflect on the... >Page 5

PHOTO ESSAY

POLO WITH PACHYDERMS

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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)

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Every little thing called love

LOUNGE PREVIEW LEKHANA, BANGALORE

I COURTESY SOTHEBY’S INDIA

or a nation stereotyped into the grand gesture, we sure do love a helluva lot in many quiet ways. Love graffiti defaces our most prized monuments (our most beautiful one is just such a graffiti on the walls of time), and our railway coaches. Where we cannot dance in open spaces, we glance in confined ones. More alliances are today wrought in one morning commute on the Delhi Metro than in all of a matchmaking aunty’s morning gossips (Page 8). Our school desks are compass-etched with initials that are certainly not algebraic. Even the benaami is a trademark. The indefinable, that which lingers between the law and the custom, is attractive to us. The Indian spirit of entrepreneurship finds ways to transact a currency of love in this space between relationships as well (Pages 12-13). Even the law today understands that it is better to bend and make space for India’s many passions than to expect this madhouse nation of varied community-driven licentiousness to adapt. But we do not stop with romance. Absence, too, is love. Ask a team whose editor is away. Pressure is love. Sachin Tendulkar at 99 bats for the love of India, not for an inanimate record. It is only in India that the guru-shishya relationship is akin to love; even in its modern avatars of the coach-star or the corporate mentor and protégé. Anger, too, is love. Only in India can Shah Rukh Khan slapping Shirish Kunder be dismissed as an act of brotherly love for Farah Khan. Groups, sangathans, sansthas, cults and causes,

Modern Modern love love:: Stop Stop Think by Think Go Go (2006) (2006) by Thukral Thukral & & Tagra. Tagra.

too, are love. From Anna Hazare to the Brazilian football team—Indians are roused to topi-wearing, team-colour T-shirt-toting, screaming-from-thebalcony-at-3am passions. We ache for our cities, through our art, our poetry and our literature, so much so that we append their names into our surnames and travel to tech shores overseas. Even our elderly, like Bangalore’s Pizza Grannies who raised funds to build themselves an old-age companionship centre (Page 9), or the oldest man yet, 92-year-old R.T. Tiwari, to register himself with the senior citizens’ marriage bureau, are full of India’s endless hope. We die for love, and sadly, this means we kill for love—of honour, family, status, society, too. This is how we love; deeply, abidingly, intrusively and loudly. When our narrative borders on hysteria, no Indian raises an eyebrow.

Is it surprising that this multiplicity exists? There are, in Sanskrit, over 99 words for love. There are more than 33 in Persian, and four in Greek, only one in English. In Sanskrit, angaja means “blood”. But it also means an intoxicating passion that flows within you akin to blood. Ananga, its opposite, means “bodiless”. But it also refers to Shiva’s incineration of Kama, the god of love, for having made him fall in love with Parvati. In India, such incendiary anger, too, is love. Kandarpa is that which is so sensual, it inflames even the gods. Words within words across centuries strung together with double entendre at its core evolved to make the modern Indian tongue. Across generations, India is reclaiming it.

n a single multilingual event, we plan to bring together writers in many languages, as well as their pluralistic audiences, over a threeday period of readings, discussions and small performances,” says C.K. Meena, chairperson of Toto Funds the Arts (TFA), describing Lekhana, a festival of literature in Bangalore this weekend. Much more intimate than the Jaipur Literature Festival, Lekhana will tap into the city’s literary talent in an organized way for the first time, and bring together regional and English-language writers for public dialogue and conversation. Four independent literary organizations, the TFA, Sangam House (an international writers’ residency programme), Desha Kaala (a journal for arts and letters in Kannada) and Reading Hour (a print magazine dedicated to Indian creative writing), along with the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), have jointly organized the festival. “We deliberately stayed away from trying to create yet another festival with big international names who write in English. We thought they get their share of attention, HEMANT MISHRA/MINT so why not bring together writers in the city and have a multilingual bash,” says Meena. The festival will be held at the NGMA and will include readings, short performances and panel discussions. Readings by a host of writers will also take place at the Smriti Nandan auditorium across the street from the NGMA. The panel discussions will include “Translations As Conversations”, on the art of translation, and on whether translated works can be a bridge between different linguistic backgrounds, with writers Lakshmi Holmstrom, Rahul Soni, Venue: The NGMA, Bangalore. Arshia Sattar, Vanamala and Giriraj Kiradoo. “It’s one way of getting regional literatures out into the world but it’s also about bringing the world to us,” says Sattar, director, Sangam House. On another panel, Vivek Shanbhag and Jayant Kaikini will discuss new Kannada writing. There will be outreach activity for students through a creative writing and photography contest. The weekend will close with a session by playwright Girish Karnad, who will read from his memoir Aadaadtha Ayushya. Lekhana, till 12 February, 10am-6pm, National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore. Entry is free. For details, visit http://www.sangamhouse.org/lekhana-a-literary-gathering Pavitra Jayaraman

Gayatri Jayaraman Issue editor

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

Following the signs in Berkeley JEFF LOCKARD

Once you partake of California’s supermar kets, eating out is not an easy thing to do

he gnarly senior citizen with the white beard stands impassively on the pavement outside my window with a sign that reads, “Only 119 days left to judgement day.” On a walk downtown yesterday, I saw a panhandler with a sign propped against his begging bowl. It said: “Need money to fight aliens and impress girls.” A little further, I see poems carved into the pavement. Walking through the campus of the University of California, Berkeley (or “Cal”, for short)—where I am presently on sabbatical, teaching for a semester—I stop to read one of many steel-bronze plates embedded in the ground; this one proclaims that the air above this plaque is “subject to the jurisdiction of no nation”. At Berkeley, home to more Nobel laureates than perhaps any other place on earth and more restless young people than anywhere in the US (400 were tear-gassed and arrested last month), there are signs everywhere—droll, informative, never boring. But the signs that interest me most are posted in the Berkeley Bowl, a hulk of a supermarket, half the size of the Wankhede. I know the US is the land of choice, and I’ve seen some big supermarkets, but this place drives me to disbelief. There are signs for six varieties of eggplant (brinjal)—Japanese, Indian, Thai, Mexican, Italian and another I can’t remember; at least 10 varieties of garlic, including black garlic (a type of fermented garlic used in some Asian food); as many of chillies, tomatoes and, oh, every fruit, vegetable and herb you can think of (from lime leaf to curry leaf) and many that you cannot. There are ready foods—I snap up turkey loaf and eggplant lasagna—and wines and spices and a diversity of things. As one blogger noted, the Bowl has “aisles packed with fair-trade cocoa, bulk bins overflowing with every type of spelt pretzel, and a produce section that’ll make you slap your mama”. A visit to the Bowl and $100 (around `4,900) lighter, I am ready to stop eating out at Berkeley’s endless array of restaurants and eager to fire up the gas stove in the little kitchen

of our rambling, basement flat on a quiet Berkeley hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. No one is more delighted than the wife and my garrulous 21-month-old daughter. The wife, a finicky vegetarian, loves each of my experiments with the bags of organic produce (everything in Berkeley seems to be organic). Let’s see, I’ve cooked something different for almost every meal: cabbage tossed with garam masala and sesame seeds; couscous mixed with lemon juice (the lemon plucked from the landlord’s tree), tomatoes, baby spinach, brie, soy and pepper; steamed beans stir-fried with slivered yellow pepper and finely chopped galangal. There’s no help, of course, but dishing out these meals takes little time. Everything is clean. The salad is “triple washed, so you don’t have to”, as the packets say, though one friend in Michigan darkly warns of the time a dead frog turned up in one such packet. “Good thing you’ll eat anything,” she says. That’s true, I will. I am gleeful as I toss fresh salads every meal, the latest with edible flowers. What’s that? How many varieties of edible flowers? I counted eight. I am surprised Americans eat out as much as they do when there is this cornucopia at hand. On some days I cook breakfast, lunch and dinner and go to work or ramble in the park or playground with the daughter. The kitchen is littered with bottles of wine—cheap ($10 on average; $6 will get you a good bottle) and infinitely superior to the sludge at home. The daughter, who has adjusted to a life without the stuffed parathas and adulterated milk of home in Bangalore, devours a brown-egg omelette every morning, along with a large slice of Mexican papaya and a cup of blueberry yogurt. For dinner, she struggles along with two roasted chicken legs, banana and milk. Today, I stuffed the skin—chicken legs without skin are hard to find—with garlic and marinated the drumsticks with soy, pepper, salt and cinnamon powder. As for me, I make do, whipping up something for

Produce heaven: The Berkeley Bowl supermarket in California, US, stocks everything from 10 types of garlic to ‘pesticidefree heirloom tomatoes’. myself after the girls are fed. The day before I had wild Atlantic salmon, pan-fried with a miso-ginger marination. Yesterday, I had spicy, herbed Italian sausage. Much to my displeasure, I had to share both the salmon and sausage with the daughter who yells “Me! Me!” whenever I eat, convinced that I reserve the best for myself. Today, I intend to hide from her the lean, beef keema, which cooked on an open stove within 15 minutes. One of those signs carved into a pavement downtown jokes how children born in California emerge in the “lotus position”, a reference to the preponderance of yoga, and turn vegetarian— this is the only city in the US that appears to have vegetarian Chinese restaurants. Well, my child obviously has not seen that sign. I log on to my Twitter feed to check the latest signs from the Bowl. They tell me of “pesticide free heirloom tomatoes”, pineapples from Costa Rica, Peruvian mangoes, and that I better rush if I want to the catch the end of the California stone-fruit season. Where’s that bus? As long as I am in California, I will follow the signs.

Stirfried zucchini and baby spinach Serves 2 Ingredients 2 tsp Chinese sesame oil (try til oil, though I am not sure it is the same; or stick to olive oil) 2 tsp sesame seeds 1 tsp pepper, freshly ground 2 tsp garlic, finely chopped 1 tsp ginger, cut into thin slivers 3-5 tsp soy sauce 1 large zucchini, sliced into half, lengthwise, then cut into halves 2 handfuls of baby spinach (hard to find in India, hard to substitute with regular palak, try pak choi or steamed beans instead) N red pepper (capsicum, chopped into fine slivers) Juice of K lemon (optional, do not replace with lime) Salt to taste Method Gently heat the sesame or olive oil. Drop in the sesame seeds, and wait till they pop. Add garlic and toss till lightly brown. Add the zucchini and stir-fry for a minute or two (the zucchini should remain firm but not crunchy). Add the soy sauce and toss for a minute. Add salt, then spinach in handfuls. Keep tossing till the spinach reduces, then add the slivered red pepper. Toss for a

minute. Add the ginger and toss for final a minute before taking off the stove. Stir in lemon juice, sprinkle the fresh pepper and serve hot.

tsp of oil) on medium to low heat until the salmon is lightly browned and cooked through.

Salmon with pepper and soy; or sesame oil and redchilli powder

Serves 2

Salmon is a fish with firm flakes and a strong flavour of its own. You really don’t need to add much. Serves 1-2 Version 1 Ingredients 2 large pieces of salmon, 1-inch thick 2 tsp black pepper, freshly ground 4-6 tsp soy sauce 1 tsp olive oil Salt to taste Version 2 Ingredients 2 large pieces of salmon, 1-inch thick 1 tsp red-chilli powder 3 tsp soy sauce 1 tsp sesame oil Salt to taste Method Marinate the salmon, in either case, with the ingredients mentioned. An hour is enough. Fry in a non-stick pan (adding a

Cabbage tossed with sesame seeds and garam masala Ingredients K cabbage, shredded 2 tsp sesame seeds 1 tsp garlic, finely chopped N tomato, finely chopped K-1 tsp garam masala Juice of 1 lemon 2 tsp olive oil Method Heat olive oil in a non-stick pan, splutter the sesame seeds. Add garlic and stir for a minute. Add the cabbage and toss for a minute or two, or until it begins to soften. Add the garam masala and mix well. Add the tomato. Stir in the lemon juice. Do not overcook. Samar Halarnkar is consulting editor, Mint and Hindustan Times. He is presently a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. Write to him at ourdailybread@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Samar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/ourdailybread

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

SWEET VALENTINE

I’m also particularly partial to white chocolate which, strictly speaking, is not really chocolate at all as it contains no cocoa solids, only cocoa butter and milk solids. It does, though, make beautiful truffles and these Cardamom and Orange White Chocolate Truffles would be a particularly gorgeous Valentine’s Day gesture. There are two types of truffle—one made with egg yolks, another that only uses chocolate and cream. I decided to do the egg-free kind but this was the first time I’d made them and I quickly realized that you can’t substitute white chocolate in a dark chocolate truffle recipe. You need a lot less cream with white chocolate, otherwise the

hour. Roll the mixture quickly (or it will melt) between your hands, then roll each truffle again in either the cocoa or icing sugar. You could also roll them in melted white chocolate but you have to work quickly and make sure the mixture is very cold. Finely chopped pistachios and desiccated coconut also make pretty coatings for truffles. Place each truffle in a small paper case, then keep in the fridge till needed. Truffles will keep happily in the fridge for about three days.

mixture won’t set enough to mould—and I have several bowls of Cardamom and Orange White Chocolate Sauce in my fridge to prove it. Once you know that (and you do now, so no excuse) they’re quick to make, look beautiful boxed for a present and, most importantly, they taste wanton and voluptuous, just the right side of schmaltzy and sickly sweet. A bit like Valentine’s Day itself.

Valentine’s Day Cardamom and Orange White Chocolate Truffles

Multihued: Truffles are quick to make and make for a beautiful gift.

Makes 12-15 Ingredients 150g good-quality white chocolate (not cooking chocolate—this is for your loved one after all!) 85ml whipping cream Zest of K orange, very finely grated N tsp cardamom seeds, freshly ground Sieved icing sugar or cocoa powder to coat the truffles

Method Chop the chocolate into small pieces, then blitz in a food processor. Put the cream, cardamom and orange zest in a small pan and bring to a boil. Immediately pour the cream on to the chocolate and blitz the mixture until it’s smooth and all the chocolate has melted. Pour the truffle mixture into a shallow dish and chill for an hour or so.

Handling the truffles needs to be done as quickly and coolly as possible—this is definitely not a hot-weather job. Run your hands under the cold tap for a minute to cool them down. Dust your hands with either the cocoa powder or icing sugar, depending on which you’re using. Use a small teaspoon to take out a cape gooseberry-sized chunk of the mixture. If it’s too soft to handle, return to the fridge for another

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 bake Valentine’s Day Cardamom and Orange White Chocolate Truffles, visit www.livemint.com/choctruffles.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Earth laughs in flowers

I want a big bunch of yellow roses, I tell the vendor behind the wooden bench. In response, he lifts a string of marigold he is braiding. It is only after walking through six stalls with no rose to show for it that I pause and reflect on the irony of the situation. All over the world, people are moving towards handmade, handcrafted local objects—made to measure and customized right in front of your eyes. Here I am, doing the opposite. All around me are fragrant, beautifully stitched strings of native Indian flowers. Why am I harking for a bouquet when stringing flowers together is the Indian way? So this Valentine’s Day, as you search for flowers for your sweetie, I submit to you an alternative: Rather than buying those obligatory long-stemmed red roses, why not braid some intoxicating Madurai jasmine in your hair instead? Instead of dazzling her with a bouquet, caress her with a rose garland instead? Or hang chains of tuberose all around the bed. Why? Because here in India, it is possible; and when done right, it is wonderful. As this issue points out, there are 99 Sanskrit words for love. There are just as

many Indian flowers that are available to us if only we cared to look: champa, mogra, neel kamal, rajnigandha, raat ki rani, nithyakalyani, jati, parijat, kadamb, punnaga, the list goes on. A wonderful site called Flowersofindia.in has photographs of native Indian flowers and their historical significance. As collector and scholar Kamala Vasudevan points out in her essay, Ancient Gardens of India, the Aryans of Vedic times were great nature lovers. They called flowers sumanasa, which means “that which pleases the mind”. A hymn that I listened to while growing up begins: Sumanasa vandita sundari madhavi, and was dedicated to Goddess Lakshmi. I am crazy about flowers. When I die, I want to be surrounded by them: fragrant tuberose, strings of heady night jasmine, Oriental lilies, roses, gardenia, if possible, all of the above. Why do Western societies collect their flowers in bouquets while here in India, we string them together? I have two theories to explain this. One has to do with cheap labour. It is far less labour-intensive to cut flowers into bouquets. Stringing them into garlands takes work. Visit the flower markets in any

city to see men and women busily stringing fragrant flowers into garlands that we all take for granted. Tuberose with a dash of green tulsi in between; yellow and orange marigolds alternating; scented mogra, mixed with green, differently scented marugu; orange kadamba; rose garlands encased in a silvery net—the varieties of ways we string flowers together reflects an aesthetic that pays attention to pattern and ritual. The fact that early European societies used to string flowers into their hats lends credence to this theory of labour-intensiveness contributing to the fall of handwork with respect to flowers and the rise of easy-cut bouquets. The second reason, I believe, has to do with adornment. Indian literature is full of flower references. They are viewed as symbols of auspiciousness and adornment, which is why no Indian function is complete without them. Flowers are also symbols of “shringara rasa”, as depicted in pretty much every miniature painting and all our dance forms. The adornments are usually the same: sandal paste; strings of jasmine flowers coiled through black hair; and little else. The whole effect is simple, sensual, divine. I wear strings of jasmine in my hair when I am home but take them out when I go out, mostly because I stand out. In Bangalore, philanthropist Sudha Murty appears in public with flowers in her hair but I haven’t seen anyone else. Mostly, we wear our hair loose these days and how does one attach flowers to loose hair? Chennai weddings, thankfully, are

Street blooms: The Dadar flower market in Mumbai, on a recent winter morning. still full of young girls in half-saris, as we call them, with long strings of jasmine pinned on braided hair. The scent and sight are intoxicating. Western adornment with flowers usually involves just one, if that. You may pin a flower behind your hair, or in the place of a brooch but that’s it. Complex adornment, the way we Indians do it, requires the flowers to be stitched or strung together. The practice may be dying though. According to an essay, Cut Flower Production in India by the Delhi-based Narendra K. Dadlani, editor-in-chief of the journal of Indian Society of Ornamental Horticulture, there are about 65,000 hectares of land under cultivation for flowers. Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are the states with maximum flower cultivation and the bulk of it comprises loose flowers used for our strings and garlands. But slowly, stemmed flowers for bouquets are gaining ground and there may come a time when strings and garlands will become too expensive to

produce. Until then, enjoy. So this Valentine’s, take your lover out for a candlelit dinner by all means. Buy them expensive foreign brands—I want a handbag by Moynat, if you must know. But when it comes to buying flowers, why not visit one of our flower bazaars, chat with the guy sitting on the wooden bench and get a custom-made string or garland to take home? The `3,000 that it will cost you to get a nice bouquet will buy you enough fragrant strings to suffuse every corner of your home with the scent of love. Shoba Narayan buys Oriental lilies for her vases and strings of jasmine every day. She floats marigolds in her uruli and wears whatever she can get in her hair. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shobanarayan

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012

Spotlight

LOUNGE

NONFICTION

Puncturing a fable Katherine Boo’s remarkable book about a Mumbai slum scrubs away the abstractions of urban poverty

Behind the Beautiful Forevers—Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity: Penguin India, 254 pages, `499.

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

···························· n humid afternoons, when the door to an aircraft opens on to either of Mumbai’s airports, the smell of burned-up fuel and heated metal rushes in accompanied by a riper, more human whiff—not exactly shit, but not exactly far from it. Nonplussed first-timers sometimes essentialize it as the smell of the city, and perhaps the country. Others may guess that this comes from the complex of slums which surrounds both airports, supplying vast quantities of labour, little of it formal, to surrounding suburban industries. Katherine Boo’s first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, is an investigation of one of these slums, Annawadi, a semi-solid patch of land first settled by immigrant Tamil labourers in 1991. It follows three years in the lives of some of its residents, including a family of garbage sorters, a fixer associated with the Shiv Sena who hopes to gain serious political control over her neighbourhood, and a few young boys trying to stave off hunger as they shuttle between recycling work, petty crime, and the night-time comforts of Erase-X, which provide “an infusion of daring for after-midnight work”. Luxury hotels tower in the near distance around Annawadi. A long-standing project—sometimes reported as “airport beautification”, sometimes as “slum demolition”—to clear residents off the foetid land haunts it at regular intervals. These sound like familiar stories about urban India because, like an indeterminate airport smell, they linger in urban Indian consciousness without quite assuming a fully explained presence. In that sense, the most immediate surprise that Behind the Beautiful Forevers will hold for an Indian reader

is the depth and intimacy of Boo’s investigation. Boo, a reporter with The New Yorker, has been praised before for the remarkable sense of involvement and scrupulous, insider-level detail she brings to her journalism about urban poverty and injustice. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a book for which she reported in Annawadi from November 2007 to March 2011, will confirm all the compliments paid to the quality of her work, and occasion several new ones. Boo narrates the years in the lives of these residents in third person, subsumed near-totally by the voices of her subjects. The book opens with Abdul, age 16 (or perhaps 19; “his parents were hopeless with dates”), fleeing from the scene of a crime he has not committed, and follows him as he and his family are accused, arrested and dragged through a monstrous routine of torture, corruption and indifference. They hunt for justice in the “overcity” of policemen and special executive officers, judges, and overseers like Asha, a corrupt neighbour trying to take control of Annawadi’s problems because there is money to be made. Almost all of Abdul’s story happens in reported speech; when he or Annawadi’s residents do talk directly, it is always to each other, and never to Boo. What does it mean for a reporter not to be present in her work? Two recent narratives about urban Indian poverty, Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing and Aman Sethi’s A Free Man, come to mind in this respect. In both books, the reporters are always present as they talk to their protagonists. Both reporters, perhaps as inhabitants of the same ecosystem from which their books spring, make their difference a part of the story, and the transparency of their perspectives contributes to the success of each book. Boo, on the other hand, forsakes a presence in the book,

Chronicler: Katherine Boo; and (below) the author’s book closely tracks the distribution of opportunity in informal industries like garbage recycling. knowing or guessing the pitfalls of playing a “bridge character” between her audience and the people of whom she writes. She remains, as a writer, beautifully alert and vibrant, illuminating character and motive like a good novelist. “One of his private vanities was that all the garbage sorting had endowed his hands with killing strength,” she writes of Abdul, “...that he could chop a brick in half like Bruce Lee. ‘So let’s get a brick,’ replied a girl with whom he had once, injudiciously, shared this conviction. Abdul had bumbled away. The brick belief was something he wanted to harbour, not to test.” When the young orphan Sunil slips into thievery, she writes of him, with as much wit as precision, as a “new economy microsaboteur”. Where spoken, the languages of Annawadi are reported accurately, without gimmick or reinvention: The boy who says, “I think his guarantee is over”, to describe a dying neighbour is also the boy who will eventually tell us:

“I don’t like myself, doing this work. It’s like being an insult.” Indeed, perhaps the only times the reader is jostled out of the narrative are whenever religion intrudes into the lives of Annawadians. Boo is forced into the role of explainer: There is no convenient way to avoid writing things like, “But once the coconut was thrown, the evil eye would stick, even if your enemy hired a baba to burn three incense sticks in a glass of rice with a sprinkle of vermillion powder on top.” As the book progresses, it becomes evident that even the small details work to enlarge a reader’s understanding of this world, not just conceptually, but through humane, individual truths. “The Annawadi Dalits had christened their slumlanes Gautam Nagar, after an eight-year-old boy who had died of pneumonia during one of the airport authority’s periodic demolitions,” she writes, in her first and last mention of Gautam Nagar in the book. But there it springs to life, in wrenching and unexpected detail. In an artfully placed clause, while writing about Sunil, Boo can create a picture of children living “in a state of almost constant hunger”, and pulverize the fond myth many urban Indians, and Mumbaikars in particular, harbour about their cities being places where no matter what, at least fellow citizens don’t starve. Boo’s name does not appear in the book, but many others do. Doggedly obtained information about bribe-taking officials and abusive policemen, in particular, implicates several offenders by name. More broadly, Annawadi’s stories make plain the serious dysfunctions in the way state and private mechanisms interact with the poor. As a structural critique of inequality, the book is a remarkable and discomfiting success. Its other big victory is moral. Annawadi may be a place easy to call “Dickensian”, but Dick-

ens’ sentimentality could not have begun an exploration like Boo’s, so uncompromising about the exigencies of good and evil, rich and poor. Boo does not write to elicit compassion or charity. This raises the question: What does this story demand of its reader? There may be those who read Boo’s book to experience the pity and terror of a narrative in which the hardcover-reading classes are absent. But the book does not exist to restore humanity to an “undercity” (Boo’s word) that others simply haven’t yet noticed. It is also, symptomatically, a book about the failure to notice. Boo is not in the business of making class-based accusations, but Behind the Beautiful Forevers eats into the hazy but persuasive confidence widely harboured about urban growth. The elite embarrassment over “Slumbai” is often secretly accompanied by the perverse notion that this blatantly public view of inequality, specific to Mumbai, is in some way its own solution. The contradiction of this visibility is that it softens the idea of real and deep divides into abstraction. That is why the Erase-X and the suppurating hands of scavengers will come as a shock to few Indian readers and almost no Mumbaikar. Boo attacks this narrative obfuscation, not to deflate expectations, but to better understand the challenges of these expectations. The story is not just that growth fails to be inclusive; it is about the ways in which the excluded negotiate these failures. The story is these lines from the book’s last quarter: “Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity, but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating. ‘We try so many things,’ as one Annawadi girl puts it, ‘but the world doesn’t move in our favor.’” DANIEL BEREHULAK/GETTY IMAGES

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Torque: Krishna Poonia at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi; and (below) Virender and Krishna in training.

‘He gave me vision’ How Krishna Poonia, India’s best bet at the track and field events for the Olympics, found the perfect coach 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.

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

·································· ow can she not be strong? She grew up nourished by the milk and ghee of 200 buffaloes!” It’s Virender Poonia’s way of expressing his affection and pride for Krishna, 29, his wife as well as trainee, the first Indian woman to win gold in a track and field event at a Commonwealth Games (discus, 2010, New Delhi), and the first Indian since Milkha Singh way back in 1958 (400m, Cardiff, UK) to do so. Needless to say, she is a very strong woman. Virender reiterates it often, each time with a childlike delight that saves the punchline from turning stale: “The strength of 200 buffaloes!” We can’t actually see the force she can generate, but we can be aware of the effect it produces. At the Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports training ground in Patiala, Punjab, Krishna is getting ready for the Olympics, from 27 July-12 August. Her afternoon session begins with an hour of throwing. She stands with her hands spread out like wings, lowers her centre of gravity, pirouettes once, gathers momentum, pirouettes again with enormous speed, and channels all the muscular energy in her 6ft, 1-inch and almost 80kg frame into the narrow bottleneck of her throwing arm. The discus sails like a ball walloped by Virender Sehwag, destined to drop somewhere in the upper tiers of a stadium. In India, track and field events are a long way from being spectator sports—so while millions of people can appreciate the beauty and power of, say, Sehwag’s batting, the biomechanical art of Krishna’s throws is an obscure notion. But it’s there nonetheless. Has she ever calculated the power her

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throwing arm generates? “I don’t know if such a machine exists,” Krishna says, “but I don’t really need to know. I can throw the discus just over 63m—in the 2008 Olympics, the gold was won with a throw of 64.74m, and the silver with 63.64m—so my aim is to get to 65m by the time the Olympics come around.” But for now, Virender is unhappy with the timing of her release. He circles around Krishna, tells her after each throw if she released the discus a little too early or a little too late. Krishna keeps at it till, after about 30-odd throws, Virender says: “Yes! That’s the one. This was perfect.” Throwing done, husband and wife go into the weight-training hall across the road, where he assists her in a routine that consists of half-squats and bench presses. She squats 100kg, but this is just the conditioning phase of her training cycle—a couple of months later, when she hits the phase known as “maximal strength”, she will do half squats with 250kg, and bench presses with 135kg. If they ever have a domestic tiff, she could hurl Virender out of the window. “No, wait, hold on,” Virender says, “I can squat with 300kg, okay? So we are kind of equally matched.” There is more to that statement than just loving banter. Shattering social convention, Krishna began her career in athletics only after her marriage and the birth of her child. She grew up in a joint family in a village called Agroha in Haryana, where her father ran a dairy farm (of the “200 buffaloes” fame), and though her family was liberal and not opposed to a career for her, there was little knowledge or impetus for sports. “My childhood was entirely ordinary,” Krishna says. “Go to school, play with my cousins, study, help out at the farm. There were no sports facilities or coaches in my village or school, so it never crossed my mind that I’ll be an athlete.” It was only after joining college in 1998 that she picked up her first discus and immediately began winning at state-level and collegiate competitions. The same year, she was selected for a national camp in Patiala. Unknown to either of them, Virender, at that time a national-level hammer thrower, was attending the same camp. In early 1999, Krishna and Virender’s families sought each other out (both are liberal families with a bent towards women’s empowerment and living in conservative villages) and arranged their marriage. By the end of the year, they were married. The year after that, Krishna suffered a back injury during training, pulled out of the national camp, and became pregnant. Virender quit sports soon after to look after his ailing

D R E A M C A T C H E R S father, who had terminal cancer. “Even at that time, I had no real desire to want to become an athlete,” Krishna says. “When I quit, I was all ready to become a housewife and bring up our son.” But Virender, who by now knew he would not make the cut at the international level, turned his attention to his wife. “I could see that she was built to be an athlete and it would be a shame for her to sit around the house or work in an office,” Virender says. “So I transferred my personal desires on to her.” This meant counselling Krishna tirelessly to build awareness and ambition in her, to tell her what it means to win an Olympic medal. “He gave me vision,” Krishna says. Six months after the birth of their son, Lakshyaraj, in 2001, Krishna was ready to get back to sports. They began at home, in a small village called Gagarwas in Rajasthan, 270km from Jaipur. Virender, who worked for the Railways,

took Krishna every day to the railway grounds and gym near the village to train. “A woman in sports was unthinkable in our village at that time,” Virender says. “I’m pretty sure that Krishna is one of the first women not to wear a ghunghat (veil) in the village, so we hid the fact that I was training her.” Virender’s family had no problems with this—his grandfather Changdi Ram was a member of the Arya Samaj, a former freedom fighter and a Left-leaning intellectual who opened schools for girls in Gagarwas and its neighbouring villages. His legacy runs through the family. “It wasn’t an easy time for us,” Krishna says. “Virender’s father was ill and then passed away, we had a son, Virender had a poorly paid job, and I was desperately looking for one... “But it didn’t matter,” Virender interjects. “We stuck to it.” In 2002, Krishna was back at the national camp, but it came at a price. She had to leave her son, then a year-and-ahalf old, for six months. “That was horrible,” Krishna says. “Though Virender’s family was looking after him, he was just a baby, so he had no idea why his parents were not there for him. I used to have nightmares that he will forget me.” But gradually Krishna began making inroads at the national level, and then at the international level. In 2006, she won a bronze at the Doha Asian Games, cementing her place as one of India’s top

track and field athletes. In 2008, she qualified for the Beijing Olympics with a little over three months to spare before the Games. “Back then, we did not really know how to prepare for an Olympic, and we also had little time,” Krishna says. Krishna has come a long way since. She brought discus into the limelight in India with a gold at the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games and a bronze at the 2010 Asian Games—she had already set her personal best throw so far, 63.69m, at a tournament in California, US, in April 2010. In October, with just under a year to spare, Krishna qualified for the London Olympics. “This is just perfect,” Virender says, “because now we can take her through the correct training schedule, which is designed to make her peak at the Olympics in July 2012.” “Where I will throw 65m,” says Krishna. It has turned into an obsession, this 65m mark. “That’s the single-minded state every coach wants from their athletes,” Virender says, “though maybe it’s not so nice when you are a husband and you have to listen to the same thing all day and all night…” “And who is to blame for that?” asks Krishna. “But it’s wonderful that my husband is also my coach. Even after we leave the training ground, he looks after every little aspect of my life—what I’m eating, when I’m eating, if I’m getting enough rest...It’s a good life!” Virender points out that even elite women athletes in India hardly ever get the right kind of coaching input. “It’s another social barrier,” Virender says. “Most girls come from rural areas, and find it awkward to train under a male coach. If a coach touches a trainee, it could become a big scandal, but how can you avoid contact in sports? Thankfully for us, there are no such problems.” The only problem that remains then is the time spent away from their son. At the time of this interview, Krishna had again not met her son for six months—she was away training for four months in the US, and then two months in Patiala. “At least there is Skype now, so I get to see him every day,” Krishna says. “But sometimes I do break down, and then Virender has to handle my pain. After all, it’s been like this for 10 years now, and time is just slipping away.” “But think about it,” Virender says, “an Indian woman winning a medal at the Olympics! Our son will see that happen. The whole nation will see it. Then we will make up for all the lost time...” www.livemint.com To read our previous stories in the Dream Catchers series, visit www.livemint.com/dreamcatchers

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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Rosy day: Anayana, a marketing analyst, met her French boyfriend, a PhD student, at Rajiv Chowk Metro station.

romance central

FAN LOVE

SPOUSE LOVE

We met commuters on the Delhi Metro to find out how the trains have transformed love life in the city BY M A Y A N K A U S T E N S O O F I mayank.s@livemint.com

································· This msg is for cutie pie who boarded Metro from Pitampura on 2 February around 8.30am & left at Sec 16 Noida station. She was wearing blu jeans & black levis tee. U were looking gorgeous. I am the guy standing near u. Is there any chance of new frnd. If you too liked me, reply me. —A message on “Dil Se”, a classified section in the HT City, Delhi, supplement of Hindustan Times.

train pulled into the yellow line underground Metro station at Rajiv Chowk, below the bustle of Connaught Place. The doors opened. They entered. The doors closed. The train moved. Leaning over her in the crowded compartment, his blue-green eyes resting on the beauty spot on her left cheek, he said, “I want to coat you in honey.” She laughed, saying softly, “All the uncles and aunties are staring at us.” Anayana (name changed on request) wants to keep her romantic life secret. The 23-year-old knows her relationship may lead nowhere. She is a marketing analyst, he a PhD student. She is Kashmiri, he is French. Her conservative parents might never agree…to what? She met him at a Metro station. He will eventually return to his country for good. One February evening, pointing to the little circle that indicates Rajiv Chowk on the Delhi Metro route map, Anayana says: “I first saw Laurent (name changed on request) here.” It was 11am, nearing the end of rush hour, but still crowded enough at Delhi Metro’s biggest junction station. “I was walking towards the exit near my office,” Anayana recalls. “Laurent was

with a friend who was telling him that Delhi is designed at right angles. I don’t know what came over me…and I said, ‘No, Delhi is a circular city.’ He smiled at me; I smiled too. Stepping out of the L-block exit, I gave him my visiting card.” The origins of this love story can be traced back to 1998, when the construction of the Delhi Metro began. Today, the subway system has 200 trains running on 190km of tracks daily from 6am-11pm, carrying around 1.8 million commuters every day. The Metro has changed the way Delhiites tackle their city. The Capital has been condensed into a rainbow of lines—red, yellow, green, blue, violet and orange. The pillars under the elevated Metro tracks serve as landmarks and, on occasion, as a guiding system for lost sheep. The Metro track also marks the boundary between stifling tradition and relative liberty. At least one Bollywood film has documented that the modestly dressed girls of Old Delhi fling off their veils as the train leaves the Chawri Bazar station. That the Metro is convenient for more than just commuting became evident in 2011 when a management student launched MetroMates (www.metromates.in). The website helps travellers find love on the tracks. “The idea of MetroMates came when I noticed people staring at each other, wanting to strike up conversations but not knowing how to do it,” says Sameer Suri, 25, who started the dating service with his brother Harsh. It has more than 8,000 registered users. In the old days of getting from A to B, Delhi’s Blueline buses were romantic only in films like Dil Se.. (1998) and Sarfarosh (1999). In real life, they were dreaded for rash driving, overcrowding, jostling and groping. Usually, if a girl locked eyes with a man on the bus, it meant she was glaring at him. Anayana, who commuted in buses during her college years, says: “I looked ugly on buses, but look like a babe on the Metro. You also smell better. You reach on time and have fewer fights with your boyfriend.” Praising the anonymity of the Metro, she says, “If I’m spotted with a boy in an autorickshaw

or on a bus, I might be in trouble. But if I’m seen talking to Laurent on the Metro, I can always say I met a friend on the train.” The malls and multiplexes in the vicinity of Metro stations have become popular meeting points for people in love. It is far from unusual to see youngsters holding hands, whispering into each other’s ears, even embracing inside the Metro. A TV ad for a toothpaste has a couple pretending to kiss in what looks like a Delhi Metro compartment. A discreetly shot YouTube clip that shows a pair kissing on the Metro received 130,000 hits at the time of writing. Smooching, though, is still rare. Love is as old as time, but why are we looking for it in Delhi Metro? “The daily proximity and exposure to each other helps build a relationship, which could bloom in an office café, a college canteen or on the Metro train that you catch daily at 10am from Rohini,” says Samir Parikh, chief psychiatrist at Max Healthcare. “The Metro is air-conditioned, more comfortable, and has commuters from all walks of life, which makes it easier for you to find someone like you.” Ex-radio jockey Rochie Rana, 31, made a friend in March last year when she took a train from Saket. “This American was sitting next to me. I was reading a Murakami, which gave me a good excuse to banter with him (‘Have you read Kafka on the Shore?’). Soon, we started traipsing the city together.” In this too the Metro helped them. “We regularly met at the Nehru Place station, where we would stand in front of the Metro route map. He would put his finger randomly on some spot and we explored it that day.” IT professional Sumanta Roy, who blogs at OMGDelhi (omgdelhi. blogspot.com), likes people-watching on the violet line that connects Central Secretariat to Badarpur. “The most handsome commuters are from south Delhi, and many of them go to Khan Market in the violet,” he says. “Once a dashing-looking man, while parking his Mercedes at Moolchand Metro station, offered to treat me to a drink. I was flattered.”

LOST LOVE

BUSINESS OF LOVE

METRO LOVE

ONCE A DASHING LOOKING MAN, GROUP LOVE WHILE PARKING HIS MERCEDES AT MOOLCHAND METRO STATION, OFFERED TO TREAT ME TO A DRINK. I WAS FLATTERED.

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However, it’s the blue line that has the most attractive passengers, according to an online Train of Love survey conducted by the MetroMates website last month. In the survey—which included inputs from around 300 Metro commuters—48% of the respondents voted for the “lookers” on the blue line, 39% disclosed they look for friendship on the trains and platforms, 22% look for dates, and 10% for love. Some 37% of them said they like staring at beautiful fellow travellers, 87% said they are attracted to other passengers, but only 7% could muster the courage to actually talk to someone they liked. Anayana and her Frenchman would often go to a library in Civil Lines. Since Anayana lives in Noida, she takes the blue line, while Laurent, a resident of Greater Kailash-I, comes north on the yellow line. They avoid Kashmere Gate because Anayana’s ex, with whom she broke up last year, uses that junction to change his connection for Pitampura. Priya Bhattacharji, a 24-year-old brand consultant working in Sainik Farms, is practised in what she calls “passive interaction with good-looking boys”. She says, “In the underground stretches, it’s dark outside the windows, so you stare at all the eye candy. They know I’m looking, but—and this is the best part—these boys don’t make me feel self-conscious.” Every night, Anayana gets down at the Noida Sector 15 station. If she is late, she calls her father as the train reaches Yamuna Bank, four stops from home. “I don’t want to think of the day when I would have to tell mummypapa about Laurent,” she says, waiting for the home-bound train at Rajiv Chowk. “But he is now in France and will come back late in the year. I don’t know whether what we have between us can last for long. But I’m happy. I haven’t told him that I’m talking about us to a newspaper. Our story will be a surprise gift for his birthday, which falls the day after Valentine’s Day.” The train arrives. The recorded voice announces, “Please mind the gap.” The doors open. Anayana gets in. The train pulls out.

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the granny joy club LOST LOVE

METRO LOVE

Retirement is not the end. From selling pizzas to establishing a home for the elderly, the ‘Pizza Grannies’ show you how it’s done B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN pavitra.j@livemint.com

································· ust get me an appointment and I’ll convince him,” says a feisty 75-year-old Padma Srinivasan on the phone to a friend whose husband is the head honcho at a multinational corporation (MNC). She is seated in the dining area of Vishranthi, a senior citizens’ home on the Hoskote-Malur Road on the outskirts of Bangalore. She built it with her daughter, Sarasa Vasudevan, 52, and 80-year-old friend Jayalakshmi Sreenivasan, also Vasudevan’s mother-in law. Srinivasan is pitching the possibility of selling home-made pizzas at the MNC. “It all began with the pizzas, and the pizzas still help us,” she explains with a smile. As the managing trustee of Vishranthi Trust, Srinivasan runs a home that promises a comfortable stay, healthy vegetarian food and a positive environment to senior citizens who choose to live independently of relatives or children. Built on a 1-acre plot, the campus is lined with trees, patches of lawn and vegetable gardens. It is guarded by Shanti, the welltrained resident dog. “This is the result of our labour of love,” Srinivasan says with pride. It all began a decade ago, when Vasudevan and her mother, who worked with Indian Telephone Industries as a cost accountant until her retirement, discussed giving back to society. They thought about starting a school, but decided against anything that could easily lose its way in the money-making schemes around. Then Vasudevan zeroed in on a home for senior citizens. “My brother and I lost our father when we were children and my mother worked full-time, so I spent most of my time with my grandparents,” says Vasudevan, explaining why the project was

GROUP LOVE

BUSINESS OF LOVE

The force: Padma Srinivasan (extreme right) with the residents at Vishranthi; and (top) the ‘Pizza Grannies’ at work in 2008.

close to her heart. “Both my mother and mother-in-law were so taken up by the whole thing that there was no looking back,” she adds. The two older women decided to try and raise funds. Vasudevan came up with a recipe for a quick, easy product that everybody would love: pizza. Srinivasan and Sreenivasan began making pizzas in the latter’s garage in 2004. Boys from a neighbouring school would come by for an afterschool snack. Home-made sauces, fresh vegetables, loads of drippy cheese and Srinivasan, equipped with a smile—there was no looking back. The two were quickly dubbed the “Pizza Grannies”. “We started out making pizzas with the aim of generating a steady income,” says Srinivasan. Over time, they graduated to catering to IT companies in Bangalore. “That’s how we made the contacts and got all the sponsorships (for the home),” says Srinivasan. They finally set up the home in 2009. The funds to build the home came from companies, individual donors and Srinivasan, who sold the house she had inherited from her father—a prime property in central Bangalore. “It was almost miraculous how it all came together,” Srinivasan says. Adds Vasudevan, “We had an estimate of `1 crore and only `5 lakh in hand. But every time we needed to make a pay-

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ment, it would come our way, either by our own money being released or by someone else stepping in.” Fifteen varieties of their pizza, with home-made cheese sourced from Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu, are still served at a few IT companies. “The ground work is done here in the Vishranthi premises by our staff, and put together at the caféterias,” says Srinivasan. The `15,000–20,000 profit per month that they receive from it helps pay staff salaries at the home. Vishranthi currently has nine permanent residents—both men and women—who have paid `4 lakh for a life-time stay to cover their food and accommodation costs. Residents can also stay for shorter periods. Tariff plans are given in terms of days, weeks and months. Shanta Rajagoplan, 75, a former resident of Salem, Tamil Nadu, decided to move into Vishranthi two years ago. “I stayed with relatives for a while after my husband passed away four years ago, but how long could I do that?” she asks. She also did not want to move to the US to stay with her daughter. “Then I came to Vishranthi, I loved it,” she says. “She came, she saw and I conquered,” says Srinivasan, interrupting her. Elizabeth Gardener, a citizen of Switzerland, bursts into the room with a frown. “The sun is out and the curtains are drawn,” she says, shaking her head disapprovingly at Srinivasan. Gardener stays at the home for two months every year when she takes a break from travelling around the world to visit friends. She recalls the first time she met Srinivasan: “This was just a piece of barren land and behind the truck was this woman counting bricks, one by one,” she laughs. Srinivasan defends herself, “Someone had to count it, and I was hoping I could save the money I’d spend on hiring an accounts person on building the home!” Every penny mattered. Srinivasan gently explains to Gardener that the older residents feel cold if the curtains are pulled up. “You have to be strict, loving and

THEY ARE ALMOST SET TO START A 40BED ORPHANAGE FOR CHILDREN ON THE SAME PREMISES AND ARE RAISING FUNDS FROM COMPANIES AND PRIVATE SOURCES

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firm. The firmness is often mistaken for being bossy. Vishranthi is not mine, it belongs to everybody,” says Srinivasan, adding that her friend and partner Sreenivasan had to step away from the project due to health issues two years ago. “If she says they should be given only two cups of tea in a day, it’s not to cut costs but to take care of their health,” Vasudevan explains. Vishranthi has a tie-up with a local hospital, which provides free regular check-ups and surgeries, so residents need only pay for their medicines. “We understand that the number of financially stable senior citizens is low and will soon start a home for those who have been discarded or are orphaned,” says Vasudevan. They are planning to start a 40-bed orphanage for children on the same premises and are raising funds from companies and private sources. “We need funds at the moment, but hopefully that will start soon,” she says. Each of the senior citizens will be asked if they’d like to adopt one child (in principle). The idea is that each elder can mentor a child and enjoy the company of children in return. Vishranthi has also begun a senior citizen helpline, where the elderly can call in when they feel lonely. “This will be manned by the residents,” says Vasudevan, adding, “Sometimes all they need is someone on the same page and who understands that better than our residents?” They have also started a training centre to teach skills such as tailoring to women from the neighbouring villages. Vasudevan conducts spoken English classes for the children from the villages and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has given the home 10 computers to teach the children basic computer courses in the evenings. They do not charge for any of their social service activities. Srinivasan is now looking forward to the day she can retire, hand over the reins to her daughter, and live at Vishranthi with her friends. She laughs. “I would like to stop worrying about bills for a while.” ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

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union state of the

With livein, semiarranged, gay and liveout relationships on the rise, the legal system is learning to cope with India’s complex and varied marriage landscape

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

··································· n June, a couple in their 20s walked into the office of senior lawyer Mrunalini Deshmukh in Bandra, Mumbai. Deshmukh asked them if they needed a divorce. “No,” they said. Did they need counselling? “No”. They were not even engaged, let alone married. Deshmukh explained she was a family lawyer. The couple smiled. “We came to a lawyer because who would know better what goes wrong in a marriage and what leads to a divorce,” they said. For the next hour, the couple asked Deshmukh about inlaws, money, children, finances, assets, and drew up a road map for a path they were not even clear they wanted to go down. “They were looking at what are the issues that are likely to come up. They asked for dos and don’ts. It was an eyeopener for me,” Deshmukh says. As the institution of marriage evolves socially and legally, it is clear that Indian society has always had a more practical approach to it than the Western world. In Ahmedabad, the non-governmental organization (NGO) Vinamulya Amulya Sewa is a marriage service for senior citizens set up by 62-year-old Nathubhai Patel in 2001. Patel has just received an application from his oldest member yet:

1919-born R.T. Tiwari in Bhopal. In Coimbatore, as in San Francisco, US, couples working in the IT sector routinely choose “weekend marriages”, living apart in perfect harmony for their jobs. Newlywed Rekha Sinha (name changed on request), a 35-year-old Mumbai corporate executive, whose husband has a special child from a previous marriage, says: “I am clear that should anything happen to my husband, the financial responsibility of that child is as much mine as it would have been his.” These are the new spaces being negotiated. The legal system, Deshmukh says, is beginning to take note of what the courts are calling “the changing fabric of society”. Take, for instance, a marriage in the public eye like that of director-actor duo Kiran Rao and Aamir Khan. It would have to deal with children from a previous marriage, exes, former and current inlaws and a child born through IVF-surrogacy—not the easiest of mixes. With it come issues of inheritance, property, legal rights, medical decisions and more. The courts are trying to keep pace with this kind of elasticity. Even as the break-up of the joint family and changing definitions of what constitutes a “family” put a strain on marriages, the pace of social change is still glacial. Sociologists say 80% of Indian marriages

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was Hindu practice too to take multiple wives. Without a uniform code, India’s marriages have been directed more by the flow of custom at any given point. “The first social reform was the Hindu Widows Remarriage Act of 1856, which has rarely been implemented by the upper classes, while it was common practice in lower classes even before reform,” Uberoi says. India has always been governed by codes based on community law. “Marriages, remarriages, love marriages, homosexuality, wife swapping, etc., always existed in India. If a man wanted to marry a widow, or elope, he paid compensation to the husband’s kin. A lot of the breast-beating is by upper classes who looked to align social reform with a Western world view of what is ‘modern’.” As Asiya Alam, a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, researching changing marital practices during the colonial period, puts it, “Regardless of community, there is an increasing focus to legislate marriage on common grounds with emphasis on the financial security of the wife. The regional and religious diversity in India prevents simple generalizations about family dynamics.” The one constant in this diversity of India’s marriages has been love. Goabased psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar points out that the Dharmashastras list eight

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still follow the “arranged” or “semi-arranged” (love with parents’ approval) format. Yet, our laws barely span India’s complex marital systems where, in Shavian terms, a puritan morality remains a luxury of the upper classes. Sociologist Patricia Uberoi, honorary director of the Institute of Chinese Studies, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, and author of Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India, points out that paradoxically, India’s new laws constrain traditional freedoms. “That elderly women are able to find companionship is a change over the past. Marriage between cousins is no longer legal, yet it continues by partial recognition of customary law.” In the politicisation of Muslim polygamy, it is forgotten that till colonisation, it

LOST LOVE

GHANASHYAMDAS TRIVEDI AND MADHUBEN, AHMEDABAD

DEEPTI CHATTI AND UDIT PAREKH, BANGALORE

THE NEWLYWEDS Even as the phone line crackles long distance, 65yearold Ghanashyamdas Trivedi’s pride is unmistakeable. He has told this story before and he will keep telling it to make a point. “Main akela ho gaya tha meri wife ki death ke baad (I had become lonely after my wife’s death),” he says. After his wife died of cancer in 2002, Trivedi, a retired bank employee, lived with his son. Elsewhere, Madhuben, 65, a widow, was being shunted between the homes of her three sons and daughter, all of whom were married and resented her intrusion into their lives. They decided to send her to an oldage home and, unable to resign herself to such a life, she approached the Vinamulya Amulya Sewa trust, an Ahmedabadbased marriage service, says its founder Nathubhai Patel. She hoped a remarriage would change her life, she told them. The trust matched the pair, called their families and arranged for the marriage. Trivedi’s family was game, Madhuben’s children opposed it. But the couple went ahead anyway. “It worked wonderfully for us because my son needed a mother, I needed a companion and my wife needed us too. We all needed each other so it fit,” Trivedi says. It has now been four years since the Trivedis’ newage family was formed. Madhuben’s children are also beginning to accept her remarriage. The Trivedis are the otherwise traditional Indian couple with a modern twist. Trivedi says: “We have become celebrities in Ahmedabad. I took her around and told people in my housing colony, society and everywhere I went that I am remarried and this is my new wife. People came to visit us and congratulate us. Many people come to interview us. They tell us we are an example for society. We want old people to consider remarriage. Do not live alone and without support, go and do it, we want to say.”

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Deepti Chatti, who works in the social development sector, and Udit Parekh, who works with a startup, are in their mid20s. The Bangalorebased couple, who returned from the US in 2010, have been in a livein relationship for five years. To them, their rela tionship is not a stopgap until a marriage. It is what the court refers to as “akin to a marriage” legally. Young, giggly and in love, the couple say it struck them early on in their relationship that they would want the other to be able to take medical decisions for them, or stay financially sound, in the other’s absence. They approached lawyers and were in the process of drafting legal documentation to this effect (options for this are available in the US) when they returned to India. They’ve withstood social pressure to tie the knot formally. “Neither of us is religious, so to marry for religious reasons would be hypocritical. We have a strong objection to society’s pressures on young people to get married,” says Parekh. Chatti adds: “We also object strongly to the withholding of the right to marry from people in homosexual relation ships. We have no wish to be part of a social institution (marriage as it exists in society today) that is so inequitable and illogical. It’s like being asked to join a club whose political mandate is antithetical to ours—we are politely saying ‘No thank you’.” Chatti believes the justifications for marriage are eas ily countered: “Your family just wants you to be happy and safe. Once they realize the person you are with ensures that—and this is as much for the guy as for the girl—they see marriage from your point of view; it is a formality,” she says. The absence of the security net that marriage as an institution becomes for a couple is some thing you can always find legal alternatives to. For instance, the couple have discussed buying a house together. While unmarried partners can jointly own a home in letter, loans are not avail able, and complex inheri tance laws leave unmarried survivors optionless. Some insurance companies have started “life partner” policies, but can a partner step in to take crucial medical decisions? “We haven’t found lawyers in India yet who can address these issues for us, but we are looking,” says Parekh. Affidavits and memoran dums of understanding, though not legally binding, are options. The couple believe love and commitment are not the sole preserve of the narrow institution of marriage, and legal alternatives can handle social security.

www.livemint.com To read Mrunalini Deshmukh’s interview, visit www.livemint.com/familylaws.htm

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RAMESH DAVE/MINT

THE WHYWEDS

METRO LOVE

types of marriage, but it is only in the Kama Sutra that “love marriage” tops that list. This is not to say that love has historically been of no consequence. On the contrary, love is the intrinsic constant; just not the staple Bollywood, violins-in-the-air kind. Indian society has always had space for, like its multiplicity of gods, its multiplicities of love. Kakar explains: “In the traditional Indian view, which still exerts a powerful influence on how even the most modern Indians view marriage, the couple is not the primary constituent of the family, as is taken for granted in modern Western societies.... The Bollywood love story, as befitting a dream, is not a reflection, but a subverter of Indian mores prescribing the relations between the sexes.” While Indian marriages may seem to be the result of loveless social machinations, it is not so. Indian marriage, elastic in its embrace of multiple social circumstances, is big, ancient and strong enough to take on whatever kind of love you have in mind. In this context, we visit the modern Indian marriage in some of its newest forms.

THE WANTTOBEWEDS BUSINESS OF LOVE

“Straight people take marriage for granted because you have systems that have been put in place. We crave the safety of it,” says Jerry Johnson, 30, a marketing executive. Johnson lives with his partner Deepak Kashyap, 25, a counsellor, in Mumbai’s Santacruz suburb. The couple got engaged over the New Year and are working out how best to get married. As Kashyap meets Johnson at his workplace for lunch, they embrace and kiss. They hold hands through lunch and are visibly comfortable with their relationship. In a society where most gay couples prefer to be quiet about their sexuality, Johnson and Kashyap are brave. “It’s about wanting to go to work and sharing your lunch and saying ‘yes, my boyfriend made that for me’ with as much pride as straight couples do. It’s about saying in a conversation, ‘yes, my boyfriend and I went for that movie last night’,” they explain. Many don’t know how to react to them. Kashyap says he’s ready for confrontation: “If you are visible, you are vocal; if you are vocal, society confronts you; if they confront you, interaction begins. Eventually, acceptance will come.” Their confidence is disarming. It’s not all easy though. As the straight world eschews the traditional safety of marriage,

gay couples yearn for it. Their biggest fear is that a disapproving family can today disallow a gay partner to make health or financial decisions in a partnership, leaving them with no legal recourse. Only marriage or civil union, anything sanctioned by law, will help. Kashyap says: “Straight couples don’t question being allowed to own assets, adoption, health decisions and visitation rights during illness. It’s just about acquiring a sense of family and society.” While the law in letter allows two unrelated men to own property jointly, in reality many gay couples form fake or real joint partnership companies to buy a flat, or buy neighbouring flats, to skirt issues of loans, society approvals, registrar red tape and inheritance. Johnson says that sanction goes beyond mere legalities: “When a straight man reaches an age eligible for marriage, there is a social structure that encourages him to look for a partner. This allows him to make a relationship decision that is secure and responsible. A lot of young gay men get into multiple or destructive relationships because they don’t have anyone telling them they are getting into these things too young. Access to a conventional marriage will set up a social structure for the gay community.”

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SRISARANYA MOHAN AND PREMKUMAR DEVRAJ, POLLACHI, TAMIL NADU

THE TOGETHEREVEN APARTWEDS SriSaranya Mohan and Premkumar Devraj, both 30 and IT professionals, are newly weds. They are a couple who’ve opted for a “weekend marriage”. It is a feature increasingly common to couples who work in the IT sector. Often, jobs are locationdriven and couples live apart to reunite over weekends, or once every month, or even once every six months, depending on the distance. Mohan was a blogger and Devraj a frequent commenter who fell in love with her words over a twoyear period when she was working in the US. When she came to India, he courted her for a year and they got married in June. “We pooled our money and started our own manufacturing business here in Pollachi (in Coimbatore). My husband handles the business, but I was looking for work and found a suitable job only in Bangalore,” she says. Devraj left the decision to her, so Mohan began to commute. “We discussed it before marriage and decided that our permanent home would remain Pollachi, and I would commute to Bangalore for work. I didn’t want to be lonely so I chose not to rent my own place, but stayed in a paying guest arrangement and returned for weekends,” she says. It helped that the families extended support. The couple also had a tough time at their wedding, convincing a flabbergasted traditional society that this could work. Mohan says it was not an easy decision to arrive at. “Apart from the physical strain, we had to work out so many other arrangements to make sure we did not ignore each other or decrease the commitment to our relationship,” she says. The first year of marriage, she insists, has been made sweeter by the separation, and both learnt to treasure each other more in the limited time they had together each weekend. “It is a pain every time I board the bus to Bangalore. He has to return to a lonely home and I have to look forward to a lonely week ahead. There have been many times when we both wanted to throw away financial stability and just stay together. But frequent vacations, workfromhome options and flexible timings provided by my IT employer were all a great support.” To Mohan, her husband’s support has just made her value him all the more. “We do think society needs to open up to couples who are trying to find their own balance. Women should be encouraged to work, and supported in their choices,” she says. ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

JERRY JOHNSON AND DEEPAK KASHYAP, MUMBAI

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union state of the

With livein, semiarranged, gay and liveout relationships on the rise, the legal system is learning to cope with India’s complex and varied marriage landscape

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

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LOST LOVE

GHANASHYAMDAS TRIVEDI AND MADHUBEN, AHMEDABAD

DEEPTI CHATTI AND UDIT PAREKH, BANGALORE

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

www.livemint.com To read Mrunalini Deshmukh’s interview, visit www.livemint.com/familylaws.htm

GROUP LOVE

RAMESH DAVE/MINT

THE WHYWEDS

METRO LOVE

THE WANTTOBEWEDS BUSINESS OF LOVE

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SRISARANYA MOHAN AND PREMKUMAR DEVRAJ, POLLACHI, TAMIL NADU

JERRY JOHNSON AND DEEPAK KASHYAP, MUMBAI

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ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

click here for the butterflies Exclusive networks designed to find ‘a real connect’ promise a trump card over Indian matrimonial websites—they promise love B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

································· iddharth Mangharam met his wife of three years, Simran, at a party in Bangalore over a platter of Roquefort. “Most couldn’t stand its pungent flavour but there was one attractive woman who, like me, was really enjoying the sharp cheese,” says Mangharam. “That got us talking for a whole hour about our shared passion for cheeses. This serendipitous interaction led to us ultimately getting married a year later.” Mangharam, 37, is now in what he calls the “business of catalysing serendipity”. A business management graduate whose first start-up, Peek, is into cloud computing, his second helps educated, urban singles connect with each

other. Mangharam, CEO, Floh (Find Life Over Here), co-founded the singles network in May with Simran and two other partners to address the gap in premium dating and matrimonial services in India. The model works like this: Members recommended by existing members enter the network (www.floh.in), and groups of 15-20 singles are “curated” for themed events such as vintage car rallies or wine tastings. Based in Bangalore—with plans to expand to other cities in India—the nine-month-old start-up has a revenue model based on subscription and event fees. Floh has a few hundred members in its network already, while more than 2,000 are on waitlist. In March, when the New York-based “group dating” start-up Ignighter.com set up offices in India to handle unprec-

edented traffic from the country, it highlighted a niche market that was waiting moony-eyed at the altar to be addressed. Founded in 2008 by three 20-something men who’d sought to set their dating website apart by enabling members to set up group dates, they’d unknowingly hit a bumper market with India. By 2010, they had over two million Indian users. While the safety-innumbers idea of going out with a group of strangers of the opposite sex hadn’t found too many takers on home ground, it had sparked in India. Floh and other start-ups such as www.footloosenomore.com aspire to a similar, but more elaborate, model.

THE ‘SHAADI’ WARS Matrimonial sites continue to thrive in India—Shaadi.com and others like Jeevansathi.com and Bharat Matrimony have well over a million users (Shaadi.com had over 1.3 million users as of 2011)—and the online matrimonial industry in India is estimated to generate $63 million (around `308 crore) a year in

revenue, according to EmPower Research, an integrated media and business research company. But the unprecedented success of Ignighter.com made it evident that the urban singleton had begun to frown on websites with the marriage agenda upfront. As Sunil Hiranandani, 30, a banker who co-founded the bespoke matchmaking service Sirfcoffee.com in 2008-09 with his sister Naina, a journalist based in Mumbai, explains, he wanted to take the shaadi out of Shaadi.com. Their website presently has 700 members, who Hiranandani describes as “global Indian professionals”. When Hiranandani returned to Mumbai from a stint in London in 2008, he realized that his friends were doing either of two things: meeting prospective partners through their parents or casually hooking up with people they met in nightclubs. “These processes were both extreme. It was clear that there was this new segment of high-profile, timecrunched professionals that matrimonial websites weren’t catering to,” he says.

Cupid on call: Mangharam, 37, cofounded the singles network, Floh, in May; and (below) Floh members at a vintage car rally.

Sirfcoffee.com is against the “used car” approach of matrimonial websites, where caste, height, weight and complexion are the underlining actors. “I thought about what I wanted. I didn’t want to reach out to mass India or 64 kinds of Brahmins. I only wanted to reach out to one person; someone like me,” says Hiranandani. The service makes this process simple—arranging dates over coffee, dinner or drinks with matches “hand-picked” by the website’s moderators. Membership involves filling out a questionnaire and a personal interview. If no one on the network matches your criteria, Hiranandani says they’ll go as far as to “headhunt” a perfect match. Hiranandani, who splits his time between New York and Mumbai, describes himself as the site’s model client. He met his London-based wife through Sirfcoffee.com in 2009—when he conducted her personal interview. Sirfcoffee.com’s clients are largely from Mumbai but they’re spread across 19 countries, including

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the US, UK, UAE, Spain, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and the Philippines. Naina manages the India operations and they have field offices in London and New York. The exclusivity is clear at the outset. When you log on to the website, you cannot “join”, you have to “apply”, with the bottom line being a college education, a job and a “long-term view” of your next relationship. Aware of the risks associated with such a venture, Mangharam and his team also thoroughly screen those who apply for membership. They talk to singles who approach them before making them Floh members. “Men tend to lie about their salaries. Women, while they don’t always hide their age, send us older pictures of themselves when they apply, which is why the personal interview is an important part of the application process,” says Hiranandani, adding that the variety of income classes, aesthetic and sociocultural backgrounds makes such a process imperative. Subscription fees are another screening factor. Floh’s subscription package starts at `1,000 per month (if you buy a 12-month subscription). Members, in turn, get to attend over 50 unique events a year. Likewise, Sirfcoffee.com charges `15,000 (or $300) annually for an “unlimited” number of dates. “You have to be realistic. If you’re 40 and divorced, and looking for Aishwarya Rai you might get one date in two years,” says Hiranandani, adding that they set up around 25-30 dates across the globe every month. Discretion is the other keyword. No one is aware of your membership except you. Marriage, though clearly a long-term goal, isn’t mentioned anywhere on Sirfcoffee.com. The focus, instead, is on love. The website’s tag line reads: “Just one cup... Dil se”. Says Hiranandani’s note on the home page: “There’s no substitute... for that fuzzy feeling (that) often overrides all checklists.” The service doesn’t attempt to replace that feeling. “What we do try, however, is to make it more conducive for you to meet somebody with a similar value system...,” adds Hiranandani. Both Floh and Sirfcoffee.com are pegged to the idea of simulating a real date scenario. Sirfcoffee.com, for instance, doesn’t provide onward contact details once the first date has been set up. In Floh, Mangharam points out a unique feature called Floh Living Room, in which, after attending one of the themed events, members can log into their accounts and register a discreet request to meet a particular member one-on-one. “Our server only connects the two if they’ve both picked each other,” says Mangharam. You can exchange numbers if you like, date for years, marry next week or simply leave after a casual drink. But if you cease to be single, you have to leave the network.

THE REAL CONNECT It is the stress on connecting people based on “interests” and “passions” that sets the new Indian singles’ platforms apart from the matrimonial jam-

B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

LOST LOVE

································· n a weeknight in a bar in Bandra, Mumbai, the ratio is completely skewed. Vicky Kalwani (name changed on request) does a rough headcount in the outdoor section of the bar, pointing out the around 40 men to just four women. He shrugs in a self-explanatory manner. Kalwani is a dating consultant on an evening out with a “friend”, or client, in an exercise to get the latter to mingle and chat. Their chances this evening are meagre, because of the lopsided gender ratio, though for all practical purposes Kalwani’s work is not restricted to only chatting up women. The 32-year-old has a day job in

METRO LOVE

GROUP LOVE

BUSINESS OF LOVE

IT WAS EVIDENT THAT THE URBAN SINGLETON HAD BEGUN TO FROWN ON WEBSITES WITH THE MARRIAGE AGENDA UPFRONT

”

boree. The youngest of these start-ups, Mumbai-based Shweta Sharma’s Ditto (Ditto.co.in), which is currently in beta with close to 500 members (and set to launch formally in a few months), perhaps articulates this the best. Sharma, 36, with over 12 years’ experience in advertising, founded the singles’ relationship portal for those who believe that “shared ideologies, tastes, interests and passions connect people and build relationships and not caste, creed, religion, body type and skin colour”. Vir Dasmahapatra, 29, a leadership consultant who moved to Bangalore from Mumbai in January 2011, and joined Floh a month ago, reiterates this.

commodity trading but also decided to put to use his social skills in helping men get “into the game”. When Kalwani moved to Mumbai more than a year ago from London, he scoped the market for such an opportunity but found none (unlike in the US, where he has also lived). He was already familiar with Ross Jeffries, the creator of “speed seduction”—writings and seminars designed to help men understand women better—and The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, a non-fictional book by undercover journalist Neil Strauss. So he decided to coach men in his spare time on how to improve their social skills through a series of theoretical and practical lessons.

································· ou can chat or video-talk on the Internet, but one of the problems that dogs long-distance relationships is the lack of physical intimacy. Singapore-based Iranian researcher Hooman Samani wants to change that with the Kissenger or Kiss Messenger device created by his research centre Lovotics. Lovotics is part of the Keio-NUS CUTE Center, Singapore, a collaboration between the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Keio University of Japan. Samani hopes with his research to “improve human affection with the careful use of technology”. Samani has been working on Lovotics to develop a better understanding of human love and create a system for robots to feel affection for humans. The millions-of-dollarsfunded research will go into furthering human and robot interactions. Over email, Samani outlines the goals of his research. The Kissenger looks like a stuffed toy; a deformed pig with large human lips. Samani explains: “I have been working on the Kissenger since 2008 with my team. The pig-like design is our prototype to investigate feedback from users using kawai (cute) design. This is not necessarily the final design as our research is continuing.” Earlier designs for the Kissenger included more mechanical shapes and metallic orbs with lips. The Kissenger is a system of devices paired over the Internet which attempts to replicate the overall sensation of a kiss. When you kiss the set at one end, the person holding the device to their lips on the other side will feel the kiss.

Common ground: Shweta Sharma’s Ditto connects singles based on shared interests.

If you are having trouble finding the perfect woman, this is the man you need—a commodity trader by day and courtship coach by evening arun.j@livemint.com

air kissing 101

A new technology for Internetconnected kisses wants to redefine longdistance

date doctor B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN

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He wanted to meet people “at the level of interests and values”. It was his mother who learnt about Floh through a local magazine and told him about it, an indication that de rigueur matrimonial specifics weren’t important to him or his family. “We’ve had an unpleasant experience with matrimonial websites in the past... for someone else in my family,” he explains. “People have strong preferences these days, which is why meeting someone at an event which appeals to both of us makes it that much simpler to find someone like-minded,” says Dasmahapatra. He has already attended three consecutive weekend events since he joined—a green heritage walk, a theatre workshop and a culture quiz—because they were well adjusted to his broader interests. Ditto uses a device called the Ditto Cloud, which allows people to showcase their preferences (from movies, books, travel, cuisine and music to political ideologies and spiritual beliefs). The data from this cloud feeds into an algorithm that throws up the profiles of other people who connect with you over a multitude of interests. Sharma, who met her husband six years ago on a dating website, says this was a throwback to when she was creating her own profile all those years ago. “I was frustrated with the restrictive drop-down menus. I was more than the sum of ‘female’, ‘advertising’ and ‘curly hair’,” she says. Sharma plans to start offline interest-based events once the website gathers a critical mass. The revenue model—subscriptions and fees—is still being worked out. The new catchline in the business of love, then, is to build a space to discover a partner in a relaxed manner without the “happily ever after” sword looming large. “Come to Ditto to find that compatible soul and then, do leave Ditto to see if the love and chemistry follow,” writes Sharma in her sales pitch. The idea is to walk off the websites and group events and happily into the sunset. And no one would object to a background score of wedding bells.

“Bombay has a lot of people,” he says laughing, “and people with money but no class. Most can’t approach women because they are too shy. Some guys can make the hardest business deals, but when it comes to women, they don’t know what to do.” Kalwani symbolizes urban cool—smartly dressed with an afterwork lack of formality, his hair fashionably spiked, wine glass in hand, casually confident, with a robust voice and a hearty laugh. He walks around with a sense of familiarity, has a friendly word for most of the staff and speaks easily to strangers. He calls it high social value, or at least perceived value, which lets

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According to Samani, it’s not as simple as setting up movement through small motors the way video-game controllers do. He says, “I am working with designers, social scientists, psychologists, robotics experts, etc., and my focus is to investigate methods which can use robotics systems to improve human relationships with consideration of technical and ethical issues.” The resulting prototype, according to Samani, goes beyond selling a commercial unit. He says: “The prototype version costs less than $100 (or around `4,900) for hardware but the main cost is the research behind that... Kissenger enables three modes of interaction: human-to-human tele kiss through the device; a human-to-robot kiss, enabling an intimate relationship with a robot; and a human-to-virtual character kiss, where humans can receive physical kisses from their favourite virtual character.” Lovotics also wants the robots you kiss to feel the way you do. The robots are equipped with programming to simulate human hormones associated with love, such as oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin and endorphin. Programming measures the activation of these virtual hormones, and the levels of affection the robot feels, allowing them to exhibit happiness, love, even jealousy. If people can have meaningful relationships with a pet, why not a robot? Samani sees the work he is doing as having long-term consequences for human happiness. He says: “I don’t have any commercial intention. I am not trying to replace natural human affection but my aim is to improve it with technology. I believe Lovotics is the new generation of such technology.”

Telekissing: The future of romance in the digital age?

others believe that he might be somebody important. His story bears a strong resemblance to that of Alex Hitchens from the 2005 Hollywood film Hitch, in which Will Smith is the smooth-talking date doctor who teaches a bumbling Kevin James how to approach the woman of his dreams (the film was remade in Hindi in 2007 as Partner, with Salman Khan playing the lead with a swagger and a drawl). In the film, Hitch gets outed by a journalist, which makes Kalwani somewhat guarded about revealing anything more about himself. What Kalwani offers is a monthlong or three-month course, which includes theory and practical experience. The schedule can be flexible and tailor-made, depending on the client, but the theory is usually spread over four days, 2 hours each, broken up into eight chapters, which include lessons in grooming, dealing with the approach anxiety, social dynamics, flirting, how to get telephone numbers, dating etiquette and “closing the deal”. He says he is not a misogynist, nor does he work with men who have just one thing on their mind. “There is a line between being sleazy

and friendly. Lots of people can’t differentiate. It’s about grabbing a girl’s attention and how to maximize chances that they would respond. If they don’t, that’s fine, you don’t follow them; because then it becomes stalking,” he says. The practical section involves going to coffee shops or bars and breaking the ice with the girl at the next table. He says the idea is not to “pick up women”, just acquire better social skills, which is why some of his “students” are businessmen who merely want to impress their clients by being better conversers. This includes talking to individuals or groups, men and women, in a friendly, platonic way that may eventually lead to getting a telephone number. “You never compliment a girl on the first meeting, never,” he says. “Let’s say there’s an attractive 25-year-old woman. Even if you do some basic math, she has been hit on at least five times a day for at least five years, that’s over 8,000 times already. There’s nothing you can say that she has not heard before,” he laughs. “I am not a matchmaker, it’s a selfhelp thing,” he insists. “Once you know the problem, it’s trial and error, it’s about having fun without taking it too seriously. The worst that can happen is nothing will happen.”

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Longdistance relationship: Mumbaibased Malik Sumrani, 22, has been a fan of the English football club Manchester United since he was 14.

the football ‘tifoso’ Globalization has created a new kind of love. These are mostly young men, embracing foreign football with an allconsuming passion B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

································· ne evening in May 2007, Italian football club AC Milan played a scrappy but tense Champions’ League final against Liverpool Football Club in Athens, Greece. It was 3am in Mumbai, 5,000km away, but 19-year-old Himanshu Parmekar was awake, watching. Milan had scored two miraculous goals, but Liverpool had pulled in a late one. The referee’s whistle seemed to be holding the world to ransom. When it finally blew, signalling full time, Milan won 2-1, and something inside Parmekar went for broke. He ran out to his balcony and screamed into the summer night. “We won!” he shouted. “We won!” “I must surely have upset the neighbourhood,” Parmekar, now 23, states modestly. His neighbours may take comfort in the fact that they are not alone. At least Milan haven’t won another European trophy in the intervening years. Imagine harbouring an FC Barcelona fan in your backyard: two winning finals in three seasons, all starting at 1am, and a total of 13 trophies in that time. Around the Manchester United follower in your family, you find yourself thinking longingly of the 2009-10 European season, the only time in the last four years the club didn’t make it to a Champions’ League final. Somehow, in a nation particularly adept at devotion, millions of people—largely, though not exclusively, men under the age of 35—are called every year, around the year, to worship in sports stadiums five time zones away. Football, like the late-night shift in US-facing workplaces, has made a mess of our circadian rhythms. It keeps us up in the wee sma’s. It takes over our holidays. Like flowers to the sun, we turn our faces in whichever direction it leads us: Now a domestic league match in Stoke; next a European showdown in Kiev, Ukraine, later in Tokyo for the Club World Cup finals. And then there are the weekends. “Why are you laughing at the screen?”

Dinar Nasnodkar’s mother in Goa snaps when he finds himself amused by something happening during a match. “They don’t even know you exist!” All fans, categorically, are worshippers from afar. But even by love’s absurd standards, the long-distance relationship a new generation of Indian fans has developed with football is intense. Within a decade, European football—especially English football—has become serious business. In 2011, the Barclays Premier League (EPL) attracted a viewership of 76.9 million, a 20% jump over audience figures in 2010. Between 2008 and 2011, viewership for the Premier League experienced a 53% growth. Major English clubs such as Manchester United, Chelsea Football Club and Liverpool FC, all run youth football programmes of various kinds in the country, partly to keep an eye out for talent at the grass roots, but also to establish a relationship with growing hordes of fans from what is known, in polite European shorthand, as “the Asian market”. All sport elicits warlike attention from its fans, but football is particular because of the global breadth and depth of its fandom. Many of the Premier League fans to whom this reporter spoke expressed a longing for football to be more popular in this cricket-loving country, but their increasing numbers do not erase a long tradition of local support in India, ranging from Kerala and Goa to Bengal and the North-East. Where else in the world might the result of a derby determine the sales of fish? (In Kolkata, in the aftermath of Mohun Bagan-East Bengal games, the story goes that victory for East Bengal means feasting in the homes of their ilish or hilsa-loving bangal, or East Bengali fan base. A Mohun Bagan win means the markets are cleared out of chingri or prawns, the semaphore of their ghoti followers, of West Bengali origins). For winning athletes and coaches, European clubs sometimes employ a biological metaphor: They embody “the Barca DNA” or “the Milan DNA”. For fans, the more appropriate analogy is a

virus. There is an Italian word for persons like us; it is tifoso, derived from typhus. A pathological condition. Malik Sumrani, a 22-year-old in Mumbai, began watching football eight years ago. “I can tell you two people because of whom football really began to pick up as a sport when I started watching,” he says. “One was Bhaichung Bhutia, who is an idol and one true star for the nation. The other is David Beckham. He really brought football to India.” Sumrani, who has been a Manchester United fan “from the start”, rightly says that the EPL’s success worldwide had much to do with Beckham’s celebrity in the 1990s. “But love has nothing to do with one single player, or one successful manager,” he clarifies. “That’s not what fan following is about.” Fan following is about loving the badge, not the player; else you would switch loyalties each time Cristiano Ronaldo switched teams. It means being emotionally invested in a club’s history, not its future, since that way you will love your team no matter what its results are. It remains deeply ironic that the true fan in India is largely restricted to cheering for one of eight major clubs in Western Europe, because only the successful teams get much airtime in international markets. “The result determines how the next week is going to be,” says Kunal Dua, a New Delhi-based Liverpool supporter, about what it’s like to love his “glorious, tragic” team, with which he fell in love because of their relative underdog status. “Is it going to be a beautiful Monday morning (won last night)? Or Monday morning blues (draw or worse)?” Big European clubs, having moved around traditional match timings and added a variety of exhibition matches to their calendars to appeal to fans in different parts of the world, have told their stories well. Younger fans, in particular, are untroubled by the possibility that globalization has gamed the system, and that they might really just be hostage to market forces. For Valentine’s Day, AC Milan sends out an email circular to all its registered fans announcing their own celebration of this love: a 20% discount on club merchandise (full disclosure: This reporter is a registered Milan fan). “Teams in Europe are no longer indigenous to their respective places,” argues Dinesh Natarajan, 22, a Liver-

FAN LOVE

SPOUSE LOVE

LOST LOVE

BUSINESS OF LOVE

ONE WAS BHAICHUNG BHUTIA, WHO IS AN IDOL AND ONE TRUE STAR METRO LOVE FOR THE NATION. THE OTHER IS DAVID BECKHAM. HE REALLY GROUP BROUGHT LOVE FOOTBALL TO INDIA.

”

pool fan from Chennai. “They have millions of fans overseas, and they do care for all their fans.” “This was a question I wanted to answer for myself,” says Pranav Raje, 29, a Milan fan from Mumbai. “I see a lot of football followers in India get really upset and even get into fights with fans of rival teams. I mean, we’re a continent away and most of us don’t even play the game. I used to feel very weird.” Raje and his wife, a Chelsea fan, have started to save money and travel to watch their teams in the last two years, and he says they have

come away with a much better understanding of the culture, having made local friends, met fellow fans, and rivals. “I think fans like me want to identify with a style of play, and a successful club,” he says. “Though many miles away, we want to attach ourselves to the character of the club we identify with.” For the majority of his fellow fans, visiting their home grounds in distant climes is a cherished dream. Instead, some corner of a foreign field is forever Madrid, or Munich or north London. Sumrani recollects the visit of Gary Neville, veteran footballer, to the Manchester United Café Bar in Lower Parel, Mumbai, last month. “He looked at the reception he got,” Sumrani says, “and the first thing he said was, ‘Looking at you, I want to cry.’” Like Beckham and the fans he created, Neville has been lucky to play in an era when global multimedia has made this kind of romance, with all its joys and sorrows, possible. “A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers,” says one stick figure to another in the trenchant Web comic xkcd. “Let’s use them to build narratives!” The comic is called “Sports”. It pokes nerdy fun at the human obsession with the trivial pursuit of athletics, but it also gets exactly why they assume such importance for us: The stories within a game are instantly evocative of great emotion. Advertisements targeted at sports fans follow a common narrative. They show us using a television, or drinking a beverage, that collapses the boundaries between our living room and the football field, and allows us to be right there, next to the players and the other fans. “There’s no good or bad time to follow football,” Sumrani says. “Any time is the perfect time when you want to follow a sport. There’s no downside to it, no fallout. It can only do you good, because sport teaches you not to end up as a bitter loser in life.” And so, the other thing Italians are supposed to say: that’s amore. Barclays Premier League viewership figures for India provided by Rathindra Basu, senior director—corporate communications, business development and event management group, ESPN Software India Pvt. Ltd.

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

soup boy, you go man! SPOUSE LOVE

Yo baays, I am write article. If you are brutally dumped in love, this is where you can go

HAND LA GLASSU Ah, alcohol. It’s helped the broken-hearted cope for four millennia. And if alcohol is your coping mechanism of choice, don’t limit yourself to the neighbourhood dive. Go out into the world, and seek out its most interesting brews and spirits—and the travel might help you forget long before the booze does.

The good: We’re going to stay conventional here, and recommend a

B Y A ADISHT K HANNA ·························· or those who’re in love, travel is easy, disgustingly so. Travel agents and hotels fall over themselves to give them Valentine’s Day or honeymoon packages (all of which seem to mandatorily include complimentary fruit baskets for some reason). But what if

F LOST LOVE

whisky tour of Scotland. A quick tour will cover the coast and the island of Islay, but if you’re mending a broken heart, you might as well take a few extra days and head into the Scottish highlands, where you can intersperse your single-malt sessions with treks around the lochs. For details on whisky tours: www.rabbies.com

BUSINESS OF LOVE

The bad: If you want to get straight to the drinking and not mess about with distractions, we can

you’ve been jilted in love? In that case, Lounge loves you—and we’ve got a list of the best, worst and weirdest places you can go to do the things that the unlucky in love usually do: Get hammered, get religious, conquer the wild, or bid goodbye to this cruel world, once and for all.

METRO LOVE

Write to lounge@livemint.com

WTF (Weirder than

GROUP fiction): In a world full LOVE of weird drinking experiences,

suggest nothing more suited to your purposes than Russia. Fly to Moscow (Aeroflot fares are cheap too!) and head to a liquor store. Avoid the premium brands like Stolichnaya: You need something so horrible that the hangover will make your heartache seem insignificant. Illegally distilled vodka, or samogon, is available at shady street corners, but it can kill you. Just head to the local liquor kiosk, and buy the cheapest bottle available—then you’ll only wish you were dead.

the first prize has to go to Finland, which has come up with a gin and gooseberry juice premix cocktail called Lonkero. That gets the prize on three counts: the taste, a name that translates to “tentacle”, and it glows in the dark. Finland is weird enough without the drink too: The country has invented wife-carrying tournaments, the Molotov cocktail, and Angry Birds. For more details: www.visitfinland.com

Bad medicine: Drown your sorrows, in faraway Scot land, Finland or Russia.

FRANCK PREVEL/GETTY IMAGES

HOLY COWU Religion seems to distract people from financial misfortune, crumbling governments, and all the other sorts of bad things, so why not from being soup boys or girls as well? We pick the religious destinations. You travel.

The good: You can’t go wrong with a stint at a Japanese Zen monastery. When Pico Iyer did it, he came up with one of the greatest travel books ever, and also found a wife. Even if you don’t go as far as he did, you’ll definitely learn how to move on from your bad romance. For options: www.templelodging.com

REVERSE GEARU

Cistercian order believes in financing itself through selling the handicrafts of its adherents—which has made Trappist beer and cheese delicious and famous. If you’re a soup boy, enrol in the Orval Abbey in Belgium, which makes one of the best beers in the world. If you’re a soup girl, head to the Mississippi Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa, US, which supports itself through the manufacture of Caramel candy. For more details: www.orval.be, www.mississippiabbey.org

Alcohol and spirituality aren’t for everyone. Some people prefer to dive into adventure or work instead. Is this also a sort of escape—from routine and civilization—or is it a determination to take the world head-on? We’ll let you decide after you’ve done it—right now, here are the choices.

The good: Since we’re

The bad: As bad religions go, the Church of Scientology is quite possibly the worst. Some detractors claim that it’s just a business that has declared itself a religion to get tax-free status in the US. These detractors ignore the other detractors who point out that Scientology’s beliefs are seriously cuckoo and that its practices are cult-like and involve brainwashing. Head to the Church of Scientology headquarters in Gold Base, California. One way or another, you’ll find that your broken heart is quite a small problem, in perspective. For more details: www. scientology.org

WTF: Not up to Zen or Scientology? Try the Trappists. Contrary to urban legend, Trappist monks don’t undergo a vow of silence—but they are strongly discouraged to speak about anything other than the spiritual life. Also, the

Heartbroken? Join the French Foreign Legion, and get sent on com mission to France’s remaining colonies, most of them island paradises.

GOD, I AM DYING NOWU We think that no matter how awesome the girl or boy who dumped you was, there’s still lots more to live for, and emphatically don’t endorse suicide. But if you’re determined, here are the places you can head to for one last brush with life before you give it all up.

The good: San Francisco’s Join the order: Become a monk to mend a broken heart.

DANIEL TIBI/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Golden Gate Bridge has always been popular for suicide tourism. No other bridge—and possibly no other man-made structure—has hosted as many suicides as the Golden Gate Bridge. Before you add to the tally, spend a week bumming around San Francisco and its legendary hippie scene. If San Francisco hasn’t managed to restore your appreciation of life, head to the Golden Gate Bridge—where there are no suicide barriers but every pillar has a suicide helpline number pasted on in case you have

last-minute doubts. For more details on the Golden Gate Bridge: www.goldengatebridge.org

The bad: For the worst way to go, we suggest sticking to domestic travel. If you succeed, your relatives won’t have to travel too far to recover your remains—and if you fail, you’ll have to recover in a horrible medical system and quite possibly face legal charges, considering that suicide is a criminal activity in India. But since this is about travel, don’t just pick your neighbourhood water tank. Instead, travel to a place that will make you even more miserable. We pick Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu. It bills itself as the city of a thousand temples, despite which it’s utterly godforsaken. Filthy and noisy as soon as you move out of the temples, Kanchi will sap any vestiges of your will to live.

WTF: No contest here. If you have to travel to die, just head to Australia. It has eight of the world’s 10

going to tell you how to shoot bears later on in this article, we’re going to expiate ourselves right now by telling you to go and become a wildlife conservation volunteer. Volunteering opportunities range from two-week-long eco-tourism junkets, to stern and earnest vocations where you first arm yourself with a degree in zoology and then head into the field to study animals in the wild your whole life. There are lots of options, but we suggest you start with one of the shorter ones before you commit yourself. And since we’re partial to our cousins, the great apes, we pick

most poisonous snakes, and the spiders are even more lethal. You also have the option of being disembowelled by a crocodile. The seas are no safer: You can be eaten by sharks, or poisoned by stonefish, scorpionfish or jellyfish (which are not actually fish, but can kill you in 3 minutes anyway).

the Sarawak Orangutan Volunteer Programme, where you can spend up to a month helping out with maintenance at an orang-utan sanctuary in Malaysian Borneo. For more details: Orangutanproject.com.

The bad: P.G. Wodehouse’s heroes would often contemplate dealing with rejection by going to the Rocky Mountains to shoot grizzly bears. If you’re determined to take your frustration out on a bear that has done you no harm, there are guided hunting tours to help you do it. Find them at www.rocky mountainadventures.ca

WTF: For more than a century, people have joined the French Foreign Legion to forget. You can too! The French army has a unit called the Foreign Legion (made famous by Beau Peep and the new Tintin movie) that is open to foreigners. Join and you get sent all over the world: either to France’s few remaining colonies (most are island paradises) or on peacekeeping missions. Visit www.legion-recrute.com/en/

Yes, these are fairly low probability events, but it’s a question of playing the odds. Hang around long enough, and something’s going to get you. For more details: www.australia.com (Disclaimer: Please note that Lounge in no way recommends that you fling yourself off a bridge/into piranha-infested waters, etc.)

Got a death wish? The sights in Australia may effect a change of heart, or you could be eaten by sharks, or poisoned by stonefish, scorpi onfish or jellyfish. THINKSTOCK

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EXCERPT

the slave’s dream An exclusive from Sheba Karim’s story ‘Zulaikha to Her Daughter’, which features in Zubaan’s upcoming anthology of erotica Ladies said in the City: “The wife of the (great) ‘Aziz is seeking to seduce her slave from his (true) self: Truly hath he inspired her with violent love: we see she is evidently going astray.” When she heard of their malicious talk, she sent for them and prepared a banquet for them: she gave each of them a knife: and she said (to Joseph), “Come out before them.” When they saw him, they did extol him, and (in their amazement) cut their hands: they said, “Allah preserve us! No mortal is this! This is none other than a noble angel!” —Quran, excerpt from Surah 12: Yusuf (translation by Yusuf Ali) The idol of my life—divine! All radiant, clothed in mystery And loving me as I adore, As none dared ever love before, Shall be—nay, is—even now, is mine! —Jami, Yusuf and Zulaikha (translation by Charles F. Horne)

his is the most important story of my life. You might find it too honest, too blunt, but I cannot tell it any other way, and if you desire it to have a moral, let it be this—if there is anything worth striving for, it is to love madly, and be madly loved. *************** When I was a girl in Mauritania, I dreamt one night that my hands brought death to anything they touched. I’d been banished from the city, my hands tied together and wrapped in cloth. I wandered through fields and jungles, bit fruit off trees, lapped water from streams. When I’d given up and laid down by a riverbank to wait for the end, a young man stepped out of the light. Brown hair, golden skin, green eyes. He kneeled next to me, and I moved my hands away. Don’t touch them, I said. You’ll die. Eleven stars, the sun and moon have prostrated before me, he said. I will not die. Pulling a dagger from the satchel strapped across his chest, he cut the ropes that bound me. He kissed my left palm, then my right. His tongue slid past my wrist, down my arm, along the curve of my neck. He was almost to my navel when I awoke, my entire body pulsing with pleasure, my hips thrusting at air. No one had ever told me about sex, but my body knew what to do. Our bodies are born knowing. It is our minds that take time to decide. *************** When I got married, I prayed my husband would be like the man from my childhood dream. But my husband had the face of a crow, the body of a goat, and fucked like a dog. He’d order me to cover the idol with my scarf, force me on all fours, winding my long, thick hair around his fist and yanking at it. He would not look at me, or say my name, or offer a tender gesture. One day, I cut off all of my hair. When he saw what I’d done he said, “I like your new look. Now I’ll complete it,” and added two bruised lids and a swollen lip. He bought a slave, a black-skinned Nubian, and fucked her instead. When she got pregnant, he told me to take care of it. I told her she could run away. I didn’t have much money, but I’d give her what I had. “Please,” she said. “Get me the abortion first.” And so we went, the pregnant Nubian slave, the wife with the terrorized eyes. The abortionist saw us and said, “This man’s a real prize.” I watched as she poured warm oil into the slave girl’s vagina, and two days later, I watched the slave girl die.

My husband spat in my hair. “You’re ugly,” he said. “And stupid. I told you to take care of it, and you got her killed.” Later, I lay next to him, weeping without tears. I beseeched the gods. Please please can you not give me just one tiny morsel of joy. *************** My husband went to the slave dealer to purchase another. When he returned, he said, “Look what’s outside.” “Why don’t you bring her in?” I asked. “It isn’t a her,” he replied. I went to the small room built off of the stables. A young man was leaning against the sunlit brick wall. Brown hair, golden skin, green eyes. My heart, turned to flame. My husband came up next to me, and I prayed he could not feel how I burned. “His name is Yusuf,” he told me. “The dealer gave him to me for a good price. He said he couldn’t find a man who would want such a handsome slave around his wife. But I told him I don’t have to worry about my wife. What real man would want to fuck a woman who looks like a boy?” I lowered my head, too embarrassed to meet Yusuf’s gaze. “He’s not allowed in the house,” my husband continued. “I thought I’d make him a shepherd.” “But we have no sheep,” I said. “I’ll buy him some sheep. We’ll put some bells around their necks. Wouldn’t that be nice?” He slapped my ass and laughing, sent me back inside. When I got to the kitchen I had to hold onto the table to keep from falling. A dream turned into beautiful flesh, given a name, and made a shepherd. Mine. Imagine sharing a space with such a long awaited lover and such a terrible animal of a man. Imagine such geometry, such extremes of dark and light. Imagine being able to stand.

tured, divine and kissed me, softly, gently. A sheep bleated. I pulled away. “Yusuf,” I said. “If he finds out…what should we do?” “We shouldn’t harm him,” he said. “That would be the darkest path. We have to find another.” From the house, a noise. “I better go,” I said.

Then the short one yelped, “My thumb!” and they realized what they’d done. Beware, beware the neighbor’s wives, who slice their own hands with knives. Blood spilling from thumbs. Blood on potatoes, onions, carrots, on the floor and table. The power of lust, personified. The power of Yusuf, Yusuf who was mine.

He lifted me up and carried me to his room. I picked up his scarf from the floor. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Covering the idol.” “Let your idol see,” he said. “What better offering is there than this?” I let the scarf go, turned around. He pulled up my dress, got on his knees, and breathed in the heat between my thighs.

*************** *************** The next afternoon, the neighbors’ wives arrived, one short, one slender, one tall, one fat. Four pairs of glistening eyes. “Yes?” I said. “Is it true?” the tall one said. “Is your slave really so beautiful?” “Can we see him?” said the short. “He’s out with the sheep,” I said, but the slender one was already inside. “We’ll wait,” she said. “Do you have anything to eat?” asked the fat. Entering the kitchen, they saw the vegetables piled high. “We’ll help,” offered the slender, handing out knives. They went to work, exchanging rumors as they peeled and diced, and I began to fear what they might say about Yusuf. “You should leave,” I said. “But why?” the tall one replied. And then, the bells’ distant chime. “The sheep!” the fat one cried. Yusuf looked to the window expecting me and found four mouths instead, parted and gasping, their hot breath creeping from side to side. I had never seen him so beautiful, framed by the sycamore’s cascading figs, illuminated by the afternoon’s soft light. A sheep nudged his hip. There was a smear of dirt on his cheek, beads of sweat on his jaw’s strong line. The fat one’s gasp turned into a sigh.

*************** I used every single vegetable in the stew that night, and every scrap of blood. My husband usually pecked at his food, but today he ate like he fucked, belching between rounds. As he slept that night, his stomach groaned. When he woke up, he was too ill to move. He asked for water. I thought of denying him, but couldn’t. I gave him sips, but only a few, and brought him a bowl to piss in. This was the limit of my grace, and I left him alone and went to Yusuf’s room. In the corner was an altar to the goddess of protection the slave girl had left behind. There was a bed of hay, a blanket of soft wool draped over it. On the floor was Yusuf’s scarf. I held it to my nose. It smelled of earth, of warmth, of danger. Of life. The sound of bells. Sheep running down the hill. Yusuf, flanked by sky. He saw me and he knew. This was it. There would be no other time. “Where is he?” Yusuf asked. “Upstairs. He cannot move.” “Have you done something?” “Not I.” “Come.” He gave me his hand. We walked to the tank, where I poured water down his arms, his ass, his spine. I entwined my fingers in the curls at his stomach’s end, cupped his swollen flesh, licked the streams of water from his chest.

*************** And imagine how I yearned for the sound of those bells, for it meant Yusuf had returned. From the kitchen window, I caught glimpses of him at the water tank, washing the scent of pasture from his skin. Let this be enough, I thought. His damp shoulder. The small of his back. A tapered stretch of calf. But it was not enough. It could not be enough. You’ll understand this, one day, when you have loved as I. And so one afternoon, I filled a cup with wine and brought it out to him. He turned from the tank, sensing me. My hand trembled. I took a sip of wine. “I used to have long hair,” I said. “I didn’t used to look like this.” “And now you have short hair, and I can see all of your beautiful neck, all of the time,” he said, and I remembered what it was to smile. He took me in his arms, every part of me, bruised, wounded, tor-

Perhaps I have made you shy, though there is no shame in it. I will not tell you more of our afternoon together, though there is so much I still remember. The ways in which he touched me. The things he said. All of his different tastes. The fire in his eyes. It is what I have spent my life remembering. It is how I made it through. It is how I made it to you. *************** He kissed the palms of my hands. “Do you believe in dreams?” I asked. “I know all about dreams,” he said. His tongue slid past my wrist, down my arm, along the curve of my neck. “Did you know, then,” I said, “that this was mine?” *************** At first, neither of us noticed when my husband’s shadow pierced the light. When I saw how calmly he observed us, perched in the doorway, I despaired, for the quietest rage can be the most unkind. Wrapping the blanket around me, Yusuf rose to face him. “I always thought she was a whore,” my husband said. “And now I’ve proven it.” “We’ll leave quietly,” Yusuf told him. “Let’s have no trouble.” “You’re the one who’s in trouble,” he replied. “The police are already on their way.” “Please,” I begged him. “You can easily find another wife.” “We can end this peacefully,” Yusuf said. “I own you both,” my husband said. “I decide how you end. I decide whether you live or die.” The sound of barking. Footsteps. Four policemen, short, slender, tall, fat, wielding batons instead of knives. A dog snapping at Yusuf’s naked side. “My slave tried to take my wife’s honor,” my husband cried. “And then he attacked me.” “He lies,” Yusuf said. Four batons aimed at his head. Four pairs of incensed eyes. They bound his hands with rope. He watched me, our last words exchanged over silence. Be strong. One day, the universe will bow to us, for we are God’s purest light. I’ll try. The police led him away, taking Yusuf to his prison, and leaving me in mine. *************** His mouth savoring my left breast, then my right, his hand opening up my legs, his fingers stroking pleasure’s every ridge, every rise. Me, arching underneath him until I burst, and, bursting, became whole again. “What were you,” he asked, “before this?” “I was dead,” I said. “And now I’m alive.” He kissed my neck, my hair. “What were you,” I asked, “before you were a shepherd?” “I was naked in a well,” he whispered. “Dreaming of you.” Sheba Karim writes literary and young adult fiction. She is currently working on a historical fiction novel set in 13th century Delhi. Excerpted from Venus Flytrap: The Zubaan Anthology of Women’s Erotica, edited by Rosalyn D’Mello; Zubaan, 280 pages, `395. Venus Flytrap will be published next month.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

TELEVISION

the pecking order ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

The Hindi GEC space is exploding with love stories ‘with a difference’. But can Indian television really move on from kitchen dramas?

THE 500EPISODE FORMULA Nissar Parvez, director, 4 Lions Films, has directed and produced some popular love stories on TV (‘Geet’, ‘Miley Jab Hum Tum’, ‘Dill Mill Gayye’, ‘Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon’). Some secrets on what’s worked for his shows

B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

································· omething strange is happening in the Hindi general entertainment channel (GEC) space. Until about nine months ago, at prime time, characters such as Tulsi and Mihr (of Star Plus’ long-running and best-selling soap Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi) and Naitik and Akshara (of another longrunning daily on Star, Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai) epitomized eternal love. Their romance was confined to the four walls of their homes, with about a dozen in-laws and at least a handful of children watching over their every move. Then came Anandi (Balika Vadhu, Colors), who had no choice in the boy she would marry. She and other young heroines instead fell in love with the mother, father and grandparents-in-law. But over the last few months, things have begun changing. In mid-2011, the not-so-trim Ram Kapoor and the not sosprightly-any-more Sakshi Tanwar burst on to the small screen in their avatars as Ram and Priya in Bade Achhe Lagte Hain on Sony (produced by Balaji Telefilms), billed not as a “family drama” but as a “different love story”. They were soon followed by Khushi (Sanaya Irani) and Arnav (Barun Sobti) of Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon on Star Plus—both shows started shaking up the TRP (target rating point) game in Hindi GECs. Kuch To Log Kahenge followed in October, on Sony. In the last month alone, two channels have launched two new shows (Na Bole Tum Na Maine Kuch Kaha on Colors, and Kya Hua Tera Vaada on Sony), each declaring theirs “a love story with a difference”. Another show, Sajda Tere Pyaar Mein on Star Plus, is slated for launch on Valentine’s Day and, yes, this one too is a different love story—with a patriotic angle to boot. In this rechristened genre, which some say is midwifed by Ekta Kapoor of Balaji Telefilms, the romance and relationship between a man and woman are taking precedence over kitchen politics between mother-in-law, daughter-inlaw and sisters-in-law. “I get at least five calls a day to write a ‘different’ love story,” laughs Venita Coelho, a scriptwriter who is currently working on Na Bole... and has authored Writing and Surviving Television in India. “I chose to go with this one because this is a story about a widow and a confirmed bachelor falling in love, and one in which the woman has children from her previous marriage. Now there’s a chance at showing some real love and freshness in a story.” Says actor Mona Singh, who chose to break her six-year hiatus from the daily soap scene with Balaji Telefilms’ Kya Hua...: “I am a complete romantic at heart, and I know Ekta (Kapoor) is too. When she told me that this show will be about a couple rediscovering love after 11 years of marriage and three kids, a stage when love usually goes out of the window in most marriages, I was excited. I have seen this happen around me. Ekta was clear that this love story will be realistic and personalized.” The credit for being the true game changer goes to Bade Achhe...—a “mature love story” in which two older characters decide to get married for their family’s sake and then start falling in love. And to a lesser extent, Iss Pyaar..., a romantic tale of an arrogant young businessman and a small-town girl with middle-class moral values. In the 22-28 January week, Khushi and Arnav’s now-on, mostly-off romance reached a new peak, with the two leads managing to plant a

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Soap diary: (from above) Khushi (Sanaya Irani) and Arnav (Barun Sobti) of Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon; Mona (Mona Singh) and Pradeep (Pawan Shankar) of Kya Hua Tera Vaada; Priya (Sakshi Tanwar) and Ram (Ram Kapoor) of Bade Achhe Lagte Hain; and Dr Ashutosh (Mohnish Bahl) of Kuch To Log Kahenge. peck on each other’s cheek. While thousands of fans dissected every angle of the twin kisses, the show went from its ninth position (3.7 television points) in the first week of January to No. 5 (4.6) in the week from 22-28 January, according to TAM Media Research. News of their possible wedding took the show to No. 4 in the 29 January-4 February week. “Ours is a love story with a lot of focus on the lead pair, who fortunately share a great on-screen chemistry. The great thing for our show is that we have survived eight months without getting our leads married, and that is not the norm. Though we may get them married soon enough, not many other love stories on Indian TV have managed this,”says Rajesh Chadha, the producer of the show on behalf of Panglosean Entertainment. “We have been doing stereotypical shows for so long that it is hard to show a love story where the man is not sandwiched between his mother and his wife,” says Rajan Shahi, producer, Director’s Kut, which is making Kuch To... for Sony and also produces Yeh Rishta... He believes the TV audience is now ready for more realistic stories which are not centred around the kitchen. “There is a slight change in what audiences want and yes, the relationship between a man and a woman is taking precedence. Channels, production houses are looking for new ways to tell stories and yes, perhaps love stories are the new formula. The time to churn out permutations and combinations of the same old family dramas is gone,” he adds. Based on the Pakistani soap Dhoop Kinare from the late 1980s, Kuch To... is the romance between a much older man and younger woman, and even after nearly five months of being on air, no motherin-law of any kind has

KUNAL PATIL/HINDUSTAN TIMES

m a d e a n appearance in the show. “The hardest part was to get writers who could break out of the family drama genre and write a mature love story,” says Shahi. What has surprised him most about the feedback on the show is the reaction of the male audience. “I think most were fed up of shows with nonsensical bickering, over-thetop jewellery and typical costume. It restricted prime-time TV for just female viewing,” he says. There was no independent male perspective; the male protagonist usually had only a stereotypical role: an over-the-top hero or an outright villain. “In these newer soaps, with characters such as Mohnish’s (Mohnish Bahl)

Dr Ashutosh, there is a great sense of identification: His discomfort with the idea of public display of affection, his remorse at falling in love with a younger girl and his inability initially to acknowledge that love, all worked well for the show,” Shahi says. In fact, that is what works in Bade Achhe.. too—the way Ram’s point of view is explored, and how it is not linked to his stepmom or dadi’s all the time. Both Chadha and Shahi believe that today’s older generation of women, the safe audience that makes an appointment to watch their shows, is now more open to stories of real relationships between a man and a woman and less than ideal, totally pristine characters. In Bade Achhe... the male lead Ram is known to grapple with weight issues; in Iss Pyaar... Arnav believes in live-in relationships rather than marriages; and in Kuch To... Dr Ashutosh does not mind weeping while female lead Nidhi is aggressive and expressive of her feelings. “Imperfection of male and female characters and their situations is what makes these love stories interesting,” says Shahi. Chadha admits that this acceptance

u Casting: You have to get the right male and female lead. The audience has to be able to feel the attraction between them, some kind of sexual tension. They must look at the duo and say, “Oooh, they look so good together.” u Opposites attract: The male and female lead have to be as different from each other as possible. That is the only way sparks will fly. u Keep them apart: The leads cannot be friends or loveydovey from Day 1. Sure, the audience wants them to be together and married but what really works for a love story is when they are not together and the audience stays curious about how they will become a couple. u The point of view: The story should mostly follow the girl’s point of view. u Hero: He has to have a largerthanlife quality; the ability to do what no ordinary man can or would do. u Sacrifice: A key element. One of the two lead characters must have the capability to sacrifice something dear to them at some point in the show. u Focus: Even while the parallel leads or secondary characters are given screen time, they must somehow allude to or discuss the main leads in either a positive or negative way. In love stories, everything is about the protagonists. u Screen space: Do not take the leads away from the screen for too long. u Believe in it: As a director, I have to believe in the story completely and be convinced about every aspect. But I cannot write or build the story in accordance with what the audience wants. That is a complete nono. Seema Chowdhry comes with a caveat. “We cannot make a love story with a lead pair in isolation. No soap can sustain constant loveydovey scenes all through. The characters need to grow organically. If everything is concentrated on their love and interactions, then how can this happen? There has to be conflict in any story and especially in a love story between the boy and girl, and characters like dadi, bhua, mami, sister, the brother-in-law, in our case, provide these openings,” he says. The dadi, nani, bhua angle cannot be done away with completely—after all, these people form a chunk of the daily viewership numbers. Moreover, tertiary characters help to highlight, and in some cases do away with, generation-gap issues. A point that Coelho agrees with. “There is no point in comparing a romantic movie which finishes in twoand-a-half hours with a daily soap which is roughly about 10 hours of programming every month. Saying a serial is deemed a love story only if the focus is solely on the lead pair 24x7 is just not possible. Some amount of family drama is necessary.” Nitin Vaidya, business head, Hindi channels, Star India, adds: “No story, love story or otherwise, can compromise on one basic premise: that the entire family can watch the story together.” That’s why, Shahi says, he shies away from overt physical intimacy in any of his shows. “There is a certain contradiction in the fact that people don’t mind watching Chikni Chamelis in their living rooms, but when it comes to TV shows, they prefer a certain amount of restrictive behaviour.” Perhaps that’s why in Iss Pyaar... its Mills-and-Boonish hero Arnav ends up ending his live-in relationship with girlfriend Lavanya and shows his intent of love for Khushi not through the usual hug or lip-lock, but a tame peck on the cheek.

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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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MUMBAI MULTIPLEX

wings of a city Sudarshan Shetty’s ‘Flying Bus’ is a love song for Mumbai, reminding us of the city’s history and the need to adapt to new realities B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com

·································· ooking at Mumbai can sometimes be a joyous thing. If you’re sitting on the upper deck of a Routemaster, the familiar becomes cinematic and distant, and the city’s beauty becomes easily recognizable. The last time I sat on one was in 2007, out of necessity. It was a Mumbai bandh called by the Shiv Sena, and no suburban cabbie would drive to Dadar. Dadar is perceived, especially on days like these, as an intimidating Sena stronghold. The wholesale vegetable market I pass by every day in a taxi, on the pavements of the Lokmanya Tilak Bridge, looked beautiful. Usually I recognize it by its distinct smell. Coriander leaves, combined with earthy dust and putridity. The bus trundled by, passing wads of green vegetables and women lumbering them on to small vehicles; the familiar smell was faint. The rest of Dadar was restive, and a bit eerie. Mumbai was diminutive and surreal. The Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport Undertaking (BEST) double-decker bus, the Routemaster, negotiates the city’s maddening traffic jams by blocking what’s around it. Everything stops when the bus stops. Sitting atop, and looking down at still, dysphoric Mumbai, I remembered REM’s music video, Everybody Hurts, set in a better-looking traffic snarl. Joy and vexation in one traffic jam moment. In artist Sudarshan Shetty’s mind, Mumbai’s claustrophobia and its ability to surprise and challenge him coexist harmoniously. He has engaged with the city of his birth with playfulness, evident in his large, mechanized installation works. In his new installa-

tion work Flying Bus, an exact replica of a BEST double-decker, weighing 10 tonnes, including 1 tonne of structural steel required to hold the weight of its resplendent, cantilevered wings, Shetty erects a love song to the city, drawing on two contrasting emotions. The work stands permanently at the heart of Maker Maxity, an office complex in the Bandra Kurla Complex, fortified by burnished glass. Commissioned by real estate developer Manish Maker, Shetty’s double-decker is a celebratory art piece in appearance. But the artist also intends it to be an exhortative work. “It is a reminder of the change Bombay is constantly subjected to. It is a reminder that we need to adapt,” he tells me. “Resurrecting history was a part of it, but I was more interested in the melancholy of it, that the double-decker is actually not going to be there soon. These wings weigh a lot, and the idea is that this very iconic Mumbai symbol attached to them won’t actually fly.” A few years ago, at a lecture he delivered in New York, Shetty said life in his city was like being stuck in a traffic jam behind a truck carrying inflammable liquid. “You have no other choice but to follow it, never knowing what may happen.” He says he loves and hates the surprises the city throws at him and it is his creative wellspring, a relationship he is wary of describing. “How do you describe your relationship with your mother?” The double-decker’s reappearance as art is significant not only because this work could redefine the possibilities for public art in India—it is art in progress, wherein the insides of the bus act as an exhibition space—but also because an artist captures, for the first time in a large-scale installation, Mumbai’s history of life on the streets—the act of commuting in the

THESE WINGS WEIGH A LOT, AND THE IDEA IS THAT THIS VERY ICONIC MUMBAI SYMBOL ATTACHED TO THEM WON’T ACTUALLY FLY.

city, which for some outsiders is in the realm of mundane myth, livelihoods fuelled by transport and most importantly, BEST’s amazing efficiency. These buses ply from every corner of the city, are punctual and, in my experience, the kindest modes of public transport in Mumbai. Since 2007, the double-decker is being progressively phased out. It is hard to say if its slow disappearance has had any impact on the city’s overburdened streets. But heck, the only cinematic Mumbai frame we are left to experience on a daily basis now is that from an aeroplane circling above our slums—already an inspiration for Western film-makers and journalists in a hurry. The red Mumbai double-decker was born in 1937. The engines of the earliest double-deckers were imported that year by the superintendent of the transport department of the Travancore State Transport Department of Travancore, E.G. Salter. It was also

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Come fly with me: (above) It took 248 days to manufacture the Flying Bus and 8 hours to install it; and the bus’ lower deck. simultaneously introduced in a Mumbai bus, one of the first vehicles of The Bombay Electric Supply & Tramways Company Ltd, which became the BEST Undertaking in 1947. Replicas of the elephantine carrier are preserved at the BEST Transport Museum located at the Anik Bus Depot in Wadala. At Maker Maxity’s sprawling, spotless premises, the double-decker, whimsically labelled “No 1, From Here to There and Back Again”, is an imposing presence. The idea of flight, and the promise of escape and a better life, is inherent to life in Mumbai, and the Flying Bus, above all else, epitomizes that promise. It took Shetty to a workshop in Belgaum after Maker commissioned this project. Before the bus was installed, the ground platform at Maker Maxity had to be reinforced so it could withstand the sculpture’s weight. As the project grew, Shetty started thinking of using the space inside the bus. Although the bus is stationary, it accommodates an audience that can move in and out of it, like the passengers of a bus do. Shetty worked with a team of 64 engineers, technicians, electricians, crane operators, tinsmiths, painters, welders and scaffolders to install the Flying Bus. Maker tells me what happened thereafter: “Around lunchtime one day, as I entered the project I found about 15-odd people standing around the artwork. Some were from the offices in Maker Maxity, some were walk-in visitors, some had cameras. Everyone stopped to look. There was a sense of wonder, a sense of intrigue. Every day we have visitors who purposefully come to Maker Maxity to view Flying Bus, and we have visitors to the offices who detour to see it, enter it, click pictures and engage with it. We often overhear viewers commenting on and arguing the possible relevance of Flying Bus.” Flying Bus is open for public viewing at Maker Maxity, Bandra Kurla Complex, Bandra (East), Mumbai. Documentary film-maker Amar Kanwar’s video works are on display inside. Forthcoming works to be displayed at the Flying Bus are photographs by Dayanita Singh, mobile works by the Bangalorebased art duo Pors & Rao, works by artist Gurdeep Singh and a work by graphic novelist Arijit Sen.