Lounge for 12 May 2012

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

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Saturday, May 12, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 19

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

BACK FOR MORE

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH TCS’ NATARAJAN CHANDRASEKARAN >Page 8

The three Indian medal winners from the 2008 Games speak of their quest for an unprecedented second at the London Olympics >Pages 10­12

BETWEEN THE CLIFF AND THE COAST

On the railway line from Mumbai to Mangalore, through the Western Ghats, almost every halt brings new wonders >Page 13

THE BEST CHUTNEY IN THE WORLD

Saleem Sinai comes to life in director Deepa Mehta’s film based on Salman Rushdie’s book ‘Midnight’s Children’ >Page 14

ON THE RECORD

S. Hussain Zaidi on his new book, his most sustained exploration yet of the Mumbai mafia >Page 16

Abhinav Bindra at his private shooting range in his family’s farmhouse near Chandigarh.

REPLY TO ALL

LUXURY CULT

AAKAR PATEL

RADHA CHADHA

THE HIGH­DESIGN, PATELS HAVE LET DOWN VALLABHBHAI LOW­PRICES DEAL

A

s Gujaratis are finally being convicted for their barbarism, a remarkable fact has emerged. We can observe this fact in the names of those convicted. The latest judgement came on 4 May, when those who murdered Ayesha Vohra, Nuri Vohra and Kader Vohra during the 2002 riots were convicted. The convicts are: Harish V. Patel, Vasant P. Patel, Nilesh M. Patel, Mahesh G. Patel, Minesh P. Patel, Ritesh A. Patel, Ashok D. Patel, Kirit M. Patel and Bhavesh P. Patel. On 9 April came convictions...>Page 4

GAME THEORY

I

t is like visiting an old friend. I am at the Ikea store in Dubai—my first time here—but the setting is familiar, just like the one in Hong Kong that I knew and loved. As I walk through the store I spot objects that used to be in our earlier homes, the Billy bookcases that bore the brunt of storage in the children’s study, the S-curved mirrors that my daughter loved as a little girl, the coffee mugs and chopping boards, the bathroom mats and bedside lamps, the endless list of everyday objects that I have used... >Page 4

ROHIT BRIJNATH

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

PRESERVING OUR SPORTS HERITAGE

D

o you recall a first tennis racket? The first bat, the first clumsy pads? Do you have a sporting history? I remember entering Calcutta’s Gander and Co., buying hockey sticks that were then pitted by a divider and oiled, cork balls that cracked, heavy footballs whose only promise after the rains was concussion after a header. I had a scrapbook, with pictures of a balanced Sunny and a diving Solkar gummed across a page. But memory dies and scrapbooks find their way... >Page 6

FILM REVIEW

ISHAQZAADE

HOME PAGE L3

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEW | RARA AVIS, GREATER KAILASH­II, NEW DELHI

R

un by two Frenchmen (Jerome Cousin and Laurent Guiraud) and an Indian (Rajiv Aneja), Rara Avis, a month-old, French-style bistro located in the Greater Kailash-II M-Block market, gets extra brownie points for not being yet another eatery opening in the super-cramped Hauz Khas Village.

The eatery is divided into two sections, outdoor and indoor. The 28-seater section on the second floor is all about largish rectangular dining tables, leather sofas and muted taupe-coloured walls. The 20-seater, third-floor outdoor section has a café feel with white wooden square tables, and cane and metal chairs. There is a covered live kitchen and lounge area on the terrace and the roof of this space has close to 300 bulbs, few of which are on at a time.

The good stuff The menu is in French, with English translations for every dish. French staples are included in the menu. Some of these are: fondues (adequate for two people) such as Savoyarde—cheese served with baguettes and cold cuts (`1,980)—and Bourguignone —tenderloin chunks cooked on the table in different sauces (`1,680); Terrine de Jerome (rabbit meat pâté, `380) and Petit Gris (escargots, garlic and parsley butter kueche, `640).

Don’t ask your table attendant for recommendations; instead wait for Guiraud, who is chatty with-

out being intrusive, to make an appearance. Since we were seated in the outdoor section, we could smell the Basa Capres et Citron (fillet of basa in lemon caper butter, `540) being cooked in the live kitchen. Thanks to Guiraud’s advice we asked for the lemon caper butter sauce to be served separately rather than on the fish. A great idea and a very French way to eat, we must add.

The flammenkueche, we were told, was the French version of pizza. We ordered Alsacienne (onion, bacon and cream, `580). The bacon, sweet, semi-caramelized onion rings and slightly sour cream made for an interesting combo. In fact, the cheese croutons served with the French soup did not use the usual cheddar or mozzarella cheese that most restaurants do. Instead, Emmental was used, giving the soup a slightly pungent flavour.

The mini dessert platter, (Café Gourmand, `320) was a sure-shot hit on our table, especially the Tarte Tatin (caramelized apple pie) with a scoop of ice cream.

The not­so­good We were a little surprised to find basil in the La Grantinee (French onion soup, `240) and when we enquired, we were told this was a mistake; it should have been thyme. The crêpe with lemon sugar (`220), unfortunately, just did not work. We were expecting a sweet- and tarty-flavoured filling; instead we were served two 8-inch-long crêpes with a cheesy-creamy filling and hardly any sugar. When we expressed our dismay, we were told that perhaps our table attendant had taken down our order incorrectly. Of course, Guiraud offered to replace the dish, but we were too stuffed to try any more food.

Talk plastic A meal for two adults and a child without alcohol was `3,196, taxes included.

Open from noon-3pm for lunch and 7.30-11.30pm for dinner. For reservations, call 9811232992.

Seema Chowdhry ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: PRADEEP GAUR/MINT CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “And a father is born”, 5 May, the book ‘Dad’s the Word’ is priced at `225.

In “Vertical limit”, 5 May, a black and white photograph shows Major H.P.S. Ahluwalia on top of Everest in 1965. Captain Mohan Singh Kohli led that expedition, but did not summit himself.

L4 COLUMNS

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SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Patels have let down Vallabhbhai

A

AFP

s Gujaratis are finally being convicted for their barbarism, a remarkable fact has emerged. We can observe this fact in the names of those convicted. The latest judgement came on 4 May, when those who

murdered Ayesha Vohra, Nuri Vohra and Kader Vohra during the 2002 riots were convicted. The convicts are: Harish V. Patel, Vasant P. Patel, Nilesh M. Patel, Mahesh G. Patel, Minesh P. Patel, Ritesh A. Patel, Ashok D. Patel, Kirit M. Patel and Bhavesh P. Patel.

On 9 April came convictions for the murder of 23 Muslims in Odh village. The killers are: Vinu B. Patel, Atul D. Patel, Vijay R. Patel, Devang H. Patel, Girish S. Patel, Prakash J. Patel, Dilip V. Patel, Harish S. Patel, Dilip S. Patel, Jayendra S. Patel, Suresh B. Patel, Arvind R. Patel, Hemant S. Patel, Sanat R. Patel, Manu J. Patel, Dilip R. Patel, Poonam L. Patel, Dharmesh N. Patel, Vinu S. Patel, Natu M. Patel and Praveen M. Patel.

On 9 November, 31 Hindu men were convicted of murdering 11 children, 17 women and five men in Sardarpura village of Mehsana district. The Muslims were labourers who worked on the fields of those who killed them. The 31 murderers are: Ramesh K. Patel, Chatur V. Patel, Jayanti M. Patel, Amrat S. Patel, Jaga D. Patel, Kachara T. Patel, Mangal M. Patel, Bhikha J. Patel, Mathur R. Patel, Suresh R. Patel, Tulsi G. Patel, Raman J. Patel, Rajesh K. Patel, Ramesh K. Patel, Matha V. Patel, Suresh B. Patel, Vishnu P. Patel, Rajendra P. Patel, Prahlad J. Patel, Ramesh R. Patel, Parshottambhai M. Patel, Ashwin J. Patel, Ambalal M. Patel, Ramesh G. Patel, Jayanti A. Patel, Kanu J. Patel, Raman G. Prajapati, Dahya K. Patel, Mathur T. Patel, Dahya V. Patel and Kala B. Patel. This fact of the killers

knowing their victims runs common through the Gujarat riots, and it is one reason why the survivors were able to accurately pick out the Patels who abused them.

Last month, on 16 April, the trial of 85 men was completed in the massacre of 11 Muslims, including five children, in the Dipda Darwaja area of Visnagar. The accused include former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Prahlad Patel, who led the mob, and the police officer who investigated the case shoddily, M.K. Patel.

A mob of 200 men, all of them Patels, murdered and then cut the bodies of their neighbours to pieces. At a “peace” meeting three days later, the Patels refused to hand over the remains to the surviving member of that family, Murad Khan. Three women are accused of handing petrol and kerosene to the men to burn the corpses. The women are Gita Patel, Madhu Patel and Manjula Patel.

Patels, also called Patidars or Kanbis, are the dominant peasant community of Gujarat, and the same caste as Kurmis in Bihar and the Kunbi Patils in Maharashtra. Writer Ratilal Nayak in Atako Kevi Rite Padi? (How Did Our Surnames Come to Be?) claims that Patel is an Arabic word. This cannot be, for there is no letter “P” in Arabic.

In my Lounge column of 10 April 2010 (“We still cling to ‘Manusmriti’”), I wrote this about Patels: “The Patel has butchered his daughters so efficiently that now other castes must supply brides.

There is evidence he is marrying eastern

In the dock: Patels comprise a large number of those convicted in the Gujarat riot cases.

Gujarat’s tribals, bringing them into Hindu culture. This is an instance of the Gujarati becoming inclusive through violence. The Patel is the sword-arm of Gujarat’s Hindutva movement (Pravin Togadia is Patel). Like all peasants, he is intellectually primitive and easily roused by symbols. He’s also familiar with violence because he handles cattle.”

Three months ago, on 7 February, The Times of India reported the wedding of seven Patel men to tribal girls. The report “Now, Kadva Patels welcome tribal bahus”, said the sex ratio of Patels had fallen to 700 girls for 1,000 boys.

The Patel is seen by his fellow Gujaratis as kind-hearted but quick to violence. The Kehvatkosh, which has sayings about communities and situations, tells us this: “Patelni vaat Patel jane, haath ma dando ane ghanti tane (Only the Patel, his staff in hand, understands his obstinate self).”

H.M. Dhruv, who defended the men who murdered 11 children in Sardarpura, told the court the Patels were “influenced by conditions”. The Patels’ other defence

lawyer, B.C. Barot, told the court the men’s behaviour was a “reaction to an action”. I disagree.

Murdering people you know as vengeance for the murder of people you did not know by other people you did not know is not a reaction.

After they were found guilty, The Indian Express reported many of the Patels exited the court smiling.

Writer Achyut Yagnik (a Brahmin married to a Patel) and I have often discussed our state and why it is the way it is. Yagnik explains the Patel’s violence against Muslims sociologically.

“Traditionally their social status was low,” he says. “Their rise only came in the 19th century when the British brought the ryotwari system, replacing zamindari.”

The Patel, who was the ryot on the field, rose in stature.

“He became ‘upper’ caste. Till then he was a ‘middle’ caste,” says Yagnik. His enthusiasm to belong to the upper castes of Hinduism shows in his violence against Muslims. The Gujarati Kshatriyas did not feel this contempt for the Muslim,

Yagnik says, because they share his non-vegetarianism.

Further, unlike Gujarati Baniyas and Brahmins, Patels don’t have a caste council, so there is no internal moderation. There is no assessment of actions, and no review.

The most feared men in Gujarat, the Vishva Hindu Parishad’s Jaideep Patel and the frightening Babu ‘Bajrangi’ (who told Tehelka he felt like Maharana Pratap after slaughtering Muslims), are Patels.

The Patels line up solidly behind the BJP and four of Narendra Modi’s nine cabinet ministers are Patels. To the extent that they have a leader, it is Keshubhai, the 81-year-old former chief minister.

As the Patels begin to be convicted, Keshubhai said, on 12 February, that Patels “were living in fear”. When asked what he meant, Keshubhai said: “You have to understand by this comment”, according to PTI. He repeated this statement on 17 April, after the judgement at Odh. And again on 7 May, at a gathering of Patels in Veraval, according to a report in Dainik Bhaskar.

Keshubhai invoked his community’s mascot, telling Patels: “We are Vallabhbhai’s descendents and inheritors.

Don’t be afraid.” This then is the sentiment of Patels as they are exposed.

What can be said of such a people who don’t accept responsibility, and feel not guilt, not regret and certainly not shame?

They feel only a fear of justice. It isn’t possible for such people to reform. The outside world must come and straighten them out.

In mutilating little Muslim girls and boys, Patels think they’re honouring their hero Vallabhbhai.

The truth is, of course, that he would be ashamed of them, and of belonging to their community.

Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist.

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

RADHA CHADHA LUXURY CULT

The high design with low prices deal

I

WWW.IKEA.COM

t is like visiting an old friend. I am at the Ikea store in Dubai—my first time here—but the setting is familiar, just like the one in Hong Kong that I knew and loved. As I walk through the store I spot objects that used to be in our earlier homes, the Billy

bookcases that bore the brunt of storage in the children’s study, the S-curved mirrors that my daughter loved as a little girl, the coffee mugs and chopping boards, the bathroom mats and bedside lamps, the endless list of everyday objects that I have used and discarded, and here they are on display again, surreal, memory-laden.

Of course, there is plenty that is brand new and utterly different, but the spirit of Ikea—that magical ability to convert small spaces into delightful homes—remains constant.

Ikea is hardly a luxury brand—in fact it trumpets its modest prices—but its design calibre, especially its sense of inventiveness and playfulness, reminds me of high-end brands like Ligne Roset and Alessi. Design capability is so high that even if you were willing to pay many times the price, there are some objects that you simply won’t find elsewhere. Take the Nordby bed tray that I bought today for 25 dirhams (around `360)—I am addicted to it, it is my third in 10 years—it is a white tray of moulded plastic on steel legs that fold in and

click shut. Probably best for breakfast in bed, but I use it for writing in bed instead, it holds my laptop perfectly. I have looked for other solutions over the years but never found anything as simple, beautifully designed and utterly functional as this one.

As I try to find a place in its jam-packed cafeteria—Ikea incidentally did more than a billion euros in its food business alone last year—I wonder what is at the heart of its universal popularity? In 2011, more than 655 million people visited an Ikea store somewhere in the world, totting up sales of €24.7 billion (around `1.7 trillion). Its stores are massive, and some of its biggest, like the one in Shanghai, equal six football fields. Its website had 870 million visitors. Its product range has 9,500 items and some much-loved ones like the Billy bookcases and Klippan sofas have celebrated 30 years. Its beds have been much loved on—according to an article in The Guardian in 2004, 10% of Europeans were conceived on Ikea beds. The same article estimates that on some Sundays in the UK, twice

Where design rules: Ikea provides aesthetic decor solutions at reasonable prices. as many people visited an Ikea store than a church.

Ikea has made a religion out of keeping prices down. At the cafeteria, a sign asks why I should put my used tray away—you guessed it, because it ultimately saves money and keeps prices low. Most of the furniture is “flat-packed”, as in you buy the components in neat flat packages, and then you go home and assemble it yourself—all steps that keep the prices low. (For people like me, born without the do-it-yourself gene, there’s an assembly service for a small fee.) In a world where prices usually go up and up, Ikea is constantly on the lookout for

ways to reduce price—new materials, new technologies, new processes, new ideas, whatever it takes to shave off another cent. Last year, the company reduced prices by 2.6%.

High design with low prices is a universal crowd-puller—and perhaps the singular reason that makes Ikea so successful across multiple cultures. The fact that you didn’t pay all that much makes it easier to chuck things and buy afresh. This furniture-isn’t-permanent theme plays well to the fact that young people typically start with small homes furnished on small budgets, and as their financial ability as well as family expands, they move into larger spaces

with larger furnishing budgets. Ikea is a great fit for starter homes, and definitely has a role to play over the years.

What does all this mean to India?

Ikea isn’t here yet, and chances are it will be a while before a store opens in India. The government’s green signal on 100% foreign direct investment in single-brand retail was supposed to encourage the likes of Ikea, but tough riders like having to source 30% of the value of products sold from small industries, village and cottage industries, artisans and craftsmen, makes it difficult, if not impossible. If “value of products sold” means “revenue”, then do your math, and a company with, say, a 40% gross margin would have to source half its goods from India. In the case of luxury brands—where gross margins are much higher—you may have an unusual situation where an “international” brand has to source almost everything from small Indian suppliers.

Doing up a home in India is a hellish process and you are usually tearing your hair out dealing with delays, quality issues, and cost overruns.

Letting in brands like Ikea would certainly make life easier for consumers. Great design, great functionality, great price, all at the click of a finger. Sounds like a deal to me.

Radha Chadha is one of Asia’s leading marketing and consumer insight experts.

She is the author of the best-selling book The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair With Luxury. Write to her at luxurycult@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Radha’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/radha­chadha

COLUMNS L5

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SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Here’s to an apt ‘app’ for everything

T

here are a few Indian iPhone apps that I wish existed: one that would recognize things in nature, for instance. Just as the app SoundHound is able to listen to a song and tell me the name of the band and even the lyrics, I

wish I could record birdsong and have an app tell me what bird it is.

There are dozens of such birdwatching apps from acclaimed field guides such as Petersen, Sibley (the best of the lot, according to Birderslibrary.com), Audubon, and National Geographic, but they apply to North American birds. A great app is Build-a-bird, which shows viewers how birds adapt by changing beak size and shape.

The same applies to the trees. I wish I could photograph the tree, feed it into the app and find out all the facts—common name, genus, species, if the roots are medicinal, if the fruits are edible, geographical origins, history of the name, and any other quirky facts. Again, such apps exist but only for trees in the West.

In Bangalore, the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) has started an excellent “tree walk” programme.

Eminent naturalists such as S. Karthikeyan lead a group of nature lovers on tree walks inside the premises. I asked Karthik, as he is known, whether he would like an app that automatically identifies trees. “But that would take all the fun out of it,” was his instant response.

In Chennai, an organization called Nizhal, which means shade in Tamil, does tree identification, surveys and

walks. My college classmate, Ambika Chandrasekar, works as a volunteer with Nizhal. She would love a tree app, she says, as it would help the digital generation connect with trees.

“It would give them instant gratification,” she says. Nizhal has developed an e-book with html links which works well on the iPad. The publication is sponsored by Siemens—a great low-cost brand building exercise. Chandrasekar has put this on her iPad and says it is a great help in her tree education. “It also delights, because let’s say I have identified it in the non-flowering season, the book shows me how the flowers look, and then quite often I’ve gone, ‘Oh hey, this is beautiful, I need to keep an eye out.’ So yes, thumbs up for a tree app.”

Downloading The Night Sky, Stars, and SkyView have made a skywatcher out of me. I point my phone upwards and watch the constellations materialize, even though the cloudy Bangalore sky hides the actual stars. I watch how Leo, Gemini, Cancer and Virgo move through the sky, sometimes close to the moon and other times, away. I am able to spot Venus and Mars, usually through my iPhone but occasionally without.

Apps are wonderful things. They let

Wish list: Are there Indian apps that can identify birds or suggest recipes? you play and amuse yourself with Angry Birds and other games for hours.

Productivity apps give you the feeling that you are in control; the master of your universe. And they let you dream.

For example, another wonderful app would be if I could lay out all the vegetables (or meats) that I have on a counter, photograph it, feed it into the app, and then get a recipe that will not involve making a trip to the grocery store. A recipe based on existing ingredients and clever substitutions (amchur instead of imli?).

Recently, I downloaded several productivity apps, which, in my mind, are exactly like buying a mop.

They represent pure potential. They give me a glimpse into a future that includes sparkling floors rather than one that is littered with socks, withered jasmine petals, and dust.

Productivity apps also make me feel like those guys who are called “productivity gurus”, in podcasts.

The only problem is that they haven’t made me more productive. Let me give you an example.

One app that I was excited by is called The Habit Factor. The lite version is free, so I downloaded it. This app, ostensibly, helps you cultivate good habits. It begins with some peppy proverbs. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” So said Aristotle.

The Habit Factor asks you to list two or three habits that you want to cultivate. The goal is to enter a time period—I entered one year—and a specific habit. I entered “meditate for 10 minutes per day”. People who do yoga every day and eat sprouts for breakfast recommend meditation first thing in the morning. I don’t eat sprouts or do yoga.

I sat down on the first day. Very happily, I opened my eyes after 12 minutes and clicked the tick mark in the app. One day down, 364 to go.

The logic behind this app is that you tick it on each day that you keep your habit and it will draw pie charts and diagrams and tell you how good you are at keeping your habit.

You know what my success rate is after three months? 0.4%. I haven’t sat down, let alone emptied my mind for three consecutive days. This app needs a built-in whip. When that berry cake in my refrigerator is singing like a siren to me, as it is now, The Habit Factor needs to say, “Don’t do it.”

Shoba Narayan is looking for a new app: one that will ease the guilt of not keeping a habit. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

L6 COLUMNS

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SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ROHIT BRIJNATH GAME THEORY

Why don’t we preserve our sporting history?

D

o you recall a first tennis racket? The first bat, the first clumsy pads? Do you have a sporting history? I remember entering Calcutta’s Gander and Co., buying hockey sticks that were then pitted by a

divider and oiled, cork balls that cracked, heavy footballs whose only promise after the rains was concussion after a header. I had a scrapbook, with pictures of a balanced Sunny and a diving Solkar gummed across a page.

But memory dies and scrapbooks find their way into a kabadiwallah’s (scrap dealer’s) jute bag. So much fades. Not just our history, but more vitally the athletes. Their clippings, letters, jerseys, bats...it all becomes a precious past lost in a storeroom.

Unless you reclaim it. Unless you start a museum, open a hall of fame. Unless you protect history.

Scrolling through the New York Mets’ website recently, by chance, I found a map of their museum. I kept looking. The US’ National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, in Cooperstown New York, celebrated its 15 millionth visitor in 2011 and has 38,000 artefacts and 500,000 photographs. The International Tennis Hall of Fame and Museum in Newport, Rhode Island, has 16,000 objects and they’re digitizing their 2,700 hours of videotape. At Wimbledon’s museum, a “ghost” of John McEnroe speaks while standing in an old changing room; in the museum at the World Golf Hall of Fame, you can play the St Andrews Old Course on a simulator.

So let’s ask...

Where can I see Milkha Singh’s spikes or P.T. Usha’s? Or watch Michael Ferreira’s billiards world record break? Or gaze at Ramanathan Krishnan’s wooden Maxplys from the 1950s-60s, of which son Ramesh says he has only

a couple left? Or learn about wrestler K.D. Jadhav’s moves which won him Olympic bronze in 1952?

Nowhere? Not in one place?

Not organized?

Not important?

Now there’s even irony. For the 2012 Olympics, all the tube stations in London have been renamed after athletes. There are three Indians: Dhyan Chand, Roop Singh and Leslie Claudius. The last named is 85, and alive, commemorated in London but not back home. So much is already being lost. The names Richard Allen, Richard Carr, Carlyle Tapsall, Pat Jansen, part of a unique slice of our history, the Anglo-Indian hockey player, is foreign to new generations.

Let’s revive them.

In 1932, when the Indians arrived in Los Angeles for the Olympics, a headline apparently ran: Hockey Kings Arrive Today: They Will Be Accompanied By Their Many Wives: There are 2 Lions In The Team. If it exists, it deserves to be behind a glass window to wonder and grin at.

Else this is what will happen in 40 years. People will think Wilson Jones is the name of a shirt company. The lone stump that businessman/writer Mudar Patherya has from India’s first Test match in 1932 will be buried

with him because he wants to leave it to a cricket museum but there isn’t an official one. As he laments: “Cricket is our religion, yet we have no mandir (temple).”

Patherya has a string of cricketer Amar Singh’s official tour ties; a thigh pad of Jack Hobbs, given by the Englishman to Prof. D.B. Deodhar; a blazer of Ghulam Ahmed’s. He’s not alone. There are private collections across India. One called Blades of Glory in Pune, apparently.

In 1991, says Patherya, he was offered Duleepsinhji’s collection, two trunks worth. The price was just a lakh

then. Patherya couldn’t afford it, and he says the collection now lies with Sussex. Treasure gone. And still going.

Maybe history doesn’t matter to an emerging India looking to the future.

Maybe we’re too busy to look back.

Maybe we don’t, understandably, care for American-style selling of balls caught in the stands on eBay or setting a price on a half-eaten Tendulkar apple. But history isn’t junk either and it’s why I admire Ramachandra Guha because he, far beyond sport, provides us both conscience and education.

History, in sport, is a way of understanding it, whether it is the THREE LIONS/GETTY IMAGES

Blast from the past: (right) The US’ National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in New York; and a statue of Fred Perry on the grounds of the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island.

MIKE DI PAOLA/BLOOMBERG

invention of cricket strokes, football tactics or how on earth they played hockey in those shorts. To appreciate how fast Leander Paes moved, and thus tennis has, you need a split screen with Naresh Kumar in the 1950s.

History is sentiment but it also brings a sense of belonging. Half the time we don’t think we’re a sporting country of any note because we’ve forgotten most people of note. Me, too.

History is footprints and to appreciate Saina Nehwal we need to know where Prakash Padukone walked first, and how. History is respect, it is celebration, it is connection. Even for athletes, who might view themselves in isolation, but stand on the shoulders of past warriors, who fought for money and rights and found excellence in harsher times.

History is just fun. Padukone told me last week that after nearly 30 years, he finally got footage of his 1980 All-England triumph. “The clarity isn’t good,” he says, then laughs, “but you can tell who’s (Liem Swie) King and who’s Prakash.” Next time I visit Bangalore, I’m going to ask him to show it to me. Michael Ferreira tells me he still has a billiards cue with which he won world titles. But it’s all going to vanish. Everything. Laxman’s bats, too, but that’s maybe because the Louvre has already asked for them. But the rest... what?

Not important?

I keep hearing there’s a Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) plan for a museum. I am also growing old. Cricket preens about its financial muscle, but history seems to scare the glitzy gang. Come on, fellows, grab one of those companies, find a space, hire a curator, source footage, get these tech whizz-kids to build interactive exhibits. OK, fine, we’ll even put the cheerleaders in, just next to Dada tearing off his shirt, a little ahead of Sunny doing his Melbourne walk-off, just before a video of Mohammed Nissar bowling, and one floor below a mini net where you can time how slow your inswinger is. If the BCCI has a heart, it should do a museum for all sport. People will thank them. Imagine that.

It won’t be easy. Because athletes are suspicious about government, hesitant about officials. They need to believe the museum will be credible and cared for; they need to believe that historic correspondence they hand over won’t just line a drawer and that famous rackets won’t disappear into Pappu’s son’s kitbag. But they’d love a museum. They love history because most, in some form, made it.

And because if they played in older times, or in lesser sports, with no footage easily found on YouTube, they’re virtually anonymous.

Like Henry Rebello, the triple jumper. In February 1948, in India, so wrote Olympic historian Gulu Ezekiel, Rebello leapt 50ft, 2 inches. It was a national record. It was the Olympic year. It was also, across the planet, the best mark of the year. Yet, in the Olympic final (he qualified easily), on a damp, cold day, just 19 years old, he didn’t warm up, went flat out on his first jump and tore his hamstring. If he’d jumped as far as he did in India, he would have won bronze.

It’s a tragic story, it’s a forgotten story and it’s an Indian story. Maybe his family has his spikes, a picture of him on a stretcher, a grainy video in an Olympic archive. Would you like to see it in a museum?

Or is it just not important?

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

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

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PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS Old­time recipes: (left) Enjoy freshly baked rolls with bhaji; and Scottish Morning Rolls are traditionally known as baps.

A very Scottish ‘pav’ How Mumbai’s popular bread bears a close resemblance to Scottish Morning Rolls

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live in two parallel culinary universes. In one, I spend abnormal amounts of time thinking about or making cake, biscuits and bread. The other is where I tramp around the back alleys eating street food, pestering vendors for recipes in a bid to replicate the dishes at home.

Occasionally the two worlds collide and today’s recipe is a good example. Pav bhaji, beloved snack of millions of Mumbaikars, is one of my favourite street foods but I only like it with the pukka soft, pillowy pav available in Mumbai and Goa. The pre-packed pav available in shops in Delhi just won’t do.

I recently came by a great recipe for vegetable bhaji but have yet to find someone to share pav know-how, despite repeated stalking of bakers in Goa and on the Konkan coast. Then, on a recent trip back to Scotland, I had a thought. I realized that pav, despite its Portuguese heritage, is almost identical to what we call “morning rolls”, the vehicle for our so-good but definitely artery-clogging “bacon butties”. All I had to do was find a recipe for morning rolls and I could be serving up pav-bhaji brunches in no time.

I needed to look no further than

one of Scotland’s oldest cookbooks, The Scots Kitchen, written by F. Marian McNeill in 1929 (I inherited my mother’s 1976 edition). It is, incidentally, a wonderful compendium of long-forgotten and evocatively named recipes, like Cabbie-Claw (salted and dried cod) and Parlies (a type of gingerbread made for members of Parliament).

In fact, this gem of a book always reminds me that Scotland once had a cuisine as rich as any in Europe—in the early years of the 20th century, there was even a Scottish version of Ile Flottante made with quince, egg whites, cream and wine. Although now most Scots buy pre-sliced, factory-produced bread, we were once particularly well-endowed in the artisan bread department—the Aberdeen buttery could have given the croissant a run for its money.

Scottish Morning Rolls, the softest, fluffiest of breads, were once made in every home for breakfast and traditionally known as baps—possibly, the author suggests, “an analogy with pap, the mammary gland, on account of its shape and size”. I see no good reason to deviate too far from McNeill’s recipe, except to bring the measurements up to date and introduce fast-action yeast. And, of course, to point out that the bap does a great impersonation of pav.

Pav/Scottish Morning Rolls Makes 12 Ingredients 450g all-purpose flour (maida)

2 tsp salt 1tsp sugar 1 sachet of fast-action yeast 50g butter 150ml of cold whey—I always have whey in the kitchen from paneer-making but if you don’t, use water 150ml hot milk A little extra cold milk for brushing Method In a large bowl, mix together the flour, salt, sugar and yeast. Add the butter and use your fingertips to blend it into the flour mixture.

Pour in the milk and whey/water mixture and mix to form a rough dough. Cover the bowl and leave for 10 minutes in a warm place (not too difficult to find at this time of year in India). After 10 minutes, you will see that the dough has already started to seem more elastic—the yeast has done its work without any arm-numbing kneading.

Turn the dough on to a lightly floured board and knead gently for about 10 seconds until you have a smooth ball of dough. Put the dough into a clean, lightly oiled bowl, cover with a tea towel and leave for about 1 hour until it has doubled in size.

Take the dough out of the bowl and knock the air out, then cut into

12 pieces. Knead each piece into a smooth ball, then place in a lightly oiled tin. Cover again and leave until the pav have doubled in size—this will vary according to how warm your kitchen is. The pav would have stuck together as they expanded. Brush the tops of the pav with a little milk.

Preheat the oven to 220 degrees Celsius. Bake the pav for about 15 minutes until the tops are brown.

Let the pav cool slightly before tearing into them.

Baps/morning rolls/pav don’t keep well. They’re at their best soon after they emerge from the oven so make sure your bhaji or vada is ready and waiting.

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 Scottish Morning Rolls, visit www.livemint.com/scotrolls.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

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SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012

Business Lounge

LOUNGE

N CHANDRASEKARAN

A 10­billion­dollar smile The TCS CEO and managing director on what makes his company successful and how he almost became a farmer

B Y L ESLIE D ’M ONTE leslie.d@livemint.com

···························· atarajan Chandrasekaran’s smile lights up the huge LCD screen, visible clearly even though we were sitting around 1,500km apart. I was in his branch office in New Delhi while he was in his Mumbai office—we were on video chat.

On his desk were family photographs of his trekking getaways in the Himalayas and some mementos he has collected over the years—the few adornments he allows in his simple yet elegant office—besides his electronic gadgets and personal computer.

Chandra, as he is fondly called by colleagues and friends, had ample reason to smile that day. His company, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS), had declared robust results for the March quarter on 23 April, the previous day, and the overall revenue of TCS, already the largest Indian information technology (IT) services provider, had crossed $10 billion (around `53,700 crore now).

TCS’ revenue today is 10% that of the entire IT industry

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(including domestic hardware) in India—$100 billion, according to software lobby body National Association of Software and Service Companies, or Nasscom. It had an employee strength of 238,000 as on 31 March—also around 10% of the IT industry’s direct employment figures in the country, according to Nasscom.

Chandrasekaran, TCS chief executive and managing director, also took over as Nasscom chairman for 2012-13 from 1 May. He was its vice-chairman in 2011-12.

“Over the last 40 years, we have created a solid platform,” says Chandrasekaran. “The company has depth and we have learnt to take risks while remaining agile. We also have developed a culture of building longterm relationships and have created many job opportunities over the years (TCS will surpass the 250,000-employee mark in the next few quarters).”

He adds in his typical unassuming style: “This is indeed a milestone. So, will $15 billion and $20 billion and so on be further targets? But that’s not the point. The IT industry throws up a lot of opportunities and we will leverage our scale to stay focused on these opportunities to grow further.”

Globally, technology company Hewlett-Packard, or HP, has an annual revenue of around $125 billion while IBM is an approximately $107 billion company. In India, however, the revenue of these companies is not strictly comparable with Indian IT firms

since companies like TCS, Infosys and Wipro cater primarily to the US and UK markets. However, for the purpose of comparison with a company like TCS, IBM Global Technology Services (the outsourcing division of IBM) is a $40 billion unit, while Accenture Plc.’s revenue is a little over $27 billion.

In the country, according to the Dataquest magazine’s DQ Top 20 domestic IT players ranking (released in September 2011), HP India had a revenue of `19,022 crore while Cisco India posted a revenue of `7,015 crore.

The impression one gets on meeting Chandrasekaran is that IT services is what he was always meant to do. He has been with TCS for almost 25 years. He never applied for any other job, starting at TCS as a software programme in 1987.

But that’s not the case. He could easily have been a farmer had he succumbed to his father’s wishes in the early 1980s.

“I was one of six children. My father was a lawyer but when my grandfather died, my father had to look after the family properties that included farmland. I went to a Tamil-medium school till class X. Being a typical Tam Bram (short for Tamil Brahmin), I excelled in math.

After my 10th standard, I moved to Trichy (in Tamil Nadu) to study further and had to stay in a hotel (it was not a hostel, he clarifies) near the school. I used to go back home every six weeks. So far, I had led a protected life. This experience came as a big change in my life,” recalls Chandrasekaran.

After a bachelor of science (BSc) in applied sciences from the Coimbatore Institute of Technology, Chandrasekaran went home and stayed back six months, “to see whether I could take up agriculture as a profession. After four-five months, I realized that agriculture was not my cup of tea,” he reminisces. “I then thought of becoming a chartered accountant. By then, I had missed an academic year.”

By this time, however, the government had introduced computer education in colleges—and this was to change his life. Chandrasekaran persuaded his father and went on to

IN PARENTHESIS

Easy­going: Despite his love for impersonal math and numbers, Chandrasekaran is considered by his colleagues to be affable and approachable.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

TCS has been named the fourth most valuable IT services brand worldwide by Brand Finance, a leading brand valuation firm which assesses the dollar value of the reputation, image and intellectual property of the world’s leading companies. TCS’ brand is valued at $4.1 billion. IBM came first with a brand value of $39.1 billion. Chandrasekaran says TCS has been investing heavily to build up its brand presence worldwide through a full range of activities, including a global public relations programme, major sports sponsorships and a wide range of corporate social responsibility activities. In keeping with his own love for trekking and marathons, TCS’ portfolio of sports partnerships over the past five years has cut across Formula 1 racing, pro cycling, cricket and running.

complete his master’s in computer applications from the Regional Engineering College, Trichy, in 1986.

In the final year of his master’s programme, he took up a project with TCS, and never looked back—starting as a software programmer and rising to the helm of the company where he learnt the ropes of the IT business. In October 2009, he succeeded S. Ramadorai as CEO and MD of TCS at age 46, becoming one of the youngest CEOs of the Tata group. It was Ramadorai, now vice-chairman of TCS, who groomed Chandrasekaran for a leadership position.

His rise in TCS was fast. In 1999, he started the firm’s e-business unit and grew it to an over $500 million segment in four-and-a-half years. In September 2007, he was co-opted on the TCS board and named the chief operating officer (COO) of the company. As the COO, he drove the company’s acquisition strategy—the acquisition of Citigroup Global Services for $505 million in October 2008 is credited to him.

The transition was wellplanned. Chandrasekaran was one of the best-kept secrets in the TCS citadel; he was identified for the CEO’s role around 2004-05, insist analysts. But his public role became apparent only somewhere around 2007.

Has his role changed drastically—from a manager to a leader? “I do not have any classical definition. But a leader must have the ability to dream, to take risks and be accountable.

Besides, a leader should be able to build trustworthy teams and inspire them. A manager, on the other hand, must be exemplary in execution, articulating and simplifying things,” he says.

How does he manage his time, juggle so many roles (he is on various other bodies like the Confederation of Indian Industry), and yet remain calm?

“Firstly, I am enjoying my current role. I also use many gadgets to streamline my activities (Chandra is an Apple Inc fan and uses the latest iPhone and iPad to schedule his appointments).

The technocrats at TCS help me optimize the use of gadgets, so I’m in a privileged position. I also get to learn much from my clients,” says Chandrasekaran, who lives in Mumbai with wife Lalitha and son Pranav, who is in class X. Lalitha left her job as an investment banker 15 years ago after marriage.

To de-stress, he reads fiction and books on politics and business. And he takes part in marathons too—2008 (Mumbai), 2009 (Mumbai, New York), 2010 (Chicago) and 2011 (Berlin, Boston).

He has also run around eight half-marathons. “Running has helped me become a better listener. It also calms me and gives me time to reflect on issues,” he says. He takes running seriously, and began training 10 months ahead of the 2010 marathon.

Chandrasekaran is also fond of south Indian classical music and lyrically rich old Tamil film songs that remind him of his home in Mohanur village in Tamil Nadu. So does he get enough time with family? “You always want to spend more time with the family. We take a couple of breaks in a year,” he says.

Will Pranav become an IT professional too? “He’s still trying to figure his life out,” says Chandrasekaran, breaking into a smile.

www.livemint.com

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Parenting

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LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

LESSONS IN WRITING My 11-year-old daughter has been winning school prizes for writing for the last two years.

Nowadays I find she reads only a lot of fantasy, and hence writes only those kinds of stories. Every story has fantasy creatures with powers, and she is using up a lot of her imagination in thinking up names for each creature (a thought-up scientific name), and its habitat or special powers, etc. Recently another child’s mother “published” such a work written by her child, and after that my daughter too feels fantasy fiction is what she must always write. I think she hopes

we too will publish her work. I feel a child with such a gift for writing should not restrict herself just to churning out fantasy, and should not be published by parents. How do we respond?

A child who shows special potential for anything—writing, painting, sport, debating, nature, etc.—should be gently discouraged from “settling” on any one “formula”! And that is what your daughter seems to have done. As have many children’s writers too, frankly!

It’s important not to belittle or even ignore her current writing efforts, but do fully encourage

her to read some of the classics, or just good old adventure stories with real people in them, and watch such films too.

If you are too critical and insistent, though, you risk her suddenly abandoning her writing. This would apply to any child who seems to be stuck in a groove or rut in the creative process.

So it’s important to increase the exposure, rather than badger her or him to try Encourage: something new.

Find out about storytelling sessions in your city, where non-fantasy stories are narrated. You could send her to a creative writing workshop or class, where someone else (not you as a parent) will insist that the child try out different genres

Don’t badger the child, instead enable increased exposure to other genres. of writing. Children are encouraged to do food reviews, humour, emotionally connected writing, play with fact and fiction both…this would help your child broaden her emerging writer personality.

Encourage her to enter writing competitions, send her work to children’s magazines and supplements. Teach her to deal with any “no” that comes in response, and while valuing the fact that

something got published, not to get hung up on it.

As for “publishing” her work, it is not a good idea. It’s just far too early, and isn’t for real. It’s an indulgence mostly by parents wanting to encourage their children, but going too far in the process. If your child would like to see her writing in print, a simple laid-out page and printout should do well. You could ask her to find ways to play around with text and pictures and layouts on her computer perhaps. But to treat it as “publishing”—with multiple copies, calling people, urging book stores to keep the child’s work, etc.—seems a bit over-the-top, and at some level a great disservice to a child.

Gouri Dange is the author of ABCs of Parenting.

Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

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

···························· n the summer of 2008, three men sparked a revolution in Indian sports. Abhinav Bindra won India’s first individual Olympic gold, Vijender Singh won the country’s first medal in boxing, and Sushil Kumar won India a bronze medal in wrestling after 56 years. They were instant celebrities in a country starved of global sporting success, lifted from obscurity to frenzied fame in a matter of minutes. The three men continued to sparkle on the world stage—Bindra won a silver at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, Singh won India’s first medal at the Amateur Boxing World Championships in 2009, and Kumar became India’s first world

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SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

wrestling champion in 2009.

But the effects of their Olympic win spread much wider and farther than personal triumph.

They broke through a psychosocial barrier, which had held fast for over half a century, that Indian athletes just can’t stand up to the world’s best.

The phenomenon can be seen in plain numbers: More Indian boxers and shooters have qualified than ever before for the 2012 London Olympics (71 athletes have already qualified across all disciplines, with more expected to make the cut, compared with the 56-strong contingent that went to the 2008 Games). Or it can be felt in the intangibles—for the first time, Indian athletes are expected to win medals at the Olympics.

But how have the four years

between the Beijing Games and the London edition changed the three men who wrought this shake-up? They have qualified for the Olympics yet again: Bindra (29) for his fourth, Singh (26) and Kumar (28) for their third. Three men—one the son of a millionaire businessman, one who struggled to continue with his sport because of his father’s meagre pay as a bus driver, and one who is taking his family’s wrestling legacy (which goes back to his great-grandfather and perhaps beyond) to new heights—with one common goal: one more Olympic medal.

Bindra farmhouse, Zirakpur Bindra holds his posture like he’s made of stone—hips extended, one elbow tucked in, the other pushed out, an uncom-

fortable curve at the lower back, finger on the trigger, head immobile. He pulls the trigger.

A hollow, metallic sound rudely punctures the silence.

The bullet hits the bullseye which, from that distance, is a dot the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence. From the moment we’ve entered the small room which doubles as a private shooting range at his home, we’ve been on tenterhooks. The hush in the room is stifling, the lighting sterile and white. Bindra acknowledges our presence more than 5 minutes after we enter, after he’s gone through the slow-motion sequence of homing in on the target, steadying himself and squeezing the trigger. Even then, he’s only paused long enough to say “sit down” in a faraway, detached

voice, no eye contact, before erasing us from his mind.

Bang! He hits the target.

Silence. Bang! He hits the target. Silence.

For 2 hours, he maintains this hypnotic, staggered rhythm.

“Every morning when I wake up my only thought is, ‘How far can I push myself today? Will I give it my absolute best shot?’” Bindra says, now lounging in a garden chair in a beautifully manicured lawn, one of many that dot the Bindra family’s luxurious 13-acre farmhouse on the outskirts of Chandigarh.

You can fit in seven football fields in 13 acres.

Bindra’s reality, though, is defined by the dry, strippeddown confines of his inner sanctum—the shooting room. Every day, for 8 hours a day, some-

OLYMPICS

BACK FOR MORE

The three Indian medal winners from the 2008 Games speak of their quest for an unprecedented second in London this summer

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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D R E A M C A T C H E R S

The countdown begins: Shooter Abhinav Bindra practises for 8 hours a day; and (extreme right) boxer Vijender Singh continued his training schedule despite the early disappointments in qualification rounds.

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

times more, his time is spent between the range and the gym.

“At the range, I’m in an inward state of mind,” Bindra says.

“There’s a neurotic quality in it.

I’m completely cut off.”

Bindra has done it all. He’s been to three Olympics already—he was the youngest athlete in the Indian contingent for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where he failed to make the cut for the finals; he believed he was a sure bet for a medal at the 2004 Olympics, and saw his superlative form abandon him at the last stage without any apparent reason (“I was stripped naked, a sporting irrelevance”); he bounced back to win the 2006 International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) world championships, and then the 2008 Beijing Olympics; and he’s got a fistful of Commonwealth Games medals.

Will he find the hunger, the drive, to win again in his fourth Olympics? To do what no shooter has done before—defend the 10m air rifle gold?

“I don’t look back,” Bindra says. “I have a poor memory for things that

“

What makes you think that competing at the Olympics is fun? It’s not. When you look back, it’s joyful, but when your ass is on fire, it’s not a pleasant experience.

AND YOUR ASS IS ON FIRE, EVERY STEP OF THE WAY. ABHINAV BINDRA

”

have happened in the past. For me, this is a new event, it’s that time towards which my entire life is focused.”

He may choose to forget the past, but it shapes Bindra anyway. In the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, Bindra was willing to do anything as long as it offered even the remotest chance of bettering his skills on the range. He practised shooting in a dark room, immersed himself in a lightless flotation tank to find that perfect sense of calm, got himself bespoke “compression” underwear, replicated the Beijing shooting range conditions at his home, hooked himself up to electroencephalography (EEG) machines to study the reactions of his body and brain during shooting, and went through commando training. “I don’t feel the need to experiment so much any more,” Bindra says. “I’m a calmer shooter now. I understand that everything boils down to my ability to mobilize all my resources at that particular moment, to find courage at that spot when you are shooting for an Olympic medal. And I believe I can do it.”

Bindra’s training for the 2012 Olympics is much more conventional—hours spent at the shooting range honing his skills, and lots of physical training. “But I might get back to experimenting with all kinds of things,” he says.

“My mind changes from morning to evening.” If there is one thing that has not changed, it’s Bindra’s unusual relationship with his sport. Shooting is a source of both great pain and great pleasure for him. He is masochistic with his training and brutal with his failures. “I’m extremely anxious and nervous when I’m in competition. It’s a horrible feeling, but I’ve learnt to live with it and use

it to my benefit,” he says.

During a tournament, he visits the bathroom every 10 minutes.

It’s a far cry from the usual swaggering self-confidence that athletes portray. “What makes you think that competing at the Olympics is fun?” Bindra asks.

“It’s not. When you look back, it’s joyful, but when your ass is on fire, it’s not a pleasant experience. And your ass is on fire, every step of the way.”

Like a person trapped in an abusive relationship, Bindra has often flirted with the idea of giving up his gun, but failed to really do it. After the 2004 Olympics, “I thought I could not go through the pain of training and then failing again”. After the 2008 Olympics, “there was no fun left in it, no purpose, I was depressed”.

The failure in 2004 fuelled a monstrous quest for perfection that led to the Olympic gold in 2008, but the emptiness after 2008 was more difficult to overcome.

Bindra’s long-time coach and mentor, the former Olympic shooter from Switzerland Gabriele Bühlmann, told him right after his victory in Beijing: “You’re done with shooting. You’ve killed me, you’ve killed yourself.”

A year of introspection later, he was back on the range like an addict looking for his next shot.

“I like to struggle, I love struggling, it’s needed, I need it,” Bindra says.

The boxer Vijender Singh, who won India’s first and only medal in boxing at the Olympics in 2008, says that to be a successful athlete in India, you need to come from a poor background, and really understand the desperation to escape your economic reality. In India, Singh says, to be a world-class athlete, prodigious skill and extreme work ethics are not enough. You have to also fight the very system that is supposed to groom you—a system that is outdated, politicized, apathetical, and saddled with crumbling infrastructure. Bindra agrees with this analysis. What then explains his desperation? His rejection of the wealth that surrounds him for a monkish life of discipline, pared to just one objective: shooting?

There’s love for the sport, of course, but Bindra also had a heightened awareness of his privileges, of the fact that anytime he wants, he can fall back on his father’s more than `500 crore business empire that encompasses real estate, hotels, food processing and importing weapons. This realization pushed him to become more obsessive with his sport, more harsh on himself.

“My internal being, my mindset is impoverished,” Bindra says.

“That’s how I am, and I like it, I engage with it.”

At the 2012 London Olympics, Bindra will dig for his own wealth—yet another Olympic medal, and you can’t put a price on that.

Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports, Patiala While no one can accuse Bindra

of being complacent, the accusation is hurled at Vijender Singh with ridiculous ease.

Singh’s sense of humour doesn’t help—ask him about the windfall from his success in boxing and he says, “I have everything I can think of, maybe I should buy a helicopter.” Singh has made close to `2 crore from government cash awards since his 2008 win, and nearly double that from endorsements and TV appearances (on game shows and reality shows).

But the bluster of the boxer had been punched out of Singh in the lead-up to the 2012 Olympics. He lost in the first round of the 2011 International Boxing Association or Aiba World Boxing Championships, scuppering his chances of early qualification for the 2012 Olympics. In fact, Singh knew he only had one more chance at qualification.

“And immediately people all around me were saying, ‘He’s got money, it’s all gone to his head, he’s finished,’” Singh says.

He had been in this position before—he qualified for the 2008 Games at the last possible chance as well, but that was not followed by a barrage of public criticism. Back then, the turmoil within drove Singh to spend hours in a gurudwara to calm his mind. “I feel at peace there, even though I’m not religious,” Singh says. When he finally qualified, Singh forgot immediately about the ordeal, and began backing himself as a contender. “That’s what it’s like for us athletes,” he says. “You have to quickly forget the bad times, and completely believe in the good ones.”

Selective amnesia is an athlete’s best friend.

For the London Olympics, Singh again made the cut at the final qualification event.

“That’s my style, isn’t it?” he says. And then, in a more serious tone: “Of course I wish I had qualified earlier, I wish I did not have to go through the extra pressure and nervousness, the fear of not making it.

But the public criticism did not TURN TO PAGE L12®

“

What does my World Championships medal, my Asian Games medal, mean if I can’t qualify for the Olympics?

If there was any room for being complacent, that was taken away from me.

I HAD TO PROVE MYSELF AGAIN THROUGH THIS STRUG­ GLE TO QUALIFY. VIJENDER SINGH

”

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

···························· n the summer of 2008, three men sparked a revolution in Indian sports. Abhinav Bindra won India’s first individual Olympic gold, Vijender Singh won the country’s first medal in boxing, and Sushil Kumar won India a bronze medal in wrestling after 56 years. They were instant celebrities in a country starved of global sporting success, lifted from obscurity to frenzied fame in a matter of minutes. The three men continued to sparkle on the world stage—Bindra won a silver at the 2010 Commonwealth Games, Singh won India’s first medal at the Amateur Boxing World Championships in 2009, and Kumar became India’s first world

I

SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

wrestling champion in 2009.

But the effects of their Olympic win spread much wider and farther than personal triumph.

They broke through a psychosocial barrier, which had held fast for over half a century, that Indian athletes just can’t stand up to the world’s best.

The phenomenon can be seen in plain numbers: More Indian boxers and shooters have qualified than ever before for the 2012 London Olympics (71 athletes have already qualified across all disciplines, with more expected to make the cut, compared with the 56-strong contingent that went to the 2008 Games). Or it can be felt in the intangibles—for the first time, Indian athletes are expected to win medals at the Olympics.

But how have the four years

between the Beijing Games and the London edition changed the three men who wrought this shake-up? They have qualified for the Olympics yet again: Bindra (29) for his fourth, Singh (26) and Kumar (28) for their third. Three men—one the son of a millionaire businessman, one who struggled to continue with his sport because of his father’s meagre pay as a bus driver, and one who is taking his family’s wrestling legacy (which goes back to his great-grandfather and perhaps beyond) to new heights—with one common goal: one more Olympic medal.

Bindra farmhouse, Zirakpur Bindra holds his posture like he’s made of stone—hips extended, one elbow tucked in, the other pushed out, an uncom-

fortable curve at the lower back, finger on the trigger, head immobile. He pulls the trigger.

A hollow, metallic sound rudely punctures the silence.

The bullet hits the bullseye which, from that distance, is a dot the size of the full stop at the end of this sentence. From the moment we’ve entered the small room which doubles as a private shooting range at his home, we’ve been on tenterhooks. The hush in the room is stifling, the lighting sterile and white. Bindra acknowledges our presence more than 5 minutes after we enter, after he’s gone through the slow-motion sequence of homing in on the target, steadying himself and squeezing the trigger. Even then, he’s only paused long enough to say “sit down” in a faraway, detached

voice, no eye contact, before erasing us from his mind.

Bang! He hits the target.

Silence. Bang! He hits the target. Silence.

For 2 hours, he maintains this hypnotic, staggered rhythm.

“Every morning when I wake up my only thought is, ‘How far can I push myself today? Will I give it my absolute best shot?’” Bindra says, now lounging in a garden chair in a beautifully manicured lawn, one of many that dot the Bindra family’s luxurious 13-acre farmhouse on the outskirts of Chandigarh.

You can fit in seven football fields in 13 acres.

Bindra’s reality, though, is defined by the dry, strippeddown confines of his inner sanctum—the shooting room. Every day, for 8 hours a day, some-

OLYMPICS

BACK FOR MORE

The three Indian medal winners from the 2008 Games speak of their quest for an unprecedented second in London this summer

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

LOUNGE SERIES

D R E A M C A T C H E R S

The countdown begins: Shooter Abhinav Bindra practises for 8 hours a day; and (extreme right) boxer Vijender Singh continued his training schedule despite the early disappointments in qualification rounds.

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

times more, his time is spent between the range and the gym.

“At the range, I’m in an inward state of mind,” Bindra says.

“There’s a neurotic quality in it.

I’m completely cut off.”

Bindra has done it all. He’s been to three Olympics already—he was the youngest athlete in the Indian contingent for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where he failed to make the cut for the finals; he believed he was a sure bet for a medal at the 2004 Olympics, and saw his superlative form abandon him at the last stage without any apparent reason (“I was stripped naked, a sporting irrelevance”); he bounced back to win the 2006 International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) world championships, and then the 2008 Beijing Olympics; and he’s got a fistful of Commonwealth Games medals.

Will he find the hunger, the drive, to win again in his fourth Olympics? To do what no shooter has done before—defend the 10m air rifle gold?

“I don’t look back,” Bindra says. “I have a poor memory for things that

“

What makes you think that competing at the Olympics is fun? It’s not. When you look back, it’s joyful, but when your ass is on fire, it’s not a pleasant experience.

AND YOUR ASS IS ON FIRE, EVERY STEP OF THE WAY. ABHINAV BINDRA

”

have happened in the past. For me, this is a new event, it’s that time towards which my entire life is focused.”

He may choose to forget the past, but it shapes Bindra anyway. In the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics, Bindra was willing to do anything as long as it offered even the remotest chance of bettering his skills on the range. He practised shooting in a dark room, immersed himself in a lightless flotation tank to find that perfect sense of calm, got himself bespoke “compression” underwear, replicated the Beijing shooting range conditions at his home, hooked himself up to electroencephalography (EEG) machines to study the reactions of his body and brain during shooting, and went through commando training. “I don’t feel the need to experiment so much any more,” Bindra says. “I’m a calmer shooter now. I understand that everything boils down to my ability to mobilize all my resources at that particular moment, to find courage at that spot when you are shooting for an Olympic medal. And I believe I can do it.”

Bindra’s training for the 2012 Olympics is much more conventional—hours spent at the shooting range honing his skills, and lots of physical training. “But I might get back to experimenting with all kinds of things,” he says.

“My mind changes from morning to evening.” If there is one thing that has not changed, it’s Bindra’s unusual relationship with his sport. Shooting is a source of both great pain and great pleasure for him. He is masochistic with his training and brutal with his failures. “I’m extremely anxious and nervous when I’m in competition. It’s a horrible feeling, but I’ve learnt to live with it and use

it to my benefit,” he says.

During a tournament, he visits the bathroom every 10 minutes.

It’s a far cry from the usual swaggering self-confidence that athletes portray. “What makes you think that competing at the Olympics is fun?” Bindra asks.

“It’s not. When you look back, it’s joyful, but when your ass is on fire, it’s not a pleasant experience. And your ass is on fire, every step of the way.”

Like a person trapped in an abusive relationship, Bindra has often flirted with the idea of giving up his gun, but failed to really do it. After the 2004 Olympics, “I thought I could not go through the pain of training and then failing again”. After the 2008 Olympics, “there was no fun left in it, no purpose, I was depressed”.

The failure in 2004 fuelled a monstrous quest for perfection that led to the Olympic gold in 2008, but the emptiness after 2008 was more difficult to overcome.

Bindra’s long-time coach and mentor, the former Olympic shooter from Switzerland Gabriele Bühlmann, told him right after his victory in Beijing: “You’re done with shooting. You’ve killed me, you’ve killed yourself.”

A year of introspection later, he was back on the range like an addict looking for his next shot.

“I like to struggle, I love struggling, it’s needed, I need it,” Bindra says.

The boxer Vijender Singh, who won India’s first and only medal in boxing at the Olympics in 2008, says that to be a successful athlete in India, you need to come from a poor background, and really understand the desperation to escape your economic reality. In India, Singh says, to be a world-class athlete, prodigious skill and extreme work ethics are not enough. You have to also fight the very system that is supposed to groom you—a system that is outdated, politicized, apathetical, and saddled with crumbling infrastructure. Bindra agrees with this analysis. What then explains his desperation? His rejection of the wealth that surrounds him for a monkish life of discipline, pared to just one objective: shooting?

There’s love for the sport, of course, but Bindra also had a heightened awareness of his privileges, of the fact that anytime he wants, he can fall back on his father’s more than `500 crore business empire that encompasses real estate, hotels, food processing and importing weapons. This realization pushed him to become more obsessive with his sport, more harsh on himself.

“My internal being, my mindset is impoverished,” Bindra says.

“That’s how I am, and I like it, I engage with it.”

At the 2012 London Olympics, Bindra will dig for his own wealth—yet another Olympic medal, and you can’t put a price on that.

Netaji Subhas National Institute of Sports, Patiala While no one can accuse Bindra

of being complacent, the accusation is hurled at Vijender Singh with ridiculous ease.

Singh’s sense of humour doesn’t help—ask him about the windfall from his success in boxing and he says, “I have everything I can think of, maybe I should buy a helicopter.” Singh has made close to `2 crore from government cash awards since his 2008 win, and nearly double that from endorsements and TV appearances (on game shows and reality shows).

But the bluster of the boxer had been punched out of Singh in the lead-up to the 2012 Olympics. He lost in the first round of the 2011 International Boxing Association or Aiba World Boxing Championships, scuppering his chances of early qualification for the 2012 Olympics. In fact, Singh knew he only had one more chance at qualification.

“And immediately people all around me were saying, ‘He’s got money, it’s all gone to his head, he’s finished,’” Singh says.

He had been in this position before—he qualified for the 2008 Games at the last possible chance as well, but that was not followed by a barrage of public criticism. Back then, the turmoil within drove Singh to spend hours in a gurudwara to calm his mind. “I feel at peace there, even though I’m not religious,” Singh says. When he finally qualified, Singh forgot immediately about the ordeal, and began backing himself as a contender. “That’s what it’s like for us athletes,” he says. “You have to quickly forget the bad times, and completely believe in the good ones.”

Selective amnesia is an athlete’s best friend.

For the London Olympics, Singh again made the cut at the final qualification event.

“That’s my style, isn’t it?” he says. And then, in a more serious tone: “Of course I wish I had qualified earlier, I wish I did not have to go through the extra pressure and nervousness, the fear of not making it.

But the public criticism did not TURN TO PAGE L12®

“

What does my World Championships medal, my Asian Games medal, mean if I can’t qualify for the Olympics?

If there was any room for being complacent, that was taken away from me.

I HAD TO PROVE MYSELF AGAIN THROUGH THIS STRUG­ GLE TO QUALIFY. VIJENDER SINGH

”

L12 COVER

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SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

® FROM PAGE L11 L10

bother me. I think the biggest lesson I learnt from the 2008 Olympics is how not to be affected by media attention.”

Singh worked hard at blanking out the negative thoughts.

He trained through the year as if he had qualified for the Olympics, maintaining a routine meant to make him peak at London in July. He went back to the gurudwara. But did he have enough motivation?

“What do my World Championships medal, my Asian Games medal mean if I can’t qualify for the Olympics?” Singh says.

“If there was any room for being complacent, that was taken away from me. I had to prove myself again through this struggle to qualify.”

Though Indian boxing has gone through big changes, Singh’s own training regimen is no different from what he did for the 2008 Games. “Except I now train in an AC hall with new gloves, bags and rings,” he says. His coach has remained the same, his personal trainer and sparring partner is still around, as is his personal physio. The only difference, Singh says, is in the mental make-up—he believes he is more mature, less prone to stress, more in control of his game. Does that make him a better fighter? Or was there a more desperate and raw desire to win back in 2008?

“Actually, none of these things make any difference in the ring,” Singh says. “The only thing that matters is what you are thinking and doing at that moment. And I’ll only know that when I’m in the middle of the fight.

“But there is no question of losing your hunger for an Olympic medal,” Singh says.

Singh says that being a hero to a generation of boxers, some

of whom are now on the team for the Olympics with him, has also helped his confidence.

Four of the seven-member Olympic contingent—L. Devendro Singh, Shiva Thapa, Sumit Sangwan and Vikas Krishan—are young rookies bound for their first Games, and openly give Singh credit for fuelling their ambitions.

“In Indian sports, someone needs to break a barrier,” Singh says. “In 2004 it was (Rajyavardhan) Rathore’s silver in shooting, and it turned to gold in 2008 with Bindra. If my bronze medal is one of the reasons so many fantastic young boxers have come up, then I hope we will see the same change in boxing—the bronze will turn to gold.”

Sports Authority of India Training Centre, Sonepat Sushil Kumar, too, craves a bit of alchemy.

His bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games is not enough. “I’m good to win a gold,” Kumar says. “The truly great wrestlers have won multiple Olympic golds, they’ve won many world championships. I have a long way to go. I’ve got time on my side, and I’m at my peak.” His father and his coaches, Satpal Singh and Yashvir Singh, never fail to remind him of this, he says. “Satpalji tells me that I’ve just started on my way to becoming a champion,” Kumar says.

Kumar knows there’s no transformation without pain.

He’s stumbled out of bed at 4.30am fully alert, said his p r a y e r s , s t r e t c h ed, had his high-energy drink of almonds and milk, and begun running. A 7km run is followed by 500 push-ups and 500 squats. Once that is done, there’s another hour of complicated bodyweight exercises (like making an arch with his body with only

“ “

I’m good to win a gold. The truly great wrestlers have won multiple Olympic golds, they’ve won many world championships.

I HAVE A LONG WAY TO GO. I’VE GOT TIME ON MY SIDE, AND I’M AT MY PEAK. SUSHIL KUMAR

”

his feet and the top of the skull in contact with the floor, and then pivoting around using only his neck muscles). Then it’s an hour of grappling. This is the morning training.

In the evening, Kumar will play football, lift weights and go through an extended session of stretching.

“I need to feel the pain, feel the training,” Kumar says, sitting in his tiny room at the training centre, which, as usual, is packed with his fellow wrestler friends. “If I can feel the difference my training is making, I’m happy, I need

nothing else.”

Kumar’s cramped room, which has just enough space for two double beds, three small cabinets, and a desk with a TV, has not changed a bit since 2008, despite the crores he has made from wrestling since then (Kumar has made around `2.8 crore in government cash awards alone since his 2008 win). He wants it to be like this, it’s part of the hermetic philosophy that is an intrinsic part of traditional Indian wrestling.

Kumar’s life is centred around almost no possessions, save his TV, a spartan set of clothes and training gear.

Instead, he is constantly surrounded by friends and training mates. An old man, newly deployed as a guard at the Sports Authority of India training centre, walks up to Kumar’s room to meet him. The guard’s family and Kumar’s family know each other. Kumar quickly gets up and touches the man’s feet, hugs him, and calls for tea. He asks the guard about news from his village. If he is one of India’s most celebrated athletes, he doesn’t show it.

Though Kumar’s life at the training centre follows its own stable rhythm, his life outside has been a bit more stormy recently. At the 2011 Wrestling World Championships, Kumar, the defending champion, crashed out in the second round. It was a massive upset, as the World Championship was also an Olympic qualification event. No matter, there was one more qualifying tournament coming up in early 2012. Kumar failed in that too.

The media began reporting a rift between him and his coach Yashvir, about Kumar losing his desire to put himself through the grind after his wedding in 2011. Kumar says the reports are unfounded, even though he

did consult his former coach Satpal, who devised a slightly different training routine for him. “That has nothing to do with Yashvir,” Kumar says. “I went to Satpal because he is a great coach, he is a great wrestler and he knows my technique inside out. If you have a person like him willing to help you, why shouldn’t you take it?” Satpal also happens to be Kumar’s father-in-law.

Kumar says the one mistake he made, and it’s a big one, is that for a year after the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, where he won a gold, he did not take part in any competition. The decision was taken partly to give time for a shoulder injury to heal, and partly because the wrestling federation did not bother to send a team to any international competition. “You need to both train and fight in tournaments, otherwise you lose sharpness,” Kumar says. “Not fighting in a competition for so long had disastrous results at the world championships.”

Finally, on 27 April, Kumar managed to qualify for the London Games by winning the 66kg freestyle title at the World Qualifying Tournament in Taiyuan, China. “I never doubted that I would qualify,” Kumar says. “But I almost felt like crying when I did.”

Kumar’s preparations for the London Games have gone according to plan: He has fought in two tournaments in 2012 already, and has a couple more lined up before the Games. He’s trained for a month at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and has two more such stints lined up before the Olympics.

Kumar says this is not different from the kind of international exposure and training he got before the 2008 Olympics.

Powering on: Wrestler Sushil Kumar’s training begins at 4.30am and includes 500 push­ups and as many squats.

The one difference is technical—he has implemented Satpal’s training regimen, which has been fine-tuned with the help of Yashvir, to make himself stronger on the counter-attack. “My usual strengths are power and speed,” Kumar says, “but in a counter-attack you use little force. You use the opponent’s momentum and power to your advantage, so it’s a great technique to have on your side.”

Compared with the 2008 Games, where he was relatively unknown and had little pressure to win, Kumar now faces a maelstrom of stress and expectations. “I have a technique to keep myself protected from the constant pressure,” Kumar says. “Every time someone starts talking about it, I start thinking of a wrestling move that I need to master and I start dissecting it in my head.”

“I’m going to be on the mat, and I know that there are at least four-five wrestlers as good as me in the world right now,” Kumar says. “My motivation is simple—I need to know if I can beat them. That thought has been my motivation ever since I was eight or nine years old.

“Maybe it’s childish,” he adds, “but it’s also a very, very powerful thought.” www.livemint.com To read our previous stories in the Dream Catchers series, visit www.livemint.com/dreamcatchers To watch a slide show of the three athletes featured here, and videos of Sushil Kumar and Abhinav Bindra, visit www.livemint.com/ threeolympians.htm

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SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012

L13

Travel

LOUNGE

Wes’ Coast fo’ Life: Kudle Beach in Gokarna, Karnataka.

FULFILLING STOPS

The iron line between cliff and coast

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

On the railway line from Mumbai to Mangalore, through the Western Ghats, almost every halt brings new wonders

B Y A MBA S ALELKAR ·································· or all Mumbaikars who keep hopping on trains to Goa, it’s probably hard not to take this service for granted. It’s not their fault—they didn’t have to struggle for decades with the unappealing routes between Mumbai and Goa. For those of us with family split between the two places, travel was utterly exhausting. There were nausea-inducing buses, but also a short-lived catamaran service by Damania Shipping, and a really roundabout railway route, which took almost a day to traverse. The weak-stomached had to take expensive flights.

That changed in 1998, when the Konkan Railway launched services. A project stuck in red tape from the 1960s was completed in a short time after the incorporation of the Konkan Railway Corp. Ltd in 1990. A railway line already existed between Mumbai and Roha in Maharashtra—the challenge was to extend this up to Mangalore, which was no easy task.

The railway line was to meander between the Western Ghats and the coast, possibly the most challenging railway project independent India had seen. E. Sreedharan, chairman and managing director of the Konkan Railway Corporation, who, a friend claims, has demolished mountains by sheer force of willpower, headed the project. The completion of the railway was a proud family moment as well—my uncle, Shivanand V. Salelkar, was one of the chief engineers.

So now, you have wonderful options to get to Goa—the Jan Shatabdi or the Mandovi Express. The usual favourite is the Konkan Kanya—you can go to work, come home, eat dinner, pack and wander on to Dadar station for its 11.20pm departure. A good night’s sleep later, you’re at Karmali station, maybe an hour or two late, but it’s Goa, right? On the way back to Mumbai, catch the train at Thivim at 7pm and you’re in Thane at 5am.

What about dinner, you ask? On the

F

train, you are seduced by the smell of deep-fried treats in the air. The Konkan Kanya and the Mandovi Express are filled with culinary delights, thanks to the innovations of Ahuja & Care Catering, a relatively unknown company. Samosas and vadas are passé—on this train, you can fill up on cheese chilli toast, and spring rolls, all freshly made in a pantry car.

Many snacks later, dinner arrives. Do not miss the well-cooked chicken curry (but don’t try the rotis). For biryani fiends, the chicken is tender, the rice is plump, long-grained and full of whole spices. The vegetarian one is no disappointment either, and I’m partial to the egg one.

As you stuff yourself, the rounds begin—of cold creamy matka dahi, fruit salad and hot, syrupy gulab jamuns.

When you’re done spreading your bedding and resting your weary bloated belly, a soft voice will ask if you want a glass of masala milk, and your hand is already looking for `12 in change.

Every time I travel, I try to think beyond Goa, and imagine what the gorgeous coastline has to offer me. My ideal vacation is to start from Mumbai and hop off every major station on the route, alternating between the Konkan Kanya and the Mandovi Express wherever convenient. Don’t be silly and book AC berths for this journey—the tinted windows do no justice to the lush greenery that the engineers worked so hard to preserve.

After boarding the Mandovi Express and enjoying the bread-omelettes, my first stop would be Mangaon to enjoy the beaches at Dakshin Kashi (Harihareshwar). The next morning, board the train again and after a snack, try and score some transportation to Mahabaleshwar from Khed, especially if it is strawberry season.

Those interested in architecture and history may make a trip to Suvarnadurg, or Harnai Fort—Shivaji’s fort-in-the-sea. If I wasn’t feeling up to the long, winding road, I’d stay in the train for lunch and get down at Chiplun instead, which is about an hour from Guhagar’s virgin beaches.

History buffs can visit the artistically done Shivaji memorial at Dervan on their way back to the station. If you’re into the weird, Marleshwar, about an hour from the next major station, Sangameshwar, is home to the temple of snakes that apparently don’t bite devotees, and a beautiful waterfall as well.

I’d rather go on to Ratnagiri, spend a day on the Ganpatipule beach, and board the Konkan Kanya early the next day. By about 8am, I’m in Kudal, enjoying the great seafood and coastline (and

TRIP PLANNER/KONKAN RAIL

The Mandovi Express (departure from Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, or CST, is at 6.55am, and from Madgaon at 9.30am) and Konkan Kanya Express (departure from CST is at 11.05pm, and from Madgaon at 6pm) run daily between Mumbai and Goa. Train timings change in the monsoon.

Stay

Mumbai

Maharashtra Roha

Ara b i a n S ea

Chiplun

Ratnagiri

New Delhi

INDIA

Goa

Karnataka

Madgaon To Mangalore

Eat

The Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC) has the most affordable accommodation options, with the best locations on the Konkan coast. You can book at their reservation office at CDO Hutments, Madame Cama Road, Churchgate, Mumbai. The rooms average about `1,800 per night for an air-conditioned double room.

Near Suvarnadurg, you can lounge at the Whiistling (sic) Palm Beach Resort (www.thepalm.co.in). The Jeevan Sugandh resort at Velneshwar is a good option (www.velneshwarbeachresort.com). The MTDC resorts at Tarkarli and Vengurla are great locations with poor service and overpriced, if available, food.

Luxury is living in a casuarina grove just off a beach, at the Jungle Lodges and Resorts’ Devbagh Beach Resort. A day’s stay with all meals included is about `3,600 per person. The Naveen Beach Resort at Murudeshwar (www.nivalink.com/naveen/index.html) has a huge fan following.

Coastal Maharashtrian cuisine, commonly referred to as Malvani cuisine, is a lot about fish. Don’t fight it. Non-fish eaters can indulge in ‘kombdi vade’ (spicy chicken curry served with a multigrain ‘puri’). Exclusively vegetarian restaurants are hard to find, except at Ganpatipule.

Many Maharashtrian families provide home-cooked meals for “decent” tourists at affordable prices, an invitation you should covet.

Udupi is the Holy Grail, with a whole cuisine named after it. Start off with Diana restaurant, a local favourite and alleged inventor of the Gadbad ice cream. Mitra Samaj’s tiffin items are legendary, as are the Jolada Rotti meals at Kamath’s. Mangalore isn’t too far behind in the good-food-races.

GRAPHIC

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

mangoes, depending on the season) at Vengurla and Tarkarli.

After crossing the Maharashtra-Goa border, you could stick on the train and explore Goa, or you could venture into more anonymity by changing to the Verna-Mangalore Passenger after a clean-up and lunch at Madgaon (don’t miss the Mario Miranda-designed murals at the station) and disembark in coastal Karnataka.

Karwar is a short distance from Devbagh, a beautiful island resort where you can even go snorkelling. At Gokarna, the autorickshaw drivers will single you out for a one-way trip to the famed stuck-in-the-1970s Om Beach. If you want to really get away from it all,

Kundapura facilitates a lovely time at Maravanthe—arguably Karnataka’s most beautiful beach.

Murudeshwar is home to the world’s second tallest Shiva statue, and some beautiful beach resorts as well. Scuba-diving off Netrani island, 12 miles (around 19km) off the coast of the town, is its bestkept secret. On the rest of your way to Mangalore, you can detour through Honnavar for the Jog Falls experience, find out exactly why Bhatkal is called “mini Dubai”, and indulge your inner foodie where it all began—in Udupi, where you reach in time for dinner.

Don’t think. Just board.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

The constant travel may be cumbersome for little ones.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

Unaccompanied senior citizens suffering from ailments might find the route inconvenient.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

Beach destinations are largely indifferent to the LGBT community.

L14

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SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012

Culture

LOUNGE

CINEMA

The best chutney in the world COURTESY HAMILTON MEHTA PRODUCTIONS

Saleem Sinai comes to life in director Deepa Mehta’s film based on Salman Rushdie’s book ‘Midnight’s Children’ PATRICK RIVIERE/GETTY IMAGES

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

···························· hings—even people have a way of leaking into each other,” Salman Rushdie wrote in Midnight’s Children. Like that, “as history pours out of its fissured body”, and with “a contradictory love of the fabulous”, in the progression of a shared legacy, the book leaks into Deepa Mehta’s film of it.

It’s been four years and 62 different locations in the making.

“Every film demands of you in its own way,” Mehta says on the phone from Toronto, where she is currently immersed in the film’s sound editing. “But this one, yes, it has been special.”

Aiming for a film release at September’s Toronto International Film Festival, an exhausted Mehta describes the involvement the biggest film of her life has demanded of her. “When I decided to do this film, I made a commitment to myself that whatever might come, I would be in perfect health. I gave up smoking for Midnight’s Children! Now that’s a commitment.”

Since the dinner at the MehtaDavid Hamilton home four years ago, when the hands of the clock joined to the hour in which Rushdie and Mehta decided to collaborate, Mehta has had to become a midnight’s child herself: superhuman in so many ways.

In scale—from a plot spanning two nations, the political repercussions (two weeks into the shoot, Iran conveyed its objections to Sri Lanka, where the film was being shot) and the bizarre demands of magical realism that required cobras and newborn babies on set, to choosing a relatively unknown actor, cultural theorist Homi Bhabha’s son Satya Bhabha, as protagonist—Midnight’s Children has not been a simple project.

“Yes, its epic quality, in retrospect, amazes me. Luckily, I didn’t think about it while we were shooting. It might have paralysed me. The ‘hand-wringing’, though private, is real. I tend to question my own decisions, briefly but not cursorily. This ensures I don’t get carried away by the enormity of the task at hand,” Mehta says.

She credits Hamilton, her partner and producer of all her films, with making Midnight’s Children possible. “Both Salman and I give him the credit for making an even playing field. Then the money to make the film—the Canadian government and its film programme was terrific. The film was pre-sold to 40 countries, which made financing easier,” Mehta says.

Despite the fluidity of interpretations that magical realism is open to, it is so unique a signature that it enables cinematic translation. “All good books create a world that belongs to them distinctly. (Gabriel García) Márquez’s Macondo, the village in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is his alone. The same is true here.

On the surface, the book is peppered with familiar characters leading familiar lives, belonging to distinct cultures. Dig deeper, and a brand new world is revealed. I think of it as Salmanabad,” Mehta says, laughing.

Where does deconstruction begin? How does one refrain from being intimidated by a book like this? The answers lay in Mehta’s

T

Historical arc: Director Deepa Mehta (left) says Salman Rushdie supported her in her decisions; and actor Dibyendu Bhattacharyya in the film. tackling of the project as a natural extension of her own aesthetic sensibilities. The complexity of Rushdie’s warp and weft and his magical realism are textures that pre-exist not only in Mehta’s work as a film-maker, but in her own intellectual cross-currents.

“I wanted to make a classical film in its look and feel, sweeping in its scope. Midnight’s Children is a saga of a country and a person who is ‘handcuffed to India’s history’. I wanted its arc to be historical, yet intimate, peppered with humour, hope and tragedy—a gamut of human emotions. Yes, The Leopard had come to mind, and also The Conformist because of its political nature. I loved the way (Kenji) Mizoguchi dealt with the ‘unreal’ in Ugetsu. The unknown was set deeply in reality; therefore Ugetsu became a springboard for my approach to the magic realism in Midnight’s Children,” says Mehta.

In her last film Heaven on Earth, Mehta tentatively introduced the magical element, which audiences did not take well to. She has also toyed with it in The Republic of Love. Overall, her films tend to evoke abstractness through whimsical characters—like Earth’s Ice Candy Man—and pivot on conflict.

“All of my films, in many ways, have led me to this point. The sheer scope of this film alone—shooting in over 60 locations with 30 principal actors in 70 days was not a task I could have done if I hadn’t had my share of struggle with previous films, like Fire. I’ve always been drawn to unusual, strong characters and their conflicts. It is understandable why I’d be drawn to this novel.”

In a surrealist twist, Mehta was originally drawn to Shalimar the Clown. That she made Midnight’s Children instead is also a quirk of fate worthy of the plot.

‘As a film­maker, I cannot be held responsible for recreating a collective memory of a defining event or period.’

When a book turns into a film, does it find its own voice, keep that of the author’s, or take on the film-maker’s voice?

“Salman’s writing voice and his Saleem Sinai are so unique that they immediately come alive in your mind. While in many ways Saleem is a voice of a nation, I can only give voice to him as an interpreted character from an extremely beloved and complex text. There were choices in the script that deviate from the book

but were essential to a cinematic narrative. I come at it as a filmmaker and he as an author. Salman was gracious enough to support those decisions that I needed to make,” Mehta says. “The voice of Saleem is the one I focused on.”

At its core, this cinematic translation must answer the question: What makes Midnight’s Children, Midnight’s Children? Mehta had to build her own map through it, picking milestones from the narrative. Then, her map had to match Rushdie’s.

“They cannot be mutually exclusive visions. The adaptation of this book into a film involved an ongoing conversation between Salman and I. The emails between us may rival the page count in the novel itself! Some things he fought for, some things I fought for, but we both respect each other’s expertise enough to put faith in each other.”

What remains is a tale within the original tale. “There is no way I could make a film retaining every detail of the book. Nor would I want to! Reading Midnight’s Children is an extraordinary experi-

ence, one that I had myself.”

“As for the humour, I think the film catches it. The irony, the schoolboys’ scatological obsessions, the melodramatic flourish of Picture Singh’s pronouncements,” Mehta says. Such metamorphosis relies on more than mere clever scripting for its success. It depends on turning points, both within the novel and the film.

“There were many such moments. Small epiphanies, if you will. These usually came with a nuanced performance. A turn of the neck, the perfect gesture, the incredible restraint.... There is a scene with Mumtaz (Shahana Goswami) and Ahmed (Ronit Roy) that comes to mind. They are in the middle of a wedding reception, oblivious to the world around them, falling in love. It’s a perfect scene, executed perfectly by both the actors. I remember having a flash ‘this feels RIGHT!’ Saleem (Satya) lost, out of his mind in the Killing Fields outside Dhaka. The look on Dr Aadam Aziz’s (Rajat Kapoor’s) face when he sees Naseem’s (Shabana Azmi’s) breast through the hole in

the sheet. Jamila (Soha Ali Khan) and Saleem dancing to ‘Aao Twist Karein’ was another indelible moment. They caught the late 1960s to a perfection; the music, their clothes, hair and, of course, the delivery of Salman’s line, ‘How do we know which side we are on?’” says Mehta.

Like all stories that change in the retelling of them, and by virtue of the distance in years—31—from the original telling of it, Midnight’s Children, as a tale, must change.

Different characters acquire a will, empowered by the new medium.

“Shiva is one character who surprised me, his importance, his presence as personified by Siddharth was so forceful that it took me by surprise,” Mehta says.

The motley cast, drawn from alternative and mainstream cinema alike, adds to the mix. “I don’t intellectualize casting. In Satya’s case, he conveyed the hopefulness, naiveté and beauty of Saleem’s character. I suggested Salman see him in a play in NYC, and he was sold as our Saleem.”

Yet, when it releases, Midnight’s Children must stand on its own merit as a film. “Movie theatres draw a different demographic from book stores. I am a filmmaker. I have to think about the movie goer who has no familiarity with the book—what can I put on the screen that draws an audience into the essential story? I am responsible to the book’s author, but also to the audience.”

For that, Mehta must have the strength to uproot the film from its origins and give it new life. “As a film-maker, I cannot be held responsible for recreating a collective memory of a defining event or period. While the film takes place during this time, I just focus on the characters and the larger human narrative within the text. However, if seeing the film creates a curiosity to explore events crucial to the identity of a nation, that’s great.”

Thus, Saleem Sinai returns to the city of his birth; he “has been given the best chutney in the world... the taste of the chutney was more than just an echo of that long-ago taste—it was the old taste itself, the very same, with the power of bringing back the past as if it had never been away....”

The interview was conducted via phone and email from Toronto.

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FILM

The wall flowers

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH COURTESY BOLLYWOOD ART PROJECT

A mural of the 1953 classic ‘Anarkali’ kicks off an initiative to celebrate 100 years of Indian cinema

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

·································· hat is this?” young passers-by on Chapel Road in Bandra, Mumbai, have been asking the artists of the Bollywood Art Project as they have encountered them over the last fortnight. “Mughal-e-Azam?”

The Bollywood Art Project, or BAP (fittingly pronounced “baap”, Hindi for father), a collective with an ambitious plan to pay tribute to Indian cinema in its 100th year, spent April creating a roof-to-base painting of the poster of the 1953 film Anarkali, on the side of a Chapel Road cottage. The older residents of the community don’t make the elementary mistake of confusing the film with its more famous successor.

“That’s Bina Rai and Pradeep Kumar, isn’t it?” they say. “I remember this.”

The 11x15ft mural is the first exhibition of BAP’s mandate, to bring some of Bollywood’s classic emotional power and aesthetic back in public currency in Indian cinema’s centenary year.

Today, they will string up a white cloth across the entrance to the narrow courtyard of the houses opposite their painting and screen the film, free of cost, to all comers.

“This city doesn’t reflect the way Bollywood has survived and thrived here for a century,” explains Tony Peters, producer, Orphanage Films and Design, and one of BAP’s founders. “We wanted to bring that heritage out into the street and celebrate it.”

Peters and his friend, Ranjit Dahiya, looked around the Bandra community where they lived, and decided to start their celebration locally. On Chapel Road, a magnet for graffitistas and wall

ROAD TO REDEMPTION

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Drive­by cinema: Bollywood Art Project’s Anarkali mural on Chapel Road, Bandra. artists, their Anarkali is in good company. Across the small, cobbled lane lined with roofed cottages, on the opposite wall, is an eye-popping young girl throwing up a peace sign, a work by renowned Japanese graffiti artist Shiro.

Under the imprimatur of The Wall Project, artist Dhanya Pilo’s effort to bring art to public spaces in Mumbai, dozens of mural painters have left works of high quality on the sides of houses and shops in this lane and the adjoining Bazaar Road since 2007.

Anarkali stands out even from this minor hoard of treasures for the scale of its ambition, and its seriousness of purpose. Dahiya, a National Institute of Design-trained artist, loves the aesthetic of Hindi cinema: He painted 31 Bollywood posters for an exhibition that showed in France and South Africa over 2010 and 2011. Having convinced residents to give BAP a chance and picked the wall of a sun-bleached cottage that once housed a primary school, he propped up a ladder one evening in April, and got to work.

The interest and admiration from Chapel Road’s passers-by, especially those who take cinema as seriously as the artists, heartened BAP. “People stopped to tell us about their memories of Pradeep Kumar, or remembered a

song from the film,” says Mallika Chabba, an artist with BAP. “There’s so much emotion associated with these movies for Indians.”

“It’s great that the community came to be part of it,” says Sruti Visweswaran, a video artist and researcher for BAP, currently working on a stop-motion video about the creation of the Anarkali painting. “We chose Anarkali because this was really Mughal-e-Azam’s predecessor in terms of scale and aesthetic. It set a new standard for films in that era.”

Visweswaran and the team are finalizing their next moves, but have already begun to collect enthusiasts to work with them across media and genres for new public projects in neighbourhoods across the city, and, they hope cautiously, the country.

“We want to celebrate the fact that our movies used to be larger than life,” Peters says. “They used to be for everyone.” The idea is familiar, but while “celebrating Bollywood” has too often devolved into kitsch, BAP’s Anarkali is really the opposite—a magnification of an already big idea.

BAP will screen Anarkali at Chapel Road, Mumbai, today at 7pm. For information, visit www.facebook.com/ bollywoodartproject

here used to be a time when the release of a Ram Gopal Varma movie was a minor event. That time has unfortunately passed. After the acclaim rightfully accorded to Satya in 1998, he needed no more than a single-word title—Kaun, Company, Mast, Sarkar—to generate anticipation. Varma’s latest terse-sounding movie, Department, opens on 18 May. It’s about power and pelf in the Mumbai police force.

If it sounds too familiar, that’s because Varma has put out permutations of the same theme—corruption in high places—in various ways in recent years. Most of his films after Sarkar have been running over the same old ground (and finding the same old fears). At least Varma isn’t trying to put his spin on a popular classic, as he attempted to do with his dastardly version of Sholay, or looking at another of his favourite themes, man-woman relations. We still haven’t been able to get out of our minds the low-angle shots peeping up Mahie Gill’s thighs in Not a Love Story.

If you met Varma before Department’s release, chances are you would be sold.

The best part about interviewing Varma begins after the dictaphone has been switched off. Varma is a great raconteur and a sharp judge of the movies. He wittily skewers the current cinema, but is also disarmingly self-deprecating. If the very mention of his name is accompanied by a rolling of the eyes, he knows it—and he will make a dig about it. Don’t be surprised if a movie called “RGV” shows up on his list of future projects.

Varma’s world view is equally cynical. However, he has been unable of late to translate his insights into images or dialogue. The director’s obvious intelligence can’t prevent bad judgement or alter compulsive film-making habits, such as the use of a background score that can be heard as far away as Pluto, the tilted-angle shots taken through the legs of a man or from below a chair, Factory­made: A still from Department. or the repeated use of narratives that are past their expiry date.

Varma’s Factory Productions threatened at one point to challenge the way Bollywood made movies. The Factory—a Varma joke about the industrial nature of the movie business—was supposed to be a crucible in which new talent would be forged. It did too, briefly—directors like Anurag Kashyap, Sriram Raghavan and Shimit Amin owe their early breaks to Varma’s munificence. But in a self-fulfilling prophecy, the Factory became an assembly line for copycat goods. Varma’s reply to the failure of the Factory was to return to the director’s chair and roll out films that can only be described as mysteries. Why were films like Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag, James, the remake of Shiva and Darling made at all? Why would a director set out to systematically destroy his good name? Yet there is no stopping the man.

Varma has doughtily survived the tsunami of bad reviews that have come his way of late. A compulsive and almost touching love for the movies propels him towards expanding his filmography in Telugu and Hindi. He continues to find backers, actors and technicians, perhaps all as compulsive as him, to sign up. Perhaps they too believe, like some critics, that despite his past transgressions, the film-maker who gave us Rangeela, Satya and Company isn’t quite finished yet. Could Department be that return to form? Life is never short of surprises.

Department releases on 18 May. Nandini Ramnath is the film critic of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net).

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012

Books

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

PROFILE

BY

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

On the record S. Hussain Zaidi on his new book, his most sustained exploration yet of the Mumbai mafia

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

···························· n 1997, S. Hussain Zaidi was in an autorickshaw, passing through Kalina in eastern Mumbai, when his pager beeped with a request to call on a local number. He got out, went to a local restaurant, called the number, and was told to wait by the phone. When it rang, there was a polite, well-bred voice on the other line, speaking in chaste Urdu. Zaidi, amused by the posh manners of gangsters’ phone attendants, conversed for some time before asking: Janab, aap ka isme gerami? (Pray, your good name?)

“This is Dawood speaking,” the soft voice replied. “I believe you wished to speak with me.”

This is how Zaidi landed a 50-minute interview, and a frontpage story in The Indian Express, with Dawood Ibrahim, India’s most notorious criminal. Ibrahim, a man near the top of Interpol’s most wanted list, is perhaps the most dangerous man ever to have come out of Dongri, a small neighbourhood in south Mumbai with a long history of criminal activity. Zaidi’s new book, Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia, is his most ambitious yet: It is the story of how this historic district came to be known as the capital of organized crime in Mumbai (and consequently the country) and how this capital eventually expatriated to Dubai.

Zaidi, former resident editor of The Asian Age, remembers that pager era, in which he landed his Ibrahim scoop, with a certain relish. “Crime reporting is so much

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COURTESY RETIRED ACP MUMBAI POLICE ISHAQ BAGWAN

easier now,” he says. “We have mobile phones, email, all kinds of communication systems. I had an informant who used to send me the pager message ‘I love you—Rachna,’ every time he wanted to talk to me. And if he wanted to talk to me urgently, he’d write, ‘I want to love you today.’”

Zaidi’s 17-year career reporting on crime has been full of big stories. So have his previous books.

Last year’s popular success, Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Stories of Women From the Ganglands, which he co-wrote with Jane Borges, was a collection of reported stories of women in the Mumbai underworld and their power. Compared with Dongri to Dubai, Zaidi smiles, Mafia Queens is “almost leisure reading”.

“The issue in Dongri is something like Kashmir, or Ireland,” Zaidi says. “A few bad guys come out of the place, the police dubs it the crime capital, they persecute many for the sins of a few.” Dongri is a historically Muslim-majority neighbourhood, but Zaidi refrains from making a larger criticism of systemic injustice. “It’s the cops’ job to detect crime,” he says. “If they hear that someone has a connection with the mafia, they use force because they must try and extract information. But that’s why they care a damn for the law in Dongri.”

What gives crime in Mumbai its particular power, different from elsewhere in the country? “It is far more organized here than any-

Going to press: (clockwise from above) Dongri, Mumbai; Dawood Ibrahim (third from left) in the early 1980s; and S. Hussain Zaidi.

Dongri to Dubai— Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia:

By S. Hussain Zaidi, Lotus Roli, 408 pages, `350. where else,” Zaidi explains.

“Dawood’s entry rather corporatized it. In other places, a mafia will deal in one kind of crime. The Mumbai mafia is in politics, real estate, cricket, Bollywood, even movie piracy.”

Ibrahim looms over Dongri to Dubai on virtually every page— as we track back through the history of crime in the city, the wrangling of policemen and gangsters who came before builds up to Ibrahim’s spectacular and destructive career. The narrative seems movie-like, but the movies have always imitated real-world crime in Bollywood, and vice-versa.

“Look at what happened once movie crews passing through Dubai discovered Ibrahim was a dapper guy in suits, puffing on a cigar, with gel in his hair,” Zaidi says. “Directors realized that their villains would have to be suave, not street ruffians any more.”

Zaidi’s first book, Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts, remains perhaps the single most comprehensive work on the March 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai. Like many journalists, he started out with doubts about his ability to create a book from the stuff he was used to writing about in a few hundred words at a time.

“David Davidar (then publisher of Penguin India) asked me to write a fiction plot, to encourage me, in 1997,” he remembers. “I wrote something about a nuclear attack on Mumbai, something that brought the government down to

THE OBLITERARY JOURNAL | EDITED BY RAKESH KHANNA AND RASHMI RUTH DEVADASAN

Blaft­off!

The charms of the Chennai indie publishing house and its latest offering B Y D EEPA D . ···························· f it is possible to anthropomorphize a publishing house, then I imagine Blaft Publications Pvt. Ltd to be strutting along the streets of Chennai like dancer-actor Prabhu Deva—an endearing mixture of jaunty kitsch and carefully crafted style, all powered by an exuberance which manifests as quirkiness underplayed by rigour.

To the unfamiliar eye, like the arasik (non-aficionado) who would dismiss Prabhu Deva as a knock off of Michael Jackson, Blaft might appear at first glance to be the sort of hyper-stylish niche peddler of charming textual trinkets rescued from the masses.

Any translations-focused publishing house runs the risk of fetishizing the cultural quirks it seeks to celebrate. Blaft make no

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bones about gleefully taking the piss. From its opulently lurid covers for the Tamil Pulp Fiction anthologies, to the breathtaking gem of a picture book Kumari Loves a Monster, its design and production values offer a biting deconstruction of the day-to-day visual tropes and traditions that are as taken for granted as the pottu (bindi) no decent young lady (sneaking out to meet her boyfriend under the guise of attending Bharatanatyam class) should be seen without.

But Blaft’s irreverence finds its backbone in its curation and editorial democratization. Blaft is translating not for an audience of the Other, but for the codeswitchers, the ones who have two or more mother tongues, and can get the wordplay even if they cannot read the original script.

The experimental, subversive

quality shared by the writing of Charu Nivedita (the author of Blaft’s Zero Degree) and Kuzhali Manickavel (author of the Blaft title Insects Are Just Like You And Me Except Some of Them Have Wings) makes the choice of supporting those authors a literary one, but there is, nonetheless, a political sensibility that informs the editorial choices, as exemplified in their latest offering, The Obliterary Journal. By placing celebrated graphic novelists side-byside with sign painters and equalizing the commercially literal

The Obliterary Journal: Blaft, 270 pages, `695.

its knees, in which Ibrahim had been involved, and he told me, ‘If you can write a plot like this, you can write non-fiction.’”

Zaidi decided to write about the 1993 bombings, not so far in essence from his doomsday idea.

“God forgive me for this, like a lot of cocky reporters, once I decided to write it, I thought, there’s so much in place—witnesses, court documents, written evidence. I can do this in six weeks!” It took him five years.

His writerly voice has always been that of a newspaperman: controlled, grim, often more notable for substance than style. His writing rarely veers from a straightforward agglomeration of facts, but he sometimes displays an acute eye for emotional detail.

One of Black Friday’s most affecting moments comes when a policeman enters a narrow lane of Zaveri Bazaar, minutes after a bomb has gone off in the packed little district. Disoriented by the

with the artistically abstract, Blaft demonstrates a respect for craftsmanship that is more important than policing the boundaries of highbrow versus low art.

The term “journal” is, of course, tongue-in-cheek. The book is an odd duck; not quite glossy and self-important enough to be a coffee-table book, not linear enough to be read straight through like a graphic novel. In some lights it is like a museum catalogue; a compendium of visuals lovingly annotated by geeky experts who have loved their urns rather too well. In other lights, it is like a 19th century scrapbook of ephemera—daguerreotypes of touring two-headed “pushmipullyus” cheek-by-jowl with love notes scribbled in the margins of a playbill.

If I may advise the prospective reader: Like a book of poetry or an expensive box of assorted chocolates, this is not a compendium meant to be consumed in one sitting. Sustained engagement will dull your sense of whimsy, and you might find yourself flipping through pages of photos of hand-lettered signs saying “danger” and “taxi”. Or you will try to figure out what the sequential art of Vidyun Sabhaney and Malavika P.C. is trying to say, because you expected a narrative like Amruta Patil’s qui-

smoking wreck of rubble and bodies before him, the policeman looks up for a moment, wonders why someone has hung out long ribbons to dry on their balcony, and then realizes that he is looking at the shreds of a sari, torn to strips by the impact of the blast.

“You just don’t write about the crime, but the criminal,” Zaidi wrote last year in an obituary for his friend and former colleague, the crime journalist Jyotirmoy Dey. “You pare him down to his soul, and in the process gain access to an unsavoury world that you cannot abdicate in a hurry. It is your bread and butter.” This carefully controlled handle on people and their inner lives serves Dongri to Dubai well, as Zaidi recreates the story of an underworld through the men who run it.

Nothing has described the parallel economy of crime controlled

by Ibrahim and his cohorts in such detail before as Dongri to Dubai. In this sense, it is the story that Zaidi has been writing for all his life as a reporter. In his 1997 interview with Ibrahim, Zaidi asked him about his drug smuggling, to be met with a chilling rebuff. “Zaidi saheb, because I respect you, I pardon such an irreverent line of questioning,” Ibrahim said. Dongri to Dubai is a record of the questions Zaidi hasn’t stopped asking ever since.

etly scathing Atlantis.

If, instead, you dip into the book for just one piece to savour, you will find yourself lingering over the miraculous artistry of Sri Pachanana Moharana, who has rendered, on one palm leaf, no less than 18 unique and detailed ink illustrations of the robots that landed in Nayagarh (one has pigtails).

Or you might give your bed mate nightmares when you wake them with your giggles, by describing the dastardly deeds of the dozen dangerous food items chronicled by Rashmi Ruth Devadasan and illustrated by B. Anitha, among which are Terror Thakkali (which crushes its victims by rolling back and forth over them) and Psycho Sorakkai (a gourd armed with an aruval—machete—which decapitates victims in the men’s loo). Or you might find yourself surprised by the way that art can capture a moment of furtive tenderness in a way words sometimes fail to, when you see a panel with two fingers gently entwining in Bharath Murthy’s A Kovai Gay Story.

Blaft dances on the street with a completely open heart, but does not assume the airs indicating that it deserves to be elevated to a more rarefied state of being.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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EXCERPT

Jango unchained A new collection of essays shows us how reading second­hand books can lead to strange meetings

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worry how the lovely hole-inthe-wall store (or in Mumbai, the pavement) selling secondhand books will survive the e-book phenomenon. It would be a shame to see them disappear like the typewriter and the Lambretta scooter. My entire set of V. S. Naipaul books came from the pavements of Fort in Mumbai.

I used to cover the stock markets for a business daily those days and my friend Nikhil and I were walking back to our respective offices after a press conference. Though I have often lingered and browsed, I hadn’t really bought anything from these pavement stores. But that afternoon, the outer periphery was stacked with books that were fantastically preserved. Most of them were hardbound and covered with transparent plastic dustsheets. We walked past more than a dozen books before I found myself stopping and picking one up. The fly leaf of each of the books had Jehangir Mehta written in smooth, cursive writing. Some of them had a date inscribed, others a place.

My copy of A House for Mr Biswas says ‘Jehangir Mehta, September 12, 1980, A fox in search of a wolf’.

Between the two of us, we bought 14 books for `100 a piece. I remember because we didn’t have enough cash on us. I stood guard, melting under an October Mumbai sun, while Nikhil ran to an ATM at Flora fountain to withdraw the money.

I spent the next three months reading my pickings from the Mehta library. Each of the books spewed some evidence or the other of Mehta’s existence. I found boarding cards, two flights

between Mumbai and Kolkata, and one a Lufthansa stub from Frankfurt to Marseille, with St Tropez and a phone number written on it. There was a bill from a medical shop for neurobion and aspirin, 300 tablets each. And a visiting card of a Hong Kong suit maker. I imagined Jehangir Mehta to be a dashing 56-year-old bachelor. A playboy who loves his Cognac and has a heart problem.

‘Why 56? Why not 55 or 60?’ asked Nikhil when I mentioned it to him while we were having a beer at Café Mondegar one Saturday night.

‘Because that would be so predictable,’ I cried.

Nikhil had found a bounty too.

His copy of The Tin Drum had a note in the same handwriting comparing the cost of brake fluid, oil and tyres in 1965 and 1985.

‘He owns a garage, I am sure of it,’ he said.

‘How many mechanics do you know who summer at St Tropez?’

‘His fortune’s inherited. Cars are his passion.’

‘No, I don’t want him to be a mechanic. He is an art collector.’

And so it went on. Jango, as we had come to call him, always appeared in our conversations.

We made a life for him, filling in the details as we went along. His lover jilted him and he vowed to stay single (mine). He is gay and is living with Robert his partner and Pussy his cat (Nikhil’s). ‘Are we not even going to consider the fact that there might be a few junior Jangos?’ Nikhil asked. I wasn’t, there is something so intrinsically sad about a man whose family would give his books away. It’s like callously pitching an urn of his remains into a paan-stained dustbin.

‘What if he’s dead?’ I asked.

‘Could be,’ Nikhil murmured.

It was a day that the Sensex had soared or fallen. Either way I had a lot of work. I stepped out of office at 10 and discovered several missed calls from Nikhil. When I called him back, he picked up the phone and said, ‘Jango lives at Kalbadevi. I have a share certificate, 2,000 shares of ACC. I am thinking of going there and giving

Would You Like Some Bread With That Book?

And Other Instances of Literary Love:

By Veena Venugopal, Yoda Press, 114 pages, `195. it to him. It might be important,’ he said.

‘Can I come too?’ I asked, the excitement forming a knot in my stomach.

‘I was hoping you would,’ he said.

We decided to go on Friday, two days later. I imagined Jango would open the door in a silk dressing gown and a pipe. Nikhil and I met at Churchgate and we took a taxi to Kalbadevi. The driver dropped us off at the entrance to a narrow gali. We walked down picking our way between banana sellers and handcart pullers.

We reached the dark entrance of Number 72. An old watchman was nodding off on a wooden stool. ‘Flat number? Flat number?’ he asked us.

When we showed him the address, he suddenly got belligerent.

‘Why are you going there? You can’t be a paying guest in that house. The society officers will throw you out,’ he said.‘They have cut his water off , the power will go in another week.’

‘We just have to give him something,’ Nikhil said.

‘First floor,’ the man waved us away but looked suspiciously after us.

I was nervous, but we walked upstairs. Like most of the neighbourhood, this building too was

completely run down from outside. Naked wires hung heavily from the ceiling; there was no light. We stumbled and tripped on the staircase. Once on the first floor, though, we walked past beautifully carved wooden doors. One was open and we peeped into a spectacular ivory and beige living room with a chandelier like you find in a banquet hall in the Taj hotel lighting it up. The door we sought was of stripped down plywood.

There were notices that were stuck on it. Most were ripped off, all of them were yellowing. We checked the number on top of the door again.

Tentatively, Nikhil rang the bell. No one answered for several long minutes. I was feeling very uncomfortable. ‘Let’s go,’ I whispered. A maid servant from the neighbour’s house had stepped out and was watching us in brazen curiosity.

Finally Nikhil nodded.

We turned around when we saw a tiny man in a polyester suit with prominent sweat patches under his arms rush towards us.

‘What do you want bhenchod, who are you?’ he yelled.

Nikhil stepped in front of me with the share certificate in his hand. ‘Mr Mehta, we found this in your book. We thought it might be useful,’ he said.

‘Where did you get my book from? Who gave you my book?’ he barked.

He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. I noticed he was wearing slippers on his feet, the torn rubber held together by a cobbler’s twine.

‘We bought it at the second hand place in Fort,’ Nikhil mumbled. The certificate was still in his hand.

‘Second hand place?’ he asked.

And again louder. ‘Second hand book? Bhenchod you buy second hand books? You are parasites.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

Leeching a man, one book at a time.’ And he burst into shocking laughter. When he finished, he looked at us, and in the smoothest action I have ever seen, cleared his throat and spat twice. A shining gob of moss green sputum slid down Nikhil’s jeans and another landed between my fourth toe and the little one.

It’s now eight years since our run-in with Jango. Nikhil has moved abroad. But his emails to me always start with the salutation ‘Jango ki jai ho’. And when I see it, I have to go to the bathroom and wash my feet. No matter what you

say, I highly doubt swapping a file on your Kindle will help you meet a Jango. Or give you a mental disorder that makes you retch at anything moss green. While this might not seem like a bad thing, I am sure the universe intends that we meet some Jangos. And buy their books. And dress them up in silk dressing gowns and pipes.

Would You Like Some Bread With That Book? And Other Instances of Literary Love by Veena Venugopal released on 3 May. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Q&A | ADAM FOULDS

Found in nature, captured in prose GETTY IMAGES

The author of ‘The Quickening Maze’—once a forklift operator— talks about his life and work

B Y R AJNI G EORGE rajni.g@livemint.com

···························· here’s something about virtuoso novelist, poet and now short-story writer Adam Foulds that won’t give way, whether it is to media frenzy or the public’s desire to get a hold over him.

In between readings at a writing showcase at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, this March, while being assaulted steadily by students, writers and readers, he is quietly, resolutely elsewhere—yet vitally present. His unflinching yet tender eye does not miss a detail.

Foulds, who once studied creative writing at the same university, is one of England’s most unusual and promising young writers. The 38-year-old’s award-winning first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times (2007), is about the relationship between Howard, a Scottish loner, and 10-year-old math prodigy Saul.

This was followed by the long narrative poem The Broken Word (2008), about Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, as seen through the eyes of an English schoolboy. It won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2009.

The Booker-shortlisted The Quickening Maze (2009), a partly historical, partly fictionalized novel about the meeting between Victorian poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson at a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest, brought Foulds to international attention. A fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature, he currently lives in London.

When I spoke with him, on a park bench in his former campus, Foulds had just rendered a sexy, savage passage around deer slaughter

T

The lay of the land: (left) Writer Adam Foulds; and Epping Forest, England, is the backdrop to Foulds’ Booker prize­shortlisted novel, The Quickening Maze. and was about to read a careful account of tortured early romance. Edited excerpts from the interview: You’ve written about imaginary worlds in more ways than one. How did you handle Africa, the setting for ‘The Broken Word’?

There is a minimal way of writing that makes the reader co-create the imaginary; imagine the landscape for themself. I haven’t been to Africa. But people who grew up in Africa said that this book was one of the most vivid things they’d read. They look at the description of landscape first.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on a novel whose subject matter is close to The Broken Word. War and violence, conflict, complicity.

I’ve also been writing a bunch of short stories, one of which

{

has emerged in Granta this month, another in the New Statesman. The novel I’m writing is quite research-intensive, but the stories are not, it’s quite nice.

Extensive research is a big part of most of your writing.

Research provokes your imagination in a particular way. It feeds your imagination

and allows your mind to do something in the background while you work. It can feel like it’s pulling you away from the writing of the book though.

Who are you reading while you write? Do you find there is value in spending time with one writer at a time?

I read Yeats, Wordsworth, Browning, Larkin, Eliot, loads of poets from that time. The Australian contemporary poet Les Murray, I like him a lot.

You read stuff because you discover who you want to read.

I’ve found that with poets who I’m familiar with, I like buying the individual volumes. There’s a publishing house that has reproduced volumes of the late Yeats as they were published originally: The Winding Stair, The Tower. All those wonderful books in The London Library. I have liked D.H. Lawrence’s writing and I have been giving my

}

FIRST WORDS: “He’d been sent out to pick firewood from the forest, sticks and timbers wrenched loose in the storm. Light met him as he stepped outside, the living day met him with its details...”

QUICK LIT | AADISHT KHANNA

Christopher Moore writes a murder mystery where the victim is Vincent van Gogh

T

he first I heard of Christopher Moore was when Amazon suggested Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art earlier this year in its list of forthcoming releases. Clicking through, I discovered Moore is a writer of vampire comedies.

Deciding that this was just what I needed to read in a world that was inundated with overwrought vampire romances, I made a note to myself to read Sacré Bleu as soon as it came out.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t read the blurbs carefully enough. Sacré Bleu is not a vampire comedy. It is, and there is really no shorter way to put this accurately, a screwball fin-de-siècle comic

in London?

I have something in mind at the moment that has to do with the particularity of the suburban world I grew up in, the kinds of houses and experience available there.

A lot of my short stories happen in that natural environment for imagination.

I’ve been trying to confirm from different sources if you did, in fact, work as a forklift operator. Can you tell us more about this?

Yes, I have, among other things. I didn’t want anything that would take up too much mental space. By default I went for jobs that had little kinds of responsibility. I’d come from working in the shops and moved out to working in the warehouses. It all connected up and it wasn’t massively hard work. I rather liked working in the warehouse, and sort of missed it when I was published and didn’t need to work there any more. It was quiet and there were few of us. I managed not to go back; the other blokes there might have wondered why I was back there, though, of course, they always knew I was different.

FREE VERSE | SUMANA ROY

Amusing the muses supernatural murder mystery.

Moore claims in the afterword that he had decided to write a novel about the colour blue, and everything in the book simply followed from there. The murder victim is Vincent van Gogh, the detective is a wannabe painterbaker named Lucien Lessard, and the supporting characters include painters Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, James Whistler and Claude Monet. The Impressionists, their paintings, and their subjects form important plot points, and Sacré Bleu also functions as a mini introductory course to them, providing you lots of anecdotes that you can use to impress other guests at parties. In this respect, it functions a little like The Da Vinci Code, except with better writing and less mass-market cachet.

It’s important to point out that the murder mystery is a howdunnit and whydunnit, not a whodunnit. We’re introduced to the antagonists early on—a

attention to, one to one (smiles at the question).

In ‘The Quickening Maze’, there’s a beautiful sense of nature-poet John Clare’s relationship with a woman, as well as that of his relationship with the land, both sensuous ones. How do you handle these two equations?

They are not that far apart in Clare’s experience. Nature is part of what Mary (the woman) represents: health and wholeness and the sense of longing for what he’s lost.

Woman and landscape have always come together in the male imagination; the female body, the experience of mother. For Clare, in a more subtle way, his experience of the natural world is connected to that of the women in his life.

And your own relationship with the natural world now?

As a boy I was a passionate birdwatcher, I grew up on the edge of Epping Forest. I was passionate about natural history and being out in the natural world. I don’t still go birdwatching, but I’m aware of birdsong and I know what’s around me.

Is there a more urban experience you’ll be writing about, now that you live

guessing and trying to tease out the howdunnit right up to the end, and number of painters’ is very, very muses who all seem clever. to be the same Sometimes woman, and a sinMoore does go a ister seller of little overboard. painters’ colours.

There’s a brief What isn’t made interlude about clear until the last blue frogs in the act is what exactly Amazonian rainthey’re doing that Sacre Bleu—A Comedy d’Art: forest that provides has left poor Vin- William Morrow, some clues to what’s cent van Gogh 416 pages, $26.99 going on, but has dead and other absolutely no con(around `1,450). painters with nection to the larger severe amnesia, and why. plot. I suspect that Moore was so For fans of the fantasy and enthusiastic about his cool idea horror genres (particularly Neil that he couldn’t bear to let it go.

Gaiman’s short stories and comOther readers, of course, might ics work), the book will seem find that sort of thing exasperatfamiliar. The muse, the nonde- ingly precious, but for me this hit script and off-key villain, and the just the right note, seeming like real-life characters fictionalized evidence of just how much fun are all stock characters now. the author had writing this. It’s a That doesn’t mean that Sacré sense of joyousness, not complaBleu is derivative. Moore’s lan- cency at its own cleverness, that guage is effervescent, bringing in pervades the novel, and it makes anachronisms and profanity that Sacré Bleu great fun to read. don’t sound out of place at all.

The storytelling will keep you Write to lounge@livemint.com

Long distance relationship Every relationship is a long distance relationship: Every poem a letter Every prayer a curiosity Every goodbye a question Every return a going-away Every longing a sigh Every embrace a withdrawal Every tiff an awakening Every patch up hibernation Every whisper an alarm clock Every sneeze a calling bell Every touch a telegram Every tickle a missed call Every relationship is a long-distance relationship Write to lounge@livemint.com

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

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

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