Lounge for 12 Nov 2011

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Saturday, November 12, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 46

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Nissim Ezekiel, the first editor of Quest, was one of India’s finest English­language poets, and a legendary critic and mentor.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH VODAFONE INDIA MD AND CEO MARTEN PIETERS >Page 9

CAKE RUSH

Work on those delectable Christmas plum cakes begins months ahead and involves lots of alcohol >Page 6

A new anthology recalls the heady legacy of a small literary magazine that published great writers and thinkers. We revisit the ‘Quest’ story and its importance to Indian modernity >Pages 10­12

SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE Our round­up of what to watch out for at the second “laid­back” Bacardi NH7 Weekender music festival in Pune >Page 16

REVOLUTIONARY

ROAD GAME THEORY

NANDAN’S LITMUS TEST The thinking man’s “multiplex” is 25 years old, but debates continue on the kind of films it should screen >Page 18

THE GOOD LIFE

ROHIT BRIJNATH

REPLY TO ALL

SHOBA NARAYAN

AAKAR PATEL

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

ROCK MUSIC IS THE MADNESS OF IN THE SHADOWS COMEBACK ATHLETES SOMEPLACE ELSE OF THE ARC LIGHTS

L

ove,” says swimmer Ian Thorpe in the midst of our conversation on comebacks. Love, huh! Sounds a bit trite. But, really, who am I to argue? Anyway, I like him. He’s not your average jock inflated with machismo. He’s built like a lumberjack but designs jewellery. He speaks so articulately he lulls you into feeling he’s unburdening a part of his soul. I like him, this boy probably born in a bathtub, also because of how he swims, an elegant leviathan who moved so smoothly it seemed the waters... >Page 4

I

am doing something I haven’t done in a long time: asking a perfect stranger out to a nightclub in a strange city.

Now that I have your attention, let me tell you that this piece is about music, not blind dates. His name is Prasanna Singh, and I found him online. He writes a blog called Musings of A Manic Manipuri Metalhead, in which he discusses the music scene of Kolkata with headers such as “The PIT v.5—Rising Fists”. >Page 4

A

fter John Lennon died, Paul McCartney re-released Beatles songs.

Without notice or explanation, he changed the credits from “Lennon/ McCartney” to “McCartney/Lennon”. Such pettiness was unexpected from an entertainer already a legend, but this is how desperate people are to claim the status of frontman. To be seen as THE person responsible for the band, not grouped with those in the back.

One person cannot be a band... >Page 5

FILM REVIEW

ROCKSTAR

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT JASBIR LADI SUNDEEP KHANNA ©2011 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE LOVES | BREAKFAST WITH BUTTERFLIES

Wing it Enjoy a Delhi winter morning with butterflies, spiders and moths B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

···································· id you know that not all butterflies spend most of their day flitting from flower to flower? Some are likely to make pit stops on decaying fruit, animal poop—even on your sweat-soaked shoes.

Most are active only when the sun shines and, like birds, maintain territories to keep out butterflies of other species. Some butterflies have migratory patterns like birds and can fly hundreds of kilometres.

I learnt all this and spotted more than 15 species of butterflies at the Asola Bhatti sanctuary, near Surajkund, Haryana, last weekend during a Breakfast with Butterflies (BWB) walk conducted by Sajeev T.K., centre manager, Conservation Education Centre (Delhi), Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS).

The best part about the two-and-a-half-

D

hour walk that starts at 9am is that there is no strict agenda. Our group of 35 ranged from children as young as 5 to some senior citizens.

“We want to encourage families to come out together. Most of these walks are not conducted for professional butterfly-watchers only, but amateurs and first-timers,” explains Sajeev. So if you spot funnel-web spiders and wonder why they weave their webs on the floor of the forest, just ask.

We took turns trying to distinguish a peacock pansy butterfly from a blue pansy and chased striped tigers, danaid eggfly females, common grass yellows, Indian cabbage whites, yellow orange tips, and tried to tell a SAJEEV TK pale grass blue butterfly from a rounded pierrot and a zebra blue. The children got a chance to study the life cycle of a butterfly and touch a larva and a pupa.

Our walk, priced at `175 per person (programme charges and menu vary, based on location), started with a round of hot samosas, tea, biscuits and Beauty: The tiny grass jewel.

gulab jamuns and ended with sandwiches.

After the walk, a slide show recapped all the butterflies we had spotted. Budding nature photographers are also encouraged to practise their skills and discuss their pictures.

Sajeev has organized two such walks since September, as part of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the BNHS and the Delhi government on running educative programmes on conservation and environment in Delhi. “I hope to conduct the third one at Lodhi Garden in early December. Once the flowering season begins there is no dearth of butterflies in any garden of Delhi.” Sajeev claims to have spotted 45 species of butterflies at Shalimar Bagh in west Delhi just last week. Whether it’s the Sanjay Van, Shalimar Bagh, Okhla Bird Sanctuary, Sultanpur Bird Sanctuary and Asola Bhatti or the Jahanpanah forest, he says it is possible to conduct these walks just about anywhere. There are also plans for a birdwatching tour at the Okhla or Sultanpur sanctuaries.

For more information, sign up at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ cecbnhsasolabhatti or email cecbnhsasolabhatti@yahoogroups.com

inbox

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com TINTIN FAN CLUB I loved reading Sanjukta Sharma’s cover story, “Tintinology”, 5 November. It brought back memories of childhood. I grew up reading ‘Tintin’ and it was the colours, images and, of course, the exotic locales that fascinated me. In fact, my knowledge of world geography was sharpened by ‘Tintin’. The fact that Bengalis are fascinated with ‘Tintin’ is an amazing insight into how cross­culture comics play a huge role in shaping children.

SARITA

TOURIST TRAIL It is sad that the writer of “Peace in water world”, 5 November, dwelt on the natural beauty of Fiji while completely ignoring the blatant abuse of human rights there. Maybe the sanitized conducted tours manage to keep the significant minority of Indo­Fijians (about 37% of the population) and their problems out of sight of tourists.

SUBBARAO TADAPATRI ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: MADHU KAPPARATH

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ROHIT BRIJNATH GAME THEORY

The madness of comeback athletes

L

ove,” says swimmer Ian Thorpe in the midst of our conversation on comebacks. Love, huh!

Sounds a bit trite. But, really, who am I to argue? Anyway, I like him. He’s not your average jock inflated with machismo. He’s built like a

lumberjack but designs jewellery. He speaks so articulately he lulls you into feeling he’s unburdening a part of his soul. I like him, this boy probably born in a bathtub, also because of how he swims, an elegant leviathan who moved so smoothly it seemed the waters were respectfully parting to accommodate him.

I’ve come to see him because he’s on a comeback for the 2012 Olympics.

Because he’s Thorpe, nine Olympic medals, 11 world championship golds, endless world records. Because this moment, when an older body struggles to obey the commands of a mind that insists greatness can be reclaimed, is infested with so many things: romance, insanity, melancholy, greed, curiosity.

Exceptional athletes defy the natural arrangement of things. They are not in the limitations business but in fact reorder the athletic universe. The comeback, as an idea, is part of this realm of madness. So constantly are barriers being reset, so rapidly does talent arrive globally, that the athlete who does not improve is in effect left behind. So what of the athlete who does not play at all, whose equipment is stored, whose wake-up alarm is stilled, who has

cobwebs strung across his inactive competitive mind? What chance can he have? No, wait, how does he dare believe he has a chance?

Yet they come, this tribe of the undeterred. Comebacks are made from burnout (Kim Clijsters), from illness (Lance Armstrong), from personal distress (Jennifer Capriati), from disgrace (Paolo Rossi), from injury (James Braddock, the Cinderella Man), from anonymity (Roger Milla). But mostly from retirement.

Most comebacks die quietly in a corner of a sports page. But the very fact that some succeed, that Sugar Ray Leonard returned because he just had to have Marvin Hagler and controversially did, must be fuel. But maybe the great athlete doesn’t even need external inspiration. Maybe he’s so sure of his own supremacy, sitting there like Michael Jordan might have, a man of the past, watching the men of the future from his drawing room, his insistent ego telling him: “Man, I can take them”.

And it is this vanity, boredom, money, challenge, hubris, ambition, all of it sewn together, which drives athletes to return.

You’d think the competition itself, the

BRYAN

glow which adrenalin brings on the starting blocks, is the attraction and not the pain again of practice. But Thorpe—only further informing us these athletes are odd—disagrees. “I race so I can train,” he says and I think he’s kidding, but I am mesmerized by the words he chooses. “I find a pleasure in repetition. It’s like playing an instrument and I listen to the water.”

For all athletes who once owned their arenas the return must be strange, for they are at once both old champions and new competitors and it must make for a confusing collision. How much do you lean on a previous greatness, how much does the past become an impediment in forging a fresh self? Where does faith come from, what can you trust, will experience compensate for the slightly failing body?

What must Thorpe forget? “How successful I was.” What must he remember? “The amount of control I had and how I felt in races.” What can he not do without? “The perfectionist” inside.

Before I go see Thorpe, I had already learnt something about comebacks. I was always one of those “don’t they think of their legacies?” people. As if to come back and fail is to corrupt the past, to insert mediocrity into our memories which embrace tightly images of their excellence. Why was Jordan ruining all this, why was Michael Schumacher?

But I changed my mind because of an article I read recently whose author escapes me. But he was clear: This legacy stuff is a flawed argument, the invincible hero never dies in the memory, his image doesn’t get distorted. I thought

VAN DER

BEEK/AP

Water beast: Ian Thorpe failed to reach the 100m butterfly final at the Beijing World Cup short­course meet on Wednesday. about it and bought his argument. Truth is, Jordan remains in my mind as an athletic angel, his comeback changed nothing; Schumacher will never be anything but skilful arrogance wrapped in red. I’m not always sure why they come back, why they need to, but it doesn’t diminish them for me any more.

I don’t feel the need to draw some line they should never cross. Because really it’s what we want, for them to go beyond every line. To surprise.

But Thorpe comprehends this dilemma. He understood “people hold this image of athletes at their best”, but this isn’t about people, it’s about a man and his dream. He appreciated, with a laugh, that from the conventional legacy perspective, “it’s the worst career move I’ve made”. But then he said this. “People forget athletes were once kids who love

what they do. I am finding that love again. I am prepared to sacrifice my legacy for (that) love.”

Which brings us back to where we started.

Love, huh! It’s trite, I know. It’s possibly disingenuous. It’s a nice throwaway line. And I don’t even think he’s going to make it. But what can I say.

I kind of like it.

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

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

The (rock) music is someplace else

I

am doing something I haven’t done in a long time: asking a perfect stranger out to a nightclub in a strange city. Now that I have your attention, let me tell you that this piece is about music, not blind dates. His name is Prasanna Singh, and I

found him online. He writes a blog called Musings of A Manic Manipuri Metalhead, in which he discusses the music scene of Kolkata with headers such as “The PIT v.5—Rising Fists”. I stumbled on his blog when I did a search on “Rock Music Kolkata”.

For a music lover, Kolkata offers a fork. You can walk down the path of Shastriya Sangeet and Rabindra Sangeet, or you can savour its regional take on Western music. Bands such as Fossils, Cactus and Bhoomi blend a love of rock with a distinct local beat and look—like the bright kurtas worn by Bhoomi.

Bengali friends in Singapore and New York would play their music, both out of nostalgia and a desire to appear cool.

I emailed Singh primarily because I disagreed with him. In his blog, he writes knowledgeably and passionately about the Kolkata music scene and then complains that it is “stuck in some kind of weird limbo”. Perhaps, but no more stuck than other metros, was my contention. At least Kolkata has annual music events such as “The PIT” where nearly 1,000 crazy metal heads come together to hear local bands such as Dark Ritualz, Burnout Syndrome, Sinful Oath, NoyzeAkademi, Evil Conscience, What Escapes Me, Chronic Xorn and Yonsample, all listed in Singh’s blog.

I said as much to Singh in my email, and later on phone. We got talking. He

laid out the music landscape of the city: who the bands were and what their style was. After a while, we got down to nitty-gritty. I was going to be in Kolkata mid-week, I said. Was there any place where I could hear local bands play live?

Perhaps I could tag along if he was going club-hopping with his friends?

And that, my friends, is how it is done.

That’s how you ask a perfect stranger out to a nightclub.

After a pause, he said, “Well, if you want to hear live music, you should go to someplace else.”

“Sorry. Which place else?”

“Someplace Else. It’s the only place in Cal that has live music every day of the week.”

So it came to be that I found myself on a Tuesday night at a cozy lounge bar called Someplace Else, listening to Krosswindz take their devoted but small audience to a musical high. They didn’t play original music that night, but they played popular rock songs with passion and interpretational integrity. Singh stood me up. Well, not really. We were to meet on a Wednesday, but the government declared it a dry day so I was on my own on Tuesday.

Most people go to bars for three things: great atmosphere, live acts and perfectly mixed drinks. Atmosphere has to do with age, coziness and a certain non-intimidating comfort. Wooden

Atmosphere in spades: The Someplace Else bar is just the right degree of uncomfortable. floors are an advantage, particularly those discoloured by cigarette butts and spilt drinks. The place has to reek of music and moods, lovers’ quarrels and sweet nothings. It has to “play it” like Casablanca—the movie, not the place.

You know what I mean?

The Village Vanguard in New York has this nebulous construct called atmosphere in spades; as do many of the bars on Bourbon Street, New Orleans. They have human proportions.

Bangalore’s B-Flat is fairly large, but uses oversize sofas to make the space seem smaller. Blue Frog in Mumbai, on the other hand, is too big and self-consciously stylish for me. It isn’t uncomfortable enough. You know those smoky, catastrophic places that smell

bad but somehow persuade you to get drunk enough to dance on the table?

Blue Frog makes you stand up straighter and tuck your stomach in.

Someplace Else is cozy and dark. It has uncomfortable bar stools that jiggle when you crane your neck to watch the old-timers hum to the songs. Over dinner, Jayanta Dasgupta, who transforms from a suburban Dad to the smoky voiced, grinning lead guitarist for The Saturday Night Blues band, recounted an evening when his band was playing at Someplace Else. An American man stood right in front. “He was fanning my guitar and I was like, ‘Dude, what you doin’, man? Get off me,’ and the American guy says, ‘You guys are smokin’, man. I am just cooling

you down.’” Dasgupta laughed. He reminded me of Peter Pan. After midnight, I followed the band members of Krosswindz up to the coffee shop at The Park hotel, where they were having pizza. Lead guitarist “Tuki-da”, or Vikramjit Banerjee, told me stories about the Kolkata greats: Usha Uthup, Louiz Banks, Nondon Bagchi, Bertie D’Silva and others. He estimates that Kolkata has about 5,000 informal bands, 80% of whom play in Bangla. “Bengalis like to express themselves,” he said. “Instead of eve teasing, we compose music.”

If what he says is true, Bengali women are lucky indeed.

Two days ago, at a Bangalore book party for my cousin, C.Y. Gopinath, I listened to a roomful of musicians play the blues—Radha Thomas, Ramjee Chandran, the legendary Suresh Shotam, Aman Mahajan and Chandran Sankaran. Call me biased, but if Kolkata is where the music scene is happening now, and Bangalore is the past or the future, depending on whom you ask, my hometown Chennai is where it all began. A disproportionate number of musicians, including the late genius, Dilip Balakrishnan, and every single musician in that Cooke Town home, save Mahajan, could trace their roots to that humid city so suffused with music.

Visit it during the upcoming December season and see for yourself.

Shoba Narayan took Prasanna Singh’s permission before writing about him.

Singh is engaged to a Manipuri girl and works in IT. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

COLUMNS L5

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Playing in the shadows of the arc lights

A

KRAFFT ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

fter John Lennon died, Paul McCartney rereleased Beatles songs. Without notice or explanation, he changed the credits from “Lennon/McCartney” to “McCartney/ Lennon”. Such pettiness was unexpected

from an entertainer already a legend, but this is how desperate people are to claim the status of frontman. To be seen as THE person responsible for the band, not grouped with those in the back.

One person cannot be a band, of course. The contribution of those in the back is acknowledged but they are not idolized. This makes them more interesting since not as much is known about them. But it is inevitable that the work of those who are not as popular as the frontmen is seen as lacking in some way In the case of The Beatles, the man in the shadows was George Harrison.

This was no reflection on his talent.

It was a comment on the charisma of Lennon and McCartney, and their young following.

You see, though Lennon and McCartney are credited with creating The Beatles’ sound, there is actually little virtuosity in their playing. It isn’t easy to think of moments where either man shines as a musician. The Bach-style piano solo at the end of In My Life, for instance, was played by their producer George Martin.

Musically the two most interesting Beatles songs were both written by George Harrison. They are Something and Here Comes the Sun. Something because of its double melody and double mood, at first surrendering, but then suddenly defiant, with a military drumbeat. Here Comes the Sun because of the unexpected chordal run Harrison unpacks at the back of the song. Carl Sagan thought it was so good he wanted to send the recording on Voyager with Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto and Kesarbai Kerkar’s Bhairavi. This was appropriate because Here Comes the Sun is set in the same mood as Bhairavi, a morning raga. But The Beatles’ record company acted pettily. And so Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode went into space instead, to tell the void what Man is capable of.

Because he experimented, Harrison

also made mistakes. What rubbish Within You, Without You from Sgt Pepper is. Based on his interpretation of Khamaj, it is neither within one nor without. But when it worked out, Harrison’s work was above the fray.

Another example is the strange, hypnotic song he wrote for Cream, called Badge.

We are familiar with Candle in the Wind, the song Elton John sang in remembrance of first Marilyn Monroe and later Diana, princess of Wales.

The key element of the song is its moving lyric, but that is not the contribution of Elton John, who merely set it to music. The song was written by Bernie Taupin, who has written all of Elton John’s hits but is known little. He is a fine poet, having also written Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me, but few would associate that song with him either.

Guitar players will immediately register that the quality end of the The Police’s music comes from Andy Summers. Sting is deservedly the hero of the band because he wrote most of the songs, but Summers is a musician of the highest rank. His fragmented playing is unique, and as original a sound as that of two other great British guitar players, Mark Knopfler and David Gilmour.

A relatively short man, his hand spanned five frets as he played Every Breath You Take and Message in a Bottle. The Police’s drummer, Stewart Copeland, the son of a CIA spy, was also one of the best musicians of his kind. However, since he wrote none of The Police’s songs, he made no money from anything other than touring. These days he composes background scores to movies, far from the global hero that Sting is.

Other musicians who did not write and needed to play concerts constantly to make a living are The Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood. Neither man is a particularly good musician, but one who is and is outshone by Mick

League of extraordinary men: Musicians such as Andy Summers (right) weren’t the frontmen for their bands, but their music is of the highest rank.

Jagger is Keith Richards. A great craftsman and a modest man, Richards deserved to play for a better singer than Jagger.

Often a band has a frontman who is better in the back, for instance Pete Townshend of The Who. It is embarrassing to watch Townshend trying to play a solo. A bird on the run flapping hard but unable to lift off let alone soar. But he led the band, ahead of technical players like his bassist John Entwistle.

I know something about playing behind the frontman. For six years between 1989 and 1994, I played guitar with a band in Surat. It was led

by Rajiv Desai, a handsome and

charismatic musician who drank himself to death at 39.

We practised every afternoon at the mill Rajiv’s family then owned, Paradise Prints. Because the Desais were wealthy, passing musicians often stayed with them. One afternoon, this must have been in 1993 or so, the studio was occupied, and a bearded man was tuning a many-stringed guitar. It was Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, and he had just won a Grammy Award for a record called A Meeting by the River. Bhatt had partnered with Ry Cooder, but had actually never heard their winning record. This was, he told Rajiv, because he did not have a CD player.

Rajiv did, and that was apparently the first time Bhatt heard the album recorded spontaneously at an American church after midnight. A producer called Kavichandran Alexander convinced the two guitarists to play together, and Bhatt came after playing at a concert.

Cooder went on to make another famous record with Cuban musicians, but Bhatt did not get much out of the Grammy and remains in the shadows. A Meeting by the River is seen as a Cooder-fronted record, but this isn’t because of Cooder.

After the win, Cooder gave an interview to Guitar Player magazine. Explaining the 14-hour practice discipline of Hindustani players, Cooder said few guitarists in the West could match Bhatt.

Speaking of speed, he said players like Steve Vai and Joe Satriani should observe Bhatt’s technique: “If they saw up close what he did, they would fall out.”

The frontman then said that despite playing together Bhatt probably did not know who Cooder was. “He thinks I’m a player of nursery rhymes,” said Cooder, “Mr Rogers or something.”

I like bands like Bandra’s Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. Other than the national integration appeal of their name—something I am quite attracted to—there’s the matter of their seemingly equal status. They appear in advertisements and shows together. Who writes their hit melodies? Who scores the music? Shankar Mahadevan the singer? Guitarist Ehsaan Noorani (whose beautiful black Fender Stratocaster I bought many years ago)? Could it be the quiet pianist Loy Mendonsa? Each in turn? Tough to say. They’re bound together, an indivisible unit—a band in the original sense of the word.

Aakar Patel is a director will Hill Road Media.

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

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

BUILD A BRIDGE

A

couple of weeks ago, six-year-old Aliza returned from school with good news.

We have a week’s holiday for Eid, she said.

Diwali, I said to her.

No, Eid, she said.

Then her face clouded with doubt.

I could almost see the processor in her brain working it out. Eid, Diwali. Festivals, holidays. Eid is Dadi’s home in the village. Diwali is rangoli and diyas and puja with Nana.

Remind me of these, her expression said.

Two months ago, we had visited Afzal’s home in his village. After a month of Iftar evenings with him, finally it was Eid. Our daughters took a good look at their father in his sherwani. They giggled and approved. All of them walked to the Idgah together.

They gawked at the made-in-China toys on display. They bought balloons.

We visited all the homes in the neighbourhood, offering Eid Mubaraks and collecting blessings. The heat was exhausting, the novelty fascinating. We fed friendly goats. There were guava and bael-laden trees in backyards.

Naseem got hooked to a toy car that raced when she pulled a string in its back. No remote control, no winding key. I wanted it too. Look, here is a mehendi (henna) plant. Pet pigeons. Startled pet pigeons!

And of course the stories of everyone’s childhood. How it used to be. Memories of Afzal as a little boy.

Later, liberated from their finery, the children played cricket with Gufran, the cook’s grandson. Evening light slanted in, planting soft halos on the children’s heads. A microphone sputtered. We heard the Maghrib azaan. Without a

pause in their conversation, the women covered their heads with dupattas. I got up to get my camera.

I passed my mother-in-law on the way. She is Ammi.

Ammi reminds me of my Nani. My mother’s mother.

Her children called her Mataji.

Sometimes I say “my grandmother” when I talk of Ammi. Then correct myself. It makes me smile.

My Nani was from Lahore.

Ammi is from Jaunpur in UP. The partition of India in 1947. My grandparents migrated from Pakistan to Amritsar. Ammi’s extended family migrated from India to Karachi. Her parents did not.

Sometimes Ammi admires me for being beautiful.

Sometimes she scolds me for being a fashion victim. Eat well, she will say, eat this chane ka halwa. Just like my grandmother would have said.

I have a photo of Ammi working with her sewing machine. Her glasses balanced on her nose, concentration on her face. Next to her, Sahar is drawing. Aliza is being a baby, cheeks drooping like she is a posh dog. They are my children, but it could have been me. Three-year-old

Reach out: Creating families builds bonds between the past and future. me, sitting next to my Nani as she worked with needle and thread.

I see Ammi read the Quran sitting on her bed. A shaft of light through the open door leads towards her. Her electric blue dupatta covering her head, a quiet dignity in the curve of her back. This is my Nani on her bed in her home.

A winter morning, I am 5.

Nani is reading the Sukhmani Sahib and I can hear the hum in the air.

Ammi blesses me with

elaborate phrases in Urdu.

Sometimes she keeps it short.

“I wish for you a long healthy life so that you can take care of my grandchildren the way they deserve”.

Moments like these are like the missing pieces of an elaborate puzzle. Things come together. Life makes sense. What has been lost is regained.

Childhood is a time spent collecting influences. Our earliest memories don’t store themselves in words. They are

embedded in our body. Events fade, but feelings live in the deep folds. The key to our deepest fears and strengths lies somewhere there.

Adulthood really starts when we leave home. When we agree inside of us to build a new world. Discard the broken and the outdated, and plant new seeds. Fresh air and fertile soil.

I think we create families to build bridges between different worlds. Some relationships are mere tightropes, some sturdier.

Some are drawbridges that can be pulled back if the water rises dangerously.

The best bridges are art in themselves. A destination of their own. A respite from what lies on both sides. The best place to get a good view of where we come from. And where we want to go.

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

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

L6

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

CHRISTMAS BAKING

BY

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Cake rush Work on those delectable plum cakes begins months ahead and involves lots of alcohol B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN & A MRITA R OY ···························· ridget White Kumar has a secret—or maybe not so any more—ingredient for her Christmas cakes: dates, and then more dates, this time as a syrup, added to the cake mix just before baking. “It gives the cake a deep colour,” she says.

Even as she speaks, Kumar, who has written seven books on Anglo-Indian cooking, carefully flips through the weathered pages of her grandmother’s century-old recipe book in Bangalore. She has borrowed several recipes from the family’s culinary bible, but her Christmas cake recipe comes from years of tweaking by her grandmother and then her mother.

“There isn’t one recipe for the perfect Christmas cake, every family has a different one and that’s the perfect one for them,” says Kumar, recalling her formative years in the former British mining colony of Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) in Karnataka, when the month before Christmas was exhausting, with weeks of preparation followed by days of cooking. “Everything was a family activity and the grand item was, of course, the Christmas cake,” says Kumar. “It was never a community event, it was a family thing.”

Even now, preparations begin two months before Christmas, when Kumar goes shopping for dried fruits that are then chopped/diced. The alcohol in which the cut fruits are soaked is a personal choice. Kumar opts for rum or brandy.

“But the most important part is the mixing; if you get that right not much can go wrong,” she says, adding that the tradition of mixing came with the British and has stayed on to become an event that is parcelled with the

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celebration of Christmas both at homes and in restaurants and bakeries. Over time, bakeries have made the mixing of fruits for Christmas symbolic of the beginning of the festive season.

At the ITC Gardenia, Bangalore, pastry chef Arvind Prasad’s recipe changed every year for nine years until 2010, when he seemed to have achieved a certain level of perfection that he measured from the overwhelming response he got from hotel guests. At the annual cake-mixing event last week, when the staff laid out ingredients for invitees to come and mix, the air smelled of alcohol.

“We used brandy, rum, whisky and wine in varied measures to soak the fruit,” says Prasad of his power mix, which indicates why the cake got such a giddy response the previous year.

But while Prasad was fairly generous in revealing his magic potion, for most bakeries the recipe remains a guarded secret.

Delhi’s Wenger’s, established in 1926, got its recipe from its original Swiss owners.

Unchanged since, it’s such a secret that manager Charanjeet Singh won’t even say how much alcohol and fruit they buy for the annual mixture. At the bustling bakery that is as old as Connaught Place, the city’s central plaza, these are the busiest days of the year. Huge steel jars have to be brought out and cleaned.

Kilograms upon kilograms of plums, raisins, almonds, cashews, black currants and other dry fruits have to be hand-picked, cleaned, roasted and pounded for the mixing. “We sold 1,500kg of cakes last Christmas. They don’t make glass jars in sizes that can hold the mix for such huge quantities,” says Singh.

At Flury’s, the 84-year-old Park Street institution in Kolkata,

Rent an oven If your oven is too small to cope with the demands of Christmas baking, go hire a oven at these bakeries

the first round of preparations is already over. Though the ceremonial mixing of the cake is to be held in the third week of November, when about 1 tonne of fruits will be mixed and soaked in alcohol, it’s largely a symbolic affair with celebrities and the media in attendance, according to executive chef Vikas Kumar. The “real mixing”—of about 2,000kg of dry fruits in a 100-litre cocktail of brandy and rum—happens as early as the last week of September and the first week of October.

That’s the secret to the crumbly moist plum cakes that have come

HUNGRY PLANET | JAN HORKÝ & MAREK SVOBODA

Soup kitchen Robust soups, fatty proteins, rich gravies, all washed down with Pilsner— game for some Czech food?

B Y A MRITA R OY amrita.r@livemint.com

···························· an Horký, chef de cuisine at Zlatá Praha (Golden Prague), at the InterContinental Hotel in the Czech capital, could have stepped out from the sets of some food show. Ruggedly goodlooking and oozing passion for his native cuisine, this captain of the Czech national team of chefs is as mercurial as any TV chef worth his name, as we found out when we asked him to pose for a few photos. Chef Marek Svoboda, a chef-manager at Gastro Studio, run by Czech food company Nowaco, appeared to be the more easygoing one as he painstakingly educated us about the delicious Czech spread.

The two chefs were at The Lalit hotel in New Delhi last month as part of an initiative by

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to be the physical embodiment of the Christmas spirit for generations of Kolkatans.

Preparations for the 9 tonnes of Christmas cake order that Bangalore’s Koshy’s bakery receives begin six months earlier, when dried fruit is marinated in sugar and spices. Four months later, the fruits are mixed with other ingredients that the bakery won’t reveal. The recipe has been with the bakery for 65 years. P.V. Abraham, the 62-year-old manager of the bakery, who has been making cakes for 42 years now, says, “We have

Czech please: Jan Horký (left) and Marek Svoboda at The Lalit hotel.

What are the main components in a meal?

Svoboda: They are usually threecourse—a soup, a main course of a fatty meat with a rich gravy mopped up with knediky (Czech dumplings) or a side of vegetables, and then desserts. We eat many different kinds of soups.

Most popular ones are gulasovka (a thick goulash) or bramboracka, made with wild Czech mushrooms called hrib, potato, carrots and onions, kulajda (thick soup with forest mushrooms and milk), and many more. A thick fish soup made from carps (including its head, some innards, roe, etc.) is a part of Christmas dinners.

some regulars who we take orders from, but in the weeks around the end of December we have several walk-ins.”

He adds, “Sometimes, there’s not enough cake for everyone.” pavitra.j@livemint.com

Rich Plum Cake 8 pieces Ingredients 300g refined flour (maida) N tsp salt 250g butter 300g brown sugar 100g powdered white sugar 300g mixed dry fruit (chopped into small pieces and soaked in rum/ brandy for one-two months) 1 tsp finely grated orange rind 3 eggs, beaten well K cup cold milk 1 tsp nutmeg powder 1 tsp cinnamon powder 1 tsp vanilla essence 1 tsp baking powder 1 tsp date syrup Method Cream the butter, sugar and brown sugar well. Add the beaten eggs, date syrup and vanilla essence, and mix well. Add the orange rind, dried fruits, nutmeg and cinnamon powder, and mix. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt together in a big bowl. Fold the flour into the butter mixture. If the mixture is too thick, add some milk. When evenly mixed, pour the mixture into a greased and papered cake tin, and bake in a hot oven for 45 minutes at 150 degrees Celsius or till the cake is cooked inside and brown on top.

Recipe courtesy Bridget White Kumar.

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Czech Tourism. Edited excerpts from an interview: What defines Czech cuisine?

How has it evolved?

Svoboda: We have an ancient history. At some point or other, Bohemia and Moravia, the two Czech regions, have been under the rule of German, Austrian, Hungarian royal dynasties and Communists. The country is in the heart of Europe, linking Poland, Latvia, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Russia. All these rulers and cultures have influenced our food. Red meats, games like rabbit, duck, and starch form the base of Czech cuisine. The only fish we eat are freshwater—carp, trout, pike-perch. Our techniques, however, are more like the French—a lot of braising, frying, etc, but more spicy and less buttery. We don’t use too much cream either. It’s more robust.

Horký: Nowadays, few eat traditional food except on Sundays and holidays. Restaurants too had taken to serving French, German, Italian or a mishmash of all these. Over the last few years, Czech cuisine has come back in vogue. People are beginning to appreciate it and reinterpret it to suit modern tastes.

All Saints, Brigade Road, Bangalore It accepts fully mixed cake batter at 1pm till 10 December. Deliver­ ies are made at 3.30­4.30pm. Call 080­25572091.

Institute of Baking and Cake Art, Mission Road, Bangalore The ovens can be hired in the evening for cakes of all sizes.

Charges, `75 a kg. Call 080­22106619.

Sharda Pastry Shop, Hauz Khas main market, New Delhi Ovens are available from 10­24 December at `250 a kg (last year’s price). Call 9911082828.

Surinder Bakery, IP Extension, New Delhi Located near Madhu Vihar, it takes orders from 10 December.

Charges, `150 a kg (last year’s price). Call 9810436077.

Regal Bakery and Store, Bandra, Mumbai It bakes cakes of all sizes but prefers requests that come in after noon. Charges, `74 a kg.

Call 022­26518874.

Heady start: Several kilograms of dry fruits being soaked in alco­ hol at Bangalore’s ITC Garde­ nia; and (left) Kumar inherited her recipe from her grandmother.

How difficult is it to get a vegetarian meal in your country?

Horký: Traditionally? Impossible. No one would know what to serve, except maybe a soup and the sides of vegetables. But things have changed somewhat.

Now even non-vegetarians are switching to healthier alternatives. Chicken and fish are replacing pork and duck. We eat a lot of potatoes and vegetables like carrots, peas and cabbage.

Svoboda: Most restaurants in big cities have a limited vegetarian section on their menu.

What are the kitchen staples?

Svoboda: Spices like caraway (shah zeera), paprika, cinnamon, butter, herbs like thyme and

marjoram (marwa in Hindi, maruga in Kannada or muruvu in Tamil), potatoes, plum jams and wild fresh mushrooms.

Horký: Czechs were big on foraging. They would go out to gather mushrooms and put whatever they could find in the soup. So, often it would be a mixed variety. We also use a lot of vinegar—a typically Czech variety made from potato.

There’s a very rich local beer tradition. What kind of food goes well with Czech beer?

Horký: Robust Czech food. Beers are a part of the Czech way of life and the food served at the beer halls is a cuisine in itself.

Svoboda: Our lagers are more hoppy and less fizzy than foreign ones and have a thick head. It goes well with the richer flavours. And we gave the world Pilsner. It’s named after Pilsen, the city where it was first brewed in a public brewery in the mid-1840s.

Goulash with Carlsbad Dumplings Serves 2 Ingredients For the goulash 200g beef loin 100g onions, finely chopped 10g garlic, crushed 2 tsp sweet paprika powder 1g dry marjoram 1g caraway 500ml beef stock

10g flour Pepper, salt, sunflower oil as required For the dumplings K pound sliced bread 3 eggs (separated) 20g butter K cup milk Salt, parsley (chopped), nutmeg to taste Method Fry onions in oil until golden brown. Add the meat and ground paprika, and fry for a short while, then add the beef stock. Add a pinch of salt, caraway, crushed garlic, marjoram.

Cook till the meat is soft, but leave the juices to reduce. Add flour (dissolved in water first) to thicken and bring to boil, then simmer for 20 minutes.

To make the dumplings, cut bread into cubes and lightly roast in the oven. After roasting, moisten them with half the milk in a big bowl. Add salt, nutmeg, chopped parsley, butter and the egg yolks. Whisk well.

Whip the white of the eggs until stiff and add to the mix.

Beat together to make a smooth dough. Roll the mixture in tin foil to make cylinders of about 6cm in diameter. Steam for 20 minutes. Take out of the foil and cut into discs half an inch thick.

Serve the goulash warm with plenty of gravy and the dumplings on the side.

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011

L7

Style

LOUNGE KEDAR BHAT/MINT

OUT OF THE CLOSET

Glass palace Entrepreneur Raja Dhody, who is preparing to launch a men’s accessory line, shows us why his closet is his castle

Deep focus: Glasses are a favoured accessory and Dhody has various pairs, many of them Gucci or Carrera.

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

···························· n entrepreneur with his finger in many pies, including the Nanking restaurant in Delhi, Raja Dhody claims to be in retirement. Not that it has slowed him down. He is excited about the new guest suite in his home, and a men’s accessory line is in the works.

We got a glimpse of his closet—alarmingly the size of a “normal” living room in Mumbai—which has a drawer full of belts with eclectic buckles and a whole rail of white shirts, among other things. Dhody talks about the upcoming accessories line, his fetish for spectacles with coloured frames and his shoes. Edited excerpts from the interview:

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How do you dress for business?

For business, I usually just wear trousers and a shirt; I don’t wear a suit. I hardly ever wear ties—I just hate them. My friend Avinash Punjabi does some amazing stuff, really brilliant, as a matter of fact. A lot of people go to him. I never used to get a suit made in India, I just found that they could never do it well.

I used to buy all my suits abroad but I find that Avinash does a really fantastic job. He’s made some really funky stuff for me. I feel it’s nicer to get your trousers custom-made.

What do you wear around the house and how does that differ from when you go out?

I’m most comfortable in my T-shirt and jeans, that’s about it. Or if I’m totally alone, maybe track pants and a T-shirt. I’m still a jeans and T-shirt kind of guy for when I go out, maybe a shirt sometimes, but recently, for some strange reason, I’ve started dressing up a little more. I don’t really plan anything, there’s never any major effort put into it, but you have to go out looking semi-decent.

WATCHMAN

SIDIN VADUKUT

HUNTING DOWN AN HMT

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ut we have Titan automatic, Sir!” said the somewhat bemused saleswoman as I thanked her, turned around and exited, defeated, from the sixth or seventh watch store that morning.

“Thank you, Miss,” I said, “but I really have to buy an HMT watch.”

A month or so ago, I was suddenly taken with the idea of buying an Indian automatic watch. I don’t remember how this inexplicable need suddenly hit me. Maybe I walked past a billboard in an airport for one of Titan’s gorgeous Tandem skeleton automatic watches. I am not exactly sure what planted that seed of desire, but it was planted deep and firm.

So at first I began to read up on Titan’s automatic range.

Some of those watches are truly gorgeous and great value, especially in comparison to

European marquees. You can get a handsome Titan automatic for well below `20,000. Late last month I’d written to Harish Bhat, chief operating officer, watches, Titan Industries Ltd (he also writes the Tongue-in-Cheek column for Mint), and he told me in an email that his favourite Titan automatic is the superb 9277WL01 model priced at `16,995.

But in the process of googling Titans, I began to run into these forum posts on newish HMT automatics. And they looked amazing in the way that Fabindia clothes look amazing: somewhat flawed, not entirely well-finished, but utterly desirable. What was most seductive about these watches was the fact that the movements were automatics entirely made at HMT factories in India. Not Chinese, not mass-produced Swiss, but authentic Indian movements.

Cloaked: (clockwise from left) Dhody in an Emporio Armani jacket, a new acquisi­ tion; a white Dolce & Gabbana blazer; and a Gucci jacket, a well­ worn favourite.

What are your ‘go to’ brands?

I shop mostly at Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana. But for jeans, I somehow still prefer only Zara.

I find that they fit really well.

Emporio (Armani) as well these days. These are the brands I’m quite fond of. In London, I shop in the big department stores and Covent Garden has a lot of tiny boutiques that are great.

There’s a reasonably priced Chinese guy there who makes some amazing shirts.

Tell us a bit about the accessory line you’re planning to launch.

It’s a line which will be basically in silver with precious stones, and non-precious stones. I don’t see much happening for men so I think it’s about time! It will be for anyone from their 20s to their 50s and even 60s. Since it’s men’s stuff, it will be belts, sunglasses, bracelets and pendants.

I’m just taking my time because I want to do it properly, not just the regular stuff you see anywhere; kind of something along

the lines of Chrome Hearts. It should be ready in about four months or so. I’ve had a few thoughts but I haven’t hit upon a name yet, let’s see.

What’s the one accessory that’s a part of you and you wouldn’t be seen without?

I actually have a few of them.

Right now, I have a fetish for glasses. On my last trip I bought about 10 different colours. I have blues, pinks and reds, and that’s something new for me. I’m wearing Carreras right now, but I’ve got everything you could think of, some really funky ones. I’ve gone a bit berserk. Otherwise, a really good belt and an excellent pair of shoes are really important to me. I love my watches and have a collection of unusual pieces. I can’t buy the Hublots and that kind of stuff—everyone has them. I’m wearing a Harry Winston at the moment. I have some Gerald Gentas, some really crazy Piagets—it’s a regular brand but the ones I have are

Now, I must admit that I had no idea HMT made automatics. I knew that the beleaguered company still made watches. But automatics? Who knew.

The more I read about the watches, the more I got hooked. Thanks to some obsessive HMT collectors on the Watchuseek.com forums, I learnt that HMT has two somewhat new automatic ranges: the NASL and the ADSL. And the moment I saw the NASL-03 model with the white dial and brown leather strap, I knew I was hooked. It was love at first sight. Inside the watch is a movement based on the Time travel: HMT automatics are made 8205 automatic calibre entirely in its Indian factories. made by Citizen’s Miyota division in Japan. The watch is a simple three-hand excellent value for money (add model with a day and date at the another zero if you want the 3’o clock position. For added exact same configuration from a “desi value”, the watch displays half-decent Swiss brand). the day in Hindi and English.

But how to buy it? First, I Priced at around `4,000, with called all the HMT phone a genuine leather strap, numbers I could find on the luminous hands and at least Internet. Not a single one three days’ power reserve on a worked. Then, I called up all the full winding, the watch seemed stockists I could find in

really unique.

How about jewellery?

Right now, I’m wearing this leather bracelet that I bought for about €20 (around `1,340) in Ibiza a few months ago. I have a lot of this stuff and it’s pretty good, it’s lasted me almost three months already. I picked up a lot of stuff (on) that trip and it was quite funny—I was staying on a friend’s yacht and I went there wearing all this stuff. The next thing you know, he comes back wearing the same stuff as me! We had a good laugh about it.

What do you recommend to friends?

I definitely make recommendations when they’re buying watches. When they look at brands that every second person seems to have, I always tell them to get something unusual. I was wearing a really nice Chopard watch recently, one of my favourite watches, and my daughter Nadine really likes it, so I just took it off and gave it to

half-a-dozen online yellow page services. Not one of them stocked HMTs any more. Then, I decided to hit the road. An entire circuit of Connaught Place later I all but gave up. The most humiliating experience was walking into a store stocked high with Breguets and Rolexes and sheepishly asking if they had any HMT NASL-03s.

Back home, I decided to give it one last shot: eBay India.

Et, voilà!

Roop Agarwal, who later told me his main business is a textile exporting outfit in Lucknow, runs KVSuperstore, an online storefront on eBay India.

Agarwal’s store stocks 24 different models of HMT watches. The cheapest is the `650 HMT Prabal, and the most expensive deal is `4,990 for a set of five gorgeous HMT Pilot watches (a splendid, funky gift idea).

Just two days after placing an order, I received a carefully packed NASL-03 timepiece with white face and brown strap in a

her. She couldn’t believe it; she got really excited about that.

Are you particular about shoes?

Ninety per cent of the shoes I wear are

by Cesare Paciotti.

I’ve been wearing them for years now and I’m constantly adding to my collection. Now, I get a pair or two shipped every month from the store in New York. Some of the Louis Vuitton shoes are nice but I’m still more of a Paciotti fan.

Have you ever made any phenomenally bad style decisions?

There’s one which always stands out. I used to play a lot of squash and I used to wear a turban those days. I wore this red patka with a red T-shirt and white shorts and I paired it with a crazy pair of red and white socks. I went there looking like such a fool!

I’ll never forget that day ever.

And I was playing with Sanjay Dutt and I’ll always remember the way they laughed at me that day.

Is there any aspect of your father’s or grandfather’s style that you picked up?

I think it’s the other way around in my case. For many years, my dad would come around to my house and whack all my T-shirts. I used to play a lot of golf, so I always had a good collection of T-shirts and I mostly wear Boss T-shirts for golf. I think my dad still whacks them, but right now, I’ve lost a bit of weight so he doesn’t fit into them!

What’s your favourite piece of clothing?

Right now, it’s a couple of jackets that I just picked up.

One is a Dolce and the other is

by Emporio.

delightfully retro dark blue HMT box made of faux leather. (the watch comes with a one-year warranty). Sensing my urgency, Agarwal even threw in express shipping from Lucknow for free, even though I’d only paid for regular courier.

Agarwal told me that he first began shipping HMT watches to textile buyers abroad who also wanted to sell Indian watches as novelties. Over time local demand had increased too, he said, and this is why he had begun selling them on eBay. The watch does have its quirks. The polished steel bezel has a few minute scratches, and the strap needed a touch of superglue to patch up a loose end. But those are minor quibbles. I absolutely love my watch.

So the next time you’re in the market for a good watch or a clever gift, why not give Roop Agarwal’s KVSuperstore a look?

His HMT watches are cheap, have a certain retro chic about them and, most of all, are bloody good watches.

Write to Sidin at watchman@livemint.com

L8

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011

Play

LOUNGE

TABLET WARS

What happened to the iPad killers?

We revisit 9 iPad challengers to find out why they didn’t make the cut B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· he 2010 launch of the iPad led to a lot of companies announcing similar products, and some of the most anticipated ones were featured in many lists as iPad killers. New and old companies, such as JooJoo and HewlettPackard (HP), didn’t arouse enough interest and many of these hyped devices ended up being disasters.

The quick launch of the iPad 2

T

Asus Eee Pad

RIM PlayBook

The Eee Pad went through a lot of evolu­ tion—moving from Windows to Android and eventually disappearing entirely. The 10­inch tablet finally materialized in the form of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer—a powerful tablet that can also become a laptop when you connect its keyboard.

The transformation mechanism is needlessly complicated though, which might be one of the factors holding back the Eee Pad.

The RIM PlayBook has an excellent form factor and an interface that bears a strong resem­ blance to HP’s webOS. The browser on the PlayBook is one of the best and the device also handles multitask­ ing competitively. Baffling design decisions held the tablet back and a severe lack of apps meant it didn’t catch the buyer’s eye.

affected the plans of quite a few companies and led to delays in entering the market as people tried to match the new device, leading, in many cases, to bloated features and overly optimistic pricing.

Some Android tablets, like the Acer Iconia and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, were reasonably successful, while the Nook Colour was an unexpected hit. Others didn’t fare quite as well though.

Here are nine tablets that failed to live up to the hype:

Archos 7 French firm Archos has been making tablets much longer than Apple, but the Archos 7 died a quiet death. Archos replaced it with the Archos 70, but even that isn’t a polished device. It works well as a portable media player, but not as a tablet. Reading, browsing and text input are imprecise and it lags slightly—it’s as if Archos completely ignored the iPad and the way it has changed portable devices while updating its product line.

Notion Ink Adam India’s bright hope in the tablet wars, the Adam was the most hyped tablet ever. Tech blogs had heated debates over the device, but prob­ lems at launch, a high price point, limited availability and marketing are just a few of the problems—the Adam is a let­ down, with limited battery life.

Moreover, the highly customized Android interface didn’t make effi­ cient use of all the hardware, slow­ ing down what should have been a speedy tablet.

MSI WindPad 110W The MSI WindPad was meant to be the breakout Windows tab­ let—Windows 7 has a lot of tablet­specific enhancements but is not a finger­friendly interface. The WindPad ran a custom interface that was a lot easier to use without a stylus, but the downside was that the interface slowed the tablet dramatically. Another drawback for the WindPad was its size—considering it doesn’t out­ perform Android and iOS devices, it was hard to justify the weight and thickness of the tablet. Microsoft’s refresh to Windows, Win­ dows 8, has gone through drastic redesign and could well be the answer to these problems—too bad for MSI that it won’t be out till next year.

Cisco Cius

HP TouchPad

A business­focused tablet from Cisco makes sense—the device has just launched in India, and it might catch on with the audience here. It can turn into a VoIP phone with a special dock, and handles video conferencing beauti­ fully. Its software has an enterprise focus. Internation­ ally at least, the device hasn’t made waves but if enough firms decide to adopt tablets, something like this could still become the next BlackBerry for busy executives.

HP’s TouchPad was the result of its acquisition of Palm, whose technology and expertise went into designing the webOS used in this fantastic tablet. The interface was one of the best out there, and the device was one of the few that matched up to the iPad. So why is it on this list? Since it wasn’t an Android tablet, there were few apps available for the TouchPad. To make things worse, management issues in HP hurt the tablet greatly. It was discontinued in less than two months, before it got a chance to catch on.

Dell Streak

Fusion Garage JooJoo A 12­inch slate, the JooJoo had the potential to be the best multi­ media tablet in the mar­ ket, but questionable design decisions led to an overpriced browser in a box that barely sold 100 units before being discontinued. Fusion Garage launched the Grid10, a 10­inch Android tablet, in the US in Octo­ ber, to lacklustre reviews.

comes with a market of curated apps that use the pen. It also comes with several such apps built into the device, allowing you to make notes on top of calendars, for example. The execution is slick and the Note is powerful enough to let all this happen without any particular slowdown.

It also has a powerful 2,500 mAh battery, and the battery life is good. Unless you’re planning on doing a lot of HD video recording, or are streaming a lot of data, it should keep you going for over 24 hours between charges.

Samsung’s Jack of all trades The firm hopes its Galaxy Note can create a category between phones and tablets B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· s it a phone? Is it a tablet? No, it’s a new paradigm in portable computing! Or at least that’s what Samsung would have you believe. The Korean company launched its Galaxy Note in India and worldwide on 2 November, and it is a thoroughly impressive device. The power and style are instantly obvious, and the interface is extremely user-friendly.

The problem with the Note is that it’s trying to fill a hole that does not exist—the iPad was also dismissed by many techni-

I

cal writers with the same logic, but in trying to give the best of tablet and phone experiences, Samsung’s device falls short on both counts.

What works?

The Note has a 5.3-inch full-HD Super AMOLED screen, and is one of the best on any handheld today. Just the screen makes a compelling case for buying the Note, or N-700, if you want to get technical. The huge body is also unbelievably light—it’s only 9mm thick and weighs 178g. The size is a little big for most pockets, but if it fits, you won’t really feel it there.

It also has a ridiculously powerful 1.4 GHz dual core processor, backed by almost 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of storage space on the system. This is clearly a machine that can handle anything you want to do.

The 8 MP camera, with a 2 MP front-facing camera for video

chats, can also shoot high-definition video. The camera is excellent, and the size of the Note makes it really good for taking pictures—it’s a lot easier to hold than a tablet, and the added size means that most people with normal-sized hands can use it easily.

A unique feature is the S pen—a capacitive pen that slots into the base of the device. It’s a little hard to remove, and unlike the styluses that you might be using, the S pen has a thin nib and is pressure-sensitive. This makes it a lot more accurate and it can be used for a number of tasks—artwork and sketching are obvious uses, and so is handwriting recognition.

Using the Note to draw a sketch is really simple, and it is both fast and accurate. So for artists, designers and other creative people, this feature will definitely add value. The other use of the pen has been in near univer-

The 5­inch Streak—like the just launched Gal­ axy Note—is an inter­ esting device, but it was trying to fill a gap that just didn’t exist. It is supposed to have the portability of a phone and the viewing experience of a tablet, but the end result feels like they got those things a little mixed up. It doesn’t help that battery life is abysmal and the screen is slightly unresponsive.

What doesn’t work?

Duly noted: The N­700 can actually function as a notebook. sal handwriting recognition—it makes note-taking a lot faster than before and the size of the Note means it can actually be used in that role.

The Note actually has a lot of custom-designed apps to take advantage of the S pen, and also

Taken on its own terms, the Note is an impressive device, even if the marketing team decided that 8 gigabits sounds better than 976 MB. However, the device has to be considered in a crowded market, where the consumer has a number of options.

First off, this is a smartphone.

It’s far too small to be considered a tablet—lovely as the screen is, reading on it and reading on the iPad, or even the 7-inch Galaxy

Tab or BlackBerry PlayBook, are different experiences. Websites look cramped, unless compared with the much smaller iPhone or Android phones.

As a phone though, the Note is too big to be comfortable. Holding it while typing or reading is easy, but holding it in one hand while you talk is awkward. Having something that big held against your face looks and feels strange—it’s as if you’re back to Nokia and the N-Gage, a device we’ve all been trying to forget.

At `34,990, the Note is a tough sell. There’s so much to like about this phone—anyone who uses it will be charmed instantly.

But a moment’s sober reflection makes it a lot harder to recommend. It costs as much as an iPad 2 or the equally impressive new Samsung Galaxy Tab. The Note is a device that you will either love or hate, simply because of its screen size. In every other aspect, it’s one of the best devices for its price today.

You’ll want to see how it fits into your life before committing to the phone, because at that size, it isn’t for everyone, no matter what Samsung says.

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011

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Business Lounge

LOUNGE MARTEN PIETERS

Making the right calls The MD and CEO of Vodafone India on making tough decisions, travers­ ing continents and telemarketing

B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN arun.j@livemint.com

···························· hen Marten Pieters visited Mumbai for talks with Vodafone India on a possible position in the company, he stayed at The Taj Mahal Palace hotel with wife Dettha. The month was November; the year, 2008.

The subsequent events could easily have influenced Pieters’ decision to work in India, as a bunch of gunmen attacked the hotel and several other places in the city, laying siege to it for a dramatic three days. The couple, who were dining in the Taj’s Lebanese restaurant Souk at the time of the incident, eventually escaped from the hotel and were temporarily sheltered at Taj’s Wellington Mews serviced apartments.

It was here that Pieters remembers his decision being made when they encountered an elderly Italian couple who visited Mumbai every year and stayed at the Taj. Asked if they would ever return, the Italians said they planned to move into

W

the Taj as soon as it was ready to receive guests and would be back the following year. You don’t want the bad guys to win, do you, they asked Pieters.

“I found it an amazing spark of courage and insight,” remembers Pieters, 58. “Also, this could have happened anywhere—London, Madrid, an embassy in Kenya…lightning strike can happen anywhere.

We decided it would not impact our decision but it had an impact on our personal life.”

Both took some time to recover from the incident— Dettha longer than frequent flyer Pieters—but they returned to India after Pieters joined Vodafone in February 2009 as managing director and chief executive officer, and shifted his residence to the Wellington Mews.

It’s relatively early in the morning when this meeting takes place, at the Champagne Lounge just off the Oberoi lobby. Pieters comes in a few minutes ahead of schedule and prefers to sit with his back to the sharp morning sunlight streaming in through the large glass walls facing the Arabian Sea. We both need our coffee, a lot of it, as there is a repeat order during the course of the meeting.

Pieters prefers not to speak about himself. He indicates it has something to do with his Dutch upbringing, which makes people from that country “down to earth”. It also, he says, determines his management style, a modesty that is important in an organization.

“What is extraordinary is I am

from an ordinary background.

My father was a hairdresser. I am not from a big industrial family,” he says.

Pieters took over at a time when Vodafone was second (to Bharti Airtel) in India in its revenue market share, but it also had huge tax liabilities following Vodafone’s acquisition of a stake in Hutchison Essar earlier (the Supreme Court hearing in the `11,217-crore tax case has concluded, its judgement has been reserved). So for Pieters, it was “a big financial exposure”.

Additionally, Vodafone’s investments in emerging markets had not turned out well. “For me, it was that scale and complexity that was attractive,” he explains.

Vodafone Essar, with a 23.56% market share, had a subscriber base of 144.14 million as of August, according to the Cellular Operators Association of India. It continues to be second to Bharti Airtel, which has a 28.09% market share, but in mid-2010, Vodafone became the fifth operator in the world with 100

IN PARENTHESIS For someone who comes from the sanitized world of Western Europe, what Marten Pieters likes most about Mumbai is the buzz. “If you would have a lot more spare time, you would think, ‘What can I do in Mumbai?’ I don’t have that problem. I like Mumbai a lot because the thrive, activity and energy level is high,” he says. Though he lives in the relatively quieter Colaba, work takes Pieters to the bustling working district of Lower Parel.

Sometime back, the Pieters were in Beijing, China, and he found it empty. “I wondered where the people are. Where do they hide the people?” He has the same reaction when he goes home to The Netherlands. “You get used to the vibe that Mumbai brings,” he adds.

Déjà vu: Marten Pieters says the 3G auctions here reminded him of the time when these happened in the UK and Germany. ‘It’s funny yet tragic that it’s happened twice and seems unavoidable.’

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

million customers in a single country.

“Business, in the end, is about making money. But I would rather sell someone a mobile phone which would improve his life than the 100th brand for perfume,” he says.

What does one do about the annoying telemarketing text messages selling onebedroom flats in Mira Road with a free ceiling fan thrown in? “Even I get them,” smiles Pieters, before explaining the concept of an SMS termination fee between operators that could act as a deterrent. The new rule of a maximum of 100 text messages a day (later increased to 200) is what he calls a great example of bad regulation.

The most common complaints he gets are about connection problems and billing.

“The Indian customer is value aware, easy to speak out,” he says, smiling. “I am used to that. Most complaints are about connection problems, but that has to do with network. We are constantly configuring our infrastructure. Radio technology is more art than science. It’s like a living organism.”

Having studied law from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands with a major in economics, Pieters started working in 1977 with a family owned confectionery company, Royal Smilde Food Plc., as general counsel. But it was soon clear to him that the business side of the enterprise interested him more than the legal angle, so he moved to finance. He then became MD of one of the subsidiaries, a confectionery company. It was the job his children (they have four sons) loved the most, because of the added benefits of what dad could bring back home.

In 1989, he joined KPN, the Dutch operator of the postal and telecom services, working in various positions, as their commercial director, managing director of a telecom region, vice-president of international operations and then as executive vice-president

for KPN International, pushing their telecom assets in emerging markets (Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa).

It was the time he made his first visit to India, in 1995, looking for investment opportunities for KPN but decided against it in the end. He was interested though in this small Kolkata-based company called Usha Martin. “It was for me a toe-in-the-water strategy: If you don’t know the temperature, then you put your toe in the water before you jump in.

It’s funny because a part of Vodafone is a part of Usha Martin, which merged several entities. In a long way, I came back to the same company.”

By the turn of the decade, as the Internet bubble burst and the telecom industry collapsed, the company accumulated too much debt and had to sell off its assets. “In the end, I sold everything I had built, which was not a nice thing to do,” he says.

Pieters became the CEO of a start-up in Africa called Celtel International BV, a pan-African mobile telecom operator.

His four-year stint ended in 2007, after Celtel was sold to MTC Kuwait (Zain). “It was a new continent for me,” says Pieters of Africa. “Once you learn how to deal with different cultures, it does not matter so much if it’s China, India or Africa. Forget what you have learnt at home. What you culturally see is that people close doors believing that the way we do things at home is the way the world should do it. Once you learn to leave that behind, and appreciate what people do in other cultures, it does not matter. People are the same everywhere, it’s just the packaging that’s different country to country.

You need to learn how to unwrap that packaging.”

As a non-executive board member of telecommunications group Millicom International Cellular SA in Luxembourg from 2008, Pieters went into some form of “semi-retirement” but realized that it was probably too early. “You need some peace of mind to sit back… I realized I was too young for that.” And then Vodafone happened.

“We need future investments,” he continues. “The moment you watch a YouTube video, we have to open a huge pipe somewhere because it’s a lot of data. It costs money. This industry contributes an enormous amount to the coffers of tax money but there is not enough appreciation in return.

We are the milking cow.”

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MADHU KAPPARATH

MADHU KAPPARATH

PUBLISHING

Stalwart: Poet Adil Jus­ sawalla was a contribu­ tor to Quest—his poem Love is included in The Best of Quest.

REVOLUTIONARY

ROAD From 1955­75, a small literary magazine in Mumbai published some of India’s greatest writers and thinkers, before falling victim to Cold War conspiracies and the Emergency. A new anthology recalls its heady legacy, and its importance to Indian modernity

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

···························· ne night in 2007, Achal Prabhala picked up a magazine from the stack that had been mouldering gently by his bedside for months. It was a pile his parents had regretfully handed him to give away to a public library, as they redid their century-old Bangalore home.

Prabhala, who had not gotten around to doing so, opened an issue at random. Then, suddenly thrilled, he stayed up reading one issue after another.

Here, in the pages of a forgotten title called Quest, was the colossal Nirad Chaudhuri, writing in his characteristically provocative style about “the Hindu order” (at the end, a note: “The writer does not apologise for using the word ‘Hindu’...instead of ‘Indian’”). Here, many years later, was Dilip Chitre attacking Chaudhuri’s “hate-affair with India” with silken vigour. Here was Jyotirmoy Datta arguing that Indian writing in English was the work of “caged chaffinches”, to evoke a response from no less than Purushottama Lal—Prof. P. Lal—about the form and function of Indian English literature Here was Allen Ginsberg producing poetry for Quest in the winter of 1962-63. Here was

O

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

The Best of Quest: A collection of essays, fiction and poetry from the journal Quest.

Mujibur Rehman’s proclamation of independence for Bangladesh, in Bengali with an English translation, dated March 1971, in that year’s September issue. Here was Agha Shahid Ali with a poem about the Nizamuddin dargah, and Arun Kolatkar’s Three Cups of Tea (“no passport/ the police commissioner asked/ why did you go to Burma?/ prickface I said /what’s there in India?”)

Fascinated, Prabhala dug deeper. He discovered that Quest had begun life in 1955 and run for 20 years, as a quarterly and then a bimonthly. It had published poetry, fiction, intellectual debates and political essays. Some of its bylines were now obscure, but many were not. The magazine had carried original poetry by Jayanta Mahapatra and Dom Moraes. A young sociologist, Ashis Nandy, had had some early essays published here. Film-maker Satyajit Ray’s illustrations appeared alongside a piece called Konarak by Marie Seton, later Ray’s biographer. Quest’s first and most influential editor had been no less a poet than Nissim Ezekiel.

It was 20 years of independent India’s intellectual history stitched together in the suave, yellowing pages of almost 100 issues, which the Prabhalas had collected for decades.

“It had disappeared off the map,” Prabhala, a writer and researcher, says. “There are no archives to look up—this collection existed in my parents’ home.”

The journal impressed him on many levels. “It mixed high-level political commentary with good, daring new fiction,” he says. “It was a magazine in which you could read a new poem by Kamala Das immediately after a lengthy essay on the Chinese invasion. The cover art was imaginative and sophisticated, and the language was perfect.”

Years after it first got his attention, The Best of Quest, the book Prabhala helped put together—a collection of essays, fiction and poetry from the journal—is finally available in book stores. His co-editors had even closer relationships with Quest. Writer and scholar Arshia Sattar’s mother had once worked as Ezekiel’s assistant, and Quest had been part of Sattar’s

childhood landscape. And the first name on the anthology, Laeeq Futehally, had been Quest’s literary editor for its entire run.

Now in her 90s, Futehally writes in an essay at the start of the book, “When World War II (WW II) finally came to an end in 1945, the overwhelming reaction throughout the world was Never Again...

For every man—we now said—the only “ism” must be a personal brand of idealism.”

The story of Quest’s illustrious life and infamous death is a story about idealism and global realpolitik. Its beginnings lie in the heady post-WW II history of an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CCF, born in Berlin in 1950 during the grim first act of the Cold War, was the brainchild of a group of European and American intellectuals who rejected the ideological pressures of communism: Arthur Koestler drafted its manifesto.

Its mandate was quickly adopted by local chapters around the world, many of which began their own magazines, most famously Encounter in England, edited by the poet Stephen Spender.

The Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF) was also born in 1950, presided over by Jayaprakash Narayan. In 1955, the lawyer, freedom fighter and politician Minoo Masani, one of its leading lights, founded a literary journal in the ICCF offices in the Army and Navy Building overlooking Kala Ghoda square, in Mumbai.

Its principles were both liberal and sharply defined. “Quest was opposed to collectivist thinking in any form,” explains S.V. Raju, secretary of the ICCF and editor of another magazine, the political monthly Freedom First, which continues to publish. “It never imposed its views on writers, but it championed the idea of the individual as the centre of society, as opposed to the collective, which was a big part of thinking at the time.”

The bare bones of this old ideological battle may seem brittle today. In the 1950s, they were at the centre of a new country’s intellectual life. Coloured now by nostalgia or a philosophical opposi-

tion to “Nehruvian” India, it is not always apparent to us how nuanced and contested that Nehruvianism was for the people living its realities—or striving to improve them.

Masani became one of the country’s most vocal advocates for a liberal economy. Culturally, the ICCF’s members had always found themselves closer to Ambedkar than to Gandhi. While some of them remained sceptical of Jawaharlal Nehru’s politics, others thought him a worthy counterweight to the advancing global influence of Mao Zedong.

This background was part of the ethos which informed Quest. Originally intended to be published from Calcutta (now Kolkata), the magazine found the visionary it was looking for in a 30-year-old Jewish Bombayite. As their first editor, the CCF chose Ezekiel, poet, critic, and eventually, the most famous professor of English Bombay University was to have.

Ezekiel was a literary modernist.

He shared the CCF’s disinclination for ideologues, but hoped, it appears, to represent a fair spectrum of political views in the magazine. His non-partisan politics led him to fashion a new imagination for the journal.

“The principles which Nissim laid down for himself have shaped the character of Quest,” Futehally writes in her introduction. “Everything about it must have some relevance to India. It was to be written by Indians for Indians.”

“Nissim was privately an antiCommunist,” says Raju. Yet he was to fight several battles with the journal’s advisory board because of his belief that Quest should represent views opposed to those of its founders.

Ezekiel was a sharp and sensitive critic, but perhaps his most enduring literary legacy was his mentorship of generations of young poets and writers. “Go and write,” he told Sattar when he first met her at her parents’ home in Calcutta. She was eight years old.

He was the man who told Shanta Gokhale to try writing in her native tongue, Marathi, and a 17-year-old Githa Hariharan, with great kindness, that her early work was “juvenilia”. In his obituary for Ezekiel, who had Alzheimer’s and

died in 2004, poet Ranjit Hoskote writes that his enduring memory of Ezekiel is of “a man in aquiline profile, hunched over a spot-lit desk…immersed though he might be in writing…he always left his door ajar.”

His Quest was to publish Gauri Deshpande, Adil Jussawalla, Mahapatra, Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan, and the young Saleem Peeradina, Kolatkar and Chitre. Its fiction contributors included Keki Daruwalla, Anita Desai, Kiran Nagarkar and Abraham Eraly.

Reading them today, the sheer verve and range of these writers is inescapable. Peeradina wrote not just poetry, but lucid film criticism.

Chitre translated the work of pioneering social activist Hamid Dalwai. In its later years, a mysterious “D.”, who wrote a widely read column on pop culture, made waves—poet and professor Eunice de Souza remembers selecting a “D.” column on actor Rajesh Khanna for a Bombay University course, and the storm of argument that followed it.

“It was read in almost every university, every library, and by intellectuals and professionals,” Raju says. “Its circulation may have been 3,000-4,000.” It is not always simple to quantify intellectual influence. In Lal’s essay on Indian writing in English, he remarks in a throwaway line that T.S. Eliot’s legendary The Criterion, after all, had no more than 800 subscribers at one time.

Quest brought together Englishspeaking Indians across what Prabhala today describes as a “centreright to something of a wide left” spectrum in the days of inland letter cards and expensive telegrams.

“Independence was seven years past when Quest began,” Sattar remarks. “The writing shows you the concern about how you were going to create the consciousness of a new world—how you would inhabit a new world, and a new South Asia.”

The clearest indications of its target audience are the advertisements directed at them—ads reproduced painstakingly in The Best of Quest. Here, Mafatlal “puts colour into my life”, suggests a man posing as a painter. “For TURN TO PAGE L12®

Guiding light: The satirical, thoughtful Dilip Chitre was one of Quest’s most influ­ ential contributors and thinkers.

TN PERUMAL

Laeeq Futehally

RYAN LOBO

Arshia Sattar

Achal Prabhala

THE PRINCIPLES WHICH NISSIM (EZEKIEL) LAID DOWN FOR HIMSELF HAVE SHAPED THE CHARACTER OF QUEST... EVERYTHING ABOUT IT MUST HAVE SOME RELEVANCE TO INDIA. IT WAS TO BE WRITTEN BY INDIANS FOR INDIANS.

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MADHU KAPPARATH

MADHU KAPPARATH

PUBLISHING

Stalwart: Poet Adil Jus­ sawalla was a contribu­ tor to Quest—his poem Love is included in The Best of Quest.

REVOLUTIONARY

ROAD From 1955­75, a small literary magazine in Mumbai published some of India’s greatest writers and thinkers, before falling victim to Cold War conspiracies and the Emergency. A new anthology recalls its heady legacy, and its importance to Indian modernity

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

···························· ne night in 2007, Achal Prabhala picked up a magazine from the stack that had been mouldering gently by his bedside for months. It was a pile his parents had regretfully handed him to give away to a public library, as they redid their century-old Bangalore home.

Prabhala, who had not gotten around to doing so, opened an issue at random. Then, suddenly thrilled, he stayed up reading one issue after another.

Here, in the pages of a forgotten title called Quest, was the colossal Nirad Chaudhuri, writing in his characteristically provocative style about “the Hindu order” (at the end, a note: “The writer does not apologise for using the word ‘Hindu’...instead of ‘Indian’”). Here, many years later, was Dilip Chitre attacking Chaudhuri’s “hate-affair with India” with silken vigour. Here was Jyotirmoy Datta arguing that Indian writing in English was the work of “caged chaffinches”, to evoke a response from no less than Purushottama Lal—Prof. P. Lal—about the form and function of Indian English literature Here was Allen Ginsberg producing poetry for Quest in the winter of 1962-63. Here was

O

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

The Best of Quest: A collection of essays, fiction and poetry from the journal Quest.

Mujibur Rehman’s proclamation of independence for Bangladesh, in Bengali with an English translation, dated March 1971, in that year’s September issue. Here was Agha Shahid Ali with a poem about the Nizamuddin dargah, and Arun Kolatkar’s Three Cups of Tea (“no passport/ the police commissioner asked/ why did you go to Burma?/ prickface I said /what’s there in India?”)

Fascinated, Prabhala dug deeper. He discovered that Quest had begun life in 1955 and run for 20 years, as a quarterly and then a bimonthly. It had published poetry, fiction, intellectual debates and political essays. Some of its bylines were now obscure, but many were not. The magazine had carried original poetry by Jayanta Mahapatra and Dom Moraes. A young sociologist, Ashis Nandy, had had some early essays published here. Film-maker Satyajit Ray’s illustrations appeared alongside a piece called Konarak by Marie Seton, later Ray’s biographer. Quest’s first and most influential editor had been no less a poet than Nissim Ezekiel.

It was 20 years of independent India’s intellectual history stitched together in the suave, yellowing pages of almost 100 issues, which the Prabhalas had collected for decades.

“It had disappeared off the map,” Prabhala, a writer and researcher, says. “There are no archives to look up—this collection existed in my parents’ home.”

The journal impressed him on many levels. “It mixed high-level political commentary with good, daring new fiction,” he says. “It was a magazine in which you could read a new poem by Kamala Das immediately after a lengthy essay on the Chinese invasion. The cover art was imaginative and sophisticated, and the language was perfect.”

Years after it first got his attention, The Best of Quest, the book Prabhala helped put together—a collection of essays, fiction and poetry from the journal—is finally available in book stores. His co-editors had even closer relationships with Quest. Writer and scholar Arshia Sattar’s mother had once worked as Ezekiel’s assistant, and Quest had been part of Sattar’s

childhood landscape. And the first name on the anthology, Laeeq Futehally, had been Quest’s literary editor for its entire run.

Now in her 90s, Futehally writes in an essay at the start of the book, “When World War II (WW II) finally came to an end in 1945, the overwhelming reaction throughout the world was Never Again...

For every man—we now said—the only “ism” must be a personal brand of idealism.”

The story of Quest’s illustrious life and infamous death is a story about idealism and global realpolitik. Its beginnings lie in the heady post-WW II history of an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). The CCF, born in Berlin in 1950 during the grim first act of the Cold War, was the brainchild of a group of European and American intellectuals who rejected the ideological pressures of communism: Arthur Koestler drafted its manifesto.

Its mandate was quickly adopted by local chapters around the world, many of which began their own magazines, most famously Encounter in England, edited by the poet Stephen Spender.

The Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (ICCF) was also born in 1950, presided over by Jayaprakash Narayan. In 1955, the lawyer, freedom fighter and politician Minoo Masani, one of its leading lights, founded a literary journal in the ICCF offices in the Army and Navy Building overlooking Kala Ghoda square, in Mumbai.

Its principles were both liberal and sharply defined. “Quest was opposed to collectivist thinking in any form,” explains S.V. Raju, secretary of the ICCF and editor of another magazine, the political monthly Freedom First, which continues to publish. “It never imposed its views on writers, but it championed the idea of the individual as the centre of society, as opposed to the collective, which was a big part of thinking at the time.”

The bare bones of this old ideological battle may seem brittle today. In the 1950s, they were at the centre of a new country’s intellectual life. Coloured now by nostalgia or a philosophical opposi-

tion to “Nehruvian” India, it is not always apparent to us how nuanced and contested that Nehruvianism was for the people living its realities—or striving to improve them.

Masani became one of the country’s most vocal advocates for a liberal economy. Culturally, the ICCF’s members had always found themselves closer to Ambedkar than to Gandhi. While some of them remained sceptical of Jawaharlal Nehru’s politics, others thought him a worthy counterweight to the advancing global influence of Mao Zedong.

This background was part of the ethos which informed Quest. Originally intended to be published from Calcutta (now Kolkata), the magazine found the visionary it was looking for in a 30-year-old Jewish Bombayite. As their first editor, the CCF chose Ezekiel, poet, critic, and eventually, the most famous professor of English Bombay University was to have.

Ezekiel was a literary modernist.

He shared the CCF’s disinclination for ideologues, but hoped, it appears, to represent a fair spectrum of political views in the magazine. His non-partisan politics led him to fashion a new imagination for the journal.

“The principles which Nissim laid down for himself have shaped the character of Quest,” Futehally writes in her introduction. “Everything about it must have some relevance to India. It was to be written by Indians for Indians.”

“Nissim was privately an antiCommunist,” says Raju. Yet he was to fight several battles with the journal’s advisory board because of his belief that Quest should represent views opposed to those of its founders.

Ezekiel was a sharp and sensitive critic, but perhaps his most enduring literary legacy was his mentorship of generations of young poets and writers. “Go and write,” he told Sattar when he first met her at her parents’ home in Calcutta. She was eight years old.

He was the man who told Shanta Gokhale to try writing in her native tongue, Marathi, and a 17-year-old Githa Hariharan, with great kindness, that her early work was “juvenilia”. In his obituary for Ezekiel, who had Alzheimer’s and

died in 2004, poet Ranjit Hoskote writes that his enduring memory of Ezekiel is of “a man in aquiline profile, hunched over a spot-lit desk…immersed though he might be in writing…he always left his door ajar.”

His Quest was to publish Gauri Deshpande, Adil Jussawalla, Mahapatra, Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan, and the young Saleem Peeradina, Kolatkar and Chitre. Its fiction contributors included Keki Daruwalla, Anita Desai, Kiran Nagarkar and Abraham Eraly.

Reading them today, the sheer verve and range of these writers is inescapable. Peeradina wrote not just poetry, but lucid film criticism.

Chitre translated the work of pioneering social activist Hamid Dalwai. In its later years, a mysterious “D.”, who wrote a widely read column on pop culture, made waves—poet and professor Eunice de Souza remembers selecting a “D.” column on actor Rajesh Khanna for a Bombay University course, and the storm of argument that followed it.

“It was read in almost every university, every library, and by intellectuals and professionals,” Raju says. “Its circulation may have been 3,000-4,000.” It is not always simple to quantify intellectual influence. In Lal’s essay on Indian writing in English, he remarks in a throwaway line that T.S. Eliot’s legendary The Criterion, after all, had no more than 800 subscribers at one time.

Quest brought together Englishspeaking Indians across what Prabhala today describes as a “centreright to something of a wide left” spectrum in the days of inland letter cards and expensive telegrams.

“Independence was seven years past when Quest began,” Sattar remarks. “The writing shows you the concern about how you were going to create the consciousness of a new world—how you would inhabit a new world, and a new South Asia.”

The clearest indications of its target audience are the advertisements directed at them—ads reproduced painstakingly in The Best of Quest. Here, Mafatlal “puts colour into my life”, suggests a man posing as a painter. “For TURN TO PAGE L12®

Guiding light: The satirical, thoughtful Dilip Chitre was one of Quest’s most influ­ ential contributors and thinkers.

TN PERUMAL

Laeeq Futehally

RYAN LOBO

Arshia Sattar

Achal Prabhala

THE PRINCIPLES WHICH NISSIM (EZEKIEL) LAID DOWN FOR HIMSELF HAVE SHAPED THE CHARACTER OF QUEST... EVERYTHING ABOUT IT MUST HAVE SOME RELEVANCE TO INDIA. IT WAS TO BE WRITTEN BY INDIANS FOR INDIANS.

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NISSIM WAS PERHAPS A MORE ACCESSIBLE PRIMA DONNA, BUT THE EDITORS OF ‘QUEST’ WERE ALL PRIMA DONNAS. THEY WERE PEOPLE WHO WERE VERY PARTICULAR ABOUT NOT BEING TOLD WHAT TO DO.

® FROM FROM PAGE L11 L10

elegance and comfort, Lambretta 150 li,” says an ad for the famous scooter. With their sparkling, lengthy copy and sophisticated models in translucent saris, they recall a time when such advertisements targeted a very small, but fairly homogenous band of English-speaking sophisticates across the country. In its last years, the magazine cost a generous `2.

But money was always a question. “If you look at the minutes of the meetings, you will come up again and again against records of people fighting about `15-20,” Raju points out. Futehally writes that Ezekiel’s literary principles—insisting that people should submit work because they wish to be heard, rather than paid— added a layer of complication; she often had to ignore his injunction that book reviewers return the review copies to the magazine after they were done.

Ezekiel’s depoliticized vision for the magazine proved difficult to sustain. Conflict with Masani and Quest’s advisory board increased. A few years after inception, Ezekiel was asked to stay on as “reviews editor” in Bombay, while the CCF appointed two new co-editors in Calcutta: the philosopher Abu Sayeed Ayyub, and the economist Amlan Datta.

“Nissim was perhaps a more accessible prima donna, but the editors of Quest were all prima donnas,” says Raju. “They were people who were very particular about not being told what to do.”

Ayyub and Datta’s clipped introduction to an early anthology, Ten Years of Quest (1965), gives us a sense of their cast of mind, as well as their style, well removed from Ezekiel’s.

“We have been devoting much more space to discursive writing than to creative literature—for one obvious reason,” they write.

“Quest is an English language magazine, and English is not the mother tongue of 99% Indians…

While we welcome adventures in germinal ideas of permanent interest, we are not averse to those which are ephemeral if they are timely. But what we would like to promote most….are timely thoughts—analytical, critical and constructive.”

By 1975, the magazine had lost

COURTESY TRANQUEBAR PRESS

From the archives: (top) A page from the magazine; and advertisements that appeared in Quest. none of its liberal vigour, but had reduced its literary content greatly. Meanwhile, the political climate of India had changed.

When Indira Gandhi’s government declared a national emergency, Quest faced its ultimate challenge. The government required it to be submitted for review before publication.

Masani went to court to ensure the liberty of his other magazine, the straightforwardly political Freedom First. But his relationship with Quest had only grown more ambivalent since the early years of debate with Ezekiel. “He

made no special efforts for Quest,” Raju recalls.

Instead of bowing to government diktat, Quest chose to cease publication. It was never to resume.

But well before its end, the story of Quest had received a true Cold War denouement. In the late 1960s, the international CCF had dissolved amid increasing evidence that it had, at various points and during various programmes, received funding from the US’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for its activities.

Around the world, intellec-

tual leaders who were part of the CCF disclaimed all relation to this development. In India, Masani went on record to state that no one at Quest had had any dealings with or knowledge of CIA funds. All its editors, past and present, likewise denied knowledge.

“The Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom was rocked when its alleged CIA connection was exposed,” Chitre writes in an essay in The Best of Quest. Raju speculates that if there was any indirect contact with money from the CIA, it had come from Paris,

from where the committee had occasionally helped out the Indian chapter with bequests of newsprint—frequently in desperate shortage in India in those years.

“It was a pity it was hidden from us,” recalls Sheila Masani, Minoo Masani’s wife, and the business manager of Quest for years. “The magazine was such an important thing for the world: all those editors from around the world getting in touch with each other, all the writers who wrote for us.”

It was gone. Eventually, so was the age of the journal of arts and letters from Englishspeaking India. “Two decades on from the end of that big chill,” Prabhala writes in his introduction to The Best of Quest, “who could have imagined that one effect of imperialism was the idiosyncrasy and iconoclasm you now hold in your hands?”

The Best of Quest contains some belated surprises. It closes with a declaration from Chitre—written before his death in 2009. In it, Chitre, one of India’s best-known English-language poets, discloses that the whimsical, hilarious “D.” was, in fact, his own pseudonym.

Prabhala’s parents’ archives, now donated to the ICCF offices—still in the Army and Navy building, now taken up on the ground floor by one of the biggest Westside outlets in Mumbai—are currently being digitized;

Raju hopes to put them all on the Internet by March and make them freely accessible to all.

The Best of Quest makes the value of that archive palpable—not just because it documents a crucial piece of modern literary history, but because it reveals its breadth and range of concerns.

Quest’s mix of culture and politics encompassed writers and editors from around India. In a postand-trunk-call era, it encompassed writers and editors nationwide—its last editor, V.V. John, was based in Jaipur.

Its headquarters arguably contributed to its sophistication. The Bombay in which it took root was much smaller than today’s. Yet, within its charmed circles, it was a more open city too: one where English-language cultural production accommodated a range of artistic struggles and political sensibilities. Masani’s Swatantra Party, begun with C. Rajagopalachari and N.G. Ranga, and a key early opponent to the Congress, was the only major political party to have had its headquarters here.

Its political climate fostered the idea of the magazine as a broad church of opinion.

“It could have happened only in Bombay,” Prabhala says, “and only in the Bombay of that time”.

“Today, we might be critical about the fact that Quest spoke only for some people, and essentially to a Westernized middleclass with intellectual aspirations,” Sattar says. “But we have to acknowledge that different things come to us from a different time; that they can tell us how our time became our time.”

is good-looking. But that is neither here nor there. He is certainly not very handsome. What is it then?

Star power: Rajesh Khanna (left) and Amitabh Bachchan in Anand. Chitre wrote in Quest that Khanna found his best script and director in this film.

EXCERPT

TO DIE FOR An extract from ‘The Charisma of Rajesh Khanna’, a column from the pages of ‘Quest’, September­October 1971 B Y ‘D .’ ···························· t is rumoured that his disarming smile costs `1.4 million.

Young women devour him with hungry eyes in the afternoon darkness of cinema halls. Mothers witness his filmic deaths with helpless pangs of frustrated protectiveness. Young adult males project themselves into his limelit presence on the screen and later yearn to recreate themselves in his image.

Millions of Indians queue up for long hours to see him break into his smile, get drunk, become furious, whisper lovewords or burst forth into a husky, vibrant played-back song. If there is one person in India today who surpasses the Prime Minister’s charisma, he is Rajesh Khanna. The multimillion rupee Hindi film industry which prolifically produces stereotyped dreams unanimously regards him as the only authentic super-star it has so far produced. He is what makes a sure-fire box-office hit. Even films with all the essential ingredients for making a sure flop have run for weeks just because

I

he starred in them. His success is so phenomenal that it challenges anyone who pretends to understand mass behaviour.

He is of medium height and build. He has mannerisms of his own which show through whatever character he plays—or perhaps that is unfair to him.

His producers and directors want him to play no other character but his own unique self.

He has a rare plasticity: that which makes a natural actor, something which James Dean had impressed upon movie-addicts during his meteoric Hollywood career. For he gives the sense that he lives his assumed role, however crudely it is scripted and directed. Yet he will not get an Elia Kazan or a George Stevens to direct him.

And his hurt-youth image, which is a factor in his success, will gradually age.

The best script and director he got so far was in the film Anand, directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee who is one of the better directors in the world of commercial Hindi cinema. His worst role was the one in Haathi Mere Saathi in which he

plays a sort of elephant-boy and in which one of the three corners of the conventional love triangle is occupied, of all animals, by elephants.

Curiously, Rajesh Khanna is considered a hero worth killing—which is amazing since in Hindi films it is a taboo to kill the hero. Curiously too, he has to die of cancer. He died of cancer in Safar and again in Anand. In Safar he is the leukaemic lover of a would-be doctor. In Anand, he is a cancer patient who spends his limited spell of life to make people around him happy. In Andaz he dies in a motor-bike accident for a change. Is it, one wonders, the expression of a mass deathwish? Some fifteen years ago, Dilip Kumar, the matinee idol then, specialized in dying as a hero. However, Dilip Kumar’s screen deaths brought no shock to the audience since he moved and spoke, from the start, as if he were his own pall-bearer.

Rajesh’s screen deaths have some novelty: he is a warm, ebullient, vivacious, blithe young man. Even if he is destined to die, it seems unfair and

too early. One has seen teenage girls sob witnessing him die. Or heaving unmistakably erotic sighs when he sings a love song (with the inimitable Kishore Kumar play-back singing for him). For the first time in the history of commercial Hindi cinema a single person has acquired such a following.

What has Rajesh Khanna got that others haven’t? He does have acting talent. But there are others who are much better. He

Excerpted from The Best of Quest, edited by Laeeq Futehally, Achal Prabhala and Arshia Sattar, published by Tranquebar Press, 2011, `695.

In the book’s last piece, ‘D.’ reveals his identity for the first time ever—he is the late poet and essayist Dilip Chitre.

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011

L13

Travel

LOUNGE DETOURS

SALIL TRIPATHI

The quiet path of poets THINKSTOCK

In a Shanghai stuck between an ancient past and modernity is the lane that once housed Tagore

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othing seemed French about the French Quarter, with its shops selling marinated barbecued meats and waiters setting afire the asparagus on my plate, and nothing seemed Chinese about the large mall, which could easily have been in any large Asian city. Nothing seemed authentic when a hawker offered me a Montblanc pen that looked exactly like the Montblanc pen in the shop behind him, where it was sold for a hundred times more. Nothing seemed ancient in a city where each building was a skyscraper taller than the one next to it, and shone like it had been just unwrapped. And nothing seemed modern in a city where on weekends in a public park hundreds of men and women talked animatedly, exchanging photographs of their sons and daughters, arranging their marriages the way their parents had arranged theirs, and their parents theirs, and so on, uninterrupted, generation after generation. Despite the apparent

Modern times: In the Shanghai of high­rises, the past can be found in museums. spontaneity of those conversations, the moves were rehearsed, the dialogue planned, a bit like the city itself, where the centrepiece at the museum of planning was a miniaturized model of the metropolis, as though everything, including this sudden growth, was exactly as the Party intended and the city had planned.

You could see some of the old Shanghai at that museum—the Shanghai that was among the last to fall to the Communists, the city which provided China with many intellectuals, the city that looked to the East, but was China’s face to the West. And you discovered that old city in large canvases of old houses from the colonial era, with

gardens and foliage implying a permanence which empires believe they possess, until one afternoon the revolutionaries arrive, razing everything (on the other side of the same hall, they displayed large photographs of its port, ships and construction activity, looking mechanical and prosaic. There are probably bureaucrats who are prouder of those photographs of modernity, and not of the stillness of the canvases recreating the old).

I was with my delightful friend Tina, who has lived in Shanghai for over a decade now, and enjoys startling the locals by speaking in perfect bursts of their language (as a Singapore-born whose parents

moved to that island from Sri Lanka, she is used to multilingual, multi-everything places). Tina is a litterateur, the spirit behind the city’s literary festival.

She took me to Siming village, named after a bank now forgotten, the village itself set away from the bustling thoroughfare that marks the border of what was the French Quarter. At one time, Sikhs and Vietnamese guarded these streets.

The street had identical two-storeyed shikumen houses with brick walls of a muddy hue that was unsure if it wanted to be brown or red, the street spotlessly clean, where a father had taken his son out for a stroll. The father ambled; the son was riding an electric

scooter, which the father manipulated with a remote controller, occasionally surprising the son by changing his course. He was always in charge, while giving the child the illusion of being in charge of the toys that the father’s prosperity had brought—almost a metaphor for modern China.

Neighbours stared at the father and son—and us—as Tina led me to a wall with a plaque full of Chinese names—of actors and academics—written in elegant calligraphy. One name stood out; it was in English. It was Rabindranath Tagore. And things fell into the pattern Tina had planned. In the year of Tagore’s 150th anniversary, and the centenary of Sun Yat-Sen’s republic, in this most independent-minded city of China, she had given me this wonderful gift—taking me to the lane where Tagore often stayed at the home of his friend, the poet Xu Zhimo, who lived with his wife in house No. 923 (alas, now gone, to make way for that thoroughfare).

As we walked down the street, we saw more plaques, with words written in Chinese, some with graceful drawings on the side—many were Tagore’s poems; others, verses by Chinese poets. It was a calming street, a soothing interlude away from the noise and babble of Shanghai, taking me to an older, quieter time when this city of commerce valued a bearded poet from a distant land (Tagore’s message of the intransience of nature and impermanence of borders was probably ill-timed; the young, radical Chinese writers and artists were seething over the handing over of Chinese land to the Japanese in the carving up of imperial possessions that followed

the Treaty of Versailles after World War I). They hated old virtues, including the Confucian ones, and they were critical of Tagore’s universalist message, which they saw as escapist naturalism.

Later that evening we went to the Bund, with its colonial buildings lit up and transformed from banks and trading posts to art galleries and restaurants, upscale shops and hotels. And across the river was the futuristic Pudong, with skyscrapers looking alike, like a permanent expo pavilion on display.

But this is China; there are rules. Even celebrations must end on time. And almost like that father turning off the remote controlling device, the lights went out, stopping lovers mid-kiss and reminding families to go home and sleep soundly, and dream patriotic dreams.

After I returned to London, Tina sent me a postcard: It showed a sketch of the compound in which Tagore had lived—it was the same spot where the modern hotel where I had stayed now stood, oblivious of that past. The large mural inside was of Zheng He, the eunuch admiral who left China in the 15th century to trade with the world.

Now the admiral is an object of art on a wall, as the world has come to trade with China, oblivious of the admiral’s journeys.

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

FOOT NOTES | PAVITRA JAYARAMAN

Worth their salt Dust road for dust road, halt for halt, four photographers retrace the Dandi march

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his July, photographers Ajit Bhadoriya, Edson Dias, Chaitanya Guttikar and P. Madhavan decided to trace the footsteps of Mohandas K. Gandhi on his historic Dandi march that was a part of the salt satyagraha. Equipped with pinhole, medium- and largeformat cameras, they traced the 387km from Sabarmati to Dandi, in Gujarat, over 24 days. We spoke to them about the march, their learning, and the images that came from it. Edited excerpts from the interview: When and why did you decide to start the 2011 Dandi march?

The idea of retracing the Dandi march happened at a brainstorming session at the ALTlab Photography residency, a programme run by the Goa Center for Alternative Photography (Goa-CAP).

We came up with the Salt Prints project to understand the relevance of Gandhian philosophy.

Additionally, we discovered that though the Dandi march was well documented by Indian and international writers, there are few visuals available on this epic event.

The mandate of the project was to visualize the space and consecutively understand the philosophy of Gandhi. We feel that the distinctive part of the project was the four artists, who came from different schools of thought, with their philosophy and visualization being quite dissimilar. The only common understanding among these artists was the use of an

analogue camera.

What did the preparations include? What did you pack?

The maps and other details about the Dandi march are easily available on the Internet. We followed the same route. Our day and night halts were the same as the ones Gandhi made. So there wasn’t much planning involved.

We arrived in each village unannounced. This gave us a real idea of what the villages were like. The equipment and film to be used during the walk were, however, planned almost two months in advance. This was because it’s difficult to obtain black and white film in India. We had to import our film rolls from the UK. The major packing was also centred around the cameras and accessories. On an average, everyone carried a weight of approximately 10kg during the walk.

How long was the journey? How did you plan it?

Gandhi walked 387km in 24 days.

He stayed in one village during the daytime and in another one during the night, including an average walk of 18km a day. Every Monday, he took a break from walking and observed silence (maun vrat) and fasted on that day. We followed the same pattern, except the silence and fasting bit. This walk happened 81 years after the original march. The world has changed since—villages have expanded into towns and towns have turned into cities; agricultural lands are now indus-

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

VINOBHA NATHAN

Beaten path: A farmer’s house in Sajod village, where Gandhi stayed a night; and (left) the team documented its journey at every milestone with a photo­ graph with local people.

trial estates; rivers are either polluted or have dried; roads are full of speeding vehicles which are unfriendly for walkers. We walked around 387km in 24 days to meet the same halts and destinations as we had to take long detours from the original route.

What was the most challenging part of the walk?

Walking on asphalt roads. The Central government has spent

`1,346 crore to develop the Dandi heritage route and infrastructure in and around the villages where Gandhi had stayed. They have, however, forgotten to lay the walking path alongside the asphalt roads. It is, therefore, tough to walk along the vehicles on both sides.

How did the photography unfold during the trip?

The walking contributed in

three essential forms of creating an image: The first of these categories is the immediate interpretations of the landscapes encountered; the second is the use of landscape, and the experience of it as a means of representing the essence of the journey; and the third is the documentation of our movement within the context of landscape.

Was there a moment that you’d describe as defining or a story you would tell when asked about the trip?

During the span of 24 days, we must have met hundreds of people and witnessed numerous events. Every happening was memorable. We would, however, like to share the story

of an old couple whom we met at the Swaraj Bhavan in Jambusar, Bharuch. Phulabhai Vaghela is a 78-year-old caretaker of Swaraj Bhavan, a place where the Mahatma had once stayed during the Dandi march.

Vaghela, along with his wife, has been maintaining this space since 1994 and has not been paid a single rupee as salary by the government. Numerous letters, reminders, petitions and personal requests to leaders have fallen on deaf ears.

Did it help you understand Gandhi differently?

As we mentioned earlier, the four artists held different views of Gandhi and his philosophy.

One common understanding about Gandhi that all these artists developed during the course of this walk was about him being a great strategist.

The Indian independence movement, which was considered to be an elitist movement prior to the 1930s, had now turned into a mass movement.

Gandhi had not only mobilized the masses for the movement, but had also educated them on why they should fight against the British.

What does this new-age Gandhi march signify to you?

Gandhi took salt as a metaphor and we took Gandhi himself as a metaphor, trying to look through history from our eyes after 80 years. We realize that the ideals and ideas of Gandhi are still relevant, and it offers the solution to modern-day problems.

What next?

We have started editing the pictures taken during the march, and shall curate the exhibition during February 2012. The book shall be released in May 2012. pavitra.j@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011

Books

LOUNGE

OPEN CITY | TEJU COLE

The migration of souls SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES

Through music, psychiatry and migratory patterns, this debut novel uncovers a complex New York universe

Open City: Faber and Faber, 259 pages, £12.99 (around `1,010).

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

···························· n her most memorable rhetorical flourish, Virginia Woolf explained the change sweeping the literature of her time and place. “On or around December 1910,” she asserted in the 1923 essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, “human character changed.”

Woolf’s argument, endlessly disputed in literary criticism, was that her generation of novelists had been unmoored from their past because “the tools of one generation are useless for the next”.

Woolf wrote on behalf of an ambitious national literature which found the sonorous voices of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy unequal to its imagination. She did not anticipate the UK of Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith any more than Dickens may have envisioned hers; her predecessor Henry James could not have thought that an American novel about migration—a condition fundamental to his own life and career as a New Yorker who chose to belong to Europe— would be written by a young man of Nigerian origin called Teju Cole.

Cole’s first novel resurrects a memory of the emerging Atlantic modernism of the early 20th century because it converses with questions that seemed, for a time, to be new then—about identity, alienation, urbanity and individualism—and takes that conversation forward. Yet it is possible to read through the novel without

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The flâneur: Teju Cole’s first novel is an exploration of the alienation and diversity of a big city today. once thinking of it as a reaction to its ancestors, or even Cole’s global contemporaries—so definitively does it manage to make space for itself in the present.

Open City is about a biracial Nigerian émigré to New York, a psychiatry resident called Julius, and his encounters with strangers and acquaintances alike on his walks through New York City.

There is a brief interlude when Julius flies to Brussels in dead winter to look up a grandmother with whom he has lost touch, and whom he never manages to meet.

He is most himself when he is alone, and makes this plain in the tranquil, attentive voice in which he narrates his experiences. He raises more questions than answers, and closes out the book as softly as he opens it, like someone turning down the volume on a classical music station, rather than snapping it off.

Julius’ journeys resist easy summarization, but that does not

mean Open City is vague or unstructured. The thread that connects almost all the people he meets—and there are many—is their legacy of politically inflicted displacement and social damage.

The aged Japanese-American professor for whom learning poetry by heart was a way to endure “the camps”; the Liberian behind bars at Ellis Island, awaiting deportation; the old German Jewish couple he meets at an exhibition of Martin Munkácsi’s photographs, and an array of his patients, whom he identifies, with professional courtesy, by their initials only: all these and other stories collide briefly and intimately with Julius’ own. Through them, the contours of a subterranean city, a culture built on the invisible histories of its living residents, begins to emerge.

This seems like an easy theme to follow, and Cole’s quiet, ruminative style draws us in. “And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morning-

side Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city,” reads the first sentence. “The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park is only fifteen minutes from Central Park,” says the next. The tone of the novel does not depart from these cadences at any point in its course.

It is a simple style, but difficult to imitate. Open City soon reveals itself as a work of scrupulous discipline, building its canon of fact and observation by resisting cliché after cliché, falling into no single rhythm, open to all kinds of speculation and resolution. Even the irritating literary ideal of the solitary male bearing passive witness to the events of his time, is refreshed and renewed through Julius’ experience.

Cole shapes the book through careful repetition and incremental expansion, like a musical movement—it is no coincidence

CRIMINAL MIND

that one of the constants in Julius’ life is the music of Gustav Mahler, the composer who once said that a symphony “must embrace everything”.

But nothing is a coincidence in Cole’s writing. The term “open city” refers to the city in wartime which, in its own defence, lays down arms to invite occupiers without conflict. It has an obvious connection to the novel’s interlude in Brussels, which declared itself an open city during World War II. It also applies to Julius himself, and to the gaps in his story which he avoids, as carefully as he avoids the “claims” that people’s stories threaten to make on him—the passing Africans who call him brother, the girlfriend whose devotion to her church is totally unfamiliar to him, the people who try to continue their stories past the point to which he is willing to involve himself.

But there is no such thing as perfect success. In one of the most fraught encounters in Open City, he meets a Moroccan student, an assimilator of the theories of Walter Benjamin and Edward Said, who cannot reconcile his hopes and his philosophy with the Europe in which he finds himself.

Julius is attracted to his intelligence and repelled by his anger, an anger he is careful not to feel himself. In Farouq he sees a person he might have been, and dislikes. Mon semblable, mon frère, as a certain transatlantic modernist, T.S. Eliot, said, borrowing from Charles Baudelaire. My twin, my JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES

brother (Julius’ hypocrisy, as it happens, is subject to two massive blows towards the end of the book, but to give them away is outside the scope of this review).

Baudelaire, of course, skirts the edges of this book as an early explainer of the flâneur, the male walker who reads the city like a story on his idle strolls. Julius is no joyous idler like Baudelaire’s imagined 19th century Parisian.

But who really is in a big city?

Through Julius, we come to recognize that alienation is actually a kind of familiarity in itself, a routine with which we acquaint ourselves every day. Those reviewers who say that nothing much happens in the book are really pointing out how cities are built by those repetitive tasks, those acts of mutual witness, and of mutual ignorance—in the train, on the street, on a daily walk from Morningside Heights—that amount to the practice of nothing much, except being there.

You cannot suggest a person by painting a picture of their surroundings, Woolf cautioned.

Cole’s greatest achievement is the way he lets people build their surroundings, mediated through the unreliable but hypnotic voice of Julius. His beautiful sentences, which give the impression of being weighed before spoken, then spoken in the absence of listeners, allow a fractured world to coalesce, here and there, in the precincts of its own capital city.

It has been 10 years since the World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed, a catastrophe that finds brief mention in the book, and then lingers in the background. Has human nature—at least on the coasts of the Atlantic, where it has caused such particular anxiety in the last few years—changed again? We are too suspicious, and Cole too opposed to the rhetorical flourish, to argue in favour. This cool, reticent book acknowledges, instead, that the human condition is always changing, and that it makes new demands on our literature all the time.

IN SIX WORDS The invisible, fragmented histories of cities

WALTER BIRD/GETTY IMAGES

ZAC O’YEAH

Agatha and Afghanistan The two distinct trends that have emerged in some recent crime fiction

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’ve been somewhat inundated with Agatha Christie lately. First I received a set of lavish graphic novel adaptations of her books for review, and then a few days later I got an intriguing and delightful serial novel written by a collective of writers among whom Dame Agatha featured.

It was a bit of an overdose, I admit, although regressing into a world of cozy and, with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight, comparatively bloodless killing was not an entirely unpleasant experience.

The package of 18 graphic novels has its focus on “Golden Age” Christie, with seven adaptations each from the 1920s and 1930s, plus a sprinkling of later Christie, and so I do recommend picking up at least a couple of them (in beautiful hardback editions by the way); they are all drawn by French artists and, as you all know, they say that in France even the intellectuals read Christie. I myself took a childish delight

in comparing the brutish Poirot envisioned by Marc Piskic in The Mystery of the Blue Train, to David Charrier’s sophisticated gentleman surrounded by foxy ladies in Five Little Pigs, and then the more cartoonish caricatures in Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express, both by Solidor.

For another dose of vintage crime, it’s worth picking up the highly collectible The Floating Admiral, a rare, relatively hardto-find novel originally published in 1932 and just reissued in a unique Indian edition (with original cover art). This was written jointly by the Detection Club, a British society that counted among its members some of the greatest crime writers of the day, including Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton and Ronald Knox. The novel is essential reading for anybody who wants to return to the roots of crime fiction, and may even serve as a good hands-on tutorial for an aspiring crime writer, considering

that you are privy to the secretive goings-on at the back-end of mystery writing.

If Christie & Co. represent old and familiar flavours, the newest flavour is—I noticed as I browsed my yard-high pile of books to review—Afghanistan. After first being pummelled during an occupation that drained Soviet strategic strength and indirectly led to the end of the Cold War, then being pummelled by its very own Taliban for a decade, and subsequently pummelled by the international anti-terror war, the country is now being pummelled by thriller writers. And these writers may actually help us understand something about the Afghani predicament.

Jon Stock’s fresh-off-the-press novel, Games Traitors Play, is a sequel to his Dead Spy Running (2009). This new book is a rather delightful story about a renegade British spy, Marchant, who is as comfortable in Mediterranean luxury resorts as in the Meenakshi temple of Madurai. The British spy is distrusted by the CIA, which does its best to put obstacles in his path, yet he is entrusted with the task of finding an elusive

terrorist whose trail leads through various parts of the Islamic world—including Afghanistan—as well as to India, Russia and the UK. I wouldn’t have got obsessive about this novel if I hadn’t happened, immediately afterwards, to read Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith. This is a sequel of sorts to his Child 44 (longlisted for the 2008 Man Booker, winner of the Ian Fleming Award for best thriller, and soon to be filmed by Ridley Scott). In Agent 6 Afghanistan plays a pivotal role, although large chunks of the book are set in the old Soviet Union. The story spans over three decades of Cold War horrors and is highly relevant in how it explores the importance of the 1980s Soviet war in Afghan-

istan. It is quite fabulous in its epic sweep and its daringness in digging deep into the roots of today’s troubles.

The story revolves around a disgraced KGB officer who becomes the proverbial spanner in the works as he goes about trying to find out how and why his family was destroyed in a badly thought out Communist propaganda plot outside the UN headquarters in New York. Sent to Afghanistan as a punishment and tasked with building up a KGBlike secret police, he comes to spend many life-changing years there, until a dramatic final confrontation propels him into a stand-off with himself.

For those interested in some clever theorizing about what has

Return to roots: Agatha Christie (above, right) and 13 other members of the Detection Club wrote The Floating Admiral; and the latest flavour in crime fiction is Afghanistan. actually been going on behind the curtains during the recent decades of terrorism and the global war on terror, both Stock and Smith provide highly readable plots.

Zac O’Yeah is a Bangalore-based crime novelist. His most recent novel is Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan.

Write to Zac at criminalmind@livemint.com

BOOKS L15

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

QUICK LIT | GOPAL SATHE

A LOVESONG FOR INDIA | RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA

A translated country

A darkening disc EVENING STANDARD/GETTY IMAGES

The author’s skill at evoking the sweep of a life works through all the stories in her new collection

B Y S ANJAY S IPAHIMALANI ···························· omparisons have often been drawn between the work of Anita Desai and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. A gentle melancholia pervades most of their tales, whether set in India or elsewhere, with characters being drawn into relationships and predicaments that leave them more alienated than before. In their quests for rootedness, many such characters, one imagines, would echo the words Jawaharlal Nehru so famously wrote in his autobiography: “I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere”.

Desai’s latest collection of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance, was released earlier this year; now, as a handy counterpoint, we have Jhabvala’s own collection, A Lovesong for India.

Translators, civil servants and others ill at ease with the ways of the world find a place in both volumes. To read both is to find that Desai is the better craftsperson at the level of sentence and structure, while Jhabvala, less delicate but no less evocative, is more accomplished in creating the sweep of a life in just a few pages.

In A Lovesong for India, one finds the same preoccupations that have concerned Jhabvala from almost the start of her writing career. The search for redemption in the form of allegiance to spiritual figures; unequal relationships between disparate characters; and the faint Jamesian pulse of the seductive charms of an older civilization for those from newer cultures: All these can also be found in earlier stories such as the well-known How I Became a Holy Mother or Two More under the Indian Sun. The stories here are largely divided between those set in India

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Off Off the the boat boat:: Jhabvala’s Jhabvala’s stories stories examine examine moments moments of of crossover. crossover.

A Lovesong for India— Tales from East and West: Little, Brown, 288 pages, `495. and those set elsewhere—primarily New York’s Upper East Side—as was the case with Jhabvala’s earlier East Into Upper East.

A last section comprises what could be said to be a combination of the two. Given the number of stories that feature variations on the theme of unequal alliances, the collection could well have been titled Odd Couples. An Oriental scholar from the US comes to Delhi to be drawn into the muddled private life of a charismatic, ageing poetess. A lonely talent agent in New York takes under

her wing a strange, waiflike aspiring singer. An influential film critic is drawn to a conniving actress. A 50-something widow of a Hollywood studio head takes up with a young Indian writer-director in Los Angeles. An ageing Bollywood star starts to rely more and more upon his daughter-in-law (though many of the characters are drawn from the worlds of film and entertainment, Jhabvala, as before, manages to keep her scriptwriting and fiction writing in separate compartments. The stories here are anything but cinematic in the telling, being more concerned with interiors than exteriors).

Other stories bring to mind yet other aspects of Jhabvala’s work.

There’s a whisper of Three Continents, for example, in the story of the secretary who moves to London to work with a charismatic director, only to find him becoming besotted by her brother. With the title story, though, there’s evidence of a newer, brasher India edging out the old in the contrast between the actions of an upright civil servant and his more business-minded son. Another trope, that of the differences between the “real” and “translated” versions of India, is touched upon in the tale where the American narrator translates the work of an author who was her former flat-

mate in New Delhi.

The story with which the collection ends is an odd, ethereal tale of an unlikely courtship between two wraithlike individuals, with much more being implied than said. The spectre of AIDS, the contrasting ties of blood and marriage, and the enervating effects of time are all encompassed in a somewhat eccentric mix. It’s deftly done, but undoubtedly strange in its wide-ranging arc.

As with Desai’s stories, here, too, there are no pat endings.

Rather, one is left with the plight of those who find themselves in scenarios not of their choosing, with a sense of life going on after the printed stories come to a close. It has been said of Anton Chekhov that at the end of his stories, he returned his characters to life, and he himself once wrote that “obligatory for the artist is not solving a problem, but stating a problem correctly”. Bearing the burden of their problems, Jhabvala’s characters continue onwards—as one of her titles puts it—in search of love and beauty.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Gentle melancholia, in India and elsewhere

If this is a war Stories from World War II do not always conform to straightforward narratives

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trove of incredible stories, narrative bullion, locked up in the years 1939-45. As the Great War fades from living memory and becomes part of history, its successor takes its place. The conflicts of 1914-18 were largely European. A genuinely global struggle, the second world war satisfies an international appetite for war stories, some of them now coming to light for the first time.”

In Hastings’ effort to achieve his great goal with this book—“my story emphasizes bottom-up views and experiences, the voices of little people rather than big ones”—he tells dozens of new stories. Stories of the bloody fabric of this great war are told by the wretched threads—soldiers, mothers, children—that sometimes kept it together and sometimes fell apart.

And in their telling—channelled through Hastings’ smooth, measured prose—the stories have

erry Pratchett has now written 39 novels set in the Discworld universe he created when he wrote The Colour of Magic in 1983. The British fantasy writer’s sense of humour is constant through books that combine genres such as detective fiction and political thrillers, with subjects ranging from feminism to militaristic jingoism. Despite the early onset of Alzheimer’s, with which he was diagnosed at the age of 59 in 2007, Pratchett continues to write almost one Discworld novel every year. He cannot type or write any more; instead, he uses a voice-recognition software on his computer, which he says has made his writing style more conversational.

His latest novel, Snuff, is set around his long-established character Sam Vimes, and is rich in references and callbacks to other Discworld books. It is a story about class, about law and about justice, and Pratchett manages to be both funny and gripping, never trivializing the subjects he makes fun of. You don’t have to have read his other books to enjoy Snuff, although long-time readers might find explanations to past events slowing the book a little.

Snuff is a police procedural at heart and, like previous Vimes books, shows us the darkest parts of the Discworld. Vimes is on his family estate on vacation, but as his boss, the beloved tyrant Lord Vetinari, has noted, where there are policemen, crimes inexplicably follow.

Vimes’ busman’s holiday begins with the murder of a goblin on his land. As Vimes sets out to investigate the murder, he discovers at work a larger conspiracy built around human hatred for the goblins that live under their land. The goblins are almost universally despised—they are a primitive race with no culture of their own, except for a strange religion that requires them to retain their snot, earwax and nails (but not teeth, for some reason), and Snuff—A Discworld Novel: are known to eat their young.

Doubleday, Naturally, no one other than 384 pages, £18.99 Vimes is interested in investiga(around `1,500). ting the murder.

As Vimes digs around, he slowly begins to learn about goblin culture. And even as Pratchett explores this, he manages to throw in a boat chase, a crazed killer, a close look at the class divisions between the landowners and the below-stairs staff, and a nod to Jane Austen, with a proper young country lady writing a book called Pride and Extreme Prejudice—dedicated to Vimes.

Pratchett makes you laugh, but over the years, as his writing style has matured, he’s less reliant on one-off gags and wordplay, and instead lets the situation itself drive the humour. This means that the books have gotten darker over the years, and his characters have to earn their happy endings.

In Snuff, he manages to raise a lot of thoughtful points about our world through the lens of Discworld, and succeeds in telling a gripping story.

Snuff was launched globally as a Kindle e-book on 11 October, and is available on the Kindle store for $14.58 (around `700). gopal.s@livemint.com

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ALL HELL LET LOOSE | MAX HASTINGS

B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ···························· t the end of Max Hastings’ delectable new book on World War II, two things linger in the mind.

The first is wonderment. How, year after year, are such excellent books written about the war? What is left to tell? Surely now that you’ve read Cornelius Ryan, Antony Beevor, Anthony Roberts, Winston Churchill, Hastings himself; visited war museums everywhere and walked the beaches at Normandy; and sat through every emotional blockbuster on the war, told from every perspective, including Clint Eastwood’s— surely there is nothing left to say?

Your wonderment is understandable but not, it appears, justified. There are many stories left to tell.

As Robert McCrum wrote in The Observer earlier this month in his column: “There’s also a treasure

Terry Pratchett’s new Vimes novel is part comedy, part exploration of class warfare

Narrative bullion: World War II’s well of stories is near­inexhaustible. new life breathed into them. “I am fascinated,” says the author, “by the complex interplay of loyalties and sympathies around the world.” And then he goes on to say how people in many countries harboured far less polarized views about the good and bad guys than we have been led to believe: “Colonial subjects, and above all India’s four hundred millions, saw little merit in the defeat of the Axis if they continued to endure British suzerainty.”

The book is relentlessly fascinating. Hastings knows that merely giving us greater depth and colour into known stories is

not enough. He must shake us with fact and statistic. And this he does regularly.

For instance, during the Battle of Britain, the subject of much post-war mythologizing, onethird of the overall losses were due purely to accidents and noncombat mishaps.

Or in September 1940, after having declared war and made early gains, the Italian ministry of war decided it could revert to the prewar practice of closing down for business at 2pm. Silvio Berlusconi would have approved.

But the most startling numbers are those of the massive losses suf-

fered by Russia and China in the war. In the process of repulsing Germany’s invasion of Russia, Hastings says, over two million Russians died of hunger in land controlled by the Russian government—Stalin preferred to feed soldiers first and the old and infirm last.

Particularly amusing is his sweeping study of American sentiment prior to that country’s crucial involvement in the war. Hastings quotes William Calvin, the treasurer of Harvard University: “Hitler’s going to win. Let’s be friends with him.”

In a poll conducted in late 1939, 26% of Americans surveyed felt US citizens should have the option to enlist, if it came to that, in the Wehrmacht. Yes, for the same German army they’d be chasing down in Europe in just a few years.

All Hell Let Loose can transform, for many people, their idea of the two sides in the war. What was everyone fighting for? Who was on whose side?

And the more those answers become elusive, the more futile the war seems.

The second thought the book leaves you with is one of dread.

What do we know of the wars raging on in our own lifetimes? If World War II, the first massive human conflict to be recorded

All Hell Let Loose—The World at War 1939­1945: HarperPress, 768 pages, £30 (around `2,400). and studied in such living detail, can still surprise us with truths, what will happen in 2030 or 2050?

Who knows what truths about Kargil, Iraq, Afghanistan or Jaffna we are yet to learn.

But they will be told, no doubt, and everything will no doubt seem futile.

All Hell Let Loose is a riveting work on a period of human history that continues to shirk closure.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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FESTIVAL PREVIEW

Q&A | KARSH KALE

Shiny happy people

Indie surprise The most closely guarded secret of the Weekender on what’s changed in the circuit

SHIV AHUJA

The Bacardi NH7 Weekender is meant as a ‘laid­back’ musical experience.

Keep an ear out

B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

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

···························· he Happiest Music Festival in India” is how Vijay Nair likes to describe the Bacardi NH7 Weekender. Nair is the CEO of Only Much Louder, an artiste and live music company based in Mumbai which organizes the multi-genre music festival in Pune.

“We didn’t want it to expand too much. But we’re bringing a lot of other arts into the festival,” says Nair, referring to the inclusion of an international tattoo convention and an area designated for graffiti artists at the second edition of the festival, from 18-20 November.

With the opening riffs set for the evening of 18 November, this year’s event will have more than 60 artistes converging on six stages.

The idea for the festival germinated during a conversation that Nair had with friends in London two years ago. They were gunning for a “Europe-like multiple stage festival” to be held in India. After months of planning, Nair decided to launch the inaugural edition last year.

“Only Much Louder approached us with the idea,” says Arvind Krishnan, director, marketing, Bacardi India, the festival’s main sponsor. “It was about putting together a fest that supported Indian music, and we jumped in.”

“This is probably the only festival where you will see the lead singer of a hardcore metal band leap on to the stage and perform with a folk band,” says Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy, a vocalist with the hardcore metal band Scribe.

This year will feature three main stages—Eristoff Wolves Den (electronica, dance), Bacardi Black Rock Arena (rock, metal) and The Dewarists Stage (folk and fusion).

Curiously, Nair says he doesn’t want the festival to be the biggest music festival in India. He simply wishes to continue offering the people what he calls a laid-back

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Come together: (above) The crowd at The Dewarists Stage in 2010; and Imogen Heap will perform on Day 2.

In March 2010, Bakshi performed at the Holi Cow! Festival (Delhi), his maiden performance in the country. He released his first EP the same year.

This is the first time Bakshi will be hitting the stage at the Bacardi NH7 Weekender, although he did play during an after-party at last year’s edition. He is scheduled to perform for 45 minutes on the opening day.

Bacardi Black Rock Arena musical experience. Here’s what to expect:

Eristoff Wolves Den Devoted exclusively to electronic and dance music, this stage will have the London-based House group Basement Jaxx as the international headliners on Day 1.

Indian artistes Bay Beat Collective and BREED will take the stage on 19 November.

Look out for 24-year-old Sahej Bakshi, who calls himself Dualist Inquiry. Bakshi began strumming the guitar at 9, while idolizing Joe Satriani and Rage Against the Machine. In 2005, he left for Los Angeles, US, where he studied at the Thornton School of Music, and it was there that his brand of rockinfluenced electronica was born.

His affinity to Indian instruments and music is not lost in the sounds he creates. “It’s Indian music,” he agrees. “It has the guitar, it is electronic, yes, but Indian sounds affect my music profoundly.”

An all­new state With translations of his Gujarati plays into Marathi, Saumya Joshi is reversing the trend B Y M AULIK P ATHAK maulik.p@livemint.com

···························· e moves briskly from one corner to the other of an empty hall in Ahmedabad, trying to get under the skin of an imaginary audience. Playwright Saumya Joshi halts only to shout out to his actors, signalling them to stop as he reworks the sequence which, as an actor says, would be well over the 50th time now. Joshi doesn’t believe in 40-day productions, the norm in Gujarati theatre.

Gujarati language theatre, which has seen a dearth of original plays compared to regional theatre in neighbouring Maharashtra, had two plays receive box-office success in Mumbai last year. Welcome

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··························· ndian-American composer and multi-instrumentalist Karsh Kale is a pioneering figure who has helped define the Asian Underground genre, collaborating with artistes such as Sting and Anoushka Shankar. Born in England and brought up in New York, Kale’s visits to India have stepped up in recent years for various collaborations, including forays into Bollywood.

His fifth studio album Cinema released earlier this year in the US and is due for release in India in the next few months.

A first-timer at the Bacardi NH7 Weekender, he spoke to us about working in Bollywood, using social media and the changes in India’s indie circuit. Edited excerpts:

Zindagi and 102 Not Out, both by Joshi, are now being adapted into Marathi, a reversal of the trend all these years.

So far, Gujarati plays have been associated with slapstick humour.

“It’s a first,” says Joshi, 37, who quit his job as a professor of English literature at the HK Arts College in Ahmedabad this September to pursue theatre full-time.

“I am not clever. But I am ready to slog,” says Joshi. He took nine months to write Welcome Zindagi and rehearsed for four months before going on the floor. The play, about a strained father-son relationship, has been a runaway success in Mumbai, a large base for Gujarati audiences. They have performed over 200 shows so far,

The last few years have seen Indian audiences headbanging to the likes of Iron Maiden and Metallica. This stage will offer metalheads another chance to bring the house down with Pentagram, Bhayanak Maut and Demonic Resurrection.

Scribe, a hardcore metal band which will play on the closing day, is now synonymous with the Indian metal sound. The group came together in 2005. “Looking back, we have grown into each other, and grown stronger,” says Scribe’s Krishnamoorthy. Scribe has released two albums (Confect, 2008; and Mark of Teja, 2010) and two EPs (Have Hard Will Core, 2006; and Breadcrumbs, 2009).

They will release their third album at the festival in Pune.

The Dewarists, and more The Dewarists Stage promises interesting artistic mingling. If you find fusion more palatable, then this is the stage to head for, with the multiple Grammy Award-win-

with actor Paresh Rawal claiming to have seen it five times.

“Gujarat has an audience for theatre. In a place like Bharuch, we have done eight shows, which means 8,000 people from the town with a population of around 1.5 lakh saw our play.

There is an audience but they’re tired of mediocre commercial theatre,” says Joshi.

Theatre and art were in the family. His parents, both professors, frequently had literary stalwarts such as Vijay Tendulkar, Ratnakar Matkari and Umashankar Joshi as guests at their home in Ahmedabad. Joshi also has the support of his elder brother Abhijat, who shot to fame co-writing scripts, screenplays and dialogues for films such as 3 Idiots and Lage Raho Munna Bhai. As a student, Joshi says he would offer to run errands for any playwright in town. “I visited Tendulkar at his hotel when I was 13. I told him I would bring him tea and do anything else he wanted me to do.”

Before Welcome Zindagi, his plays (he’s written and directed 18

ning Imogen Heap as its international headliner.

Indian acts such as Raghu Dixit, the folk-rock group Swarathma and Hipnotribe will also be there. Papon, whose collaboration with Midival Punditz for the Hindi film Soundtrack received ample accolades, will also bring his mix of folkfusion to the stage.

The festival will have three more stages, which Nair calls an opportunity to showcase all those genres that get left out of the three main stages.

Pepsi Dub Station will have an alternative, edgy and experimental sound, while The Other Stage will present an opportunity for amateur singer-songwriters to take over. The last stage, called Bacardi Together, is intended as a surprise package for the closing day. But read carefully, the clues are out.

Tickets are priced at `750 for any one day, `1,500 for Days 2 and 3, and `2,000 for all three days; student tickets are `999 for all three days. For details, visit www.nh7.in/ weekender/

so far) have been what is termed “parallel theatre”. Critical acclaim came with Dost Chokkas Ahin Ek Nagar Vaastu Hatu, a musical black comedy on the 2002 Gujarat riots. The protagonist was Nehru Bridge, which connects two glaringly distinct ends of Ahmedabad.

This play prompted The Week magazine to name Joshi as one of

You’ve started composing for Bollywood, the most recent being for ‘Soundtrack’ (2011).

How different is your approach in films?

It’s definitely the difference between helping to tell a story and telling your own story.

My work tends to be more personal, and basically a soundtrack for my own experiences.

Films allow me to step outside.

ANJA MATTHES

String theory: Kale has released six solo albums and recently worked on a rescoring of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon.

the 50 rising stars of India in 2003.

Soon after, the play Aathma Taaru Nu Aakash became the first play from Gujarat to be selected for the prestigious Prithvi Theatre Festival in Mumbai in 2005. Joshi’s latest, 102 Not Out, which is running fullhouse in Mumbai after over 90 shows, is about a 102-year-old father who wants to break the ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Trendsetter: Playwright Saumya Joshi.

What will you be performing at NH7?

It’s meant to be a surprise...What I can say is that I am putting together a special performance at the Bacardi Together stage.

Has the indie scene heated up in India in recent years?

Most definitely, and this is mostly due to the more discerning listeners, who are demanding better concerts and better venues. To be fair, a lot of the indie artistes who are getting recognition now have been doing this for a long time.

It’s their years of struggle that’s made all of this possible.

What role have artiste websites and direct interaction with a fan base played in this?

A big role. The middle man—the mainstream label or Bollywood entity—which used to be the only way an artiste could get exposure. has gone. With the Internet, Facebook, SoundCloud, MySpace, etc...there is less of a hype machine at work and more of a direct choice for the listener.

Are you big on social media and promoting your gigs online?

I am able to share tour dates and experiences on a regular basis.

This is truly a new phenomenon in the world of a musician.

How would you describe your sound? An elevator pitch for Karsh Kale, if you will.

If I were to say that my sound is a fusion of electronica, rock and Indian classical music, it locks me into that space. How do you describe the collective influence of Led Zeppelin, Zakir Hussain, Stevie Wonder, Ravi Shankar, Run DMC, Rush, Underworld, Peter Gabriel, Stravinsky, The Police, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Nusrat, Aphex Twin, John McLaughlin, Frank Zappa, Hans Zimmer, Bjork, Tori Amos, Depeche Mode, Queen...because that’s the pool from which I draw my influences, and I don’t know what that is called.

Which city or venue in India have you most enjoyed performing at in recent times?

Two years ago, I performed with the Punditz, Randolph and Ajay Prasanna in Coimbatore at the Isha Foundation for a huge Shivratri concert. There were over 400,000 people in attendance (the largest crowd I have played for) and the energy was immeasurable.

world record of a Chinese man who has lived for 120 years.

Joshi says that while Marathi theatre transitioned smoothly from commercial to meaningful because of playwrights like Vasant Kanetkar, this did not happen with Gujarati theatre. “We never had any great Gujarati playwrights, although we had veterans like Jai Shankar Sundari who could act and sing. But a game changer like a Kanetkar, a Tendulkar or a Prashant Dalmi was missing.”

Joshi is currently working on a tragic comedy with live music that will open in January. Like his brother, he sees himself in the film industry in the future. Asked how he would handle this new medium, given that he has little exposure to the technical nuances of cinema, Joshi says he is ready to learn. “Remember, I can even run errands,” he laughs.

Welcome Zindagi will play on Sunday at the Tejpal Auditorium in Mumbai. 102 Not Out will play on 20 November at the Nehru Auditorium in Mumbai.

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Path to glory: Salim Ahamed’s debut film has won four National Awards already; and (below) a still from the film.

Q&A | SALIM AHAMED

Pilgrim’s progress The debutant director on his film, India’s entry to next year’s Academy Awards

B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN pavitra.j@livemint.com

···························· n his first film Adaminte Makan Abu (Abu, Son of Adam), 39 year-old Malayalam film-maker Salim Ahamed tells the story of attar seller Abu (Salim Kumar) and Aishumma (Zarina Wahab) and their struggle to save money to make the last journey of their life—to Mecca. The film, which won four National Awards for best actor, best cinematography, best feature film and best background score for 2010, is India’s official entry for nomination in the Best Foreign Film category for the 84th Academy Awards.

We spoke to Ahamed about his journey from television scriptwriter to film director. Edited excerpts from an interview:

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You worked on the script for ‘Adaminte Makan Abu’ for a decade. What were the challenges?

The story of Abu was on my

mind for more than 10 years.

But it took only a month to prepare the final script. I had written three basic plots in college around 15 years ago.

One was based in a local school in Kerala, one was a thriller, and the third was the story of Abu. I chose Abu’s story because I wanted my first film to have a message.

The biggest challenge was to find a producer. Nobody was prepared to finance a noncommercial film like this one, so I started saving up from my television pay cheques. But that wasn’t enough. Somewhere in the middle of filming, I had to approach a friend (Ashraf Bedi), who agreed to co-produce the film.

Is the concept of Haj or the pilgrimage to Mecca something close to your heart?

I know many people who will identify with the story of Abu. When I was younger, there was a man named Abu in my village who looked and behaved a

lot like my central character.

But this is not his story. In my five years of working in a travel agency right after college, I met many such people who dreamt about going to Haj—it is their life’s biggest desire. The storyline reflects the thought process of a majority of people in the village I grew up in. That is my inspiration.

You chose some of the best technical talent in the Malayalam film industry for the film...

I had decided from the beginning that these would be the people I would work with in my first film. Getting the industry’s best talents to work with me was hardly a challenge because they all liked the subject.

You have struck gold with your first film. Just getting the best talent couldn’t have been enough.

I did a lot of research before I finalized the cast and crew. The film’s music is by Isaac Thomas, who has used a lot of Arabic sounds interspersed with

A tale of two rivers The Yamuna­Elbe art project couples two unlikely rivers to showcase artwork about sustainability B Y S HREYA R AY shreya.r@livemint.com

···························· irty-grey, garbage-littered and foul-smelling, the Yamuna is now a muse for art.

Even stranger, it is being coupled with Germany’s squeakyclean Elbe river for a public art project. Not the likeliest of muses—or pairings—to someone carrying a south Delhi lens, but the idea is exactly that: Change the way you see the Yamuna.

The Yamuna-Elbe: Public Art and Outreach Project, a part of

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the “Germany and India 2011-2012: Infinite Opportunities” celebrations, is premised on the idea of creating ecological rivers in cities and have people “experience the rivers”.

“In Delhi, nobody goes to the river. All discussions about the Yamuna are in terms of ‘polluted’ versus ‘clean’, but it has so many aspects to it: social, political, biological and ecological. Not too many of us know about this because we don’t see it,” says artist-environmentalist Ravi Agarwal, who has co-curated the project, which began on Wednesday.

In Hamburg, he says, although the Elbe is very clean, it has been tamed to a point that it looks like a water channel, with all its biodiversity wiped out because of over-engineering. “Both rivers, in very different ways, suffer from the same problems. Both have become controlled human

landscapes rather than natural landscapes,” he says.

In order to bring people to the river front, its banks have been embellished with some of the most cutting-edge art from both cities. German performance artiste Ines Lechleitner will create a “Yamuna-Elbe perfume” after talking to people about it, and feeling and smelling it. “She will develop the perfume on the imagined fragrance of the rivers.

The project will happen over the course of this year,” says Till Krause, land artist from Hamburg and co-curator. In all, four Indian artists and five German artists are taking part.

Delhi-based artist Atul Bhalla will engage local villagers to make small wells connected to the river-water table, made from reeds and local grass. Each well will be covered with a small translucent tent and have a question—about the river and the city—in LED running text.

silence, which I have used in a very powerful manner in the film. The success of the film lies in a way in the hands of the very able technical crew and the excellent actors. But in addition to that, the film leaves a warm feeling in your heart and that, I believe, is its real selling point. I have travelled a lot with the screening of the film in the past few months and I can say that audiences in India and abroad have loved it.

Of the many things being said about the film, one criticism is that the characters are too idealistic. Do you agree?

The characters in my film are idealistic but I wouldn’t say that people like that don’t exist; they do. The central character, Abu, is a man who is good and honest and his treatment of people begets goodness in return.

Your lead, Salim Kumar, is best known for his comedy roles. Why did you cast him?

Salim Kumar’s performance in films like Bridge—which is one of the 10 films in the Kerala Café anthology—is outstanding.

He was a bit surprised being cast in the lead role himself! As for Zarina Wahab, I cast her because she has the face of a Malabar Muslim.

The Oscars involve a lot of lobbying. Are you prepared?

I have been advised by my friends from Mumbai to hire an agent to look after promotions, which I have done.

What are you working on next?

I want to make my next film just like I made this one—with the simple aim of making a good film. I am working on two scripts: One is historical and the other is based in a village in Kerala. But I want to erase the thought of awards from my head while I’m working on them.

Gigi Scaria’s The Fountain of Purification pumps up the waters of the Yamuna into a spectacular multi-storeyed fountain which, by the final level, becomes pure enough to be served as drinking water.

Asim Waqif’s Jumna’s Satyagraha—an installation work made of the remnants of the abandoned pontoon bridge on the Geeta Colony banks of the Yamuna—is an expression of goddess Jumna’s anger at mod-

t has been the done thing for international artistes touring India to jam casually with a local band or musician.

Sometimes these interactions are in the form of short workshops, master classes or interactive sessions with young musicians and students, and at other times, Indian stars perform alongside international greats, making the city’s rich and famous scramble for seats to “rattle their jewellery” while people in the cheaper seats clap their hands, if I might borrow from John Lennon’s words.

Things weren’t any different when Lady Gaga came gracing the Formula One event in India. I’d like to begin by thanking her for thinking of performing with a sitar player because left to our desi event designers, the likes of a sitar or a sitar player would never have found their way to any of the events associated with the racing mega event. But when Lady Gaga expressed a desire to jam with a sitar player, recommendations were sought and I found myself recommending Delhi-based Fateh Ali, an accomplished khandaani musician who, along with his equally accomplished twin brother, sarangi player Murad Ali, is at ease playing classical music or collaborating with musicians from across the world.

I believe the performance by Lady Gaga at a lush spa resort in Greater Noida attracted a huge audience despite tickets selling for a massive `40,000 each. It gladdens my heart to hear that Indians will pay such premium prices to listen to music, and I waited eagerly to see reports of the performance, particularly her interaction with Fateh Ali, whom I have known since he was a little tike obediently following his bespectacled grandfather and ustad, the late Siddique Ahmad Khan, at music events in the Capital. Next morning, the papers were full of all manner of detail about the event—what the star wore, what she said, the celebrities attending the event, what they said and did, and sundry trivia.

What almost everyone forgot to mention was the sitar player who accompanied Gaga, and I was left wondering if she had at some point changed her mind about jamming with a sitar player.

A leading publication reported that she had flown in a sitar player from the US, and indeed that might be what we would need to do in future if we are going to treat our own so shabbily.

Others reported “a sitar player” having played but no one seemed to have bothered to ask for his name. In a large picture from the event published in a certain publication, I could see a sitar player perched behind Lady Gaga, but the smokescreens and the shaggy haircut the sitar player decided to sport made it impossible for me to figure out if it was indeed our own familiar Fateh bhai. Did he or didn’t he? Finally, I got the answer in a small report published in the Hindustan Times (Hindustan Times is published

by HT Media Ltd, which also publishes Mint), and on YouTube, where a user called Grecocroat1980 had helpfully posted what seems to be a video from the performance. As the strains of the sitar reach out to a cheering-jeering rowdy audience, Lady Gaga announces clearly “introducing Fateh Ali”. At the end of the song she again duly acknowledges Fateh Ali. She cared to do so. But did we listen and did we care?

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com AP

In the shadow: Fateh Ali played on stage with Lady Gaga.

ern civilization for turning water sources into sewage canals. Historian Sohail Hashmi and environmentalist Vimlendu Jha will also conduct walks around the Yamuna to explain its history and the disaster urban development has unleashed on it. There will also be an outreach programme, including film screenings, inter-school debates, music concerts and organic food stalls.

A river front is an extremely By the riverside: Gigi Scaria’s The Fountain of Purification will be one of the many works on exhibit.

complex space containing flora and fauna; in India it also has the added dimension of being a religious and mythological figure, says Krauss. “There is an entire cultural life around the river, people still take ritualistic baths in the river, and all of this is missed by most of the people in south Delhi,” he says. “Only when you look at the river front will you think it looks different from your typical image of ‘dirty’,” he says.

The events attempt to present the Yamuna—as well as the Elbe—as “individual entities, and not in relation to humankind,” says Agarwal. “In India, we are over-planning rivers and taking away their natural landscape. In Europe, although they are clean—the Thames, for years, has been the ideal set for the Yamuna cleanliness drives—they have been overengineered,” he says.

“Merely talking about cleanliness is a flawed ideal,” says Agarwal.

The Yamuna-Elbe project will run till 20 November on site at the Golden Jubilee Park near Old Yamuna Bridge, Delhi.

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Art house: (clockwise from left) The Nandan complex being repaired before the ongoing film festival; then chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee at last year’s festival; and the inaugura­ tion ceremony at the com­ plex last year.

KOLKATA CHROMOSOME | SHAMIK BAG

Nandan’s litmus test PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

SAMIR JANA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

The thinking man’s ‘multiplex’ is 25 years old, but debates continue on the kind of films it should screen

W

hen the roof of its main auditorium collapsed in April, Nandan, the showpiece state-owned art film multiplex and cultural complex in Kolkata, had just completed 25 years of existence. Nandan was among the first multiplexes in India when it was established in 1985 with two auditoriums; a third was added soon after. What added to its aura was the fact that it was conceived as a venue for noncommercial cinema and an extension of the city’s influential film society movement, set up and supported by the state government.

Termites, it was reported, were behind the collapse of the false ceiling that happened between film shows and left nobody hurt.

The insects left behind a fragile wooden facade of the ceiling after years of slow-chewing the core—an act that was promptly linked to what many Nandan veterans feel is the gradual rot at the film complex.

The ceiling was restored ahead of the week-long Kolkata International Film Festival, which began on Thursday, says the complex’s chief executive officer, Jadav Mondal.

But this may not undo a bigger setback suffered by Nandan. In a move felt to be loaded with populist aspiration, West Bengal’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee shifted the film festival’s inauguration from Nandan to the Netaji Indoor Stadium. Though Nandan is still the festival’s fulcrum, stripping it of the inauguration venue honour is a dent in its reputation.

Since its establishment, the complex had come to be recognized as part of the cerebral nucleus of the city. Almost as an ode to Nandan’s grip on the city’s imagination, an oft-repeated jibe would mention “Nandan and Chandan” (Chandan being the son of the former chief minister, the late Jyoti Basu) as the two main contributions of Basu to Kolkata.

Basu, however, is said to have been indifferent to the cause of cinema, even remarking during a film festival inauguration speech at Nandan: “Cinema finema ami bujhi na. Buddha bollo tai elam” (I don’t understand cinema finema. I came here on Buddha’s request). Former chief minister and cinema aficionado Bud-

dhadeb Bhattacharjee (or Buddha) was then the state information and culture minister.

Banerjee “never shared her predecessor’s (Bhattacharjee’s) fondness for Nandan”, an English national daily reported after she announced her decision to shift the inauguration venue. Nor is much known about her fondness for cinema.

In a city where culture and politics often share the same bed, Nandan had played a cushioning role for the former Leftist chief minister. Bhattacharjee was a regular at Nandan on weekday evenings when he would sit for private screenings—European arthouse, Hollywood war cinema and the film festival selection being his preferred choice—and meet civil society intellectuals over tea.

But the “rot” had already set in by then at Nandan, which was being run by the writ of Writers’ Building (the state secretariat), contends Premendra Mazumder, vice-president of the Federation of Film Societies of India. While Nandan was initially conceived as a platform for “healthy cinema”, even formulaic mainstream Bollywood and Bengali films were being released there in recent years, he adds. “Nandan had deviated a lot from the original vision. From being a space for non-mainstream cinema, Nandan had become just another multiplex. It couldn’t become the film academy as was originally contemplated.”

Among those who envisioned Nandan was Satyajit Ray. The late film-maker, who was a foundermember of the Calcutta Film

Society and the Federation of Film Societies of India, also created the Nandan logo and played a role in the complex’s striking architectural design. Ray had a yardstick in Paris’s Cinémathèque Française, which not only has a voluminous collection of films but is a one-stop guide to cinema culture with screening halls, a library, reading rooms, conference halls, a thematic restaurant, museum and memorabilia, says Sanjoy Mukhopadhyay, professor at Jadavpur University’s film studies department and a member of Nandan’s advisory board. “Importantly, before Nandan, there were few screening spaces for noncommercial cinema in Kolkata. Even for screenings organized by the film societies and clubs, stand-alone halls had to be hired,” he adds.

In the Inner Eye, Andrew Robinson’s biography of Ray, the predicament of film societies is explained well. The book mentions that as a member of the Calcutta Film Society, Ray felt they had acquired a bad reputation among professionals as “conceited highbrow theorists who do nothing but debunk the Indian cinema—which is of course far from the truth”. For the Calcutta Film Society, Ray made available all books and magazines, while the late critic, film-maker and co-founder Chidananda Dasgupta provided a room in his house for meetings, discussions

and film viewings. But lacking a place suitable for screening films regularly, they took to doing the rounds of various rooms belonging to members, Robinson writes.

“On one occasion, in the middle of our discussion,” Ray is quoted in In the Inner Eye, “our friend was summoned by the owner of the house and summarily told that he would not put up with film people spoiling the sanctity of his house.”

Years later, Nandan provided relief. Its three screens, combined seating capacity of around 1,400, and inexpensive tickets (rates continue to be in the `40-70 range) was the best way to watch world and Indian regional parallel cinema. Ray, who had first met Renoir in Kolkata when the French film master had come down to shoot The River (1951) in Bengal, is believed to have watched Renoir’s A Day in the Country there. An equally

noteworthy film society event was a scripting class taken by Ray based on the Italian film-maker Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic L’avventura—probably the only time Ray had done so, notes Mukhopadhyay.

Antonioni, too, was present at Nandan during a retrospective of his films in 1994. In The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the biographical sketch of the Italian director by Sam Rohdie, the author writes about the episode at Nandan: “The reception for Antonioni in Calcutta was extraordinary. Not only on the first night when he appeared, but every afternoon and every evening when his films were screened; the same warmth, the same crowds. Every seat was taken, all the aisles filled…. The atmosphere was chaotic, expectant, excited, with a real hunger.”

Other acclaimed film-makers like Argentines Fernando Solanas and Eliseo Subiela and Pole Krzysztof Zanussi too have made multiple visits to Nandan during the Kolkata Film Festival, along with one-time visitors, film-makers such as Amos Gitai, Catherine Breillat, Gus Van Sant, Jafar Panahi, Miguel Littin and Tehmina Milani.

On non-festival days, Nandan was given up to its regular patrons: students at the well-stocked library, cinephiles, the city’s young cinema-literate intellectuals, wannabes and furtive lovers around the jheel, the British-built water tank meant for the fire-fighting department, over which the Nandan structure came up.

“Almost three generations have benefited from Nandan, which has had a specific clientele for good cinema. The complex Pack­up: A worker at the end of the film festival in 2010.

nurtured the minds of many creative professionals and bred a certain open-mindedness about the arts. Many who have gone on to become established film-makers started their careers with the adda sessions at Nandan,” claims Anshu Sur, who headed the Nandan administration between 1992 and 2004. “I’m not sure if Nandan will play the same role any more,” he adds.

His pessimism stems from the fact that from 2007 Nandan saw “attitudinal changes” in its administration. During his tenure at Nandan, Sur says he made concessions for the screening of films like Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, James Cameron’s Titanic, Mani Ratnam’s Roja and Kalpana Lajmi’s Rudaali—the reasons ranging from mass entertainment in the case of Jurassic Park and Titanic, aesthetic and social relevance in the case of Roja, and refusal to screen by mainstream distributors in the case of Rudaali.

The glut of mainstream commercial films released in recent years in Nandan, Sur feels, “might be thought of as a revenue model but maybe doesn’t explore whether the original objective behind Nandan was getting hurt”.

That the spaces vacated since the shifting of the film archive from Nandan to a better-equipped building at Chalachitra Shatabarsho Bhavan in Tollygunge, haven’t been utilized creatively also shows that enough thought has not gone into it, he feels. “But above all, Nandan needs to get rid of the commercial interest,” Sur says. His opinion is reflected by a senior member of the executive council of the Kolkata Film Festival: “The screening of Dabangg and Ray’s films cannot be part of the same policy. Nandan requires a definite cultural policy.”

Controversial films, especially ones that cast a critical eye at the policies of the erstwhile Left Front government, were also reportedly shunned at Nandan. After Nandan withheld its screening in 2005, a signature campaign was organized for Suman Mukhopadhyay’s Bengali film Herbert, which held no sympathy for the erstwhile political order of the state.

“Nandan’s preview committee had objected to the film, saying it will send out wrong signals to audiences. But they didn’t explain their position in writing,” says Mukhopadhyay. After protests, it was eventually screened and ran for three weeks. The film has since gone on to achieve cult status, as much for its aesthetic merits.

One Day from a Hangman’s Life, a Drik India-produced documentary film by Joshy Joseph, also ran foul of the Nandan authorities, as did director Kaushik Ganguly’s critically acclaimed Arekti Premer Golpo, ostensibly for its blatant content on homosexuality. “Since all these films, including mine, had a censor certificate, it wasn’t Nandan’s role to play super censor,” says Moinak Biswas, associate professor at Jadavpur University’s film studies department, who co-directed Bengali film Sthaniyo Sangbad (2010), which takes a look at the intrigues between land sharks and local politics in a refugee colony.

“There was favouritism in Nandan and the dominance of one party,” Biswas claims.

As in other spheres of life in Bengal, change has come to Nandan too. A new advisory board is in place, though there are murmurs of protest about it being packed with people from the commercial film industry.

Meanwhile, the new CEO admits to not having formulated a plan for Nandan’s turnaround yet.

The termites, for now, have been controlled.

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