Lounge for 14 April 2012

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

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Saturday, April 14, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 15

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

THE GOAN THEORY OF RELATIVITY A church that held fêtes and a club bar that housed a long­forgotten uncle—a discovery of Goan life and culture in Karachi >Pages 10­12

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH INFOSYS’ SD SHIBULAL >Page 9

‘I SEE THE MEDAL, AND I WANT IT’ Saina Nehwal says when she is at her best, no one can beat her. She is currently training to achieve that invincibility >Page 8

RESILIENT EARTH There are several reasons for visitors to trek up this mountain of ice that never melts >Page 13

A WONDERFUL TIME UP HERE

One of the early landing ports for jazz, Kolkata recently celebrated the 100th session of the Jazz Listeners’ Forum >Page 18

An autorickshaw driver in the Clifton beach area, Karachi, in the early 1960s.

GAME THEORY

PIECE OF CAKE

ROHIT BRIJNATH

CRAVING AN EDGE FOR THE OLYMPICS

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hooter Abhinav Bindra, a man of religious precision, also listens to his gut. But it isn’t quite speaking to him yet. Only whispering to him about standing at the door of a plane, parachute strapped on, the world a blur below, and stepping out into the cold, thin air. Bindra wants to “test” himself before the London Olympics, but is this it? He’s not certain. In the skydive, he’ll be strapped to an instructor and when he’s falling, he’s not really... >Page 4

THE GOOD LIFE

PAMELA TIMMS

SHOBA NARAYAN

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

YOTAM’S MERINGUE BETWEEN RESEARCH MYSTERY AND REALITY

L

ondon-based chef Yotam Ottolenghi has done for the Israeli staple Shakshuka what Claudia Roden once did for hummus. Whereas back in the 1980s every dinner party kicked off with a chickpea dip, now no self-respecting middle-class brunch is complete without eggs poached lightly in a spicy tomato and pepper stew. Ottolenghi’s best-selling Middle East-inspired cookbooks have made vegetables sexy, baking raunchy, and in his cafés, foodies... >Page 4

I

n her magnificently reported and lyrically written book, Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, Sonia Faleiro describes a poignant scene when the heroine, Leela, goes to visit a fellow bar dancer and sex worker, Ameena, in her chawl. The whole scene is heartbreakingly set up. Leela goes to visit Ameena because she wants to be the “wife” of bar owner Purushottam Shetty, and is doing the duty of the boss’ wife in reprimanding an absentee bar dancer.

Ameena hasn’t been coming to work... >Page 5

PHOTO ESSAY

FACES OF TRAVEL

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

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

Pr e s e nt e dby

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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

LOUNGE LOVES | TARA BOOKS BOOK BUILDING

LOUNGE REVIEW |

Pop­up books

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The multifunctional Chennai space displays the unique art of their handcrafted books

MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

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n the alley behind a seventh century Shiva temple in south Chennai, amid a cacophonous stream of cycles, cars, trucks and bullock carts squeezing past banana vendors and jasmine garland sellers, Tara Books has culled its own plot.

But this creation of the nearly two-decade-old, Chennai-based independent publishing house which specializes in handmade books is no page-turner. It’s an eye-popper. This gallery-cum-office space, located a kilometre from south Chennai’s cultural landmark—the Kalakshetra dance school—reveals itself only closer to the end of a nondescript residential lane.

The Tara Books Book Building—a three-storeyed, ecologically friendly architectural masterpiece inaugurated on 25 February—is a labour of love of Tara Books’ founder Gita Wolf and her team, which outgrew several rented office

spaces, pining for a dedicated display for their books and artist sketches.

“It was getting harder to display our books in book stores, and so when we were on the lookout for our own office space, we planned to make it multifunctional,” says 55-year-old Wolf, a former academic who used to teach comparative literature at the University of Erlangen in Germany. Wolf launched Tara Books in 1994.

The airy, sunlit, minimalist building which will soon be 80% solar-powered currently houses a book store and a gallery of its book art. Work is on on the ground floor to create a children’s reading nook and a small refreshments area, where visitors can make their own coffee or tea. These are expected to be completed by the end of the month.

The non-committal nature of the ground-floor space, which can play numerous roles for people to converge, is similar to the peepul tree in a village, which becomes the focal point for meetings and conversations.

The Book Building’s gallery area doesn’t have the conventional heavy frames. The artwork of tribal artists, who have illustrated the publisher’s books, dangle from clips on a wire line.

NATHAN G/MINT

The gallery: Book art is on display.

S WI P EF OR C L ARI T Y

TheMi nti Phonea pp Av ai l abl eont he

VINOTECA BY SULA, MUMBAI

Currently, two walls of a pillar on the ground-floor public space host brightcoloured murals by patua artists from West Bengal, interpreting the story of the Italian wooden puppet Pinocchio and that of African-American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. The remaining two walls of the four-sided pillar are a staid white, an invitation for visiting artists to leave their mark.

“Tara Books works with artists and art forms, and so the building itself will be an evolving canvass,” says Mahesh Radhakrishnan, the principal architect of the Book Building. “New work will be laid on top of old work, and each space will take a different meaning at a different time.”

The pièce de résistance, revealed only when one steps away from the wall display of Tara Books into the open gallery, is Gond artist Bhajju Shyam’s approximately 25x15ft tree. The grey-coloured tree winding up to the first floor, and dotted with imaginary birds, insects and animals in yellow, green, red and blue, is simply spectacular.

Shyam, who authored Tara Books’ The London Jungle Book (2005)—a pictorial travelogue of the artist’s first trip to a Western metropolis—took seven days to finish the mural.

While wandering through the Book Building, it is easy to forget the absence of air conditioning—generally a must in the blistering Chennai summer. But any memory of the rising mercury levels outside is forgotten amid the cross-currents of the sea breeze flowing through the doors, coupled with the coolness of the floor. So slip off your shoes and walk in—visitors are expected to remove their footwear before entering.

Tara Books Book Building, Plot No. 9, CGE Colony, Kuppam Beach Road, Thiruvanmiyur, Chennai. Open from 10am-7.30pm (Sundays closed).

Anupama Chandrasekaran

here is a bowl of butter popcorn on the table next to my Sylvia’s Sula Sangria, which is touched up with orange juice and dry vermouth in a sparkling white. In the midst of setting up shop at his new wine-tapas-pintxo bar Vinoteca, Rajeev Samant, the founder and CEO of Sula Vineyards, raises an eyebrow at the popcorn, but his Spanish chef, Sylvia Grimaldo-Torres, insists this is what is hot in Spain. “It makes you drink more,” she says.

“Everybody’s doing it in Ibiza.”

This is what Vinoteca is about, simply put: making wine fun.

At first appearance, the single 1,600 sq. ft room lined, and also lit, with bulb-holding wine bottles would seem like another showcase for the pompousness of wine culture. But as you step in, you see it isn’t. The walls are burgundy, as are the tassels on the comfortable grey sofas. The wine is Sula’s entire range of home-grown wines and imports. The food is the edgier form of tapas—pintxos, which are individual-portion tapas from the Basque region of Spain served on toothpicks. They do plan to open for lunch shortly and begin workshops.

The good stuff Grimaldo-Torres draws her recipes from home—the sangria recipe is her father’s—and since she’s familiar with India, she has been able to modify Catalan recipes to suit the Indian palate.

Unlike other places, neither the wines, nor the choices, are intimidating. This is Sula—the familiar Dindori bottles line the shelves, so you can just point. The menu helpfully lists pairings with the food. The service staff—the man serving us was Amit—know what they are talking about.

Do try the wine-infused chocolates and sorbets too.

The tapas range from simple savoury dishes like Patatas Bravas (skewered potato wedges served with spiced aioli, `200) to meltin-your-mouth roasted aubergine filled with minced lamb called Berenjena Rellena (`400). The pork tenderloin—Entrecot a la Pimienta (`850)—was served with a popping green pepper sauce and the meat was so tender that you barely had to chew.

The not­so­good stuff The place is tiny. If you have more than 10 friends, or maybe even six, you may need four of them to sit in turns. There is an outside section but it’s noisy. For a home-grown brand to decidedly push Indian food away seems defeatist.

Talk plastic Wines are `200 a glass or `450 a bottle onwards and dishes are from `200. A meal for two with four tapas, two desserts and two glasses each of wine would come to about `3,000.

Vinoteca by Sula opened on 12 April at Sunville Building, Dr Annie Besant Road, Worli, Mumbai. For reservations, call 8691033900 or 40046234.

Gayatri Jayaraman ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: ROGER WOOD/CORBIS

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ROHIT BRIJNATH GAME THEORY

As the Olympics beckon, athletes crave an edge

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CAMERON SPENCER/GETTY IMAGES

hooter Abhinav Bindra, a man of religious precision, also listens to his gut. But it isn’t quite speaking to him yet. Only whispering to him about standing at the door of a plane, parachute strapped on, the world a blur below, and

stepping out into the cold, thin air.

Bindra wants to “test” himself before the London Olympics, but is this it?

He’s not certain.

In the skydive, he’ll be strapped to an instructor and when he’s falling, he’s not really required to complete a specific task. He simply plummets. As a challenge, it’s not equivalent to negotiating a rock face blindfolded, or climbing a 40ft “pizza” pole, all of which he did before Beijing 2008. Then, as fear arrived and adrenalin flowed, he had to learn to control his body and mind. It was a simulation of sorts, of what occurs in a shooting range, of what will transpire at the London Olympics. If I can manage the pizza pole, he told himself then, then these insane Games can’t rattle me.

So as Bindra contemplates another personal examination, a final link in his preparation for London, he’s waiting for his gut to tell him what’s right. At what time. Except, he has only so much time.

In about 100 days, in London, he can’t ask himself if he’s ready. He better be.

Almost every Olympic athlete is commencing a last training lap. Tuning their minds, making final adjustments to technique. Can I subtract .03 in a race? Can I find the edge to separate myself from the talented pack? In this pursuit, detail is their God. At a meet in the US, Michael Phelps wins a 100m butterfly race, but his coach Bob Bowman frowns. Victory is insufficient, he desires perfection and Phelps’ finish lacks it. Bowman deals in fractions because fractions are decisive.

Like the .01 by which Phelps won the 100m butterfly in Beijing. Because of a strong finish.

“I can’t stand those finishes like that,” Bowman said. “We’re at a point now where the details are important and you can’t just keep blowing them off till later.

“It is later.”

Athletes want to leave nothing to chance, yet can never quite predict chance. Noureddine Morceli never knew he would be spiked in the 1,500m at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Phelps never knew his goggles would leak in Beijing. This is the adventure of sport—athletes challenged by circumstance and still finding a solution. But even if nothing unspools according to plan, athletes can never afford not to plan. To find a fractional advantage, they will even flirt with absurdity. A British Olympic Association doctor even wants to limit handshakes. Hygiene for him is the athletes’ ally, germs their foe.

Everyone is seeking advantage and no athlete comes equally armed to the Olympics. Some are comforted by their history and record (Cubans in boxing, Japanese in judo) and some genetically blessed with fast-twitch fibre. China has a pool of a billion, New Zealand of five million. Pakistan has 20-plus hockey astro-turfs, the Netherlands apparently around 500.

But as sport evolves, it is the benefit of science, even in just how deep a swimmer should dive in at the start, which can be telling. Swimming technicians in Britain film every competitive race and can send data to a coach’s iPhone for review. At the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), an army of scientists turn their expertise in biomechanics, skill acquisition, physiology, psychology, medicine, into finding those fractions of seconds and centimetres the athlete craves.

A single conversation with David T. Martin, a senior sports scientist at the AIS, becomes like a wander through a sci-fi script written by James Cameron.

Except this is reality, not merely imagination. In this world of fractions, equipment selection is a process. But picking the right swimsuits, oars for rowers (stiff or flexible), helmets for

DILIP VISHWANAT/GETTY IMAGES/AFP

Every fraction counts: Bindra (top) and Phelps chase perfection to the last decimal. cyclists, says Martin, is not just a matter of physics but also of psychology. “It’s like a soldier going to war,” he says. “If they know they have the best weapons in the world, it adds to confidence.”

So cyclists troop down to a wind tunnel—usually reserved for automobile testing—to assess aerodynamics. Here, chance does not live. Cyclists are tested at competition-specific wind speeds and estimates of aerodynamic drag are calculated as they experiment with a variety of wheels, helmets, skin-suits and riding positions. Certainly, Abebe Bikila would have been astonished.

He won the 1960 marathon while running barefoot.

Military analogies might be tiresome

in sport; nevertheless, the AIS resembles an athletic Pentagon at work where sporting generals design detailed plans. If this year is competition time, last year was the reconnaissance mission. In 2011, Australian cyclists travelled to London, visited their hotel, met the staff, collected data on weather and terrain and evaluated strategies for winning. Videotape of the course, for instance, allowed coaches to be specific with instructions: Here come the technical turns, here is the best place to drink fluids, here you can expect an attack. You can even sit on a programmed stationary cycle in Australia and pedal through the virtual world of an English course.

The modern athlete, in a way, is a

machine disassembled into a hundred parts. He is belief, fitness, diet, technique, recovery...and it is a polishing of these parts which finds him those fractions. If the real athlete can’t be poked and prodded enough, well then they just animate him. As Martin explains, with an undisguised passion, research is now ongoing on laser scans of swimmers which offer scientists a three-dimensional picture of the athlete’s shape.

This image is then turned into a object on a computer whose arms and legs can be manipulated. Already, scientists have filmed the swimmer and know precisely how he moves. Now scientists can measure how the animated swimmer moves through water and estimate drag using computational fluid dynamics. It allows for unique insight into which technique offers the least amount of drag.

It appears a staggering amount of effort for a metal sphere, except that this sphere signifies the best of the world. But in all this deeply serious business, athletes occasionally embrace a less-than-scientific approach once competition is done. Call it indulging the tortured self. I am uncertain what precisely Olympic athletes do, but Eddie Ng, the gifted mixed martial artist, gave me an amusing example of what they might.

Two days before his recent fight, he went berserk in a supermarket, as if after a season of dieting, the ascetic in him was readying to make way for the glutton inside. So he bought himself bags of chips (he had 18 at home), two large packets of peanut M&Ms, condensed milk and bread. As we sat together after his fight, he specifically listed every junk food item he was about to devour.

Evidently, even when rewarding themselves, athletes never lose their sense of detail.

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

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

UNRAVELLING THE OTTOLENGHI MERINGUE MYSTERY

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ondon-based chef Yotam Ottolenghi has done for the Israeli staple Shakshuka what Claudia Roden once did for hummus. Whereas back in the 1980s every dinner party kicked off with a chickpea dip, now no self-respecting middle-class brunch is complete without eggs poached lightly in a spicy tomato and pepper stew. Ottolenghi’s best-selling Middle East-inspired cookbooks have made vegetables sexy, baking raunchy, and in his cafés, foodies swoon over the dramatic displays of salads, pies and cakes, particularly his signature giant raspberry-splattered meringues.

Incredibly, everything tastes as good as it looks, if not better, and to cap it all, the man himself is pretty easy on the eye too.

Ottolenghi fans can be obsessive though. There are whole food blogs devoted to making every recipe in his two cookbooks; Twitter is on fire every time he tweets a picture of a new dish, and his baking provokes near-hysterical acclaim.

Ottolenghi’s own blog is a giant forum for this hero-worship; thousands of followers leave drooling comments about recent trips to the cafés or the recipes they’ve tried at home. On issues from failed brownies to the sourcing of mini Bundt tins, Yotam (we’re all on first name terms with him) is unfailingly helpful and charming. But when readers have the nerve to ask for a recipe which hasn’t appeared in the books, a certain froideur sets in. The reply is always the same: “I am afraid some great things must remain a mystery. This is one of them. Sorry.” No one asks twice.

One of the most hotly debated of Ottolenghi’s cakes is the magnificent raspberry meringue—tantalizingly, there are pictures of the meringue in the first cookbook, but no recipe.

Whole baking discussion boards are taken up with trying to work out exactly how he manages to achieve the dramatic raspberry topping. Many a sleepless night has been spent fretting over whether a raspberry syrup or

purée is used and whether it’s drizzled from a spoon or splattered Jackson Pollock-style with a brush.

As far as I know, the Ottolenghi Meringue Mystery is still a long way from being solved so I recently decided to try it for myself. Inspired by the beautiful, ephemeral mulberry season, I decided to see if I could bring a little desi perspective to the debate. There were a few mishaps along the way, not the least a colourful makeover of my kitchen tiles, but I now have a box of beautiful, vibrant Mulberry Meringues. Very Ottolenghi—but don’t tell Yotam.

Mulberry Meringues (with apologies to Yotam Ottolenghi) Makes 6 large and 12 small meringues For the meringues 3 large egg whites 175g caster sugar For the mulberry splatter 200g fresh black mulberries,

Mulberry magic: This version is a take­off on raspberry meringues. washed and stalks removed 1 tbsp caster sugar Juice of half a lemon Method Line a large baking sheet with baking parchment. Preheat the oven to 110 degrees Celsius. In a large, clean and dry bowl, whisk the egg whites with a hand-held or freestanding mixer until frothy. Tip in the 175g caster sugar and whisk until the mixture is stiff and very glossy.

Take tablespoons (Ottolenghi makes them much bigger than

this but I prefer them a little more modest) of the meringue mixture and drop on to the baking tray. Make sure they’re well spaced. Put into the oven and bake for about 1-1N hours. The meringues should not be browned but firm on top and bottom.

While the meringues are in the

oven, tip the mulberries, 1 tbsp of caster sugar and lemon juice into a saucepan. Heat the berries, then simmer for a few minutes until the juices have run and the sugar is dissolved. Tip the berries into a sieve and squeeze out all the juice. Put the juice back in the pan and boil for a few minutes to thicken slightly.

Now comes the fun part.

When the meringues are cooked, take them out of the oven and apply the mulberry syrup while the meringues are still hot. You could line your work surface and walls with newspaper, or like me you could decide to live dangerously and end up with purple-speckled walls, floor and trousers. Choose your weapon—I went for a pastry brush rather than a spray gun—then imagine you’re back in pre-school and throw the syrup at the meringues until you achieve the amount of mulberry you want. Be careful, though, you don’t want to end up with soggy meringues.

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

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

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SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Where research ends and reality begins

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CLEMENS BILAN/AFP

n her magnificently reported and lyrically written book, Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, Sonia Faleiro describes a poignant scene when the heroine, Leela, goes to visit a fellow bar dancer and sex worker, Ameena, in her chawl.

The whole scene is heartbreakingly set up. Leela goes to visit Ameena because she wants to be the “wife” of bar owner Purushottam Shetty, and is doing the duty of the boss’ wife in reprimanding an absentee bar dancer. Ameena hasn’t been coming to work because she has AIDS. Yet, when the two girls meet, their conversation is so bright and funny and full of Mumbai slang and energy. And you think to yourself, “How could these girls, who have been serial-raped since the ages of 12 or 13, laugh and joke with each other?” How could they possibly get out of bed every morning? The answer, of course, is: What choice do they have? Or as one of the characters in the book says tartly, “Otherwise?”

I have never met Faleiro but the question I have for her is this: How did she spend five years researching this brutal world and manage to maintain writerly distance? It is a question that could be asked of any author who dips into the whirlpool of lives that are entirely alien to her affluent readership—people who live in gated communities with tinted windows, as Katherine Boo said in an interview with American talk show host Stephen Colbert. Boo is the acclaimed author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which reports on “life, death and hope in a Mumbai undercity”.

Detachment is an interesting idea. Eastern religions—Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism—all speak of it.

Some Judeo-Christian faiths allude to it: St Ignatius of Loyola talks about “holy indifference” or Indiferencia. Tamil poetry urges us to live in the world like dew on a lotus leaf. The Bhagavad Gita tells us not to be attached to the fruits of our actions. I used to divide the world into observers and doers.

Journalists fell into one camp; entrepreneurs in the other. One group needed distance and detachment as part of the toolkit; the other, not so much. The question is: How do you stop yourself from forming bonds of attachment with the people you report on for years? Can you? How do you forget the lives in which you have immersed yourself for years?

Are you able to put it behind you?

War photographer Kevin Carter, who was part of the Bang Bang Club (a label associated with four combat photographers—João Silva, Carter, Greg Marinovich and Ken Oosterbroek—capturing the final days of apartheid in South Africa), is one famous example of a journalist who couldn’t put these lives and situations behind him. His famous haunting image of a starving Sudanese girl with a vulture behind her won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. But it also brought an onslaught of questions from the readership of The New York Times, which published the photo. Readers wanted to know what happened to the girl. They questioned the role of the journalist: Should he have clicked his photos or saved the child?

Carter later committed suicide—for a variety of personal reasons, including debt, but also because he was “haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain...”, as he said in his suicide note.

War photography is riveting. You only need to go through the website of the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for examples.

Photographers risk life and limb to capture images that encapsulate the essence of a scene, situation or incident for a viewing public that lives in another world and another

Seeking closure: Photographer Steve McCurry’s iconic picture of the Afghan girl Sharbat Gula in Paris. continent. Look at Carolyn Cole, whose images of the civil war in Liberia won her all the three top prizes in the US for photojournalism in 2004, including the Pulitzer Prize. Cole’s photos are stunning. They also raise the question: Does she cultivate detachment? How so? How does she walk away?

Not all photographers walk away.

Steve McCurry went back to Afghanistan to find Sharbat Gula, the Pashtun girl with haunting green eyes who made the cover of National Geographic. It gave him—and his readership—a measure of closure.

Different professions fall in different positions in the spectrum between activism and detachment.

Or so I thought. You needed to be engaged—an activist—in order to found a company or an NGO; you needed distance and detachment in order to report, to be a war photographer. Does an activist need

passion or detachment? Can you have both?

Do you need detachment to be a war journalist or an author who reports on a society’s underbelly?

Do you need detachment to do what Girish Kulkarni does at Snehalaya in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra (where he rescues and rehabilitates prostitutes), or what the sisters in the Missionaries of Charity, Kolkata, do? In the spectrum with action at one end and renunciation at the other, how attached or how detached do you need to be in order to function effectively in a frail world—full of contradictions and foibles?

In India, we do this intuitively. In India, we are surrounded by grinding poverty and stark contrasts. Visitors to our country, particularly those from the West, frequently ask what us natives consider a naïve question: Don’t the beggars bother you? Doesn’t the poverty all around affect you?

How can you live like this? But we do, don’t we, by developing some defence mechanism that helps us not to “see” the filth that is all around; by looking away when a beggar approaches our vehicle; by being Good Samaritans and rabble-rousing activists at some points and practising the nivritti-marga at others?

Are you detached or engaged?

Where do you fall in this spectrum?

And which is the right path? Please, don’t tell me about the Buddhist Middle Path. That’s a cop-out answer. Which part of the middle, is my question?

Like others, Shoba Narayan wonders what happened to that Sudanese girl. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

THINKSTOCK

NATASHA BADHWAR

DEMONS, CLIFFS AND RESCUE MISSIONS

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don’t remember exactly what it was that started this conversation. We were out for a walk in a park after dinner.

The children were scampering ahead of us.

“I am becoming more and more like a mother and you are becoming like a father these days,” Afzal said to me.

“That sounds like a good thing,” I said.

“I’m not sure it’s a good thing,” he said.

“It is, Afzal,” I said. “One person doing the same thing all the time gets depleted.

Like farmers rotate crops, we need to be the other parts of ourselves too. People who don’t get a break become angry. And bitter.”

“Like our mothers,” he almost completed my sentence softly.

“Like our fathers too,” I added.

Naseem, the youngest, comes running towards us.

Splotch! Her foot lands in a dark patch in the path. She

almost bounces out of her sandal, stuck in the wet mud.

Some giggling, some crying and a treacherous rescue.

Also, end of conversation.

Afzal leads the way home, holding Naseem mid-air and at arm’s length. I do the same with the “favourite sandal” and follow with our older children.

I know a man who never wanted to be a father. He is the father of our three children. His daughters have started to become quite bossy with him. Very bossy.

Naseem climbs over him like he is a tree and perches on his shoulders, then tries to sit on his head.

“Are you a monkey?” he will say.

“Yes. Come and make a puzzle with me,” she will answer. She has absolute power over him.

“MY Papa,” she asserts.

Sahar, who is 8, scolds him, tells him off, and explains things to him very slowly.

Reluctant dads: Fatherhood is something you grow into, even if you never wanted it. good father to my children,” I said.

“I’m quite sure I never want to have children,” he said.

I had heard that a few times before.

I’ve always known that I want to be a parent. Afzal was always clear about not wanting to be one. I have looked back at my growing-up years and said, “I am going to show you how it is supposed to be done.” Perhaps he looked back at his life and thought: “Man, what a mess!

Why bother at all?”

Sometimes it takes a while

to realize that two seemingly opposite positions can actually be motivated by similar experiences. It is possible that people who express conflicting views can have the same aspiration, going forward. Our words can be deceptive, often we need to go beyond them to begin to see in our hearts.

I show this to Afzal. “I have called you a man who never wanted to have any children,” I say to him.

He reads. “Don’t use the past tense, he laughs, I still don’t want to have any children.”

“You’re so clever, no?”

I say.

“I’m just being honest, Natasha. This is scary stuff.”

“Just like the adventures you chase,” I say. “The

demons you like to slay. The rescue missions you paraglide into. The cliffs you’d like to jump off from…”

“Can you give me a new snake and monkey story idea?” he says. “Naseem is waiting for me in the bathroom and that’s my challenge for now.”

“Oh, you mean, one day at a time, baby?” I say.

“Now that’s clever,” he says.

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

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

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MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

Sometimes she interrupts our absent-minded conversations to explain to Afzal what I really mean. Or want.

“Let me speak, he will say.

I am explaining something to Natasha.”

She will clamp her hand on his mouth.

“Am I talking too much?” he will say in a garbled voice from behind sealed lips.

“Look how he sounds,” she will announce with glee. The others will mimic him. Like audio playing in rewind.

Aliza is our middle child.

We used to call Afzal and Aliza twins, when she was a baby. Afzal would stick his stubbly face next to her cheeks and ask: “Don’t we look like twins? Tell, tell.”

Many years ago, we were sitting in the front seats of a state transport bus on our way from Dharamsala to Pathankot. We had the seats ahead of the front door. A great panoramic view, and the soundtrack of enthusiastic honking all the way down from the mountains to the plains. I had my dupatta loosely over my head and face to protect it from the heat and dust. And to soften the light, I suspect, so I looked pretty to him.

“Why do you want to marry me?” he asked me.

“I think you will make a

Just 40 Mins. Drive from Azadpur By Pass

L6

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SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2012

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE

TREND

Click and pick A host of online grocery stores in Bangalore are making shopping easier for the tech­savvy city

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

···························· here really is nothing quite like the rush of picking up those brightly packaged products off the supermarket shelves and filling your cart with the month’s groceries—until you get to the half-hour-long weekend queue at the checkout counter.

But the sheen of the aisles is lost on Bangalore-based college lecturer Amrita Paul-Chakrabarty, who chanced upon online shopping a few months ago. “My weekends are now suddenly free,” she gushes. She switched to shopping at BigBasket.com four months ago and now orders from there at least once a week.

“I was a bit apprehensive about getting fresh foodstuff online, but I had to try,” says Paul-Chakrabarty. She was happy with what was delivered at her doorstep.

While she buys pulses and grains on a monthly basis from BigBasket, she logs on to the website every week to stock up on vegetables and fruits. “That I can get fresh and well-packed vegetables without leaving the house is a huge plus,” she says.

T

Bangalore’s technologically literate, dual-income households love the convenience of shopping for groceries online, and start-ups are picking up on the needs of the market. “Young couples and people who have moved here for their jobs understand e-commerce, and they seem to be living off instant noodles and milk,” says Bal Krishn Birla, who co-founded ZopNow.com in October. He says that at any given time, his warehouse stocks 400-500 packets of Maggi noodles.

Hari Menon’s experience has been different. “Bangalore is now ordering fresh vegetables, meat and fruits more than ever from my site as opposed to studies with local supermarkets that indicate that they were picking up a lot of packaged items,” says the co-founder of BigBasket.com, which was set up in December. In four months of being online, BigBasket claims to have 3,000 “repeat” customers.

“There was a time in February when the orders far exceeded our capacity. We had no vans to deliver, and had to deal with some angry customers,” says Menon, adding that BigBasket now has 21 vans compared with 10 in February and aims to increase that figure to 50 soon.

“The most important feature in the business is that people want things to come to them quickly,” says Birla, who assures delivery within 3 hours in south Bangalore.

“All delivery boys at ZopNow.com carry Android phones, making them traceable. The route to the customer’s house is mapped and recorded so that the next time deliveries are made in the same locality, a route map is auto-generated, ensuring time is not

wasted,” he adds.

Warehouses play a vital role in meeting on-time delivery promises, since vendors can be unreliable. Town Essentials—an-eightyear-old company which started supplying to retail customers only last year—and ZopNow both have warehouses, while BigBasket is in the process of acquiring one. At My Doorsteps sources most products from wholesale retailers Metro Cash and Carry.

In addition, the quality of delivery staff is vital. “The delivery boy is our only physical interaction with the client,” says Birla.

Menon says, “We had to ask them to wear sandals instead of shoes, since most houses will require them to take off their footwear before they enter the house.”

He laughs and adds, “There is always a problem of sticky, smelly socks if they wear closed shoes.”

But it is not all hunky-dory— several players have already exited the business.

Lounge placed an order with Adi Naturals (www.adinaturals. com), an organic online delivery store, only to receive an email three days later saying it had suspended deliveries. It has restarted deliveries since, but only for dry products such as pulses.

We checked out a few players in Bangalore to see if they really can make our lives easier.

AT MY DOORSTEPS www.atmydoorsteps.com From pulses, vegetables, meat and baby products to pet food, incense sticks and lamps, etc.— this site has everything you might go looking for in a supermarket.

But the website, which launched in February 2011, does not have images for some of the items, PHOTOGRAPHS

Net gain: (top) ZopNow has a warehouse; and BigBasket currently has 21 delivery vans operating in Bangalore.

BY

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

making the shopping experience confusing. Currently, it has discounted prices for six items, including wheat flour and baby diapers—not so exciting. Also, you get a `100 gift voucher from Bookmyshow.com if a friend you refer makes a `1,000 purchase.

Finding a particular product may take more than three clicks at times and browsing through pages in a subsection is tedious. For delivery on the same day, orders must be placed before 1pm. Otherwise, the items are delivered the next morning. At the moment, At My Doorsteps delivers only in south Bangalore. They accept cash, food coupons and card payment on delivery (the delivery person carries a wireless credit card machine). You can return anything that is damaged or of unsatisfactory quality. However, it is not a cashback policy: You will be given a credit note for the price of the item returned.

The delivery experience: The customer service called to confirm the order and ask for a convenient time for delivery. While the site mentions that deliveries below `500 will incur an extra delivery charge of `30, we weren’t allowed to proceed with an order below `500.

The quality of their in-house pulses is good. We ordered 1kg of chickpea and 1kg of peanuts. The packaging could be better, though—the groundnuts and chickpea came in plastic bags fastened with sticky tape that began to unravel. Though there was no spillage, it was not possible to

store the packet as it was. We also ordered a kilogram of grapes; these were fresh and wellwrapped. The entire order came in a cloth bag, and was unloaded in our kitchen by the delivery person, who took the bag back.

BIGBASKET Bigbasket.com From stationery items such as glue and colour pencils to accessories for printers, and fresh meats and chicken, deodorants, BigBasket.com is user-friendly. In addition to the regular range of vegetables, the website offers “exotic vegetables” too, though the items listed under this head are broccoli, lotus stems and avocado, among others. All the items are well-represented with images, which adds to the shopping experience. Also, it has a “quick shop” option which lists 100 commonly ordered items such as toothbrushes, onions, salt, all in one place for those who do not have the time to browse through multiple heads.

The website has divided the day into slots customers can choose from, depending on the time of day they will be available at home. Slots are given on first-come, first-served basis. Payment can be made by cash or cheque on delivery or online, and via food coupons. It doesn’t have a pay-by-card on delivery facility. There is a `20 delivery charge on purchases below `1,000. Currently it has an under 15% discount scheme on about 15 items, including 2-litre Pepsi bottles and Tropicana tetra packs.

The delivery experience: Delivery was prompt and the staff was polite.

The veggies— 1kg brinjal—were fresh.

BigBasket obtains perishables from vendors like Safal, who are present at various hubs across the city, only after an order is placed and doesn’t stock vegetables and fruits. We ordered mint leaves and avocados that came in thermocol dishes which were shrinkwrapped. Our order arrived in a plastic crate that was unloaded in our kitchen. Using reusable crates, they say, is part of their effort to reduce their carbon footprint.

TOWN ESSENTIALS www.towness.com Buying from the website which started home delivery service in March 2011 can be tedious since it is not easy to navigate.

But the products are photographed well. The offerings are varied and they even have a section for Bengali products like patali gur and panch phoron, etc.

The bakery section is fairly extensive and offers everything from bagels, apple strudel and ginger bread to panini. The products are packaged beautifully in brown paper bags and labelled neatly.

Town Essentials has an in-house brand of pulses and rice that it procures, cleans and packages itself. Town Essentials accepts cash on delivery or online debit/ credit transfers, and delivery timelines are long: within 36 hours, more than its competitors. No discount schemes are on currently. It replaces defective items and delivers across Bangalore.

The delivery experience: The service is not reliable. We cancelled an order because Town Essentials delivers only in the evenings.

ZOPNOW www.zopnow.com The website is easy to navigate, and has a smart search with autocomplete that makes it easier to reach the product you are looking for. ZopNow does not deal with perishables but stocks a range of consumer goods, including stationery, pet food, health drinks, packaged Indian sweets like chikki and tinned rasagullas, etc.

It delivers only in south Bangalore but plans to expand to other cities (Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Pune and Chennai) in two-three years. It has three payment options: cash-on-delivery, food coupons and card payment. It has a points system to encourage customer loyalty; customers can earn “Zoppies” or points on registration and purchases, which can then be redeemed against purchases. It has a no questions asked return policy and discounts on more than 1,700 items currently.

The delivery experience: It has the most impressive delivery time, and this is its primary selling point. It ensures delivery within 3 hours of an order being placed (provided the order is made before 6pm).

The items are neatly sorted and packed in green cloth bags which are then carried in cardboard cartons.

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2012

L7

Style

LOUNGE u Debenhams: Green parrot­print swimsuit with a peephole, at Ambi­ ence Mall, Gurgaon; and Phoenix Market City, Kurla West, Mumbai, `3,495.

t Paul & Shark: Striped one­piece halter, at Palladium mall, Lower Parel, Mumbai; DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; Taj Krishna hotel, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad; and Express Avenue mall, Royapettah, Chennai, `15,995.

p OVS: Bikini with retro belt, at Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; Linking Road, Bandra, and Infinity mall, Lokhandwala, Mumbai; Mantri Square mall, Malleswaram, Bangalore; and Express Avenue mall, Royapettah, Chennai, `2,199.

PICKS

q Zara: Bandeau with a twist, at Palladium mall, Lower Parel, Mumbai; Select Citywalk mall, Saket, and DLF Promenade, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `2,380.

Heavy necking

t FCUK: Tie­up bikini, at Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; Linking Road, Khar, Mumbai; and Mantri Square mall, Malleswaram, Bangalore, `2,499.

Halters are topping the charts this season, whether you opt for a bikini or a one­piece swimsuit B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

····························

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

q Roxy: Retro front­knot bikini, at Quiksilver stores at Ambience Mall, Gurgaon; and High Street Phoenix, Lower Parel, Mumbai, `3,495.

u Marks & Spencer: Wing­print cutout swimsuit, at DLF Place, Saket, New Delhi; High Street Phoenix, Lower Parel, Mumbai; Express Avenue mall, Royapettah, Chennai; and Inorbit mall, Cyberabad, Hyderabad, `2,799.

u Shivan and Narresh: One­piece maillot, at 12, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi, `40,500.

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES

Cool Britannia Mark Henderson of Gieves & Hawkes on what gives British menswear its edge B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· ark Henderson’s professional credentials—director, the Walpole British Luxury group, deputy chairman, Gieves & Hawkes, and chairman, Savile Row Bespoke—are as impressive as his suit. “A bespoke Gieves & Hawkes, unsurprisingly,” he says of his impeccable blue single-breasted complet, matched with a blue-andwhite striped shirt that can only be described as natty, and a bottlegreen knitted tie; the beautiful, if niche red-carpet choice for edgy young British actors, and perhaps one of the most pleasing of the 1970s retro trends that have shown up increasingly over the last year in British design. “The texture of these really makes all the difference,” he says Henderson was at the Mint Lux-

M

ury Conference last month. In a red-letter year for British public relations—Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee celebrations will be held in early June, just before the London Olympics begin—global attention will be drawn even more than usual to the UK. On 14 June, London will inaugurate its first men’s fashion season (announced by the British Fashion Council as London Collections: Men). The shows come right before the men’s fashion weeks in Paris and Milan, respectively. And gloriously, Alexander McQueen will open its first menswear store on No. 9 Savile Row, the street where the designer once worked.

It is an excellent time to reflect on what makes classicism and quirkiness two contrasting, but oddly harmonious hallmarks of British fashion. “There is something comforting about heritage, in

Classic quirkiness: On Savile Row; and (right) British actor Jeremy Irvine sports a suit on the red carpet. luxury in particular,” Henderson says about the British aesthetic.

“The Savile Row suit has lasted 150 years. (But) if you go to some of the classic British social scenes, Henley or Ascot, you see that there is an eccentricity to the way we do things.”

Winningly, British designers have used that heritage in a way that still seems unthinkable in France or Italy, where,

GARETH CATTERMOLE/ GETTY IMAGES

for all its flair and craft, fashion remains in deadly earnest.

Two overarching aspects of British design are its associations with masculinity, and—in a pleasing contrast—its ability to bridge the gap between young and old. “I think it depends on where the noise is,” Henderson says. “A lot of British imagery is very masculine, whether it’s a car like the Aston Martin, the British hunting season, or the British suit.” But houndstooth and tweed don’t speak only to those of a certain age. Henderson points out that the British have always been comfortable with both the very old and the very new. “We’ve always had, you know, punks running down the King’s Road. Part of British imagery is this lovely juxtaposition between young and old—whether or not you want to think of it as the scandalized old colonel in a bowler hat and moustache gazing at a hippie next to him. We’ve always seen the humour in that, and enjoyed that contrast.”

How does all this dialogue translate to the suit? We have seen them tend to extremes in recent years. Classic three-piece and double-breasted outfits having made a terrific impact on run-

ways and red carpets alike. At the same time, silhouettes have been compressed from slim to terrifyingly slim. Italian outfitters have superb traditions working with both those aspects. But Savile Row has had a good decade in the critical eye, and, thanks to designers like Richard James and Ozwald Boateng, is not just a place to indulge in the “experiential” quality of British luxury, to quote Henderson, with the tailoring and the bolts of cloth and so on. It’s also sharp and fun.

“Forget the label,” Henderson says about having a suit made.

“Suits are investment garments, and I hate to see people who’ve bought something just because it’s fashionable. There’s always a roundabout going as far as fashion is concerned. ‘Are doublebreasted suits in? How wide or narrow are the lapels?’”

“We’ve just had two seasons when three-piece suits have been extremely strong. Everybody is wearing evening wear. So you can have dinner jackets or tuxedos, but not necessarily with the classic bow tie. You might just be wearing a black shirt, or a white open shirt, and it will look fabulous. But the key thing is the fit of the jacket.”

L8

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2012

Play

LOUNGE

BADMINTON

‘I see the medal, and I want it’ PHOTOGRAPHS

Saina Nehwal says when she is at her best, no one can beat her. She is currently training to achieve that invincibility

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

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

···························· t’s 6am, and Saina Nehwal, bleary eyed, climbs the broad stairs that lead to the badminton hall at the Gopichand Badminton Academy in Hyderabad. Fifteen minutes later, the last vestiges of sleep wiped away, Nehwal is doing what she does best—using her quick feet to chase down shuttlecocks, squeezing out returns that look out of her reach, rising high to smash with brute power.

The screeching sound of her sneakers fills the air inside the aircraft hangar-like hall as Pullela Gopi Chand, her coach, takes her through the first drill of the day.

“Cross,” Gopi Chand says.

“Pick up. Smash. Cross. Jump.

Cross,” alternately dropping the shuttle at one corner of the net or lifting it high towards the back of the court.

Nehwal retrieves.

This is the prelude to a battle—at this juncture, the most important fight in Nehwal’s career: the 2012 London Olympics. “The medal drives me,” she says. “I see the medal, and I want it.” She had wanted it back in 2008, at the Beijing Olympics, and she came close.

She was up 11-3 in the third and deciding game in the quarter-final, the first Indian woman to reach that stage, before losing her momentum and the match. “I thought, for just a few seconds, that my god, I’m so close to winning this!”

Nehwal says. “And that’s when it all went wrong. I got too tense and too excited, and I lost.”

How will her experience in

I

2008 shape her campaign this year? “I’m not going with 2008 in my mind,” Nehwal says. “It’s a different time, a different tournament, and I’m a different player.”

All this is evident: She had just started making inroads into world badminton in 2008, at the age of 18—now she is 22 and world No. 5 (after having touched a high of world No. 2). She had won a bronze in the 2006 Commonwealth Games before she rushed into the Olympic quarter-final, and now she has four Super Series titles and four Grand Prix titles (a notch below the Super Series in importance), as well as a Commonwealth Games gold (2010, Delhi). Yet there’s one lesson from 2008 that still drives her. “I’ll never make the mistake of thinking that I’ve won while I’m still playing a match,” she says. “Even if I’m match point up, I have to stay absolutely focused and strong and fight for the next point. That loss in 2008 was needed. It made me strong.”

It’s 8am, and Nehwal is not preparing for war, she is at war.

She stands on one side of the court. On the other, four players line up against her—Gopi Chand, Nehwal’s co-trainees, world No. 30 Parupalli Kashyap and world No. 43 Guru Sai Dutt, and Dwi Kristiawan, the Indian badminton team’s Indonesian coach. Four-on-one is a joke, but Nehwal still looks like she is out to win. Her face is stoic, her lips sealed in a thin, grim line, her eyes have a cold rage. She returns everything they throw at her. She’s pumped up, wired as tautly as the netting on her racket, as she picks up smash after smash that whizzes at her.

When the body tires of this mad dance of reflexes, and she fails to pick up the shuttle, her face screws up in disappointment.

“C’mon!” she screams at herself.

Then she stares at the floor for a few seconds, steadies herself, and gets back in position to resume the battle.

“If I’m at my best on a day, nobody can beat me,” Nehwal says. “I feel that I’m world No. 1.”

Like her game, her words too are edged with steel. But this is not just cockiness—this is how she conditions and trains her mind to take on the intense pressure of competition, to remain calm under fire. “For different people it’s different, but Saina is some-

BY

KUMAR/MINT

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

In flight: Saina Nehwal jumps for a smash; and (above) Nehwal and India’s top players training at the Gopichand Badminton Academy in Hyderabad.

body who wins matches when she goes in with the belief that she will win,” Gopi Chand says. “At the moment, she is supremely confident. But whichever way you go, the important thing is that when something unexpected hits you, when something pulls you down, you still have the ability to remain calm and focused.”

In that respect, Nehwal has gone through her most severe test yet. After the high of 2010, where she won three Super Series titles, two Grand Prix titles, and a Commonwealth Games gold, 2011 went awry.

She fought with Gopi Chand and began training under a different coach, injured her ankle, and most tellingly, managed to win just one tournament, the Swiss Open. Though both Gopi Chand and Nehwal refuse to talk about the reasons for their tiff, the turmoil had severe effects on Nehwal. “To be away from my coach and my normal training was devastating,” she says. “I missed not talking about my games with him, I felt uncomfortable; nothing was going right.”

A s t h e losses mounted, so did Nehwal’s frustration. “I’m not old enough to take things easily, so every loss, every criticism hurt me bad,” she says. “I cried a lot, and nobody can really stop you from crying when you are feeling that bad.”

In mid-June, she took the first step to recovery—patching up with Gopi Chand after the fourmonth separation, and going back to training under him.

“Everything started falling back in place,” she says. Gopi Chand began counselling her. “He told me ‘you are the best player we have, and you will only go up, so stop worrying about these things and make improving your game your only headache, and the results will come’.”

Nehwal put her faith in him, stopped reading newspaper articles on her, and cleared her mind of everything but her training. The road back was slow and methodical—first the recovery from the ankle injury, then losing the extra weight she had put on because of the layoff, then increasing her speed, and finally improving her game. “I had to add more variety to my strokes,” she says. “I needed to learn how to get close to the net quicker, improve my back foot strokes and my net-play—just about everything needed to get sharper and more effective.”

She felt she was back to her best in December, and in March, she successfully defended her Swiss Open title.

“By the end of the year, Saina had beaten most of the players whom she had lost to earlier in the year,” Gopi Chand says.

“You might as well make your mistakes in the year before the Olympics when there’s still time to rectify them. I’m happy to say that she has been able to find that balance and things are on the right track for her.”

It’s 12.30pm, and Nehwal has been on the court for nearly 6 hours now, with a couple of breaks thrown in. Her forehand

is a taut, dangerous whip, and she smashes with an all-body snap that hurtles the shuttlecock, the fastest projectile in racket sports, at what must be pretty close to its top speed of around 320 kmph. The kinetic beauty and excitement on display when a top athlete trains is difficult to explain: the speeds at which the shuttle flies, the quickness with which Nehwal reacts, moves, strikes, recovers, or the way her body stretches out to painful angles effortlessly to reach for a shot. But what is most striking is the sheer physicality of the sport, which is right up there in intensity with the way boxers, wrestlers or footballers train. The court sessions will end at 1, and after a 2-hour break for lunch and sleep, Nehwal will get into the gym for hard-core conditioning work and weight training for 2 hours.

Right now, she has upped her intensity of practice to frenetic levels to build the base for the final lap of training for the Olympics, and the Olympics itself. A month before the Olympics, Gopi Chand will introduce a variety of new coaching methods designed to give her that final push, and surprise opponents who have been deconstructing and videoanalysing her previous games.

Along with the final phase of the training, Gopi Chand says, Nehwal will also need to go into a hermit-like stage. “Shut off the iPhone, the Internet, the people who say ‘all our prayers are with you, you are our only hope’ or newspaper reports saying ‘PM wants to see a medal from Saina’—shut it all out.”

The final question, the one that nags Nehwal like a chronic disease: Can she break the Chinese? The Chinese have had a stranglehold on world badminton, especially in the women’s game, where they have won 12 of the last 14 World Championships in women’s singles, and the last three women’s singles gold at the Olympics. Nehwal is not up against just one player, she is up against a sea of them—she’s taking on the most powerful champion-producing system in the world. In the world rankings, the four players ahead of Nehwal, and the player immediately behind her, are all Chinese. “I know I can beat them one by one,” Nehwal says.

In the barrage of criticism she faced in 2011, one fact was lost —she met Wang Yihan, the Chinese world No. 1 and the current world champion, twice in Super Series finals. Both times, Nehwal had pushed Yihan to three games, coming within an inch of winning.

“With every loss, I learnt something,” Nehwal says. “Every match, I realized that I had the confidence and the skill to beat her, so it’s just a matter of time.”

Is the time now? “Yes,” Nehwal says, “in my head, I’ve already won the Olympic medal.”

What will you do when you actually win a medal?

“I will only know that when I have the medal in my hand,” she says, haltingly. “Maybe it will take me months, maybe years to sink in. You asked me that and I feel like crying, I have goosebumps everywhere…I don’t know what I will do if I win it.”

www.livemint.com To see the video interview with Saina Nehwal and watch her train, visit www.livemint.com/nehwal.html. To read our previous stories in the Dream Catchers series, visit www.livemint.com/dreamcatchers

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2012

L9

Business Lounge

LOUNGE SD SHIBULAL

The silent seventh executive The CEO of Infosys says he has seen the company reinvent itself every four years in the last three decades

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

···························· eated on a swivel chair in his cabin at the Infosys campus in Bangalore, S.D. Shibulal, or Shibu as he is popularly known, is making quick notes on his iPad before this interview begins. Dressed in a dark grey suit, the co-founder, chief executive officer and managing director of Infosys Ltd says his cabin, spacious and minimalist, is his favourite place to work out of.

“I do have an office in Boston (US) as well, but this overlooks trees and this is where many greats of Infosys sat as well,” he says. N.R. Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani, he says, used the same office.

Known to be the chronicler among the seven founders of the company, 57-year-old Shibulal has watched Infosys reinvent itself in the last three decades. “Infosys changes every three-four years. In 1999, we were 98% in Bangalore, today 19% or

S

Chronicler: The last of the Infosys founders to hold the position of CEO, Shibulal doesn’t know of another team of founders which has stayed together like they have.

even less is in this city,” he says.

He has been the face of the company since he took over in August from co-founder S. (Kris) Gopalakrishnan, now the executive co-chairman. In the media glare more than ever, Shibulal, known to be the company’s operations man, says it was tougher than he thought.

“I started out thinking that now more departments would report to me and that wasn’t really much of a challenge. But after the initial months, I realized it was a whole new ball game—it was a completely different role because the buck stops with you,” he smiles.

But he is quick to add that like Murthy, he too is comfortable with the public gaze now. “No, I am not that private; every new role requires you to transform,” he says. Yet Shibulal is most comfortable talking about Infosys and fields personal questions with discomfort.

Last year, the word “technologies” was dropped from Infosys’ name, indicating the company’s aspiration to grow beyond being the information technology (IT) company that it started out as and towards a consulting and technology corporation.

Ask him what his best memories are in Infosys and he goes back in time: “I remember setting up a computer in Mico back in 1984.” Prodded for more, he continues: “Also, when we installed the link between Boston and Bangalore.”

After completing his MSc in

‘So many people have worked harder than us, were probably more capable, but we were the ones who made it.’

physics from the University of Kerala, Shibulal started his career in 1978 with the Bombay Electric Supply and Transport Undertaking (now The Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport Undertaking, or BEST), a place that introduced him to computing. “They were extremely innovative and were perhaps the first to computerize their ticketing systems back then,” he says. In 1980, he moved to Patni Computer Systems (PCS) in Bangalore, where he met Murthy. “What I first noticed about him was that he was particular about what he wants and will rarely budge.”

A familiar question crops up, one he has heard and answered before—about the founding members. “It’s a 30-year-old relationship. We have to be close-knit,” he justifies, adding, “I have done research to check if there is any other set of people who have stayed together for as long as we have been around.”

He is yet to find such a group.

Shibulal, however, did leave Infosys in 1991 to join Sun Microsytems, only to return to the firm five years later in 1996.

He would rather not comment on it, however.

The families of the seven founders have relied on each other for both professional and personal support over the years.

“We have cooked for each other, have taken care of the children and even stayed in each other’s houses,” he says, recalling that he and his family (then just his wife Kumari and daughter Shruti) stayed with the Murthys in 1986 when he moved to Bangalore from the US . “As a result, the children are also close as per their age groups,” he says.

Shruti, now 27, left Merrill Lynch in New York to come back and start a restaurant in Bangalore named Caperberry with chef Abhijit Saha in 2009.

“It was unconventional, but she was happy,” he says. Shruti has now taken a break from the restaurant and is studying for an MBA at the Columbia Business School, Columbia University, New York. “My son Shreyas (20)

IN PARENTHESIS Shibulal catches up on movies during long­distance flights across the world, and counts ‘Inception’ as an impressive watch. When not catching flicks, he tunes into his playlist to listen to Carnatic music. His love for the genre began with listening to K.J. Yesudas, and he is currently hooked to the voice of Sudha Raghuraman.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

is studying computer science at the Haverford College, Philadelphia,” he pauses, before adding with a laugh, “but I just never know when he will switch.”

“I have always treated them as adults. My wife takes care of them like a mother,” says Shibulal, who met Kumari in 1974, when she was his junior in college in Kerala. “Kumari is now busier than ever with the Akshaya Trust that we formed to aid in education and health,” says Shibulal. The family, he says, made a conscious decision in 1995 to concentrate on the field of education. The Akshaya Trust fully sponsors several students in USHA—The Usha School of Athletics, founded by P.T. Usha in 2002 with the aim of tapping the athletic potential in children.

He is happy to recall an early account that explains his relationship with Murthy. “I was running a computer centre in Bangalore in 1983. Mr Murthy would often come by and give me a set of 8-10 instructions. Young as I was, I relied on my memory and often forgot two of the 10 tasks.

This went on for a while until one day, he pointedly told me keep a diary,” Shibulal says, laughing.

Since then, he has been in the habit of jotting down notes.

His need to make lists pairs well with his love for gadgets, particularly tablets.“I also have an Android tablet,” he says, adding that while Kris looks at gadgets with curiosity, for him it begins and ends with utility.

“For both of us, it is important to study every new gadget because our clients are offering services on these new platforms and we need to understand them,” he says, adding that tablets have been his newest fascination. “They have changed the way of not only how we use technology, but also how we consume information.”

Shibulal looks at each of the founders as experts in their domain; his greatest respect, however, is reserved for Murthy. “Mr Murthy leads by example, and is strict and compassionate at the same time,” he says. “Nandan is good at strategizing and building consensus while Kris is all about innovations,” he continues, going on to list the qualities of each of the founders. “Each one of them has qualities that grew over a period of time,” he says.

“So many people have worked harder than us, and were probably more capable, but we were the ones who made it,” he trails off. The last of the founders to head the company, Shibulal maintains he didn’t become CEO just because he was one of the founders.

From 2007-11, he was the chief operations officer (COO) of Infosys. “I am here because I am a professional, and I will make space for another professional,” he says.

Shibulal’s vision for Infosys 3.0 centres around the theme of “building tomorrow’s enterprise” and he has identified several technology trends around which Infosys will work with clients. He is also clear that over the years, a lot more revenue will have to come from products and platforms, rather than the people-intensive IT services model that has worked well for them in the past.

“I am execution-oriented,” explains the frontman of the company, the worker bee among the seven founders, unapologetically.

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A quest to learn more about his late uncle Bunnu takes the writer on a discovery of Goan life and culture in Karachi B Y N ARESH F ERNANDES ···························· hen we were children, my cousins and I could have been forgiven for thinking that our great-uncle’s first name was “Poor”. That, invariably, was how my grandmother and her sisters referred to their only brother each time he came up in conversation, which, admittedly, wasn’t often at all.

“Ah, poor Bunnu,” they’d sigh whenever someone mentioned their Cambridge-educated sibling who’d chosen to stay put in Karachi at Partition, even as the rest of the family pulled up their roots from the city in which they’d lived for four generations to take their chances in India.

By the time I was a teenager, Uncle Bunnu—he’d been christened Alec Cordeiro—had moved into an old folks home in Karachi.

He’d never married, held a job for long or seen his sisters after 1947.

No one in the extended family seemed to have a recent photograph of him. The somewhat embarrassed tone in which his three sisters talked about him left Bunnu obscured by a whiff of mystery—even scandal.

But soon enough, any conversation about poor Bunnu would inevitably explode into a starburst of memories about growing up in Karachi. In a flash, the room would be filled with joyous recollections of dances at the Karachi Goan Association (KGA), of excursions to the beach in Clifton, of church fêtes at St Patrick’s Cathedral, and Bunnu would fade away again.

When he died in 1984, Bunnu had become more like a hazy myth to his younger Indian relatives than a real person.

I always knew that when I made my long-planned trip to Pakistan, one man would be able to fill in the details. Father Anthony Cordeiro, my grandmother’s cousin, was the keeper of family lore. His head held the names of hundreds of Karachi Goans spread across as many continents. For just over 60 years, ever since the family had moved to Mumbai, he’d conducted our baptisms, weddings and funerals.

Anthony was still a child in Karachi when his attractive cousins were being courted by men from across the subcontinent. Decades after they’d married the objects of their affections, Father Anthony

W

could be counted on to enliven family gatherings with his stories about the torments the suitors were put through. Then, as the laughter died down, everyone would huddle around the piano to sing the melodies they’d loved from the Karachi days. An essential part of the ritual involved Father Anthony singing his favourite tune, the Neapolitan standard, Santa Lucia.

Shortly before my visa for Pakistan came through, Father Anthony had to be admitted to hospital. It wasn’t clear what exactly was wrong with him, but over the course of just a week, a large portion of his memory seemed to seep away. The doctors explained it as a function of depleted sodium levels. He was moved to a home for retired Catholic priests. Days before my departure for the city of his youth, Father Anthony celebrated his 91st birthday. Relatives travelled from across Mumbai to be with him but Father Anthony didn’t have the energy to respond to their greetings. His voice was just a whisper. After an hour or so of strained jollity, his guests started to bid their farewells. Amid the bustle, Father Anthony abruptly raised his hand to indicate that he wanted our attention. His lips began to move but we could barely hear what he was saying. As we inched closer, it became apparent. He was singing Santa Lucia.

Family bonds: (clockwise from above) Excursions to the Clifton beach at night; the Karachi Goan Association (KGA) club hosted dances before Partition; Alec Cordeiro aka Bunnu (from left) with his sisters May and Beatrice, around 1912; Mary Cordeiro (Alec’s mother) with her daughter Beatrice and Alec; and the corridor of the KGA club is lined with portraits of past presidents.

Lurking danger I was in Pakistan thanks to the generosity of the Karachi Press Club, which had invited their counterparts from Mumbai to visit their city to fulfil a simple agenda: “to foster people-topeople ties” between the citizens of our two squabbling nations.

At the airport, we were greeted with garlands and peace slogans by smiling trade union activists.

Settling into the bus, we were joined by a posse of policemen with automatic rifles. They’d accompany us everywhere for the entire week.

The next afternoon, after a morning of earnest speeches by our hosts, I met up with Roland de Souza, an engineering consultant who is involved with a well-regarded city-focused NGO called Shehri. His family has lived in Karachi for more than a century and he seemed well

DANIAL SHAH/WWW.DANIALSHAH.COM

placed to help me find traces of Uncle Bunnu. Over a pizza lunch, De Souza drew up a list of people who would, perhaps, remember my great-uncle and gave me a little piece of advice: Never answer your phone on the street—instead, step into a shop and return the call. Since 2008, police statistics show, 219,927 people have been mugged for their phones in the city, a crime Karachiites refer to as “cellphone snatching”, somewhat understating the horror of having gun-waving thugs relieve you of your Nokia.

Karachi’s reputation as a dan-

gerous city, I discovered, had less to do with the possibility of terrorism or sectarian violence (though neither were uncommon) and much more to do with random crime. Anxiety about carjacking is so pervasive, for instance, some drivers refuse to stop at red lights after dark. A frequent drawingroom debate in Karachi revolves around whether it’s better strategy to drive a cheap car (so you have less to lose when you’re held up), or whether to travel in a really expensive car (to scare thugs away with the impression that you’re particularly well connected).

Except for the presence of automatic weapons everywhere, though, in the hands of policemen and security guards, the streets of the old Karachi neighbourhood of Saddar seemed eerily like those of southern Mumbai. The Victorian-era Empress Market, for instance, is a sister to Crawford Market. I was thrilled to chance upon a row of Chinese dentists nearby, just like you’d find in my home city, and I was told about Irani restaurants with curtained-off booths for couples. Karachi and Mumbai also share a taste for coffee-table books about colonial buildings.

Battered by unimaginably high rates of population growth that have left their infrastructural systems stretched past capacity, the two metropolises need to believe that things weren’t always so terrible, that in a sepia-tinted age not so long ago, they afforded residents lives of dignity and grace.

Both cities also take pride in providing a home to a spectrum of ethnic groups. As major port cities of the British empire, Karachi and Mumbai attracted many of the same communities: Jews, Chinese, Armenians, Siddis, Iranis, Memons, Bohras, Parsis and, of course, Goans.

My guide through this world of Karachi cosmopolitanism was the dapper H.M. Naqvi. Two years ago, he won enormous acclaim for Home Boy, his engaging, energetic novel about three Pakistani hipsters who find New York’s famed spirit of multiculturalism curdling around them amid the debris of 9/11. He has now turned his sights on his hometown.

Naqvi lives his life upside down, sleeping through the day and emerging late in the afternoon to work through the night.

When he gets tired or feels the need for inspiration, he takes long drives through the dark city, stop-

ping occasionally for a snack of halwa-puri at a roadside stall or to wolf down a chapli kabab at one of the establishments in Boat Basin. I was greatly honoured by his decision to break his routine for me. During my visit, he made the effort to do things more conventionally, taking a sleeping pill at night so that he’d be awake during the day.

One evening, he took me to a gallery called Art Chowk in Clifton, where the opening of a show called MAD in Karachi 3D was under way. The work leaned heavily towards sculpture and the themes were deeply embedded in

Karachi’s colourful, chaotic fabric. Asad Hussain’s Angel of Kolachi triptych, for instance, consisted of giant razor blades mounted on velvet, the slots in the middle fashioned to look like minarets. The artist everyone had their eye on was the elfin Sara Khan, whose creations use walnut shells that reference her Pashtun heritage, and .32 bore bullets. All around me, the elegant crowd sipped glasses of tea as delicately as if they were drinking Merlot.

Not so far away, another celebration of Karachiana was proceeding at the hilltop dargah of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, the city’s patron saint. The three-day urs at the tomb of the eighth century Sufi attracts tens of thousands of devotees. Abdullah Shah Ghazi is revered both for his ability to fulfil his devotees’ wishes as well as for the protection from cyclones he is said to bestow upon the city. For Naqvi, a devoted Karachi man, attending the urs is an article of faith. But this time around, he noted, the crowds were thinner.

In 2010, two suicide bombers killed eight people at the dargah and wounded 50. Across Pakistan, fundamentalists have been attacking Sufi shrines in an effort to enforce a monochromatic vision of Islam on a nation with determinedly diverse ideas of what it means to be Muslim. Only

days before we visited the dargah, the police had intercepted another clutch of potential terrorists; they had blown themselves up outside a beachside restaurant at which our press delegation had eaten dinner 24 hours earlier.

After showering rose petals upon the saint’s tomb, we made our way to the courtyard at the back of the shrine, skirting a gigantic whirlpool of camel’s intestines. We’d just missed the slaughter. This part of the complex, Naqvi said, was usually the refuge of the eunuchs, prostitutes and chillum smokers who demonstrate their faith more exuberantly than most other devotees.

But they were absent, he noticed, as were the ecstatic renditions of qawwali for which the dargah was famous. Instead, a group of turbaned men on the platform nearby were performing the most austere form of naat. Still, Naqvi was hopeful. “Perhaps we’ve come too early,” he suggested.

“Things will probably get more lively later.”

However, we didn’t have the time to wait. We were on our way to the KBC, as locals know the Karachi Boat Club. It was disco night and the room was filled with dashing men and gorgeous women cutting up the floor to the beats of a female DJ. Though Pakistan’s prohibition policy prevents the club from serving liquor, no one seemed unduly perturbed; they’d brought along their own bottles. Only one thing made this different from a similar event in India: None of the women wore skirts; instead, the shapeliest legs were being shown off in clingy tights. As the night wore on, the tunes got more retro.

At around 1.30am, we staggered back to the car just as a Michael Jackson classic was being dropped into the mix. Everyone joined in on the chorus: “Beat it,

beat it, beat it, beat it. No one wants to be defeated.”

Everyone goes to KGA If there’s one thing I knew about Uncle Bunnu, it’s that he’d spent a great deal of time at the bar of the Karachi Goan Association. At our first meeting, Roland de Souza had joked that the committee of the KGA had once made a decision to sack the chowkidar (guard). He wasn’t really needed since Bunnu Cordeiro never seemed to leave the building. From my grandmother’s stories, it appeared that everyone in the family had spent a lot of time at the KGA. After all, it was right opposite their home in Depot Lines.

That bungalow, sold in the months before Partition, has long been replaced by a characterless block of flats. But the KGA, a pile of stone turrets and stately arches, was more impressive than I’d imagined it would be. The front corridor is lined with portraits of past presidents, starting with the rather ghostly L.C. Gomes in 1886.

Inside the main hall, I was comforted to see a familiar face. On one wall, flanking an image of Christ, were photographs of Cardinal Joseph Cordeiro—Father Anthony’s brother. He’d been appointed head of the Pakistani Church in 1973, steering it through an especially difficult patch in the Zia era. During the 1978 Papal election, a Time magazine reporter wrote that London bookmakers were offering 33-1 odds on Cousin Joseph (a Polish cardinal won and took the name John Paul II).

The morning Naqvi and I visited, scores of people had congregated to attend the KGA’s bi-annual general body meeting. They were listening intently as the presTURN TO PAGE L12®

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GOAN THEORY OF RELATIVITY

COURTESY

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ROOTS

THE

SJAYZ PHOTOGRAPHY/MINT

A quest to learn more about his late uncle Bunnu takes the writer on a discovery of Goan life and culture in Karachi B Y N ARESH F ERNANDES ···························· hen we were children, my cousins and I could have been forgiven for thinking that our great-uncle’s first name was “Poor”. That, invariably, was how my grandmother and her sisters referred to their only brother each time he came up in conversation, which, admittedly, wasn’t often at all.

“Ah, poor Bunnu,” they’d sigh whenever someone mentioned their Cambridge-educated sibling who’d chosen to stay put in Karachi at Partition, even as the rest of the family pulled up their roots from the city in which they’d lived for four generations to take their chances in India.

By the time I was a teenager, Uncle Bunnu—he’d been christened Alec Cordeiro—had moved into an old folks home in Karachi.

He’d never married, held a job for long or seen his sisters after 1947.

No one in the extended family seemed to have a recent photograph of him. The somewhat embarrassed tone in which his three sisters talked about him left Bunnu obscured by a whiff of mystery—even scandal.

But soon enough, any conversation about poor Bunnu would inevitably explode into a starburst of memories about growing up in Karachi. In a flash, the room would be filled with joyous recollections of dances at the Karachi Goan Association (KGA), of excursions to the beach in Clifton, of church fêtes at St Patrick’s Cathedral, and Bunnu would fade away again.

When he died in 1984, Bunnu had become more like a hazy myth to his younger Indian relatives than a real person.

I always knew that when I made my long-planned trip to Pakistan, one man would be able to fill in the details. Father Anthony Cordeiro, my grandmother’s cousin, was the keeper of family lore. His head held the names of hundreds of Karachi Goans spread across as many continents. For just over 60 years, ever since the family had moved to Mumbai, he’d conducted our baptisms, weddings and funerals.

Anthony was still a child in Karachi when his attractive cousins were being courted by men from across the subcontinent. Decades after they’d married the objects of their affections, Father Anthony

W

could be counted on to enliven family gatherings with his stories about the torments the suitors were put through. Then, as the laughter died down, everyone would huddle around the piano to sing the melodies they’d loved from the Karachi days. An essential part of the ritual involved Father Anthony singing his favourite tune, the Neapolitan standard, Santa Lucia.

Shortly before my visa for Pakistan came through, Father Anthony had to be admitted to hospital. It wasn’t clear what exactly was wrong with him, but over the course of just a week, a large portion of his memory seemed to seep away. The doctors explained it as a function of depleted sodium levels. He was moved to a home for retired Catholic priests. Days before my departure for the city of his youth, Father Anthony celebrated his 91st birthday. Relatives travelled from across Mumbai to be with him but Father Anthony didn’t have the energy to respond to their greetings. His voice was just a whisper. After an hour or so of strained jollity, his guests started to bid their farewells. Amid the bustle, Father Anthony abruptly raised his hand to indicate that he wanted our attention. His lips began to move but we could barely hear what he was saying. As we inched closer, it became apparent. He was singing Santa Lucia.

Family bonds: (clockwise from above) Excursions to the Clifton beach at night; the Karachi Goan Association (KGA) club hosted dances before Partition; Alec Cordeiro aka Bunnu (from left) with his sisters May and Beatrice, around 1912; Mary Cordeiro (Alec’s mother) with her daughter Beatrice and Alec; and the corridor of the KGA club is lined with portraits of past presidents.

Lurking danger I was in Pakistan thanks to the generosity of the Karachi Press Club, which had invited their counterparts from Mumbai to visit their city to fulfil a simple agenda: “to foster people-topeople ties” between the citizens of our two squabbling nations.

At the airport, we were greeted with garlands and peace slogans by smiling trade union activists.

Settling into the bus, we were joined by a posse of policemen with automatic rifles. They’d accompany us everywhere for the entire week.

The next afternoon, after a morning of earnest speeches by our hosts, I met up with Roland de Souza, an engineering consultant who is involved with a well-regarded city-focused NGO called Shehri. His family has lived in Karachi for more than a century and he seemed well

DANIAL SHAH/WWW.DANIALSHAH.COM

placed to help me find traces of Uncle Bunnu. Over a pizza lunch, De Souza drew up a list of people who would, perhaps, remember my great-uncle and gave me a little piece of advice: Never answer your phone on the street—instead, step into a shop and return the call. Since 2008, police statistics show, 219,927 people have been mugged for their phones in the city, a crime Karachiites refer to as “cellphone snatching”, somewhat understating the horror of having gun-waving thugs relieve you of your Nokia.

Karachi’s reputation as a dan-

gerous city, I discovered, had less to do with the possibility of terrorism or sectarian violence (though neither were uncommon) and much more to do with random crime. Anxiety about carjacking is so pervasive, for instance, some drivers refuse to stop at red lights after dark. A frequent drawingroom debate in Karachi revolves around whether it’s better strategy to drive a cheap car (so you have less to lose when you’re held up), or whether to travel in a really expensive car (to scare thugs away with the impression that you’re particularly well connected).

Except for the presence of automatic weapons everywhere, though, in the hands of policemen and security guards, the streets of the old Karachi neighbourhood of Saddar seemed eerily like those of southern Mumbai. The Victorian-era Empress Market, for instance, is a sister to Crawford Market. I was thrilled to chance upon a row of Chinese dentists nearby, just like you’d find in my home city, and I was told about Irani restaurants with curtained-off booths for couples. Karachi and Mumbai also share a taste for coffee-table books about colonial buildings.

Battered by unimaginably high rates of population growth that have left their infrastructural systems stretched past capacity, the two metropolises need to believe that things weren’t always so terrible, that in a sepia-tinted age not so long ago, they afforded residents lives of dignity and grace.

Both cities also take pride in providing a home to a spectrum of ethnic groups. As major port cities of the British empire, Karachi and Mumbai attracted many of the same communities: Jews, Chinese, Armenians, Siddis, Iranis, Memons, Bohras, Parsis and, of course, Goans.

My guide through this world of Karachi cosmopolitanism was the dapper H.M. Naqvi. Two years ago, he won enormous acclaim for Home Boy, his engaging, energetic novel about three Pakistani hipsters who find New York’s famed spirit of multiculturalism curdling around them amid the debris of 9/11. He has now turned his sights on his hometown.

Naqvi lives his life upside down, sleeping through the day and emerging late in the afternoon to work through the night.

When he gets tired or feels the need for inspiration, he takes long drives through the dark city, stop-

ping occasionally for a snack of halwa-puri at a roadside stall or to wolf down a chapli kabab at one of the establishments in Boat Basin. I was greatly honoured by his decision to break his routine for me. During my visit, he made the effort to do things more conventionally, taking a sleeping pill at night so that he’d be awake during the day.

One evening, he took me to a gallery called Art Chowk in Clifton, where the opening of a show called MAD in Karachi 3D was under way. The work leaned heavily towards sculpture and the themes were deeply embedded in

Karachi’s colourful, chaotic fabric. Asad Hussain’s Angel of Kolachi triptych, for instance, consisted of giant razor blades mounted on velvet, the slots in the middle fashioned to look like minarets. The artist everyone had their eye on was the elfin Sara Khan, whose creations use walnut shells that reference her Pashtun heritage, and .32 bore bullets. All around me, the elegant crowd sipped glasses of tea as delicately as if they were drinking Merlot.

Not so far away, another celebration of Karachiana was proceeding at the hilltop dargah of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, the city’s patron saint. The three-day urs at the tomb of the eighth century Sufi attracts tens of thousands of devotees. Abdullah Shah Ghazi is revered both for his ability to fulfil his devotees’ wishes as well as for the protection from cyclones he is said to bestow upon the city. For Naqvi, a devoted Karachi man, attending the urs is an article of faith. But this time around, he noted, the crowds were thinner.

In 2010, two suicide bombers killed eight people at the dargah and wounded 50. Across Pakistan, fundamentalists have been attacking Sufi shrines in an effort to enforce a monochromatic vision of Islam on a nation with determinedly diverse ideas of what it means to be Muslim. Only

days before we visited the dargah, the police had intercepted another clutch of potential terrorists; they had blown themselves up outside a beachside restaurant at which our press delegation had eaten dinner 24 hours earlier.

After showering rose petals upon the saint’s tomb, we made our way to the courtyard at the back of the shrine, skirting a gigantic whirlpool of camel’s intestines. We’d just missed the slaughter. This part of the complex, Naqvi said, was usually the refuge of the eunuchs, prostitutes and chillum smokers who demonstrate their faith more exuberantly than most other devotees.

But they were absent, he noticed, as were the ecstatic renditions of qawwali for which the dargah was famous. Instead, a group of turbaned men on the platform nearby were performing the most austere form of naat. Still, Naqvi was hopeful. “Perhaps we’ve come too early,” he suggested.

“Things will probably get more lively later.”

However, we didn’t have the time to wait. We were on our way to the KBC, as locals know the Karachi Boat Club. It was disco night and the room was filled with dashing men and gorgeous women cutting up the floor to the beats of a female DJ. Though Pakistan’s prohibition policy prevents the club from serving liquor, no one seemed unduly perturbed; they’d brought along their own bottles. Only one thing made this different from a similar event in India: None of the women wore skirts; instead, the shapeliest legs were being shown off in clingy tights. As the night wore on, the tunes got more retro.

At around 1.30am, we staggered back to the car just as a Michael Jackson classic was being dropped into the mix. Everyone joined in on the chorus: “Beat it,

beat it, beat it, beat it. No one wants to be defeated.”

Everyone goes to KGA If there’s one thing I knew about Uncle Bunnu, it’s that he’d spent a great deal of time at the bar of the Karachi Goan Association. At our first meeting, Roland de Souza had joked that the committee of the KGA had once made a decision to sack the chowkidar (guard). He wasn’t really needed since Bunnu Cordeiro never seemed to leave the building. From my grandmother’s stories, it appeared that everyone in the family had spent a lot of time at the KGA. After all, it was right opposite their home in Depot Lines.

That bungalow, sold in the months before Partition, has long been replaced by a characterless block of flats. But the KGA, a pile of stone turrets and stately arches, was more impressive than I’d imagined it would be. The front corridor is lined with portraits of past presidents, starting with the rather ghostly L.C. Gomes in 1886.

Inside the main hall, I was comforted to see a familiar face. On one wall, flanking an image of Christ, were photographs of Cardinal Joseph Cordeiro—Father Anthony’s brother. He’d been appointed head of the Pakistani Church in 1973, steering it through an especially difficult patch in the Zia era. During the 1978 Papal election, a Time magazine reporter wrote that London bookmakers were offering 33-1 odds on Cousin Joseph (a Polish cardinal won and took the name John Paul II).

The morning Naqvi and I visited, scores of people had congregated to attend the KGA’s bi-annual general body meeting. They were listening intently as the presTURN TO PAGE L12®

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ident, Valentine Gonsalves, read out the managing committee’s report about the club’s activities over the past two years—all too aware that it was, in no small measure, a report on the predicament of Karachi’s Goan community itself. The KGA, Gonsalves said, was suffering from falling utilization of its facilities.

Large-scale migration, much of it to Canada and Australia, has shrunk the club’s membership. At its peak in the 1940s, Gonsalves told me, the KGA had about 1,300 members—not counting children. Now, there are only 483. In the community’s heyday, Goans clustered around Saddar and Cincinnatus Town (now part of Garden East), within easy distance of the KGA, but have since fanned out around the megalopolis. For many, it’s not just inconvenient to drop into the KGA, it’s sometimes positively dangerous.

“The security situation in the city has seriously affected the conducting of indoor games tournaments,” Gonsalves noted in his report. “Gone are the days when the KGA used to witness huge crowds for its table tennis and snooker tournaments.”

His cautionary tone was quite at odds with the confidence that bubbled through the managing committee’s statement in 1936, the KGA’s Golden Jubilee year.

After surveying the community’s long history in Sindh to suggest that Goans had been in the province since it had been annexed by the British in 1842, the committee of the time noted, “…It is through the bond of unit and brotherhood on which the Association was founded that its members are to be found today in the forefront in every walk of life.”

Over the next few decades, Goans would run one of Karachi’s pre-eminent schools (St Patrick’s High School), head the port trust (Maurice Raymond), the standing committee of the municipality (L.A. D’Sa) and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (Sydney Pereira), in addition to representing Pakistan in hockey (Peter Paul Fernandes, Jack Britto, among others), cricket (Matias Wallis and Antao D’Souza) and several other sports. Their prominence in public life gave the tiny community disproportionately high levels of visibility in newly independent Pakistan.

The KGA was where everyone from the professional classes kicked back after a hard day at work. In their spare time, they put on revues and farces, comedies and sketches. A stage with a piano had been installed in the KGA building in 1888, two years after the institution was founded, because, as the Golden Jubilee report claimed, “the social assets of the Goan are…an inborn love for music and a keen dramatic sense”. The document lists productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, HMS Pinafore, and regular “penny readings”—dramatic performances of poetry and stories. Unfortunately, no one I met at the general body meeting had any memories to offer about Uncle Bunnu. After all, he’d been dead more than 30 years. But I did find a mention of him in the 1936 report. He’s listed as a member of the managing committee and the superintendent of the library.

‘We are all related’ With my visit drawing to a close, Roland de Souza invited me to dinner at his home in Garden East, a part of town Goans still call Cincinnatus Town. It had been founded in the early years of the last century by Goans seeking to move away from the relatively crowded precincts of the main city. It was named after the scheme’s chief organizer, Cincinnatus D’Abreo, and the streets still honour the pioneering settlers: Britto Road, Lobo Street and Pedro D’Souza Road, among them. Father Anthony had grown up here. I went by to photograph his bungalow, now abandoned, and to chat with some of the neighbourhood’s older residents.

SJAYZ PHOTOGRAPHY/MINT

SJAYZ PHOTOGRAPHY/MINT

City landmarks: (clockwise from above) Fêtes were hosted at St Patrick’s Church; the dargah of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, Karachi’s patron saint; and the Empress Market in Karachi resembles Crawford Market in Mumbai.

The old folks home in which Bunnu had spent his last years is located in one corner of Cincinnatus Town, but in the years since his passing, the staff had changed.

Cincinnatus Town was unnervingly familiar. Many of the older homes had been built in the 1930s, exactly at the time the pocket of Bandra in which I live had been constructed and with the same coastal-city architectural features, so parts of Garden East resembled the now-demolished landscapes of my childhood. They were filled with the kind of teakwood furniture you find in older Mumbai homes and had identical Catholic iconography. The first person on my list, 92-year-old Rita de Souza, even spoke in the same Goan-Edwardian cadences as my grandmother and her sisters—not surprising, since she’d been in school with them.

She displayed all the discretion you’d expect of a woman of her breeding, but under my badgering, was gradually lulled into talking about my great-uncle. “Ah, poor Bunnu,” she eventually sighed. “He was quite a talker. At one time, we were all convinced that he was living in the KGA.” Then she let slip an anecdote

relating to the time Bunnu was at Cambridge in the 1920s. “He was disappointed in love,” Rita de Souza said. “He was quite keen on a woman when he was in England but his mother heard of it and made him exit the situation posthaste.” That’s all she remembered about him. Soon, she was back to talking about Cincinnatus Town in its glory days, before the advent of the “low high-rises”, as she described the four- and five-storey buildings that had mushroomed all around her.

The company at dinner included an uncle of the de Souzas who had been a senior officer in the Pakistani navy and a former neighbour who now lived in Australia. There was also Desmond Vas, whose family are my last relatives in Karachi.

We’re third cousins—or perhaps fourth. We aren’t sure. I’d last met him in Mumbai in 1984, when he attended the party in Bandra to celebrate my grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary. Visas aren’t easy to obtain but the Indian government lets 300 Karachi Goans cross the border each December as pilgrims to attend the feast of St Francis Xavier in Goa. Many

stop in Mumbai en route.

Vas had since lost his sight, but not his sense of humour. “Do you know about the Goan theory of relativity?” he asked. “We’re all related, even if we can’t figure out how.” He remembered Bunnu, of course, especially my great-uncle’s stories about this time at Cambridge. “He’d tell us about the libraries, where you’d have to maintain pin-drop silence. ‘What would happen if you had a cough?’ we’d ask. He’d reply, ‘If you had a cough, courtesy would require that you didn’t visit the library.’”

Dinner was a chatty affair. We discussed life in Mumbai and Karachi, fraying city services, and almost everyone had a story to tell about being robbed, even here, right outside their homes in Cincinnatus Town. After the dishes were cleared away, we gathered around the piano.

Roland de Souza is an excellent musician and led the gathering in a jolly singalong. A few tunes into the session, I found myself getting goosebumps. The cozy Karachi flat was echoing with the strains in two-part harmony of Father Anthony’s favourite tune, Santa Lucia.

Bunnu and the Englishwoman A few weeks after I returned to Mumbai, a cousin of my father’s summoned a conclave to draw up a Karachi family tree. Father Anthony was better (his sodium levels had risen again). Though my father was only 9 when he left Karachi, his elder siblings had more vivid memories and the morning turned into a tapestry of recollections: trips between Mumbai and Karachi on ferries named the Saraswati and the Sabarmati (“they were like little tubs, we all got seasick”); relatives having leisurely evenings at the KGA (“gin and lime was the favourite drink”), and the enterprising nature of the Karachi Goan community (“they even owned a flour mill”).

As we slurped up bowls of soup, the conversation turned to Bunnu.

It would be difficult to send mail over the border after each IndiaPakistan war, so Bunnu’s letters were infrequent. But sometimes, perhaps to remind everyone of his real name, Alec, he’d sign himself as “Sikander”—the subcontinental name for Alexander the Great.

“He called his three sisters ‘the gangsters’,” someone recalled.

“When he was in England, they sent him a childhood photo of the four of them and he said, ‘I’m not coming home. If I do, I’ll have to take care of them.’”

My aunt Margaret corroborated the story I’d been told in Karachi.

Evidently, after he’d been called to the bar, Bunnu had refused to

return to Karachi because he’d fallen in love with an Englishwoman. His mother, Mary, who wanted him to marry a Goan, was horrified. She “picked up her skirts and took the next boat to England”. The conclave was divided on what happened next.

Either my great-grandmother “grabbed his ear and dragged him right back home” or “he sent her right home without even allowing her a day to see the sights, but promised to return soon”. At any rate, Bunnu was back in Karachi by the mid-1930s and would remain a KGA fixture for the rest of his life. I’d always held the impression that Bunnu had drunk himself to death, but considering that he was 80 when he died, he didn’t do it very efficiently.

There were sharp discussions about whether our ancestor Santan Vaz had made his money running a liquor distributorship or a booze joint, about people named Aunty Mittie, Aunty Millie and Uncle Bude. Father Anthony occasionally chimed in to correct a mistaken impression or contribute a name someone couldn’t recall. They’d been dead for decades, but in this room in Mumbai, six decades and 900km away, they were warm, breathing presences, as real and as resolute as Karachi.

Naresh Fernandes is consulting editor at Time Out India and author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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L13

Travel

LOUNGE

YANN/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

PINDARI GLACIER

Resilient earth

HIMANSHU DUTT/WWW.FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/MYTH_DRINKER

slide on transparent ice for five days over 45km to reach zero point. They leave quickly as the loose, crumbling mountains surrounding the glacier are too dangerous to linger on.

The glacier is one of approximately 15,000 in the Himalayas and is in the vicinity of Mt Nanda Devi, named after the goddess Durga, one of the tallest peaks in India at 7,816m above sea level.

Somewhere on top of the glacier lies a slippery route for professional mountaineers even as the bottom drips water into the Pindar river meandering down a deep valley to merge with the Alaknanda river.

The Himalayas look lonesome, though the passage to Pindari is well-trodden by trekkers on their way to the icy glacier. But they have different reasons for being in the harsh outdoors, where the climate can change from sunny to stormy to hostile in hours.

Jay Kutchins from Chicago, US, dressed skimpily with just a little backpack, has been jobless since the economic downturn of 2008. A Russian couple wants to expose their five-month-old baby Lev to the land of yogis. A class of schoolchildren, all in their early

There are several reasons for visitors to trek up this mountain of ice that never melts

B Y R UCHIRA S INGH ruchira.s@livemint.com

···························· massive sea of water must have burst out of the Himalayas on a path of destruction when, suddenly, a magic wand froze it into a cascading, glittering mass of ice—and it stayed there forever.

This is how visitors feel when they see the Pindari glacier, 3km long and 365m wide, close to Mt Nanda Khat. This magical ice sculpture that never melts completely, 3,820m above sea level, is the final destination of a popular trek in Uttarakhand.

Trekkers struggle through expansive meadows, damp jungles and loose gravel, slip and

A

TRIP PLANNER/PINDARI GLACIER

The trek starts from Loharkhet. The ride from Saung to Loharkhet is bumpy because of bad roads.

You can also trek the 3km from Saung to Loharkhet.

Pindari (zero point)

Stay

(3,820m)

Day 7

Phurkia (3,250m)

7km trek

The Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam has rest houses at Dinapani, Loharkhet, Dhakuri, Khati, Dwali and Phurkia and tents (personal or tour manager’s) in Pindari

Dwali (2,575m)

Day 6

7km trek

What to pack Medicines, warm clothes, well-worn trekking shoes, umbrella/raincoat, torches, many pairs of socks, sunscreen lotion, cap, dry food like soup powder and biscuits (can be supplemented with tour manager's rations), sleeping bags and tents (not needed if tour manager provides them)

Khati (2,210m)

Day 5

11km trek

Dhakuri

Day 4

(2,680m)

8km trek

Loharkhet (1,760m)

Saung

Day 3 11km trek

Trekking season and temperatures April-June, expect 10-12 degrees Celsius

Day 2 7km drive*

Contact details of guides: Private tour guide Prakash Danu, 09410867132, 08859078242, 05963-211189, prakashd_2007@yahoo.co.in; Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam Ltd, 05942-236356, 05942-235700.

Bageshwar Dinapani (1,950m)

UTTARAKHAND Dehradun

Day 1 New Delhi to Kathgodam (Uttarakhand) by train—it takes around 5 hours, 30 minutes.

Kathgodam-Almora-Dinapani (altitude 1,950m), 122km drive*

Dinapani Almora

Kathgodam

INDIA

To Delhi

GRAPHIC

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

*approximate figures

teens, is on an environmental trip to pick up non-biodegradable waste.

Most poignant is the case of Tobias Kost from Stuttgart, Germany, who has come to Loharkhet, the village from where the trek begins, in memory of his father. Peter Kost died in 2000 on his way to Pindari, suffering a cardiac arrest just 9km into the trek.

“I have come here for memories,” says Tobias, accompanied by his mother Heiderose.

Peter Kost’s memorial stone, placed prominently in a lush meadow en route, reads “Your paradise is here”, and moves trekkers to place little wild flowers on it. They didn’t know him, but they understand his struggle.

Look for mementos A porcupine’s quill. A worn-out horseshoe. The tiniest flowers you have ever seen. Mementos can be found like hidden treasures in the flora and fauna of the Himalayas.

The vegetation varies from tropical at the foothills to temperate in the middle altitudes, and alpine higher up as the trek winds through streams and jungles of fir, birch, rhododendron and juniper.

At lower altitudes, clusters of an unusual lily evoke much excitement. These are Arisaema consanguineum, or perennial Himalayan cobra lilies that have an uncanny resemblance to the venomous hood snake.

Mementos you could be subject to are leech bite marks that you collect somewhere between Dhakuri and Dwali, in the damp and rain.

Devotion and generosity A little before zero point, in inky darkness, two flickering lamps light up in the freezing chill. A loud gong sounds and the tinkling of a bell accompanies it. A waft of camphor, burning wood and lavender fills the valley. As if hypnotized, campers walk towards the light.

It is Swami Dharmanand performing aarti in his part-rock, part-wood temple built into a cave, 2km from the glacier. A glowing idol of the goddess Durga draped in glittering finery and a shivling shaped out of a rock speak of the life and work of the frail man, nicknamed Pindari baba.

“For four-five years, I struggled.

I never asked anyone for funds. I told myself, ‘I will ask God directly’,” says the baba, serving a meal of rice, spicy potatoes and a

SAIGANESH SAIRAMAN

Cold, cold heart: (from top) The Pindari glacier; the confluence of the rivers Alaknanda and Pindari; and Pindari baba, who has built a temple dedicated to the goddess Durga.

green gravy dish made from wild grass and soybean nuggets. The Pindari baba does not expect payment for the meal.

His is a full-fledged enterprise.

Every passer-by has to be offered tea flavoured with herbs and well-prepared meals, personally made by him, served in the light of LED lamps taped to automobile batteries.

The route to Pindari is interspersed with dhabas providing biscuits, instant noodles and steaming tea. But in the last stretch, where the terrain becomes too rough, the comfort of a warm roadside kitchen vanishes. It is this gap that Pindari baba fills beautifully.

Trekking a kilometre further up from Pindari takes one to a different dimension of the Himalayas.

This is where the mountains close their doors on amateurs and lure the professionals.

A brilliant blue and red tent marks Camp 1. The drizzle and biting cold make us want to run into it uninvited. No one’s inside,

but the belongings of a group of mountaineers are strewn around.

A blackened cooker, tinned fruits, a pillow-sized pack of medicines, sacks of potatoes, nylon ropes…

Fatigue and hunger make manners irrelevant, and the unknown climbers’ popcorn and tea are hastily devoured. But this must be the norm in the mountains—to have a common pool of resources and exist on what is available.

For the most adventurous, zero point is the beginning of an expedition. Professional mountaineers go beyond Pindari via Traill’s Pass, a mountain pass difficult to cross, and there have been instances of tragedy, deaths.

At Camp 1, only one thing is locked by a long metal wire—a heavy pair of purple mountaineering boots with the initials “NK” boldly scribbled on them and officiously circled. As if a mountaineer were saying, “Help yourself to anything, but not my boots!”

Animal escorts What will clumsy, bumbling, acci-

dent-prone, lost tourists do without a friendly bark, the guiding swish of a tail, the reassuring jingle of collar bells?

Furry dogs Kaalu, Monty and Maggie accompany tourists right up to Pindari, bounding about, disappearing and resurfacing to everyone’s surprise. They are like temporary pets, and you know that in a blizzard, one of them will guide everyone to safety.

Horses Munna and Raju patiently carry tourists, their hooves coming within inches of dangerous falls but never missing a step. Load-bearing donkeys are the lifeline of tour planners.

Well after the trek is over, their jingling collar bells ring in the mind and the glassy glacier seems to clink a “cheers”!

CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Children were seen on the trip, but it is advisable to hire ponies so they don’t have to walk much.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

Unless physically very fit, seniors should not undertake this trek.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

Locals are generally friendly and accommodating.

L14

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SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2012

Books

LOUNGE

Q&A | PICO IYER

The writer and the wanderer JOI ITO/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Places to go: (left) A busy street in Tokyo; and Iyer (below) has often written about Japan.

COURTESY PENGUIN BOOKS INDIA

The author, whose ‘The Man Within My Head’ released here last month, on guidebooks and Greene as muse

B Y D AVID S HAFTEL ···························· ico Iyer is the author of seven books of non-fiction, including Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports From the Not-So-Far East and Tropical Classical: Essays From Several Directions. He is also the author of two novels. In praise of his latest book, The Man Within My Head, a memoir told through the prism of the works of Graham Greene, I wrote in Lounge that Iyer “is masterful at describing travel, a genre in which many writers run out of ways to say things differently”.

Over email, Iyer tells us of his interest in writing about travel.

“I’ve always been interested in the collisions and collaborations of different cultures,” he says, “maybe because I was born as an entirely Indian boy in England and then grew up, from the age of 9, commuting between California and school in England, and seeing how each of them projected its longings, its fantasies, perhaps its delusions on the other.” Edited excerpts:

P

How long have you wanted to write this book? How and when did the idea crystallize?

I think the impulse to write the book first grew out of my last book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, on the XIVth Dalai Lama.

Although the Dalai Lama and Graham Greene could not be more opposite on the surface—Buddhist and “Catholic agnostic”, man of rare goodness and self-professed sinner, spokesman for confidence and patron saint of doubt—deep down I think they are both looking at the same essential question: how to see the world exactly as it is, and still have faith in it and in its possibilities.

The deeper I investigated the Dalai Lama, the more I wanted to continue the investigation in another form, and the best way to do it seemed to be by invoking that other great champion of both conscience

and exploration, Greene.

Was there anything new or surprising that you learnt about him or took from his writing during the course of writing this book?

Really, the more I read of him, the more I saw in him, till I began to feel I could keep writing this book forever…. In this case, as I began thinking about the theme of father and sons, I started noticing it everywhere in Greene—though, if you’d asked me 10 years ago whether Greene wrote about fathers and sons, I’d have said that nothing could be further from his interest.

You’re frequently described as a ‘travel writer’. What do you think of that tag?

I think the definition of a good travel writer is someone who has little interest in travel. He might be fascinated with the convulsions of history and its many shifts of empire, as in the case of V.S. Naipaul; he may be concerned with the delusions of power and the corruptions of absolute power, as in the fables crafted by Ryszard Kapuscinski; or he may just be haunted by something in his past that sends him off on the road in search of a peace or a resolution he’ll never find, as with the brilliant and haunted late German writer, W.G. Sebald.

What is good and bad about contemporary travel writing?

I think the best travel writing arises from great writers rather than great travellers; Philip Roth can write about drab and impoverished Newark, New Jersey, and it will be deeper and more enduring—such are his literary skills—than any of the rest of us writing about North Korea. Great travel writing comes only from the extent to which the self is hazarded or engaged in it. Orhan Pamuk, say, can write transportingly about Istanbul mostly because he’s writing about himself, and 50 years of getting lost in the fogs of his hometown, seeking out its back corners for privacy or

romance, trying to find a voice for his beloved culture that doesn’t owe too much to Europe or to other forces.

Who are the travel writers from eras past whose work has inspired you?

Too many to count, from Somerset Maugham and Norman Lewis to Graham Greene (in his fiction), Donald Richie, Paul Bowles, Colin Thubron and, when I was growing up, the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion.

Probably the greatest influence on me, as a boy in England, was Jan Morris, because she presented an image of an unaffiliated, open-minded, shrewd and deeply eloquent writer who was just travelling the globe exulting in its variety and idiosyncrasy and always having

fun, while never downplaying the gravity of what she was seeing (since she was doubling as a foreign correspondent, often).

Reading her in Rolling Stone when I was in my teens, along with books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (by Thompson), gave me a vision of how travel could be written about now, in an age that had progressed quite dramatically from the one given to us by Maugham and Lewis.

Where do you stand on travel guidebooks?

I always consult guidebooks religiously before going to a place and am rarely to be found without my Lonely Planet, which is especially invaluable for its maps (I might turn to Insight

Guides for cultural background and Fodor’s or Frommer’s for hotel suggestions).

The danger of following a guidebook—I found when I was writing them—was that you enter the little-known secret treasure mentioned in Let’s Go, to be greeted by 40 others, much like you, following the trail to that same secret, “little-known” treasure. And the book, like a camera, can come between you and a real experience of a place.

How does writing about a place change as your relationship with a place changes?

It’s like—of course—the difference between a romance and a marriage. I like going back again and again to places I’ve known for 30 years now—I’ve been to Thailand perhaps 60 times, I’m about to revisit Cuba, which I used to visit every year and…I’ve been spending time in Japan for 25 years—and I love watching how places change as one changes, and trying to find how much of the transformation lies in them, how much in the eye that’s watching them.

But I think all of us have more to say about an old friend than about a dazzling stranger who’s just transfixed us at a party.

Are there any places you would like to visit in the future that you either haven’t been to or that you would like to go back to?

There are so many parts of India I have yet to see—from Goa to Kerala to Kashmir to Kolkata—and so many parts of the world I’d love to visit, from Mali to Afghanistan. But at this point I feel I’ve been lucky enough to see so much of the world—much more than many people can—that if I never see another new place again, I certainly won’t be sad or feel sorry for myself.

Write to lounge@livemint.com www.livemint.com For the extended version of the interview, visit www.livemint.com/picoiyer.htm

BOOKS L15

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SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

THE ORIGINS OF SEX | FARAMERZ DABHOIWALA

CULT FICTION

Copulation explosion WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

An erudite study of how Enlightenment Europe changed the intercourse discourse

B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ···························· ex! Sex! Sex! Chances are that I now have your rapt attention.

But perhaps not entirely. I have also made you think of several delicious, deviant, disturbing and even distressing things that are now hovering at the edge of your consciousness. Perhaps it is the face of the most recent object of your sexual exploits. Perhaps I have made you think of a comely co-worker.

Or, if your mind is particularly prone to cascading thoughts and connections, you are now wondering what happened to that guy in college who had those massive hard drives that the entire college streamed pornography off.

Bring up the topic of sex, and your mind is putty.

Sex permeates our lives in profound chemical, emotional and social ways. For centuries societies have not only been influenced but also shaped by the need to control and regulate the way people think, talk and achieve sex. An obsession with sex, historian Edward Gibbon pointed out, was one of the symptoms, maybe even a cause, of a collapsing Roman empire.

The history of sex, of course, is the story of all life everywhere. But this history assumes many dimensions beyond the scientific when you look at it in parallel with human history.

Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s misleadingly titled new book attempts to explain a short but crucial piece of that history.

The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution investigates how much of modern liberal society’s approach to sex was determined in the

S

The Origins of Sex—A History of the First Sexual Revolution: Allen Lane, 496 pages, £25 pounds (around `2,000). course of two turbulent centuries between 1600 and 1800.

The term “sexual revolution” here is a misnomer. It conveys a certain unity of purpose, philosophical alignment and social momentum that accompanies the modern idea of a revolution. Dabhoiwala himself takes great pains to explain in the book that this is not really how it took place. The outcomes, by the early 19th century, may seem revolutionary. But the developments that led to that “modern” idea of sex within society were always unorganized, uncoordinated and confusingly organic. This revolution, the author says, “came about in a remarkably messy and inadvertent way.

From the piecemeal and some-

times incoherent assimilation of old and new points of view”.

Dabhoiwala’s efforts, then, have been to bring a semblance of linearity and cohesion to this narrative. The effort, grit and resolve and all, shows. But only because of the choices the author has made.

First of all, he chooses to tell the story largely from the context of the Enlightenment in England. He also says in the prologue that his idea is to zoom out and see the woods in lieu of the trees: “My concern...is to recover the history of sex as a central public preoccupation, and to demonstrate that how people in the past thought about and dealt with it was shaped by the most profound intellectual and social current of their time.”

Dabhoiwala is an academic and brings academic fastidiousness to this storytelling. So much so that when he has to choose between narrative momentum and explanatory detail, he almost always chooses the latter. This is unusual in contemporary history books where authors seem to prefer breaking narratives into thematic or chronological segments (Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and The Rest), where he bases his story around the six “killer apps” of Western civilization, comes to mind).

However, the rewards of occasionally having to plod

Fanning flames: Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Grande Odalisque. through a few pages are many.

Like Dabhoiwala, readers too need to occasionally step back from the minutiae of the narrative and get a sense of the changes afoot. For instance, public attitudes towards prostitution changed dramatically in the early decades of the 18th century. From “wilful, greedy sinners”, prostitutes came to be seen as “the victims of male seduction, or of economic desperation”, all in the space of a few decades.

How did this change happen? What were the associated changes in attitudes towards male sexuality and rapaciousness? What did this tolerance mean for the social standing of women as a whole? These are all some of the questions Dabhoiwala answers in meticulous, satisfying detail.

Readers who seek lessons from their history books will also be satisfied. Large parts of the world are yet to witness this sexual revolution. Dabhoiwala’s book is a reminder that these social revolutions are seldom quick and always messy.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS History, rarely pure and never simple

R. SUKUMAR

MAN OF MANY PARTONS

H

e studied science and later taught it. He was an amateur safe-breaker and musician. He even helped develop the atom bomb. And he was funny.

When I was in school, in the 1980s, his Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman! created a cult of its own among the nerds (and I must confess that I was one) and actually made physics cool.

Richard Phillips Feynman was, after all, a Nobel Prize winner.

He won the prize in 1965, along with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger, for “their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles”, according to the official website of the Nobel Prize (Nobelprize.org).

Quantum electrodynamics, abbreviated as QED (the same as Quod erat demonstrandum, Latin for “which was to be shown”, a phrase usually used at the end of mathematical proofs) is, in general terms, a theory that explains much of the physical phenomena around us. It helped advance the study of physics by serving as a bridge to (or unifying, as physicists would say) the electromagnetic theory proposed by James Maxwell in the late 1800s with quantum theory.

Although I studied QED in college (as part of a course called Modern Physics where, I am sorry to say, I made a C), I didn’t particularly understand it. I am afraid my knowledge of QED isn’t any better after reading a comic book that bravely tackles the subject. The book, titled Feynman, is by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick and, as its name would suggest, it is about the life and work of Feynman. As someone who has rather recklessly studied some fairly complex subjects (topology anyone?), I have always suspected that our understanding of these would be improved by knowledge of the lives of the people who came up with the fundamental theories on which these subjects are based. This suspicion became stronger Biography: It highlights Feynman’s after I read Logicomix curiosity, openness and intelligence. (regular readers may remember it from a column a few years ago), a graphic novel about Bertrand Russell’s quest for the fundamental truths of mathematics. The book actually encouraged me to read some of the works it was about.

Ottaviani has made a name for himself as a writer of science comics and Myrick’s illustrations boast sharp lines and soft colours (which somehow seem apt for the story of a physicist).

The graphic novel approach may well make Feynman and his works accessible to people who may otherwise not have spent time reading a biography of the physicist, although I would have preferred to see some interpretative illustrations in a book that is about a man who used doodles, not equations, to explain some of the nuances of QED. Feynman, the graphic novel, is a straight biography that chronicles the man and a little bit of his work. It covers his relationships, his quirkiness (among them, the attempt to rescue a topless dancing bar he patronized from ruin), and his work (including his attempt to make physics approachable for the common person). More than anything else, it highlights Feynman’s curiosity, openness, and intelligence.

In a parallel universe, he would have been Superman.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

THE LITTLE BOOK OF TERROR | DAISY ROCKWELL

Technicolour dynamite In this illustrated book, essays and gaudy little paintings veil wry humour B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· n seeing me leafing through The Little Book of Terror, a German friend remarked that it would make a great “toilet book”—a coinage most recently popularized by the British comedian Stewart Lee, evoking visions of a lightweight book with text and images.

Artist and academic Daisy Rockwell’s book fits these physical descriptors. It is why this deceptively modest package doesn’t cease to surprise, and then shock.

The Little Book of Terror is a set of five short essays, accompanied page-for-page by lurid illustrations, mostly portraits of “terrorists”. As writer and journalist Amitava Kumar says in his foreword, Rockwell’s playful gallery of terrorists are neither particularly heroic

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The Little Book of Terror: Foxhead Books, 55 pages, $20 (around `1,020).

nor particularly villainous.

“They’re pictures that the terrorists themselves might put up on their Facebook pages,” he says. Indeed, in these pages is the Portrait of the Terrorist as an Ordinary Man. Rockwell has a PhD in South Asian Literature from the University of Chicago, US. While her art might appear nothing like that of her famous grandfather Norman Rockwell, the 20th century painter and illustrator whose incisive posters and magazine covers depicted scenes of American culture, it does cover common ground. Her paintings portray a more recent, and very different, American culture.

The first chapter, “Why Do They Hate Us?”, starts off with a phone conversation between Rockwell and one of her Muslim students on the morning of 11 September 2001, immediately following the World Trade Center attacks. Rockwell narrates her student’s fears, and those of the dean of her college, before moving on to comment on bizarre plots hatched by the Federal

Candid: Terror suspect Mohamed Alessa with his cat, Tuna Princess.

Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Consequently, her paintings follow the traditional Indian rasas or emotional states delineated by the Sanskrit aestheticians: fear, anger, humour, heroism, peace.

Her paintings get more provocative in the chapters that follow.

In “Blood Lust”, Rockwell writes about America’s top-drawer death porn: What did the Navy Seals do to Osama bin Laden’s face to make photos of it unfit for public consumption? And what of the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein being “caught like a

rat”? She answers in pictures. One of my favourites here is her portrait of Pakistani militant Ilyas Kashmiri who, according to the US government, was killed in a drone strike while “taking tea in an apple orchard”.

In Rockwell’s rendering, we see an apple tree laden with bright, jewel-like apples. On the left, like a fallen apple, is Kashmiri’s severed head (wearing sunglasses).

A teacup lies fallen on the other side of the apple tree, creating a perfectly symmetrical mise en scène: how very convenient. The

colours, purple, red and green, jump at us: how very pretty.

For all its technicolour charms, things start to tear through the veiled pretences soon. There’s Saddam Hussein clad in a polkadotted gown, receiving “the best of all possible dental care” from the US government. Rockwell’s text is equally irreverent.

“The word ‘torture’ is probably used far more by Americans to describe visits to the dentist, the periodontist, the orthodontist and the oral surgeon than it is to describe waterboarding or taking photographs of prisoners of war in humiliating poses,” she writes. “...How civilized, how supremely humane of the United States to supply Saddam with the best possible dental care in the world.”

The bulk of the writing, and many of the paintings in the book, originally appeared on the blog “Chapati Mystery” (where she posts under the pseudonym Lapata).

Although branded as “art/nonfiction/current events”, The Little Book of Terror isn’t neat reportage or artistic bravado. It is poignant and profane. It is the big book of things people don’t say in genteel society.

If this were a toilet book, that would be one long visit to the loo.

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SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2012

Culture

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MUSICALS

Bollywood behind the curtain Two ongoing stage productions offer a dose of Hindi­movie style ‘naach­gaana’ B Y S HREYA R AY shreya.r@livemint.com

···························· his season at the Kingdom of Dreams, Gurgaon’s twoyear-old live entertainment venue, the spectacle of a six-pack-flaunting gypsy prince riding illuminated caravans will be complemented by the magic of an ordinary man’s rags-toriches story. This hero doesn’t sashay to Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s contemporary beats, he’s more old school—a throwback to Kishore Kumar.

After Zangoora: The Gypsy Prince—the country’s first Broadway-style production—danced its way to success with a near two-year run without stop, a new set of musicals has opened on the Indian stage. The first is Jhumroo, the second offering from the Great Indian Nautanki Company (which produced Zangoora), a showcase of Kishore Kumar’s classic melodies, woven together with a story. Then there’s Teamwork Productions’ stage adaptation of the Dev Anand-starrer Guide (1965), which opened at Delhi’s Kamani Auditorium on Friday. Big on budget, song and dance and spectacular costumes, both productions stick to the safest formula available: Bollywood.

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The next stage Guide: A Story of Love, Passion and Deception, directed by Sanjoy Roy (better known as the man who produces the Jaipur Literature Festival, National School of Drama or NSD’s Bharat Rang Mahotsav, and the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards, among others), is being pitched as a reinterpretation of R.K. Narayan’s 1958 novel, rather than Vijay Anand’s cinematic take on it. In fact, to ensure it stayed faithful to the book, the producers bought the book rights from Narayan’s family, and had Amitabh Shrivastava write the Hindi script directly from the

book. S.D. Burman’s haunting melodies were rearranged by Chennai-based pianist Anil Srinivasan, using vocals with piano and flute, to bring alive Malgudi, the village in which the story is originally set. “Narayan’s family wanted it to be based on the book rather than the film because Narayan himself never took to the film although it was a huge success,” says Roy. “The difference is that the story isn’t linear, the characters aren’t all-black or all-white, like the movie. The character of Raju (Dev Anand) in the book is a lot more nuanced.

His elevation to a godman is shown to be circumstantial, and entirely a result of the faith villagers entrust in him,” adds Roy. Yet, it is essentially set in the Bollywood mould. At the rehearsals of Guide in early April, we saw the song “Gaata Rahe Mera Dil”, the romantic number between Raju and Rosie, with Raju’s character (played by Dilip Shankar), arms outstretched, bobbing his head in a beret. A couple of scenes later came the iconic number, “Aaj Phir Jeene ki Tamanna Hai”, essayed by the lead actor, Namita Gyanchandani, who plays Rosie. Surrounded by a troupe of 30 dancers, and using a combination of Kathak and Bharatanatyam, she ended her piece Broadway-style, with a freeze.

Jhumroo, although an original story by Vikranth Pawar, has shades of the film Padosan (1968), with its story of Bhola, his musical aspirations and hopeless romantic prospects. Borrowing 19 of Kishore Kumar’s greatest classics, including Om Shanti Om, Mere Saamne Waali Khidki Mein, and Main Hoon Jhumroo, the story is Bhola’s evolution from a woebegone Sunil Dutt-esque character, to the bell-bottomed Rishi Kapoor-type.

Borrowing from Bollywood Zangoora, made on a budget of `25 crore, was looked upon with

a fair bit of apprehension by many in the theatre world when it opened, says Viraf Sarkari, director, Wizcraft, the man behind Kingdom of Dreams and the Great Indian Nautanki Company, which produced the play.

“They weren’t confident that a show like this could run for eight shows a week, at such ticket prices (when the show launched, tickets were priced at `750-4,500 on weekdays; `1,000-6,000 on weekends),” he says.

Once its producers realized it was becoming a success (Sarkari’s estimate is that between March-September 2013, it would have recovered its capital), Pawar, one of the assistant directors on the project, started toying with the idea of making another

musical, this time using the songs of Kishore Kumar. “Bollywood is a useful tool because of the great recall value it has. Audiences will always love the idea of seeing their favourite songs being recreated,”

Stage lights: Dilip Shan­ kar as Raju in Guide; and (top) a dance sequence in Jhumroo.

Strain in the sound of music ‘Jai Bhim Comrade’ talks about the Dalit protest movement through songs and poetry B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN arun.j@livemint.com

···························· t a public screening of Jai Bhim Comrade at Ambedkar Maidan in BDD Chawl, Mumbai, on 8 April, an announcement before the beginning of the film warns that it may exceed the timing laid down in law for the use of speakers. Yet, as the film rolls past the 10pm deadline, a bunch of policemen watch the documentary from beyond the loosely fenced walls of the ground.

It’s ironical also because Jai Bhim raises questions over the role of the police in many cases of atrocities against Dalits. Yet, its gripping narrative attracts even those scathed by the film.

Celebrated documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan’s latest venture is not timed to any

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specific or big news development, but it traces the story of the Dalit protest movement in Maharashtra, contrasting the brilliance of the poets and singers with the hollowness of political leaders. In the process, it turns out to be a severe indictment of our response, as a society and polity, to Dalit voices.

Jai Bhim is a combination of footage Patwardhan has gathered since 1997, and which he has been able to put together as one cohesive narrative with “many layers or stories within”.

His inspiration is friend and poet Vilas Ghogre, who committed suicide in 1997 as a reaction to the riots and destruction that followed the desecration of a B.R. Ambedkar statue in Ramabai Colony in Ghatkopar, Mumbai.

Patwardhan initially set out to discover more about Ghogre, shooting without any specific purpose before a clearer picture started emerging some years ago. He waited, with others, for justice, for the Ramabai trial to end in the Mumbai courts, before deciding on his film. But he was disappointed when the chief accused, policeman Mano-

har Kadam, was first convicted in 2009 by the sessions court but then let out on bail on further appeal in the high court.

Patwardhan has been screening the film publicly—in Ahmedabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai and Pune.

The next screening is in Mumbai on 16 April in Panchsheel Nagar, Nagasen.

He says he was moved by the experience of screening the film in Ramabai Colony some time back. “Many people took the

microphone and spoke as they do in most of the basti screenings,” he says. “Many are so articulate and moving that I only wish someone had recorded what they said. Mostly, people are immensely grateful that their own history has been put on record and they remember the days when idealism in the movement was strong. Many want to search for alternatives to keep Babasaheb from becoming a mere commodity.”

The film uses music as a

Parallel history: Patwardhan’s film culls archival and press footage.

says Pawar, who started work on Jhumroo in January 2011. Jhumroo’s budget has been set at `12.5-15 crore.

While this is something Kingdom of Dreams has recently learnt, Teamwork Productions has been partial to the Bollywood format for a while now: Its previous productions, Yeh Hai Mumbai Meri Jaan (2002) and, more recently, Bollywood Love Story: A Musical (2008), have been odes to Bollywood. Yeh Hai Mumbai..., written by Sohaila Kapur, premiered at the Edinburgh festival, and Bollywood Love Story has had such a busy travel schedule, showing all over Europe, Australia and the US, that the producers haven’t yet managed to bring it to India. Incidentally, Bollywood Love Story came about after a Germ a n p r o d u c e r approached Roy at the Edinburgh festival to make a musical inspired by Bollywood.

Productions like these are important because “their use of music, technology, circus acrobatics (as in Zangoora) are extremely important to expand

driving force in telling the story, mostly through folk songs and street performances laid to rich traditional poetry.

Wherever available, Ghogre’s songs play out; in other instances, musicians like Rajanand Gadpaile , Pratapsinh Bodade, Anand Shinde and Vitthal Umap, among others, bring in their own touch. “I had recorded Vilas’ music but later, wanted to use music in the film, but not just Vilas in isolation,” Patwardhan says.

One such musical troupe, the Kabir Kala Manch, was also the deciding factor for the timing of Jai Bhim’s release, because he also wanted to highlight their cause. “It was after the group went underground last year that I decided to finish with this film because otherwise I could have just gone on shooting,” says Patwardhan. Members of the group, including Sheetal Sathe, who figures prominently in the film, have been named by the Maharashtra anti-terrorism squad as having alleged Naxal links.

At over 3 hours, it’s long for a documentary; Patwardhan agrees. “It’s long and dense.

That bothers me but frankly, I would have liked it to be half an hour longer. I have crammed in

the boundaries of theatre itself,” says Anuradha Kapur, director, NSD. In addition, their scale of commercial success allows for a situation where artistes can earn a living out of theatre, she adds.

Zangoora, for instance, opened in September 2010 and completed its 600th show in March, and will continue to run alongside Jhumroo all through this year. Although ticket prices were fairly steep (the average theatre ticket is usually `100-500 in most metros), the shows have played to 65% capacity even on weekdays. In the second half of this year, Jhumroo and Zangoora will travel together on a world tour. Even Guide, which Roy says has a fairly modest budget for a Broadway-type production, has a budget of `70 lakh for its first nine-day run—a huge sum in the world of Indian theatre.

But although borrowing from Bollywood is useful, it should not become the only prescription to make large-scale musicals such as this, says Anuradha Kapur. Pawar also concedes that given the time, he would have preferred to do something original. “The Hindi musicals of Swanand Kirkire (Aao Sathi Sapna Dekhe, 2007), are an example of non-Bollywoodized musicals,” says Pawar.

It is ironic to think of theatre borrowing from Bollywood, because Bollywood itself was inspired by musical theatre, like the tamasha of the late Habib Tanvir or jatra from Bengal, says Roy. “But, yes, Bollywood today is recognized worldwide as a successful brand name, and a defined genre—as opposed to Hollywood, in which every movie is different and there is no one particular style—it is all that naach-gaana,” says Roy. Guide: A Story of Love, Passion and Deception is on till 21 April at the Kamani Auditorium, New Delhi; tickets, `200-1,000. Jhumroo opened at the Kingdom of Dreams on 7 April; tickets, `750-5,000. For details, visit www.kingdomofdreams.in

a lot in it without allowing for any breathing space,” says the film-maker.

Jai Bhim, which has already gone to several film festivals besides the public screenings, has won four awards, including one for best film at the Mumbai International Film Festival for Documentary, Short and Animation Films (MIFF). The award has special significance for Patwardhan because it not only gives the film the state’s recognition, it also paves the way for its possible screening with the national broadcaster, Doordarshan. Almost all of his 15 documentary films, made over a period of 37 years, have run into resistance—from administrations or the censor board. Most have ended up in courts but all have resulted in victories.

“That’s a tribute to the new leadership in the censor board,” Patwardhan says, smiling, on why this film has had a relatively smooth journey so far. “It’s partly been helped because I have taken them to court. I guess it’s much less trouble for them this way.”

Jai Bhim Comrade will be screened at 6.30pm on 16 April in Nagasen Buddha Vihar, Chembur, Mumbai.

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ART

STALL ORDER

Spiritual choreography

NANDINI RAMNATH

BOWLING FOR CINEMA

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Rebecca Horn’s first exhibition in India is dedicated to her favourite Indian woman

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

···························· omewhere in a large room of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi, among bamboos and skulls, colourful saris and rotating mirrors, is a tribute to Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, or Amma as the “hugging saint” is known to her followers.

It is the centrepiece of Passage Through Light, German artist Rebecca Horn’s first exhibition in India. Titled Jungle of Light, this sculpture and sound installation built around 12 bamboo plants is inspired by Amma, whom Horn has met several times during her visits to India. She doesn’t count herself a “follower” though. Her response to Amma is that of an artist’s. “I wanted Amma to come for the opening,” says Horn, at 68 a feisty vision with her orange mane (and electric green shoes).

Co-hosted by The Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations and the Union ministry of culture, the exhibition opened to the public on 8 April and is part of the “Germany and India 2011-2012: Infinite Opportunities” cultural exchange.

It spans the 40-year career of Horn—regarded as one of the most versatile German artists alive—including videos of early performance works, drawings, photographs, kinetic sculptures and installations, and cinema.

While it borrows substantially from, and doesn’t go too far beyond, an elaborate 1994 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York which also travelled to the New National Gallery in Berlin, Tate Britain, London, and the Kunsthalle of Vienna, this is the first time that Indian audiences will experience her works, crucial given their dimensional and experiential trappings. Take, for instance, Time Goes By (1990-91), an installation that uses 40,000m of developed Hollywood film, crushed coal, and three pairs of binoculars rotating on pedestals.

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PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

American comic actor Buster Keaton’s shoes are at the centre of all the action. The binoculars’ roving eye only gets to you when you’re facing this messy choreography of objects. The viewer is plunged into a frightfully busy mise en scène. As Horn says, “It’s all very cinéma vérité.” You have to be there.

Her obsession with kinetics is revealed in installations such as Octavio Paz (renamed In the Light of India for this exhibition). Evoking Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, this is a book of Paz’ poetry on display. Horn adds to it an iridescent metallic butterfly perched on a jar of blue powder.

Its wings flap mechanically. In another new installation, Crickets Song (2011), a brass cricket moves up and down a piece of volcanic rock. Both offer a unique proposition: nature on steroids.

Playing God: (from top) Time Goes By; artist Rebecca Horn; and Crickets Song.

An early taker of the “multimedia artist” tag, Horn has also directed full-length feature films, for which the NGMA has set up partitioned viewing booths.

Buster’s Bedroom (1991), for instance, is a comedy starring Donald Sutherland and Geraldine Chaplin, about a girl obsessed with Keaton who chooses to stay in the sanatorium where the actor was once a patient. Given Horn’s evident fascination with the actor, that girl could well have been her.

The Jungle of Light, says Horn, began with a poem. “All my art stems from (my) poetry,” she says, before reciting the opening lines: “Carried by the wind into a forest/born in a house bundle/nourished by mud...” . It was then set to music by the composer and multi-instrumentalist Hayden Chisholm, who has been collaborating with Horn for 12 years.

Chisholm’s soundtrack is a sombre mix of notes from the

saxophone and a classical Indian shruti box. At the exhibition, the three-verse poem appears alongside the installation as wall text. The mirrors cast shadows, the bamboos sway, the music lifts—it is true to the “spiritual experience” that Horn says she wished to convey, not just of her impressions of Amma, but of her impressions of “the women of India”.

For Indian audiences, this substantial exhibition from the NGMA comes close on the heels of Japanese artist Yoko Ono’s first exhibition in India in January, at the Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi. Both artists started their art practice around the 1960s-70s.

Both have a strong focus on performance art and the use of sound in their installations. But more importantly, the centrepiece of Ono’s exhibition was also a large-scale installation dedicated to Indian women. In Passage Through Light, Horn takes this dedication a notch ahead, and picks a favourite.

Passage Through Light will run till 20 May at the NGMA, New Delhi.

he Indian Premier League (IPL) had a connection with Hindi cinema even before the first ball was bowled. The five-year-old tournament has often been described as Bollywoodesque in its love for ceremony over substance, but there is another link between Twenty20 cricket and the movies.

The success of IPL in the stadium and the living room (not to mention sports bars and pubs in metropolises) has upset the release schedule of Hindi movies, especially A-list productions.

Rather than risk competing with an IPL match, which can sometimes reach Jason Statham-headlined-action-flick levels of excitement, producers of big Bollywood films have juggled their calendars to come out before or after the tournament. That’s good news for smaller movies, which get a once-in-a-year opportunity to have the multiplex all to themselves.

Vicky Donor is an offbeat film with a largely untested cast and an unusual subject (sperm donation), but would it have managed to get a release date any other time of the year? IPL does have its uses.

This isn’t to say that movies released during the IPL season have a smooth innings—it’s easier to compete with another film than the nationwide reach of television. However, the year has already thrown up two surprises about the movie-going habits of Indians.

Tigmanshu Dhulia made Paan Singh Tomar before Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster, but it took the success of the twisted love triangle to push the athlete-turned-dacoit drama beyond the finishing line. Sujoy Ghosh, who was all but written off with Aladin, has also had the last laugh with his Taking Lives version Kahaani. The success of both movies is extremely heart-warming, but why exactly was everybody so surprised? Have we given up completely on the ability of audiences to appreciate movies with strong stories and characters? Or are we going through yet another Bheja Fry-type cycle in which a dark horse wins all the bets only to be shoved aside by a thoroughbred in a matter of months?

The same audience that applauded Kahaani is throwing a few claps in the direction of Housefull 2, so it isn’t that viewer preferences have changed overnight—or for good. Perhaps there wouldn’t be so many raised eyebrows if the movie release calendar didn’t look so predictable.

Good timing: Ayushmann Khurrana in Vicky Donor.

The average year typically opens gingerly. A few brave producers test the waters with low-risk films. School and college examinations have their own parts to play, as does Ramzan, during which devout Muslims abstain from such pleasures as movie-watching. The biggies are reserved for after the IPL: Having watched how the year has progressed, the A-listers rush in to cram multiplex screens in the last few months. The suits who manage film production companies probably love this compartmentalization of audience tastes—all the better to boil down into an Excel spreadsheet. Yet, Paan Singh Tomar and Kahaani have shown that film-goers are more catholic in their choices than they’re given credit for. If films like Bittoo Boss and Vicky Donor hold their own despite the IPL, we may just witness more yorkers than Lasith Malinga is capable of bowling.

Vicky Donor releases on 20 April.

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

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

Swatting the formula film ‘Eega’, the Telugu film about a murderous housefly, is exploring new grounds in cinema B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· t’s a David vs Goliath story, just that it’s, er... housefly vs stereotypical villain of Telugu movies.

Eega, the Telugu film about a murdered man who turns into a vengeful housefly, will release across Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka in May. The film was made at a cost of `30 crore; `5 crore of this was spent on visual effects.

Scriptwriters are swarming to the never-before-told story and wondering how director S.S. Rajamouli, who is known for the Telugu blockbuster Magadheera, got the outrageous idea past tight-fisted producers. The trailer release in the first week of April

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quickly ended speculation that shoddy visual effects may let the film down.

The housefly, created by Makuta VFX, a Hyderabad-based post-production VFX studio, is a complex creature. “I didn’t want the fly to look comic. It needed to look real, but it also needed to be a good-looking fly. It shouldn’t become a cartoon, but it should be able to convey emotions. There are few masters of realistic 3D animation around the world, and we engaged and trained a few of them in the nuances of body language,” Rajamouli says. Artists in studios across Russia, China, Armenia, the UK, US and Iran contributed to the animation.

Rajamouli is evidently a director who loves a gamble. “No!” he says,

pooh-poohing gossip that it was a tough film to sell. “It wasn’t. I am a calculated risk taker. I try to maintain a certain degree of safety keeping the producers and buyers in mind,” he says.

“The commercial success (of any film) lies in the emotional content and screenplay. Only the theme is unconventional. But the content is love and revenge—which are the most basic emotions. So I am able to aim at a wide section of the audience, which, in turn, gives me the leverage to spend more. I like to balance art and economics.”

Eega is a film that has bided its time: It has been 15 years in the plotting and numerous months in pre-visualization. “Fifteen years ago, my father Vijayendra Prasad, who wrote most of my films, mentioned to me the idea of a housefly tormenting a powerful villain. We were so excited about the idea, but it was not a time when visual FX were devel-

Hope flies: Actor Sudeep as villain, countering the vengeful fly or Eega. oped. I was not even a director then. So it has taken many years for this idea to shape up.”

The film has been shot bilingually—in Tamil and Telugu. “You would complete a complicated shot and heave a sigh of relief when the assistant director would shout, ‘second language!’. You could hear the whole unit going

‘Ufff!’,” Rajamouli says, chuckling.

Eega has been dubbed in Malayalam and Kannada and the producers are currently in talks for dubbing rights in other languages, including Hindi.

It is a film born out of the confidence of a director with a Magadheera—which had a box-office collection of `2 crore in Andhra Prad-

esh on the first day alone in 2009—under his belt. Still, one has to ask, how did an actor like Sudeep—considered an A-list star in the Kannada film industry—not object to having his screen time eaten into and defeated by a fly?

“Ha ha! Well! If he did, he was a good enough actor to cover it up and appear excited. Ask him!”

Rajamouli says.

Even before its release, and irrespective of its success, in an industry constantly complaining of a dearth of original story ideas, Eega is a case study. Conviction, Rajamouli says, is everything.

“People detest change, but if you are convinced first, you will find a way.” He cautions against too much bravado. “Thinking differently doesn’t necessarily mean you have a winner in your hand,” he says. “If we know what the audience wants, why are we delivering flops? I think everyone does films that they like to make.”

He pauses for a bit, then qualifies that: “At least I make films that I like. At present, they are also being liked by the audience.

Let’s see what the future holds.”

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KOLKATA CHROMOSOME | SHAMIK BAG

A wonderful time up here PHOTOGRAPHS

BY I NDRANIL

BHOUMIK/MINT

One of the early landing ports for this form of music, the city recently celebrated the 100th session of the Jazz Listeners’ Forum SHAMIK BAG

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n his 70s, the distinction that Rubin Rebeiro draws between jazz, his choice of music, and pop and rock, the sound of the young, is sharp.

“All I hear the young bands sing is ‘Baby, come back, baby, come back’ on two basic chords,” says Rebeiro. “No matter how much they sing, baby will never come back.”

At Rebeiro’s central Kolkata home, nothing of the spirit of the Anglo-Indian community is in short supply. As one of the oldest surviving jazz vocalists and double bass players in the city, Rebeiro has remained a teetotaller over the five decades he’s been on stage, beginning from the now-defunct Golden Slipper nightclub in Kolkata in 1956. Yet when a guest comes over, beer pops out when water is requested. He talks about the Anglo-Indian vibe: the cheer that guides the community through high-cholesterol meals of pork, beef and ox tongue; music and dance; parties and the workplace—life, in general.

Frank Sinatra blends in perfectly with Rebeiro’s world.

When Rebeiro sings Sinatra, among others—whether it was at Park Street’s Blue Fox restaurant in the 1960s, the Princes nightclub of The Oberoi Grand hotel in the 1970s, or as recently as last month, with the music band Carlton Kitto Combo—it’s easy for listeners to get high on nostalgia alone.

In the 1940s-1950s, Sinatra was a “top-of-the-pops-guy—but sounds like a jazz musician these days”, says Tapan Desai of Congo Square—the non-profit society of jazz lovers behind the annual international jazz festival in Kolkata.

India, says Naresh Fernandes, author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age, took to jazz when it was still the world’s pop music, before rock ‘n’ roll became pop. “In the early days, Indians preferred jazz as dance music. When jazz stopped being entertainment, it got frozen into a serious concert hall scene.”

Ajoy Ray, the serious fan he is often described as, has been a part of this journey of jazz in Kolkata—one of the early landing ports of the music in India, within a few years of its birth in the 1910s in New Orleans, US. Ray has hosted appreciation sessions for the Jazz Listeners’ Forum since 26 June 2003 in Kolkata, letting the music do the talking for members of the forum.

On 16 March, he organized the 100th session of the forum at the Sandre Hall venue of the Calcutta School of Music. If it was a milestone event, it wasn’t blaringly apparent, with Ray refusing to be interviewed or photographed and displaying a

trait of aloofness not unlike many of the practitioners of a musical genre that no longer aspires to possess popularity.

With 100-odd members in attendance, Ray played videos that went back to the first session of the forum and traced the roots and route of the sound—strains of swing, big band, bebop, gypsy, Latin, Afro-Cuban, avant-garde and the music of Perry Como, Benny Goodman, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery, Big Joe Williams, right till 2011 Grammy Award-winner Esperanza Spalding.

Even though he intriguingly avoided showcasing Indo-jazz—the Indian classical-pivoted jazz subgenre evoked by the likes of John McLaughlin, Zakir Hussain, Vikku Vinayakram, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, L. Shankar, U. Shrinivas, Trilok Gurtu and Badal Roy—there are new discoveries to listen to and discuss. The music of The Rosenberg Trio from the Netherlands, the father-son Cuban duo of Bebo and Chucho Valdés, and Columbian Edmar Castaneda are discussed avidly by some members; new names and playing styles are added to the jazz discourse in Kolkata.

Fernandes doesn’t believe Kolkata is the hub of jazz in India. Jazz, he feels, found a wider spread in Mumbai, especially patronized by communities like the Parsis, who had a Westernized lifestyle.

“Calcutta lacked that sort of diversity where jazz was more of a nightclub scene. The presence of the film industry allowed many more jobs in Bombay for musicians,” he adds.

Yet, while working on a book on jazz musicians, Indo-Norwegian journalist Astri Ghosh found Kolkata to be “crucial” to Indian jazz history, a counter to the “often-repeated Mumbai narrative”. Ghosh, a member of Capital Jazz, which has been organizing the annual Delhi Jazz Utsav (earlier known as Delhi Jazz Yatra) since 1984, found mention of jazz performances in India in a New York-based publication of 1922 and later discovered a jazz recording from Kolkata that dates back to April 1926. The recorded song, House Where the Shutters Are Green, was performed by trumpet player and band leader Jimmy Lequime’s Grand Hotel Orchestra, with Pete Harmon (soprano and alto sax), Nick Ampier (trombone), Joe Speelman (tenor sax), Bill Houghton (percussion), Monia Liter (piano) and the renowned guitarist and songwriter Al Bowlly.

“The band was possibly the first proper jazz set-up in India and played at the Grand Hotel

(in Kolkata). It is also interesting that the recording took place within years of jazz music’s birth in New Orleans. Now that jazz is on the verge of celebrating its centenary, India and Kolkata play interesting roles in its history,” says Ghosh.

Her claim of Kolkata’s import in India’s jazz history is supported by Susheel J. Kurien’s documentary, Finding Carlton: Uncovering the Story of Jazz in India. The 73-minute film “takes audiences on a richly atmospheric journey into India’s little-known jazz age, which lasted from the 1920s to the 1970s…”, the film’s promo claims. While Kolkata-based jazz guitar icon Carlton Kitto is the inspiration behind the film’s title, the film makes the case, through interviews and portraiture, that “the jazz scene was in Calcutta”.

“Interestingly, India’s jazz history features two famous hotels, the Grand in Calcutta and the Taj in Bombay.

Without these two ‘characters’ jazz in India would not be the same,” the blog Bluerhythm.wordpress.com notes.

It was in the 1960s, says Kitto, that he arrived in Kolkata from Chennai, looking for an avenue to pursue his jazz dream in a city “where most restaurants would have jazz bands, foreign acts would perform, and audiences would come wearing ties, pinstriped coats and gowns”.

For someone whose father was a high-ranked police officer in Chennai, Kitto’s home at Alimuddin Street in Kolkata is austere. The walls, though, are lined with framed photographs —one such photograph has Kitto on stage with Louiz Banks, Pam Crain and Donald Saigal—among the names that ruled the jazz stage in Kolkata for years.

The house seems in sync with an uncompromising musician who has abided strictly by his passion for bebop, refusing offers from R.D. Burman and Bappi Lahiri

to shift to Mumbai. Kitto, who once shared the stage with jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, talks about the time Lahiri chose a guitar student of his when he couldn’t coax Kitto to join him.

The student went on to gain recognition in India as the composer Tabun. Some of Kitto’s other students, like Pritam Chakraborty and Jeet Ganguly, now have flourishing Bollywood careers though their 67-year-old teacher has remained unmoved, and can often be found performing at The Oberoi Grand. “The best days of jazz are past and can never come back,” he muses.

Yet, jazz continues to find an audience. In recent years, Congo Square has brought the likes of Larry Coryell, George Brooks, the late Shawn Lane, Jonas Hellborg and Kenny Garrett to the city, and maintains there is widespread interest among the younger generations. “The city still has the best audience. What it lacks is sponsors,” says Desai.

Musically, jazz is a significant presence every time bands like Skinny Alley, with Amyt Dutta on guitar, or Los Amigos, the Latin jazz outfit led by percussionist Monojit Dutta, take the stage. Amyt Dutta’s freewheeling album Ambience De Dance with

drummer Jivraj Singh, who provides an electro-industrial rhythm background, is likely to give yet another perspective to this form in the city.

“As a musician and composer I’m affected by society, by what happened in Nandigram and Singur when our society was on the verge of a civil war. Or by what happened in Mumbai on 26/11. For our band, jazz is used in context to our time and we are not aiming to be a Coltrane without belonging to his society,” says Mainak Nag Chowdhury, bassist and frontman of Kendraka, a well-travelled Kolkata-based band with two blueFROG-

All that jazz: (clock­ wise from above) Gui­ tarist Carlton Kitto; vocalist and double bass player Rubin Reberio; and Skinny Alley in concert. released albums, including the recent The Candy Album.

So even today, jazz, in its many forms, continues to find its many interpretations in a city where acclaimed American jazz pianist Teddy Weatherford—who performed with his band at the Grand Hotel in the early 1940s and is sometimes credited with having popularized the form in India—lies buried.

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