Lounge for 15 Oct 2011

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

www.livemint.com

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 42

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Force India’s German driver Adrian Sutil racing at the F1 Italian Grand Prix 2011.

CRACKING THE URM CODE >Page 13

SIX KING JAMESES AND THEN SOME

Once the capital of Scotland, Stirling was the site of a brave­heart skirmish for the throne >Pages 8­9

The build­up to India’s first F1 race has been frenetic. How will it change motor sports in the country? >Pages 10­12 THE WRIST OF THE WORLD

Plus: Rohit Brijnath on why he is put off by the F1 machine

Bishan Singh Bedi’s biography and an English analyst’s book celebrate the art of spin >Page 15

GETTING THE FORMULA RIGHT PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

THE CRISIS OF CAPITALISM

A

mericans don’t just do capitalism best: they also believe in it hardest. If it is ever the case that capitalism functions as an ideology (a system where the object of belief has a tenuous, even inverted relation to reality), it is in the US, a place where until quite recently almost 40% of Americans believed that they either were or would one day soon be among the country’s richest 1%. So what is afoot when, over the past few weeks and across the states of the Union... >Page 4

REPLY TO ALL

PIECE OF CAKE

AAKAR PATEL

PAMELA TIMMS

MAKE AND DEW

In ‘The Dewarists’, musicians from diverse backgrounds come together to find common ground in one song >Page 17

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

WHY KOLKATA WILL ICING ON THE CAKE: WIN IN 20 YEARS IT’S EGGLESS!

W

hich Indian city has the best infrastructure, the most attractive culture? In a nation where Nasscom says 90% of all graduates are unemployable, which city produces many times more competent people than it can hire? Which city is our greatest net exporter of talent? Which city will win in 20 years?

Kolkata. This is ridiculous, because Kolkata lags Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai and even Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune in attracting investment. It has no software economy... >Page 6

T

he festive season is now in full swing, and for my final egg-free recipe, here’s something to fit the mood for those who can’t eat eggs to celebrate in style. Cakes are one of the most difficult things to achieve without eggs because eggs perform the crucial functions of binding, raising and adding texture to the sponge mixture. If you care to look, there’s a world of advice out there, especially on the Internet, about how to replace eggs in baking. There’s everything from the Vegan Society’s recommendations of chickpea... >Page 7

PHOTO ESSAY

THE STREET EXHIBITIONS

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

COURTESY HIDE

&

PEEK

FIRST CUT

LOUNGE REVIEW | CERVEZA, MUMBAI

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

A

new beer bar in south Mumbai attempts to bridge several gaps—a watering hole for the young, a nightclub to some, a place to just loll and one to be seen at. Cerveza wants to do all this but executes a good idea poorly.

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

THE BUSINESS OF PLAY

I

n Bangalore I finally found the house of my dreams. It’s bright, airy, perfectly located and affordable. And the best part is it doesn’t belong to me.

Since the city frowns on children walking on the grass in its rundown neighbourhood parks, I struggled to entertain Babyjaan when we first moved here. After all, you can’t really drag a 17-month-old child down the road to check out the hottie selling coconuts more than twice a day.

Biceps don’t impress her, yet.

The city’s “perfect” weather ensured that the swimming pool water was icy on most days.

I couldn’t take her for a walk down the neighbourhood lanes for fear of being asphyxiated by the pollution or being swallowed by PARENTING the crazy traffic. The rain knew exactly what time the children came out, and it always claimed playtime sobbing: “mine! mine!” And there’s only so much a baby can play with her parents’ toys, a Bullet and an iPad. When she started yelling “wow!” every time she entered a store, I had to stop the shopping trips. Most family members were against enrolling her in daycare, even though the variety and quality of the facilities available in Bangalore are probably the best in any Indian city.

That’s when a darling neighbour with a hyperactive two-year-old, who disappeared every evening and came back looking quite pleased with himself, introduced me to the world of Play Care.

Bangalore, I discovered, has at

least half a dozen quirkily named places (Monkey Maze, Gambolla, Hopscotch, Hide & Peek) you can take your baby to play (and I’m not referring to those noisy play areas one encounters in malls).

You pay anywhere between `100 and `250 per hour to access these serene, indoor, childfriendly playgrounds.

I know childhood was once an age of free play and playing for free— but if you grew up in Bangalore for instance, the traffic never barrelled through Cubbon Park then and the chil- Play list: The dren’s theatre in the park no longer screens Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or any other films.

The rules of free play have changed dramatically in our cities (for example, playing on the streets is unthinkable); most parents just look for a place where their child is free to play safely.

That’s why my current favourite Hide & Peek, a `1,000-for-six-turns, 4,500 sq. ft house of toys seems worth every paisa. It’s a bright haven that contains a clean sandpit, a ball pool, and every non-remote-controlled toy you can think of. There’s a library with Eric Carle, Julia Donaldson and all your favourite baby authors handpicked by owner Roshini Thadani every time she travels abroad.

Thadani decided to be a play

inbox

The good

clean sandpit at Hide & Peek. entrepreneur one and a half years ago when, like me, she couldn’t figure out how to entertain her daughter in Bangalore. The business of play is not yet profitable, she says, though the classes and birthday parties hosted on the premises do well. She’s also started a café in the house and will soon announce toddler cooking classes, a mother-toddler programme, and all kinds of baby activities. She says she’s got franchise offers from cities such as Kolkata and Ahmedabad too.

Me, I’m just happy to pay up to visit the bright and breezy house where Babyjaan is free to play.

You can write to me at lounge@livemint.com

to the world, during the ‘pujas’, the world’s biggest outdoor exhibition of sculptures. Let me admit that this is the best article I have come across in recent times on the preparation for Durga Puja in Kolkata.

MANI SANKAR MUKHERJI

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com

Situated in Kala Ghoda amid a cluster of restaurants and the music store Rhythm House, Cerveza is hip in its outlook with bright walls, low lighting and intense music. The decor is simplistic though as the term “beer bar” would suggest; this is a place to stand and converse, or holler, not necessarily sit down and dine.

The collection of beer is reasonably well thought of, with a little information bar in the menu itself which gives the calorie content and alcohol percentage of each beer and also pairs it with food.

For those interested, the Kingfisher draught is the lowest on calories—99—as opposed to German wheat beer Schneider-Weisse—250 calories.

There are 16 kinds of lager, two wheat beers (Hoegaarden and Schneider), ales, stouts (Guinness, `600 for a pint and Murphy’s Irish, `550 for a pint) and fruit beer (Liefmans).

There are also potentsounding beer cocktails—one called Snake Bite is a mix of tequila, vodka, rum, gin, triple sec with draught beer (`550) and another, appropriately named Raging Bull, which combines Red Bull, creme de cassis with draught beer (`400).

Extremely busy waiters

wear T-shirts that say: “Never cry over spilt milk, it could have been whisky”, and “Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy but the Bible says love thy enemy”.

The not­so­good Cerveza is tiny, really tiny—two NBA players could fill the place up. The music bounces off the walls so conversation is—ironically for a beer bar—ruled out. If you expect a British pub, with oak tables and the possibility of a brawl, this may not be the place. It’s not big enough for a night club, so dancing has to be restricted to hip shakes.

The prices take the place—again ironically—out of the student’s league. A pint of Hoegaarden is `380, while the boutique hotel Marine Plaza’s Geoffrey’s serves it at `310, in comparison.

The food, clearly not the focus, is testing with greasy chicken wings (`200) and tough, sticky nachos, among other snacks.

Teething troubles still prevail as the service struggles in the low lighting but makes up for efficiency with enthusiasm.

Talk plastic Beer cocktails cost between `400-500, a mug of draught is `150, while a pitcher is `600, and the fruit beer Liefmans comes at `550. Snacks come in the range of `100-200.

Cerveza, First floor, above Silk Route, 38, K Dubash Marg, near Rhythm House, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai. For details, call 22818572.

Arun Janardhan HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

MODI NO FASCIST

AMOUNTING TO NOUGHT Like most of Aakar Patel’s articles, the one on Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi (“Everything you need to know about Narendra Modi”, 1 October) was spot on. Patel’s citing of facts regarding Vallabhbhai Patel’s secular outlook and his column only reinforces that stereotypes can be misleading, for instance, that Patels, being Gujaratis, must be mercenary, right­wing types, among other things. Author Raj Patel proves this as well—his book ‘The Value of Nothing’ is a marvellous read. I wish Modi meets him some day—he’ll hopefully get a lecture on how all his notions of economic growth actually amount to very little when weighed against larger social and ecological losses.

PS NARAYAN www.livemint.com

With reference to Aakar Patel’s “Everything you need to know about Narendra Modi”, 1 October, I would like to state that Patel belongs to a growing breed of journalists who have no faith in the judiciary or democracy and ascribe to themselves the tag of all­knowing. He should know that Modi is no fascist. Fascism does not exist in a democracy. He is the head of the state due to the choice of the people.

RAJESH JOGANI

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

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 40

LOUNGE

PUJA TREAT I immensely enjoyed Shoba Narayan’s article on the ‘puja pandals’ in Kolkata (“When Kolkata turns into a museum”, 1 October). It will not be unfair to say that Kolkata presents

SILK ROUTE REPLY TO ALL

N

arendra Modi is positioning himself to be prime minister. What sort of leader will he make? We can tell by understanding him as a man. Look on this piece as his biography.

Born 17 September 1950, Modi is 61. His resume says he has a master’s in political science. He speaks a Gujarati purged of Persian words (like Advani’s Hindi, but better crafted). His Hindi is marked by his nasal accent, but is correct. His English is poor and he works on it. Modi is called “NaMo” by his fans... >Page 4

Silk Smitha on the cover of Cinema Express magazine in March 1984.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH LEVI STRAUSS’ SANJAY PUROHIT >Page 9

BUTTERFLY EFFECT Your search ends here. Every perfect blouse on Katrina Kaif, and many more varieties, are in a 43­year­old tailoring shop in Delhi >Page 7

Ekta Kapoor’s forthcoming film ‘The Dirty Picture’ revisits a sequins­and­pelvic­

thrust era of Tamil cinema which was propelled by talent, scheming, hypocrisy and the intense loneliness of women like Silk Smitha >Pages 10­12

THE GOOD LIFE

AAKAR PATEL

UNDERSTANDING NARENDRA MODI

THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

PIECE OF CAKE

SHOBA NARAYAN

WHEN KOLKATA IS A MUSEUM

I

t is 1am, but the Shiv Mandir para (neighbourhood) in Kolkata is hopping.

Shorts-clad young men named Deb and Dickie are working alongside about 20 artisans who are erecting what seems to be a gigantic bamboo stage set, but is in fact a homage to Ma Durga. Tall tribal musicians made of bamboo are hoisted upright as five men anchor them to the ground. About eight bamboo musicians stand at the entrance to the pandal, serenading a... >Page 5

PAMELA TIMMS

THE ORGAN GRINDERS A journalist’s book on the organ and blood trade in India unveils grim truths about public health systems >Page 14

REVIVAL OF ‘BALAKA’ AND ‘BANALATA’ They are romantic, but are easy sacrifices for progress. This Durga Puja, two dolled­up trams will be on the roads in Kolkata >Page 18

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

FINALLY, A SLICE OF THE PIE

I

t’s time for everyone to meet Priyanka.

Priyanka is the wonderful young woman who comes to my house every other Friday afternoon to take the pictures for this column.

She’s a great photographer and genuinely interested in learning how to bake. She’s also greatly loved by our dog, Spike, who is under the impression that she comes purely to play ball with him. Our baking, clicking and ball-throwing sessions are always a good way to end the working week. >Page 6

PHOTO ESSAY

FORTY AND DONE

COFFEE DYNAMICS The cover story on coffee in the 17 September edition of ‘Lounge’ (“On a bitter trail’) made for a fine read. I’m a professor of biodynamics and have been advocating intervention at the planting stage for several years now. I commend the work David Hogg and the Naandi Foundation are doing in Andhra Pradesh. That being said, since this is a field not well­covered even by science reporters, I was pleased to read about interventions in coffee production in this article.

A PALLONJEE

Heads up: Cerveza, a beer bar, also has a few wines on the menu.

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: OLIVIER MORIN/AFP

LISTEN TO THE

LOUNGE PODCAST The music, dance and theatre in store at this year’s

Delhi International Arts Festival; why you should watch the Star World show ‘The Dewarists’, featuring artists such as Imogen Heap, Vishal Dadlani and Zeb and Haniya; and a review of the film ‘My Friend Pinto’ www.livemint.com/loungepodcast

BACKON22OCT

g ii n g , g i v i n g Th e

i s s u e

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ANDREW BURTON/AP

Get up, stand up: ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests outside 1185 Park Avenue, New York, on 11 October; and (below) a protester affiliated with the ‘Occupy Las Vegas’ movement, takes part in a march on the Las Vegas Strip on 6 October.

PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

THE CRISIS OF

CAPITALISM A

mericans don’t just do capitalism best: they also believe in it hardest. If it is ever the case that capitalism functions as an ideology (a system where the object of belief has a tenuous, even inverted relation to reality), it is in the US, a place where until quite recently almost 40% of Americans believed that they either were or would one day soon be among the country’s richest 1%.

So what is afoot when, over the past few weeks and across the states of the Union, a different statistic has focused the minds of many Americans: “99%”? It is a figure that has brought protesters on to the streets, who declare themselves to belong to the 99% of Americans who have done badly through the recent financial crisis recession.

“Crisis” has become a term that seems no longer to describe a moment but rather to define an era: one where a future once envisioned in terms of the spread of globalization and liberal democracy has clouded over.

More recently, that sense of crisis and gloom seems to have enveloped market capitalism too—a crisis that extends not only to its workings, but to its very legitimacy.

That legitimacy has been shaken not just by economic and financial precariousness which has hit so many. It’s the conjunction of that precariousness with conspicuous extravagance and consumption.

So we read about a boom in London’s prime rental market (defined as weekly rentals around £10,000, or around `7.66 lakh: there are some quite nifty places in Belgravia going for £40,000 a week, in case you are interested), or about Hermès launching its sari line in India,

about art auctions achieving record prices. Crisis? What crisis? Hand me some more cake.

Across the world then, and encompassing left and right, there is rising popular reaction against the growing concentration of wealth at the top of the order in every society—and at the relative worsening in the position of those at the bottom.

The Tea Party’s anger at the fact that the “ordinary middle class” is having to “pay for the crisis” is matched by the “Occupy Wall Street” activists, who are protesting bank bail-outs, high salaries and bonuses for bankers, and corporate tax breaks—as well as the Washington lobbying that makes all this happen. And leaders, both corporate and political, are going along with the tide. Warren Buffett speaks of his embarrassment at his wealth, and accepts the need for higher taxation on people like himself; President Obama tacitly endorses the anti-Wall Street movement. In Britain, the leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, speaks of Good Capitalism and Bad Capitalism, and across Europe there have been protests against bankers and financiers. In China, a new intellectual Left has emerged as a powerful voice in debates there, critical of the effects of market reform that are widening the economic gap, and across that country popular

ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES/AFP

The critical Left imagination has always had less to offer on the positive side.

The emerging new Left against capitalism is no different; intellectual analysis of how to improve the workings of the market rarely match the popular outrage against it. Indian capitalism’s only hope is enabling more to participate in its benefits

agitations have erupted.

Suddenly, the age of individuality seems to have given way to a new age of solidarity—and not just the rather abstracted Facebook version, but of a type that is bringing people together in more traditional forms of street protest, against what is perceived as rising inequality.

Yet, as so often with the critical Left imagination, it has less to offer on the positive side. The articulation of alternatives to capitalism remains an angry mumbling. In fact, to articulate such an alternative is a challenge to us all, wherever we place ourselves on the political spectrum. Can we invent better alternative models of market capitalism, models that absorb and support its undoubtedly necessary features and effects—but which are also able to move beyond its limits and failures? In this respect, the conservative imagination as well as that of the liberal right is also too limited.

Yet developing such alternatives will be a pressing task in the coming years. For the current dissidence is a reminder that the tolerance for disparities, for inequality, can shift sharp and sudden. In our own case, just as 65 years of democracy have broken down age-old structures of deference and released a new defiant

energy, so too several decades of rapid but uneven growth may, before we are quite ready to acknowledge it, dismantle the intricate self-deceptions that have so far kept India’s grotesque disparities protected from mass protest. Sometimes, the most inertial social habits and manners can overnight tumble into dust.

Across the developed world, popular reaction against the financiers of capitalism as well as its corporations raises the question: Can market capitalism find ways to re-legitimize itself? It’s already a pressing question in India, and will become more so if—as is quite possible—politicians start to make the market a target of attack. One counterpart of the weakening and inefficacy of our institutions has been the rise of both political and legislative populism. Even as government’s capacity to actually do things wanes, those who hold or pursue government office are only too happy to inflate their promises as to what they will do. More and more, that may now mean pushing policies and measures that curb and interfere with the market in ill-considered ways.

The fact is that intellectual analysis of how to improve the workings of the market rarely match the generalized popular outrage against it—outrage that politicians are only too happy to exploit.

When fear, greed and uncertainty whorl across the globe, we should realize we are in dangerous times. If capitalism is not able to re-legitimize itself, it is unable to reinvent itself in some less ugly form, we shall be in for some hard times too. We shall need somehow to strike a balance between, on the one hand, the desire of politicians to garner votes by pushing

redistributive social policies and regulation and, on the other hand, making sure we keep the economy open, markets functioning, and incentives alive.

Equality, the new rallying cry, is not really the issue—nor is redistribution. Indian capitalism will have to sustain its legitimacy by enabling more to participate in its benefits—and for that education, training and skills, are far more essential than redistributive policies.

It’s a crucial matter for corporate India—and also for India’s economic future—whether the current global disaffection and even revulsion against market capitalism will take wider hold in the country. It has not so far: People in India are still hopeful that their turn will come. But we are already seeing the political classes starting to exercise their populist instincts—and we may be in for a long hot season of radical rhetoric and legislative populism. If that happens, our economy may suffer a lost decade—or even worse, the very productive mechanisms we need to function effectively will be jammed. In the end, it will be very much up to our business leaders and political elites, our rich and powerful, whether or not they can focus their minds, curtail their greed and extravagance, and work together to shape an Indian capitalism that is at once profitable as well as less systematically unjust.

Sunil Khilnani is director of the King’s India Institute at King’s College London. Write to him at publiceye@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Sunil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/sunil­khilnani

L6 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Why Kolkata will win in 20 years

W

INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

hich Indian city has the best infrastructure, the most attractive culture? In a nation where Nasscom says 90% of all graduates are unemployable, which city produces many

times more competent people than it can hire? Which city is our greatest net exporter of talent? Which city will win in 20 years?

Kolkata.

This is ridiculous, because Kolkata lags Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai and even Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune in attracting investment. It has no software economy and no financial sector. What industry they inherited, Bengalis have packed off efficiently.

It is ridiculous because Bengalis don’t even have a proper trading class, and use the word “bene” (baniya) with contempt. How is such a place fertile for capital?

Then there is the matter of the anarchy. Even by India’s low standard, Kolkata is a monumental mess. Little governance is visible on its roads, which the state has surrendered to the population and shows no desire of retaking.

But Kolkata has assets, chief among them its people. In a world where cultures must integrate, Bengalis have built one of our most attractive and open cultures. More about this later.

If you were to close your eyes and imagine the city without its grubby occupants, Kolkata actually has the finest infrastructure of any Indian city.

Options for getting around the city include a Metro (not found in Mumbai), local trains (not found in Delhi), taxis (not found in Bangalore), trams (not found anywhere in India) and hand-pulled rickshaws (not found anywhere in the world).

It is even possible, though it isn’t advisable, to walk one’s way around the city because it has footpaths, something supposedly urban centres like Gurgaon and Bangalore don’t have.

The problem is only that all this great infrastructure is poorly managed. And actually it is very easily remedied. New tram cars running on these same tracks can transform inner city commuting. It is the middle class (not the poor) that uses the rickshaw in the old city lanes of north Kolkata. A boost in their incomes will mean bigger fares for the destitute

Biharis who pull them around.

Kolkata’s taxis run on metered fare, unlike in most of India, and need only to be more modern.

The systems are in place. A little governance is required to get the economy moving. A man or small group of people charged with making the city attractive for investment can transform Kolkata in five years. I’m tempted to say it should be one of the Bengali-speaking Gujaratis or Marwaris who support Trinamool. They will know what to do and instinctively connect with those who have capital.

Labour unions are not relevant in the IT industry where retaining trained talent is the problem and not job security. A little assurance from Kolkata that it will not be aggressive on such issues for white collar workers will get businessmen excited.

Let us turn to culture, Bengal’s priceless asset.

He is useless at managing his own economy, true, but the Bengali represents the moral end of our politics.

The Communists and Mamata Banerjee can be accused of many things. Being corrupt and being communal are not among them.

Perhaps they don’t really know how to make money in office, but their open-mindedness is deliberate and comes from within. The city of Kolkata is Britain’s gift to Bengal, a one-city state. Bengalis have responded by producing an urban culture that is sophisticated and modern.

This gives them an attractive duality.

Middle-class Bengalis are comfortable and, importantly, urbane in both English and Bengali. They can express modern ideas in their language, which is supple and can accommodate words from other languages easily (“bourgeois”). This separates them from much of India.

High culture comes from Kolkata’s bhadra, who is Kayastha/Brahmin/ Baidyi (Vaidya). Along with southern Maharashtra and northern Karnataka, Kolkata is the place that produces classical musicians at will.

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

IF I CAN MAKE A STORY OUT OF IT

I

am the middle child of my parents. Growing up, it gave me the unique advantage of always having an elder brother to look up to and a younger one to (try to) mentor.

Also, to always have an older sibling to resent and blame unashamedly and a younger one to boss around. Did I say boss around? I meant “try to”.

And now I am a mother of three. Our middle daughter already seems to me to be a little carbon copy of me. If I elaborate any more, she might grow up and use that sentence to sue me. So I shall stop here.

The youngest, I think, come hardy. Charming and funny, with a magnetic field around them.

Make way for me, is their first and final message to the rest of the family and world. And they claim their place.

Then there is the first born. In

the speed and rush of everyday life, I find myself forever judging whether the children are too old or too young for what they do.

Sahar, our eldest child, is 8 now.

Sometimes, she could be 18. We remind ourselves again and again that she is ONLY 8. Yet it repeatedly gets distorted and sounds like this: She is EIGHT. Eight is BIG. Just like she was big at 6 and at 4 and at 2.

TWO years old, I used to feel.

She should go to school, eat on her own, greet guests in three Indian and two international languages and put away her shape sorter all by herself. Every day.

I was a fool.

I need to pull the brakes on this racket.

Sometimes on a long drive in the car, I find an excuse to sit in the back seat with our children.

The younger ones get into my lap and lean on my shoulder and

Relic: Kolkata still has hand­pulled rickshaws not found anywhere in the world.

Despite having a majority Muslim population, Bengal’s nationalism has coalesced around Bengali language, not religion.

One reason Bangladesh isn’t Pakistan is that it is insufficiently Islamized. But why? Because the gentle leavening of Rabindric culture has resisted the harsh call of an Arab social order.

Bengal is animist, and its riverine geography has retained the river-based culture of our ancients.

This culture the Bong carries with him where he goes. Bengalis are among our most ubiquitous professionals.

They dominate the media and are represented heavily in services and academia, and in higher management. They are all-rounders.

They bring a sense of quality and aesthetic that is uncommon.

Let one example suffice. The best designed newspaper in India is Anandabazar Patrika. Its puja-special magazine is a thing of beauty and not to be compared with what other Indian newspapers produce.

The outsider who can look past the grime and the soot will find much that is rewarding in Kolkata.

It is our only city to have a Chinatown. It is our football capital, with a proper and passionate football following. This integrates it with Europe and in time, when there is money in Bengali sport, this will be one of the city’s big assets.

There is history on Kolkata’s roads, and many people will come to see it if they are shown it—the homes of Tagore

claim their places. Quietly, my hand reaches for Sahar’s. As the landscape races outside the window and music fills the car, we replenish our deferred love.

Tell us a story, the children will often say. Stories are our magic wand. They are also the best equalizer in a family where the children’s ages range from 2-plus to 40-plus years. Compared with conversation, stories are like a shortcut in the hills. They demand full attention, are exciting, and whether we reach the destination or not, they take us places.

Tell them stories, not as you remember them, but as you would have liked them to have been, a wise friend had once said to me. These words were the key to a treasure chest that In a pack: All your children should feel as special as the first­born.

and Vivekananda, Victoria Memorial and the lovely British-built areas around Park Street. Also the great spiritual centres that were founded around the city and radiated their message of soft Hinduism across India.

Kolkata is altogether more relaxed in the mingling of the sexes. This is something I’ve noticed in all cultures where honour isn’t at a premium, and it is the same in Gujarat. Single women are comfortable in the company of men.

Kolkata has excellent places to eat and drink. Meat is served, and alcohol is freely available. Bengalis don’t have the fake morality of some of our other cultures.

Gujarat covers itself with hypocrisy.

An Ahmedabad daily I worked at reported a few years ago that the majority of licensed drinkers in the city also insisted on prohibition. Why? “That’s our culture,” they said.

On leaving the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and becoming the chief minister of Maharashtra, Prithviraj Chavan’s big initiative has been to raise the drinking age in Mumbai to 25. He spent years learning at Manmohan Singh’s knee, but the peasant’s instinct isn’t easily exorcised.

Another Maratha, R.R. Patil, abolished the city’s beautiful dance bars.

Between them, the pious Marathas have done satyanash of that city. Piety is a personal value and not to be inflicted on another, but this is difficult for some cultures to internalize.

It isn’t that Kolkata isn’t devout, and there is no celebration like Durga Puja

hadn’t been opened forever. I combined horses chasing a train from Sholay’s opening with the flying bicycles of E.T.’s climax. I added my nursery school rickshaw ride in Ranchi to the mix. The possibilities became endless.

We make up stories together.

Of hippos stuck in city traffic and baby turtles looking for the sea. Of children with extra long names. Of a girl who ran too fast, a boy who had a lisp. Sometimes I get lost and ask the

anywhere in the world. This much religious fervour would otherwise always inject a harder edge into the air.

Like it does during Ahmedabad’s annual rath yatra, whose organizers insist that its floats parade through the Muslim ghettos of Shahpur, Kalupur and Dariyapur. Floats on which akhara braves, bare-chested, display their valour. What does Sri Vishnu have to do with bodybuilding?

Kolkata’s puja is festive, and inclusive.

Not threatening, not menacing.

From either end of the subcontinent, two disparate states observe India pass them by. Gujarat and Poschim Bongo (should we now call them Bongolis?) are two states that don’t fall neatly into our north-south division.

Both states have missed making money in the new economy.

Gujarat has missed out despite having outstanding infrastructure— power, roads—and access to capital. All that fledgling information technology firms need. It has governance but does not have the fundamental ingredient: human capital. Oriented towards trade, its urban class is uninterested in, for the most part contemptuous about, employment. English isn’t spoken in Gujarat, even by the elite, for Gujarati delivers the most important function of modern language—communicating complex economic thought.

This will not change for a very long time. Kolkata has a different problem: It lacks governance. But by way of human capital it is India’s wealthiest city.

Twenty years ago, this meant little and Kolkata’s brightest minds left the city.

Today it is gold.

I always enjoy visiting Kolkata, even if by the third day of looking at the happy poverty and the chaos the mind turns to thoughts of escape.

All Indian cities have problems. Few also contain solutions. It is entirely possible, and I think most likely, that Bengalis will be able to sort out theirs, which are quite minor. Kolkata will then be one of the world’s great cities again.

Such a beautiful and cultured people deserve it.

Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media.

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

children for a rescue plan for our story. Unlike adults, children don’t always need a conflict for a story to work for them. Like all children, their favourite stories are about their own babyhood and their parents’ childhood.

Our big family story is titled Numero Uno, First Prize and Most Wanted.

Sahar is Numero Uno, she will always be No. 1. Aliza is the First Prize we won,

THINKSTOCK

because we were such good parents to Sahar. And little Naseem chose us because when she was hunting for a family, we were the ones laughing the loudest. She is our Most Wanted.

Sometimes I pretend to forget who’s who and they have to tell me again. I am your First Prize, Aliza will beam and I am No. 1, Sahar will remind me.

Honestly, our days are way too cluttered with chasing and tailgating, hurts and fevers, gadgets that break down and phone calls that last too long.

And whether you came first or last, whether they tell you that you are too grown up or too little, the abiding memory of every childhood must be that you are special, you belong, that you are the most wanted. That it is always a good time for unexpected laughter.

Now you tell me your story.

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

Write to Natasha at mydaughtersmum@livemint.com www.livemint.com To read Natasha’s previous columns, visit www.livemint.com/natasha­badhwar

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011

L7

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

Icing on the cake: It’s eggless!

This festive season, surprise the vegetarian guests with some home­made muffins

PHOTOGRAPHS

T

he festive season is now in full swing, and for my final egg-free recipe, here’s something to fit the mood for those who can’t eat eggs to celebrate in style.

Cakes are one of the most difficult things to achieve without eggs because eggs perform the crucial functions of binding, raising and adding texture to the sponge mixture. If you care to look, there’s a world of advice out there, especially on the Internet, about how to replace eggs in baking. There’s everything from the Vegan Society’s recommendations of chickpea paste, blended tofu or mashed banana to the frankly perplexing suggestion of adding 7Up or Coca-Cola.

Maybe I’m ignoring a major egg-free breakthrough, perhaps fizzy drinks really are the answer, but in the end, I decided simply to leave the egg out of my standard muffin recipe and add a little extra liquid. I was expecting crumbly, sunken failures, but as you can see from the picture, they turned out rather fine, more than fine actually, well-risen, rich and with a cupcake-like decadence.

Technically, though, they are muffins. The difference between the two is in the mixing technique: When making cupcakes, the sugar and butter are creamed together before adding the eggs and flour; for muffins, the butter is melted (oil is sometimes used for a healthier muffin) and then added to other wet ingredients before being quickly mixed with the dry ingredients. Muffins also tend to use only one egg for a batch of 12, so I thought if I increased the liquid to compensate, the lack of egg might not be too noticeable.

In fact, I doubt anyone could tell there was anything “lacking” at all in these delicious cakes, but

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

···························· aspberry soda? Raspberry fizz? Duke’s raspberry? Or as some of us used to call it, by dint of its identical packaging with a more famous soft drink: raspberry Mangola?

“Please never call it raspberry Mangola,” my Parsi colleague says icily. “You should not be writing about Parsi food if you call it that.”

A quick reassurance: “Raspberry” has nothing to do with mangoes. The raspberry is a fizzy drink that is unexpectedly soft on your tongue, with an aftertaste of such sweetness that it can make your teeth fall out.

For generations, it was a staple at Parsi weddings, Navjotes, birthday celebrations—and at Mumbai’s Parsi restaurants.

“Parsi is raspberry, and raspberry is Parsi,” declares Boman Kohinoor, the 88-year-old stalwart of Britannia & Co. restaurant, Ballard Estate, Mumbai.

“Parsis are fond of sweet things,

R

and we serve raspberry at Parsi functions to guests before anything else to bring that sweetness into life.”

Years ago, some of Britannia’s customers asked Kohinoor if he kept any raspberry at his establishment. He first said no (because raspberry is Parsi, and his customers were not), but was quickly persuaded to relent. His restaurant is as old as he is; over time, it has gone from serving European food, to Mughlai cuisine, to its current signature Parsi-Iranian food.

But the raspberry drink, after that first request, has been around for most of that time.

Duke’s no longer makes raspberry drinks, which Kohinoor, fond of their taste, regrets. Mumbai-based Darius Pundol, private equity fund manager and a member of the family which formerly owned the brand, says, “Even before Duke’s was sold to PepsiCo in 1993, it was a niche product which catered to certain segments. It was inextricably

RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

Spread the cheer: (clockwise from above) Sinful muffins are possible even without eggs; don’t scrimp on the icing; muffins differ from cupcakes in the mixing technique; and the muffins are done when the surface springs back on pressing. just to ensure complete indulgence, I added a cherry filling and topped them with a rich butter icing. For a complete Diwali fire-cracking flourish, I put sinful Amarena cherries on top.

Happy Diwali!

Egg­Free Chocolate and Cherry Muffins Makes 12 large muffins Ingredients 250g flour (maida) 2 tsp baking powder K tsp bicarbonate of soda K tsp salt 5 tbsp of unsweetened cocoa powder 150g caster sugar 250ml milk 150ml sunflower oil (or melted butter for a richer cake) Cherry jam Amarena cherries for decoration

The rose of Persia The fizzy drink with a stunning sweetness still survives in niche corners of Mumbai

BY

linked to Parsis, immensely popular in Parsi restaurants.”

Pundol says that the “old, traditional formula—over a century old” was used by Pepsi to make raspberry after it took over the brand, but they eventually stopped production in the late 1990s. Representatives of PepsiCo were unavailable to comment.

Now, others have filled in.

About 10 years ago, Britannia restaurant began to stock Pallonji’s, a Nagpur company whose bottles are labelled “estd. 1865”. Their bottled raspberry can look alarmingly like rose sherbet, and contains, somewhere in its jewel-toned depths, a note of that very taste.

Pallonji’s is also the preferred raspberry at another famous Parsi establishment in the Fort area, the restaurant Jimmy Boy, where “demand is high”, I am told, for the drink.

This may be because many other Parsi restaurants don’t even stock it. It’s rare to find it in one of the usual Irani teaand-biscuits establishments.

While it’s a staple of Parsi catering, it’s no longer the ne plus ultra of beverages.

“We do order it in for big, sig-

For the icing 200g soft unsalted butter 400g icing sugar Method Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius. Line a muffin tray with paper cases.

Sieve the flour, baking powder, K tsp bicarbonate of soda, K tsp salt and cocoa powder into a large bowl. Use a whisk to make sure the cocoa is fully mixed into the flour.

In another bowl, mix together the milk, sugar and oil and then pour into the dry ingredients.

With a metal spoon, fold the wet mixture into the dry. Unlike cupcakes, it is important not to over-mix—fold only until all the flour is covered. Whereas a

nificantly Parsi banquets, such as for Parsi New Year,” says Farrokh Khambata, chef and chief proprietor, Catering & Allied, Mumbai. He says that up to 30% of people at functions still choose to drink raspberry.

“At one time, it was a really good drink because of how it complemented Parsi wedding food, which is slightly spicier than everyday Parsi home cooking,” Khambata says. “The sweetness and the fizz made it a

cupcake mix will be perfectly smooth, a muffin mix should look a little lumpy.

Put a dessert spoonful of the mixture into each paper case. On top of this, put a teaspoon of cherry jam, then fill the paper case with the muffin mixture.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the surface of the muffin springs back when pressed. Leave the muffins to cool completely while you make the icing.

Sieve the icing sugar into a bowl and add the soft butter. Mix well, adding a little milk if the

icing is too dry. If you have a piping bag, spoon the icing into it and swirl over the top of the cold muffins. If you don’t have a piping bag, use a teaspoon to cover the cake.

Top with a cherry, and serve.

Muffins are best eaten on the day they are made.

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 chocolate muffins and earlier recipes in the egg­free baking series, visit www.livemint.com/chocolatemuffin.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

great palate cleanser.”

Taken with Britannia’s rich, fragrant berry pulao, the Pallonji’s raspberry is exactly that.

Its raspberry-with-rose-notes taste is blatantly synthetic, but the tart kickback is refreshing, lighter than a syrupy bottled fruit drink, and much kinder on the tastebuds than Cola. If you have ever been a teenage girl, it will remind you of the gustatory ambitions of a Bacardi Breezer.

With the tang of the mystery

berries and the masalas under the fragrant rice, the raspberry washes down beautifully. In a way, it prepares you for the airy lightness of a good Parsi dessert—say, a well-tempered caramel custard—but that’s in spite of the fact that it practically steams with sugar itself, and can make you wretchedly thirsty. At weddings, they probably soak it up with the Scotch. I personally recommend a strong pot of masala chai afterwards.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Red velvet: Britannia restaurant is one of the few places in Mumbai that still serves the raspberry drink.

L8

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011

Travel

LOUNGE TRIP PLANNER/SCOTLAND

SCOTLAND

Six King Jameses and then some Once the capital of Scotland, Stirling was the site of a brave­heart skirmish for the throne B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ···························· n the 10th of September 2011, Stirling is cold, grey and wet. The rain comes down neither in sheets nor in thick drops, but in a swirling explosion of dampness.

Too wet to take your jacket off.

Yet not wet enough to spoil the dry and carefully packed umbrella in your backpack.

The next day, most of the world will be commemorating the terror attacks in New York.

But for Stirling in particular, and Scotland in general, the 11th of September is the anniversary of a pivotal moment in Scotland’s confusing but unrelentingly sad history: the Battle of Stirling Bridge.

All history, one might say, is sad. In the end, someone dies, one army loses, one side forever gets branded villains, pompous promises are made that such injustice will never happen

O

JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES

Crossroads of time: Wind turbines overlook the ancient Stirling Castle perched atop Stirling, the gateway to Scotland.

again. And then everything happens again.

But even after accounting for the general pathos of mankind’s tendencies, Scotland somehow seems to have drawn terrible cards—over and over again. And outlining some of this story, to a group of mostly American tourists standing outside the main gate to Stirling Castle, is Stuart, one of the castle’s historians and tour guides.

The wind and rain billow around us, and Stuart starts by apologizing for the dreadful but typical weather.

“Now look around the castle,” he says, swinging his arms.

Stuart speaks with a gentle, reassuring Scottish accent. The kind that British companies, even in England, like to employ in helplines and advertisements. All tourist guides in the world should adopt this accent.

Everyone in the world should adopt this accent.

Stirling, a small town with a population of less than 40,000 these days, has witnessed such tremendous historical upheavals because of its unique location. To the south lie the flat Scottish lowlands, and to the

north the highlands. Stirling is perched around what was historically the lowest crossing point of the river Forth. In other words, if marauding kings and invading armies wanted to march up or down through Scotland, Stirling was the narrow gateway that stood in between. Their armies had to funnel through the city and over the river. As anybody from Poland will tell you, it really sucks to get in the way.

Both Scottish and English marauded and invaded plenty.

Stirling Castle sits on a high vantage point surrounded by cliffs. This gives it a commanding position over the city of Stirling and the river crossing.

Nearby, there is another prominent rock formation locally called a “crag and tail”, or a teardrop of upturned rock shooting out of the flat surface.

It was this hill, called Abbey Craig, where William Wallace planned and executed the Battle of Stirling Bridge on the 11th of September 1297.

But we get ahead of ourselves. First let us talk about the kings of Scotland who lived at Stirling Castle and the unfortu-

Stirling forms the apex of an almost equilateral triangle with Edinburgh and Glasgow at the other two vertices.

It is extremely well connected with both cities via rail and road. It is an easy 30-odd mile (around 48km) drive from either city. If you’re travelling from London, it might make more sense to book a train. There is frequent service from Glasgow Queen Street Station and Haymarket Station in Edinburgh, which makes Stirling an excellent 48-hour excursion as part of a larger Scottish itinerary. Prices of train tickets vary with season Scotland and traffic. But expect to pay around £50 (around R3,800) per person, one-way, London to Stirling via Edinburgh if you book a month in advance. Apply for UK visas at the VFS office.

Ireland For details, England visit www.vfs-uk-in.com

Scottish Highlands and Islands

SCOTLAND Perth

Stirling Edinburgh

Glasgow

To London

London

Prices from Indian metros to London’s Heathrow Airport are:

Emirates Turkish Airlines/Austrian/BMI (Star Alliance) Aeroflot/Air France (SkyTeam) Finnair/British Airways/Kingfisher (oneworld) Fares may change.

Delhi R40,570 R42,850 R38,970 R41,700

Mumbai R37,720 R41,270 R47,880 R45,030

Stay

Eat

Bangalore R45,430 R47,360 R46,720 R46,170

Do

Stirling has a decent bus network manned by helpful staff who won’t mind dropping you between stops if you ask them nicely. However, frequency drops precipitously during the weekends. A day pass will cost you £5. Do share your plans with the driver before you buy one. A taxi ride from the station to the eastern or western extremities shouldn’t cost you more than £6. Hiring a car for the day is recommended. Visitors with Indian licences can drive in the UK with some restrictions.

Stirling has just about enough to do to vouch for an overnight stay. But don’t expect to stay in a hotel in the city centre. The good ones are located around 2 miles or so from the city centre.

Having a bus stop nearby helps. A night with breakfast will set you back by around £60. Rooms at the excellent four-star Adamo Stirling hotel will cost you twice as much. The Willy Wallace backpacker hostel is centrally located, and dorm beds are cheap at around £15 a night.

Stirling is not a sophisticated culinary destination. Yet there are a couple of shopping malls with the usual chains. But, as always in the UK, walk into a pub for cheap and filling, if unimaginative, meals.

Stirling Castle (www.stirlingcastle.gov.uk/), the National Wallace Monument (www.nationalwallacemonument.com), and the site of the Battle of Bannockburn will be top on your itinerary. There are excellent walks around the castle which are both beautiful and informative. Take the courtesy bus up to the monument. But walk down leisurely, taking in the numerous viewpoints, especially over the river Forth. Before going, however, visit www.visitstirling.org for ideas. For information on tours and special events, visit the websites of the respective monuments. The castle has free guided tours twice a day at 10.30am and 3.30pm.

Ask questions!

GRAPHIC BY AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

nate turn of events that led to the battle, and the myth of William Wallace.

For the purpose of brevity, let us assume that all was well with the Scottish kings until the reign of Alexander III from 1249-86. As we walk through the main gates of Stirling Castle and into the innards, darting from one pocket of wind to another, Stuart tells us of how

Alexander had three children: a daughter who was married off to Norway, and two boys who died young. Later, Alexander’s wife, an English princess, would also die, leaving him without male heirs.

Alexander, however, was not one to spend life besotted by the memory of his dead wife.

Oh no. Quite the contrary. The Chronicle of Lanercost, a record

TRAVEL L9

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM JEFF J MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES

Auld lang syne: (from top) In June, Stirling Castle was reopened after two years of renovation to give it a 15th­century feel; the Stirling Bridge, the site of many a battle; and a statue of the legendary King Robert the Bruce.

LONDON STEREOSCOPIC COMPANY/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

of the period, describes him thus: “For he (Alexander) used never to forbear on account of season or storm, nor for perils of flood or rocky cliffs, but would visit, not too creditably, (both) matrons and nuns, virgins and widows, by day or by night as the fancy seized him, sometimes in disguise, often accompanied by a single follower.”

Poor single follower.

While the chronicle called him a well-loved king, his indiscretions, it seemed to indicate, cost him dearly. One night, drunk and on horseback, Alexander rushed to meet his new French bride. The next morning he was found dead.

Nobody really knew how.

His granddaughter in Norway became heir, but she died of illness on the way to assume the throne (“must have been the weather,” Stuart tells us).

Suddenly, Scotland had no successor. With too many interested parties, the Scottish nobles followed up two instances of bad luck with one of bad judgement: They asked the English king to intervene and sort out the succession.

Bad card. Bad card. Bad play.

What followed were the wars of Scottish independence that raged for the next three decades. Starring such legendary characters as William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, King Edward Longshanks, and Mel Gibson, the wars were really a relentless series of battles and skirmishes for control.

Stuart tries hard to talk us through the wars without confusing us. But except for one astoundingly well-informed American tourist who is a spitting image of the coroner on CSI: Las Vegas, eyes begin to glaze over. There were six kings called James, for God’s sake.

Back in the days when Stirling was the capital of Scotland—not Edinburgh or Glasgow, mind you—the kings lived in the castle. This was the centre of Scottish power. Yet it is really rather small. The hills and landscape dwarf it. And it is austere. Part of the reason was the austerity of the nation itself, which only really became prosperous under the Stewart kings in the late 14th century.

And by then the kings rarely stayed in the castle at all.

So there is a sense of longlost glory in Stirling Castle.

Despite extensive restorations

of the inside room and outside walls, one is left with the feeling that the castle’s majesty, brief as it was, will never be restored.

After the tour, I hustle my tourist guide to a corner. So, I ask him, do you think Scotland will vote for devolution? You think enough people want it to be an independent country?

(Which is when I notice his full name: James Stuart Campbell. The only way to make that any more Scottish would be to add the name of a whisky or two: James Laphroaig Stuart Glenlivet Campbell.)

Campbell says: “Aye. I think it could go either way. Personally, I am not for it. But there are many Scottish people who would vote for independence in a referendum.”

After the 2011 election to the Scottish parliament, the Scottish National Party won with a majority. Party leader and first m in is ter A lex S a l m o nd h as since announced that a referendum on independence will take place in 2014 or 2015.

“I think Salmond is being very smart,” says the bus driver who ferries me back to the city centre. “There is no hurry. I think he is going to wait for a couple of years, wait for the Tories down in London to screw up completely, and then conduct the referendum.”

“I think we should become a free country,” he says vigorously. “We’ve suffered far too long under the English. We can be a better nation than we are right now.”

Dinner that night is at something called an EatingInn pub, a massproduced highway restaurant that has a single menu across all their outlets in the U K . T h e waitress, a young Scottish girl with bubbling enthusia s m a n d chipped nail polish, gets every single element of my

order wrong. She brings me a gin and tonic without the gin, a burger with the wrong sauce, and forgets the dessert completely.

But she blunders her way through the evening with the eagerness of an Olympic floor gymnast. Also, EatingInn provides a small flat-screen TV for each table.

Surely this country is ready for freedom.

The next morning, I wake up half expecting to see a fantastic Battle of Stirling Bridge parade of some kind, complete with bagpipes and whisky and dancing. But in fact there is nothing of the kind. The 11th of September looks just as cold and wet as the 10th of September did. My plan is to take a taxi, then a bus and finally trek up to The National Wallace Monument, via the current Stirling Bridge.

The monument website promises a lively re-enactment of history by some local actors. And then, if time permits, I’ll take a bus to Bannockburn, the site of a definitive ScotTHINKSTOCK tish victory.

“Too late for devolution now,” says my taxi driver. “We should have thought about it when we found oil. Now when the oil is running out, what is the point?”

In the 1960s, several companies struck oil in the North Sea off Aberdeen. The resultant income energized Scotland.

Today, Scotland is the European Union’s largest producer of oil, and the sector provides around 6% of total employment. However, the general impression is that the North Sea reserves are past their peak output, and this income will eventually decline.

“Without oil…who knows?

We could end up becoming like Ireland or Greece…”

The National Wallace Monument is one of the weirdest monuments, or indeed building of any kind, that I’ve ever seen. It is an intensely Gothic finger of masonry that points up from the peak of Abbey Craig hill. Fine. There is no point denying the obvious. It is embarrassingly phallic. At first glance, it looks like a castle that has tumbled down, leaving only one remaining tower.

Not only is it odd to look at, it is also somewhat cumbersome to climb. This fierce finger of stone has a spiral staircase in one corner, which I climb up to pass through a series of halls stacked one above another. The

best stops are the hall on William Wallace’s life, and the very roof itself. The view of the Stirling landscape is breathtaking.

Even if you’re slightly vertiginous, the effort to climb the 246 steps to the top is worth it.

I huff my way back down again just in time to witness the next “enactment”. A short man dressed in the garb of a 13th century Scottish foot soldier gathers us around and tells us that the “English are coming”.

Freedom fighter William Wallace was somewhere in the surrounding forest, and he would know how to push them back.

“Come with me…and look sharp!” he screams.

We follow. Suddenly, from the wet foliage, from inside the hollow of a dead tree, a man in a cloak leaps forth. He has a knife at the foot soldier’s throat. At least one of the women screams a little.

William Wallace! The outlaw!

Brave-heart! Mel Gibson!

On this day in 1297, an army of some 12,000 troops loyal to King Edward, the once-mediator-now-usurper, rode up to Stirling Bridge. They came from the south and faced, on the other side of the river, a small, hitherto unorganized group of some 3,000 Scots. A rout was on the cards. But Wallace had a plan. He waited for a few thousand English to cross before swooping.

The English were destroyed.

It was a great, if indecisive, Scottish victory. And one made immortal in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (except that there is no bridge in the movie. Really).

Wallace would eventually lose to the English at Falkirk and then be betrayed. After which he was hung, drawn and quartered. The enactment at the monument is a quick recap of the victory, the betrayal and the trial, with the foot soldier taking turns to play King Edward and the executioner. Between two acts I ask him what he thinks of Scottish devolution. “Oh aye!

We must get freedom,” he says, before adding, “but first we kill some English…”

Method actor.

With the rain beginning to pick up, both actors quickly wrap up the show.

Ironically, Lars Cook, who plays William Wallace, is Welsh. And a local history professor. “I am more a historian who can act than vice versa,” says Cook. He thinks there is a steady increase in interest about Scottish history. “More people, especially young people, are beginning to care for the history. Movies like Braveheart help, but museums and monuments are also getting their act together.”

Cook, who says he doesn’t really have a stake in it because he is Welsh, thinks that devolution is a good thing. “It will make young people take greater ownership of their country. And it is not like they will run it any worse than they already do. Things could possibly get better.”

But most of all, he adds, “Scotland will get a chance to stop blaming other people for its problems.”

As Cook walks back into an office to towel himself down and prepare for the next performance, I take the courtesy bus down the hill to the car park, and then walk south across the river. The weather is just beginning to clear up. But, most of all, I am happy that no one is waiting to ambush me on the other side.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

CORBIS

PREVIEW

GETTING THE

GAME THEORY

ROHIT BRIJNATH

FORMULA RIGHT

WHERE THERE’S A WHEEL,

THERE’S A WAIL S

o go on then you Sarojini Nagar Senna, you Vettel from Vikhroli, lick your fingers and stiffen your hair in the reflecting door of your polished BMW. Press the accelerator and lose your timidity as a man. Then go take a deep whiff of burnt rubber, bruise the eardrums, ogle the pit girls at that thing called the Delhi Formula One (F1). Watch the kiss of metal skin as a Red Bull shoves aside a Prancing Horse; discuss the cojones required to overtake at 300 kmph; drool over the sex of this technology; amuse yourself with the fact that Lewis Hamilton is a distant relative of a Patna getaway driver.

Have a nice day. Enjoy.

Meanwhile, I will be watching the Calicut Ladies Embroidery Championships. Anything. Just not this. Sebastian Vettel and the slower herd behind him are incredible, gifted folk. They compete in a sport where the implications of a mistake go way beyond defeat. They just don’t move me.

I’ve written this all before, but let me do it again for your sad benefit. It’s not just that I don’t get cars and thus my word association is all screwed up. You go “Piston”, I think Isiah Thomas; you say “bodywork”, I think Gisele Bundchen; you say “marshal”, I think Wyatt Earp. But it’s not that, it’s not even that I think this sport has it ass-ways, and didn’t Nascar driver Kyle Busch once say: “The key to driving is your ass. You have to feel what your car is doing, and that feel is in your rear end.”

Thing is, I got no feel for this sport, at any end, not as a writer, not as a sports watcher. I should have never gone to my first race in Melbourne years ago. Bad idea. The cars came, they went, I waited. So at the arena, I watched TV. This is fun apparently.

All sport requires some imagining, the tactic about to be played, the anxiety corroding the batsman’s mind, the pain coursing through the tennis player’s foot where a blister sits like a bloody snarl. But Formula One asks too much, it is too invisible, too opaque for me, too absent of the rope of emotion that binds me to the sportsperson. The driver, helmet on, hands gloved (now you’ll be a smart-ass and tell me this happens in cricket too), is plugged into the car, inserted,

The build­up to India’s first F1 race has been frenetic.

How will it change motor sports in the country?

B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA & A MRIT R AJ ···························· ven before a single Formula One (F1) car sparks its ignition in Greater Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi, for the inaugural Grand Prix (GP) of India, there will be a colossal battle waiting to be fought around the event: The logistical nightmare of flying in the race equipment to the city, and then transporting it to the newly built Buddh International Circuit.

The 12 F1 teams, all based out of Europe, will arrive in their own jets, carrying anywhere between 100-200 staff and their equipment. Five Boeing 747-400F aircraft will bring in 24 racing cars, two for each team, along with spare engines, chassis, other car parts, tyres, racespecific gadgets, computers and sensitive telemetry equipment that connects the on-track racing staff and drivers to their European headquarters in real time. More than 600 tonnes of cargo is expected.

Another 900 tonnes of racesupport cargo will be shipped in. About 30,000 litres of highoctane fuel will also come via sea in addition to the 40,000 litres of diesel supplied by Indian Oil. The entire cargo is valued at over `150 crore.

Perhaps not surprising then, that the logistical details of an F1 race are often compared to a military campaign.

This massive movement of people and machines pales only in comparison to the effort that went into building the Buddh International Circuit.

The 5.14km track was designed

by Hermann Tilke, the German track designer who enjoys a monopoly in F1, and built by the Noida-based Jaypee Group, a construction company which acquired the rights for the race in India. More than 6,000 workers and 300 engineers were employed to build the track and arena, which is spread over 850 acres, and will house around 120,000 spectators. Jaypee Sports International Ltd (JPSI) spent close to `1,800 crore on the project, which includes paying licensing fees to Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the sport’s governing body.

“The size of this project is the first of its kind in India,” says Narain Karthikeyan, who was the first Indian driver to race in F1 in 2005, and is now a part of the Hispania Racing

E

Team. “It’s a huge step for motor sports in India.”

Sameer Gaur, managing director and chief executive officer of JPSI, backs this assertion. “Till now, there was no infrastructure like this in India, and everything starts when an infrastructure is made and when big groups and companies get into these things. A lot of opportunities can come up in the next onetwo years. The outcome can be huge.”

Fast money Perhaps no sport is as blatantly about flexing economic muscle as F1. The race calendar follows the world’s wealth hot spots like a hound with a nose for blood. From Monaco, the playground of the world’s rich and famous, to the oil riches of Abu Dhabi and Bahrain, to Shanghai, the world’s newest economic stronghold.

India with its rising economy and phenomenal growth potential is but a natural progression.

Indian F1 driver Karun Chandhok, who races for Team Lotus, says India already has an established and growing market for the sport, and the timing is perfect to build commercially on that platform.

“Around 25 million people in India watch F1 on TV,” Karun says, “and we can only expect those numbers to rise with the sport actually coming to India.

Almost all manufacturers and sponsors involved in F1 are selling their products in India as

F1 RACES ARE ALSO WATCHED

BY OVER 500 MILLION VIEWERS ON TV, PRECEDED ONLY

BY THE FIFA WORLD CUP. ESPN, WHICH BROADCASTS F1 IN 24 ASIAN COUNTRIES, SAYS IT SOLD ADVERTISING SPACE AT THE RATE OF `1.5 LAKH FOR A 10­SECOND SLOT.

well, so it makes perfect commercial sense.”

When Shanghai hosted its first race in 2004, global market research firm ACNielsen’s survey showed that F1 generated around 3.3 billion yuan (around `3,199 crore now) worth of benefits for property developers, hotels, tourism, catering, retailing and advertising companies.

During the 2010 Fifa World Cup, the biggest sporting revenue generator in the world, around $1 billion (around `4,900 crore) was generated over 30 days for the hosts South Africa.

F1 races are also watched by over 500 million viewers on TV, preceded only by the Fifa World Cup. ESPN, which broadcasts F1 in 24 Asian countries, says it sold advertising space at the rate of `1.5 lakh for a 10-second slot.

The impact of F1 is best understood by Bharti Airtel’s decision to drop its sponsorship for the Champions League T20, despite cricket being the pre-eminent sport in India, in favour of the Grand Prix of India.

“The deal (Airtel is title sponsors of the Indian GP) meant three things to us,” says Mohit Beotra, head, emerging business, Bharti Airtel. “One, it would forever be remembered as the company that got F1 to India; two, the F1 equity of precision engineering, dynamism and speed would rub off on us too; and three, it would put us on the same pedestal as the other global brands who have sponsored F1 earlier.”

Beotra points out that F1 will be relevant in India given the 14% growth in 2009-10 of the $40 billion sports marketing business (sports, sports entertainment, sponsorships and sports goods retailing) in the country.

“Our association with Formula One in India is a strategic step towards strengthening our brand positioning and appeal to our target audience that is youthful, vibrant and enjoys the F1 adrenalin rush,” he says.

Mercedes-Benz, the official automobile partner for F1 in India, will be spending `12-15 crore on the marketing activities around the event. “People know us as a luxury brand. The sporty part of the brand has not been unleashed,” says Debashis Mitra, director (marketing and sales), Mercedes-Benz India Pvt. Ltd. “We provide the engines in the Force India team,

McLaren has our engines. So we will leverage this opportunity to strengthen our brand perception in the country.”

Foot on the pedal Is motor sport set to gain as much mileage as corporate houses with India on the F1 calender?

“Oh my god, yes,” says Vicky Chandhok, president of the Federation of Motor Sports Clubs of India (FMSCI), and Karun’s father. “It will project India as a country which can handle a sporting event of this calibre. It will project the technological prowess of India, because F1 is the most technologically driven sport in the world.”

Karun, who has been liaising with the FIA on JPSI’s behalf to make sure teams have everything they need during the race, and has also been testing the track through its various stages of development, believes watching the sport live will be a big influence as well. “It’s different from watching it on TV,” he says. “The sound, the speed, just the sheer skills of the drivers, it’s insanely impressive.

Maybe aspiration levels will go up, more people will take to the sport.”

Many manufacturers have sent proposals to set up racing schools at the Grand Prix facilities as well, hoping to ensure a future for the sport in India.

Mercedes has already finalized plans for setting up a driving academy, their third after China and the US, to provide training for aspiring racers.

“Some of the drivers we will bring in as trainers will be former Formula 1 drivers,” Mitra says.

JPSI is already planning ahead to make sure their circuit is well used throughout the year, and not just for the annual F1 race. “We are in initial stages of talks with MotoGP (the world’s premier motorcycle racing event) and we aim to hold this in 2012,” says Gaur.

Motor sports drivers and enthusiasts in India also hope that the sponsorships for the GP will also extend to competitors and drivers in the country as the sport catches on.

“Of course, we hope that companies will relate more to the sport,” says Karthikeyan.

“But that has not really happened in China. So we have to wait and see.” rudraneil.s@livemint.com

an astronaut on a ground mission. I feel like waving goodbye.

But I can’t see his pain, his face doing its g-force contortions, his feet doing the Liberace tap dance on the pedals. I can’t see him dribble out vomit like Pete Sampras once did, can’t read his lips going “fuck this” as a football striker went the other day after a miss, can’t see him flick a frisky Federesque forelock, can’t see his suffering like a Tour de France climber standing high on his pedals.

I can see what his car does, but I can’t see him at work, his skill is apparent in his drive yet it is also a mystery. Even when he wins, you wait for him to eject himself, and the moment dies, it’s not like the Woods’ immediate uppercut to God or Nadal doing his celebratory knee into the gonads. There’s an absence of humanness here.

Here’s another thing. They sell earplugs during the Singapore F1 in a bag called a Survival Kit! Ok, I’ll concede, this mechanical beast on its track prowl gives you an inebriated mule-kick of adrenalin but it’s not my sort of sound. Mine is the boxer’s uufffffff on glove pushing back cheekbone, it’s even Victoria Azarenka’s whoooaahhh, it’s the colliding grunt of the rugby scrum, it’s the squeak of sneakers on hardwood floors, it’s even trash talk. That is sporting music, this is noise. So sue me.

Don’t even get me started on the rules.

There used to be this red, thick grammar book we had to study as children, full of all that obscene talk of past participles and intransitive verbs. That was easier. Don’t even talk about overtaking. Apparently it happens and I know you’re going to give me a detailed example of when and where. Thank you kindly.

But let’s talk about the contest. Boxing does it best, the cold-eyed stare, the stripped-down nakedness, the truth that no one can help you when the bell goes. Man against man and all his frailties. Basketballer shouldering basketballer. Tennis player sending down intimidation. Footballer tugging at someone’s testicles at a corner. Nice.

Machine against machine. Not so nice. I want will-against-will, not wires against wires. Do you have to be a great driver to win? Sure. Can a great driver win a lesser car, can his skill make up for inferior engineering. Not really. Bah! One last point. Made before, making again. This Messi fellow, he plays with the football I do. This Nadal fellow, I have his Babolat racket swinging from a hook in my room. I like that. I like this connection, I like the insanity of what they can do with similar equipment. I make the football do the mundane thing, Messi makes it dance, sing, talk, spin. So does Nadal. The Formula One car is incomprehensible, it is beautiful, magical, astonishing engineering but it ensures a certain divide. I can’t have it. Actually I don’t want it. And herein may lie the crux of the whole damn problem.

I don’t drive.

THE FORMULA ONE CAR IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE, IT IS BEAUTIFUL, MAGICAL, ASTONISHING ENGINEERING BUT IT ENSURES A CERTAIN DIVIDE. I CAN’T HAVE IT.

Meals on wheels: The Grand Prix of India may change the status of motor sports in the country, encouraging companies to fund the fledgling sport.

Hidden: Under the helmet, McLaren Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton.

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

Write to Rohit at gametheory@livemint.com www.livemint.com

MARK THOMPSON/ GETTY IMAGES

Read Rohit’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/rohit­brijnath

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

CORBIS

PREVIEW

GETTING THE

GAME THEORY

ROHIT BRIJNATH

FORMULA RIGHT

WHERE THERE’S A WHEEL,

THERE’S A WAIL S

o go on then you Sarojini Nagar Senna, you Vettel from Vikhroli, lick your fingers and stiffen your hair in the reflecting door of your polished BMW. Press the accelerator and lose your timidity as a man. Then go take a deep whiff of burnt rubber, bruise the eardrums, ogle the pit girls at that thing called the Delhi Formula One (F1). Watch the kiss of metal skin as a Red Bull shoves aside a Prancing Horse; discuss the cojones required to overtake at 300 kmph; drool over the sex of this technology; amuse yourself with the fact that Lewis Hamilton is a distant relative of a Patna getaway driver.

Have a nice day. Enjoy.

Meanwhile, I will be watching the Calicut Ladies Embroidery Championships. Anything. Just not this. Sebastian Vettel and the slower herd behind him are incredible, gifted folk. They compete in a sport where the implications of a mistake go way beyond defeat. They just don’t move me.

I’ve written this all before, but let me do it again for your sad benefit. It’s not just that I don’t get cars and thus my word association is all screwed up. You go “Piston”, I think Isiah Thomas; you say “bodywork”, I think Gisele Bundchen; you say “marshal”, I think Wyatt Earp. But it’s not that, it’s not even that I think this sport has it ass-ways, and didn’t Nascar driver Kyle Busch once say: “The key to driving is your ass. You have to feel what your car is doing, and that feel is in your rear end.”

Thing is, I got no feel for this sport, at any end, not as a writer, not as a sports watcher. I should have never gone to my first race in Melbourne years ago. Bad idea. The cars came, they went, I waited. So at the arena, I watched TV. This is fun apparently.

All sport requires some imagining, the tactic about to be played, the anxiety corroding the batsman’s mind, the pain coursing through the tennis player’s foot where a blister sits like a bloody snarl. But Formula One asks too much, it is too invisible, too opaque for me, too absent of the rope of emotion that binds me to the sportsperson. The driver, helmet on, hands gloved (now you’ll be a smart-ass and tell me this happens in cricket too), is plugged into the car, inserted,

The build­up to India’s first F1 race has been frenetic.

How will it change motor sports in the country?

B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA & A MRIT R AJ ···························· ven before a single Formula One (F1) car sparks its ignition in Greater Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi, for the inaugural Grand Prix (GP) of India, there will be a colossal battle waiting to be fought around the event: The logistical nightmare of flying in the race equipment to the city, and then transporting it to the newly built Buddh International Circuit.

The 12 F1 teams, all based out of Europe, will arrive in their own jets, carrying anywhere between 100-200 staff and their equipment. Five Boeing 747-400F aircraft will bring in 24 racing cars, two for each team, along with spare engines, chassis, other car parts, tyres, racespecific gadgets, computers and sensitive telemetry equipment that connects the on-track racing staff and drivers to their European headquarters in real time. More than 600 tonnes of cargo is expected.

Another 900 tonnes of racesupport cargo will be shipped in. About 30,000 litres of highoctane fuel will also come via sea in addition to the 40,000 litres of diesel supplied by Indian Oil. The entire cargo is valued at over `150 crore.

Perhaps not surprising then, that the logistical details of an F1 race are often compared to a military campaign.

This massive movement of people and machines pales only in comparison to the effort that went into building the Buddh International Circuit.

The 5.14km track was designed

by Hermann Tilke, the German track designer who enjoys a monopoly in F1, and built by the Noida-based Jaypee Group, a construction company which acquired the rights for the race in India. More than 6,000 workers and 300 engineers were employed to build the track and arena, which is spread over 850 acres, and will house around 120,000 spectators. Jaypee Sports International Ltd (JPSI) spent close to `1,800 crore on the project, which includes paying licensing fees to Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), the sport’s governing body.

“The size of this project is the first of its kind in India,” says Narain Karthikeyan, who was the first Indian driver to race in F1 in 2005, and is now a part of the Hispania Racing

E

Team. “It’s a huge step for motor sports in India.”

Sameer Gaur, managing director and chief executive officer of JPSI, backs this assertion. “Till now, there was no infrastructure like this in India, and everything starts when an infrastructure is made and when big groups and companies get into these things. A lot of opportunities can come up in the next onetwo years. The outcome can be huge.”

Fast money Perhaps no sport is as blatantly about flexing economic muscle as F1. The race calendar follows the world’s wealth hot spots like a hound with a nose for blood. From Monaco, the playground of the world’s rich and famous, to the oil riches of Abu Dhabi and Bahrain, to Shanghai, the world’s newest economic stronghold.

India with its rising economy and phenomenal growth potential is but a natural progression.

Indian F1 driver Karun Chandhok, who races for Team Lotus, says India already has an established and growing market for the sport, and the timing is perfect to build commercially on that platform.

“Around 25 million people in India watch F1 on TV,” Karun says, “and we can only expect those numbers to rise with the sport actually coming to India.

Almost all manufacturers and sponsors involved in F1 are selling their products in India as

F1 RACES ARE ALSO WATCHED

BY OVER 500 MILLION VIEWERS ON TV, PRECEDED ONLY

BY THE FIFA WORLD CUP. ESPN, WHICH BROADCASTS F1 IN 24 ASIAN COUNTRIES, SAYS IT SOLD ADVERTISING SPACE AT THE RATE OF `1.5 LAKH FOR A 10­SECOND SLOT.

well, so it makes perfect commercial sense.”

When Shanghai hosted its first race in 2004, global market research firm ACNielsen’s survey showed that F1 generated around 3.3 billion yuan (around `3,199 crore now) worth of benefits for property developers, hotels, tourism, catering, retailing and advertising companies.

During the 2010 Fifa World Cup, the biggest sporting revenue generator in the world, around $1 billion (around `4,900 crore) was generated over 30 days for the hosts South Africa.

F1 races are also watched by over 500 million viewers on TV, preceded only by the Fifa World Cup. ESPN, which broadcasts F1 in 24 Asian countries, says it sold advertising space at the rate of `1.5 lakh for a 10-second slot.

The impact of F1 is best understood by Bharti Airtel’s decision to drop its sponsorship for the Champions League T20, despite cricket being the pre-eminent sport in India, in favour of the Grand Prix of India.

“The deal (Airtel is title sponsors of the Indian GP) meant three things to us,” says Mohit Beotra, head, emerging business, Bharti Airtel. “One, it would forever be remembered as the company that got F1 to India; two, the F1 equity of precision engineering, dynamism and speed would rub off on us too; and three, it would put us on the same pedestal as the other global brands who have sponsored F1 earlier.”

Beotra points out that F1 will be relevant in India given the 14% growth in 2009-10 of the $40 billion sports marketing business (sports, sports entertainment, sponsorships and sports goods retailing) in the country.

“Our association with Formula One in India is a strategic step towards strengthening our brand positioning and appeal to our target audience that is youthful, vibrant and enjoys the F1 adrenalin rush,” he says.

Mercedes-Benz, the official automobile partner for F1 in India, will be spending `12-15 crore on the marketing activities around the event. “People know us as a luxury brand. The sporty part of the brand has not been unleashed,” says Debashis Mitra, director (marketing and sales), Mercedes-Benz India Pvt. Ltd. “We provide the engines in the Force India team,

McLaren has our engines. So we will leverage this opportunity to strengthen our brand perception in the country.”

Foot on the pedal Is motor sport set to gain as much mileage as corporate houses with India on the F1 calender?

“Oh my god, yes,” says Vicky Chandhok, president of the Federation of Motor Sports Clubs of India (FMSCI), and Karun’s father. “It will project India as a country which can handle a sporting event of this calibre. It will project the technological prowess of India, because F1 is the most technologically driven sport in the world.”

Karun, who has been liaising with the FIA on JPSI’s behalf to make sure teams have everything they need during the race, and has also been testing the track through its various stages of development, believes watching the sport live will be a big influence as well. “It’s different from watching it on TV,” he says. “The sound, the speed, just the sheer skills of the drivers, it’s insanely impressive.

Maybe aspiration levels will go up, more people will take to the sport.”

Many manufacturers have sent proposals to set up racing schools at the Grand Prix facilities as well, hoping to ensure a future for the sport in India.

Mercedes has already finalized plans for setting up a driving academy, their third after China and the US, to provide training for aspiring racers.

“Some of the drivers we will bring in as trainers will be former Formula 1 drivers,” Mitra says.

JPSI is already planning ahead to make sure their circuit is well used throughout the year, and not just for the annual F1 race. “We are in initial stages of talks with MotoGP (the world’s premier motorcycle racing event) and we aim to hold this in 2012,” says Gaur.

Motor sports drivers and enthusiasts in India also hope that the sponsorships for the GP will also extend to competitors and drivers in the country as the sport catches on.

“Of course, we hope that companies will relate more to the sport,” says Karthikeyan.

“But that has not really happened in China. So we have to wait and see.” rudraneil.s@livemint.com

an astronaut on a ground mission. I feel like waving goodbye.

But I can’t see his pain, his face doing its g-force contortions, his feet doing the Liberace tap dance on the pedals. I can’t see him dribble out vomit like Pete Sampras once did, can’t read his lips going “fuck this” as a football striker went the other day after a miss, can’t see him flick a frisky Federesque forelock, can’t see his suffering like a Tour de France climber standing high on his pedals.

I can see what his car does, but I can’t see him at work, his skill is apparent in his drive yet it is also a mystery. Even when he wins, you wait for him to eject himself, and the moment dies, it’s not like the Woods’ immediate uppercut to God or Nadal doing his celebratory knee into the gonads. There’s an absence of humanness here.

Here’s another thing. They sell earplugs during the Singapore F1 in a bag called a Survival Kit! Ok, I’ll concede, this mechanical beast on its track prowl gives you an inebriated mule-kick of adrenalin but it’s not my sort of sound. Mine is the boxer’s uufffffff on glove pushing back cheekbone, it’s even Victoria Azarenka’s whoooaahhh, it’s the colliding grunt of the rugby scrum, it’s the squeak of sneakers on hardwood floors, it’s even trash talk. That is sporting music, this is noise. So sue me.

Don’t even get me started on the rules.

There used to be this red, thick grammar book we had to study as children, full of all that obscene talk of past participles and intransitive verbs. That was easier. Don’t even talk about overtaking. Apparently it happens and I know you’re going to give me a detailed example of when and where. Thank you kindly.

But let’s talk about the contest. Boxing does it best, the cold-eyed stare, the stripped-down nakedness, the truth that no one can help you when the bell goes. Man against man and all his frailties. Basketballer shouldering basketballer. Tennis player sending down intimidation. Footballer tugging at someone’s testicles at a corner. Nice.

Machine against machine. Not so nice. I want will-against-will, not wires against wires. Do you have to be a great driver to win? Sure. Can a great driver win a lesser car, can his skill make up for inferior engineering. Not really. Bah! One last point. Made before, making again. This Messi fellow, he plays with the football I do. This Nadal fellow, I have his Babolat racket swinging from a hook in my room. I like that. I like this connection, I like the insanity of what they can do with similar equipment. I make the football do the mundane thing, Messi makes it dance, sing, talk, spin. So does Nadal. The Formula One car is incomprehensible, it is beautiful, magical, astonishing engineering but it ensures a certain divide. I can’t have it. Actually I don’t want it. And herein may lie the crux of the whole damn problem.

I don’t drive.

THE FORMULA ONE CAR IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE, IT IS BEAUTIFUL, MAGICAL, ASTONISHING ENGINEERING BUT IT ENSURES A CERTAIN DIVIDE. I CAN’T HAVE IT.

Meals on wheels: The Grand Prix of India may change the status of motor sports in the country, encouraging companies to fund the fledgling sport.

Hidden: Under the helmet, McLaren Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton.

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

Write to Rohit at gametheory@livemint.com www.livemint.com

MARK THOMPSON/ GETTY IMAGES

Read Rohit’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/rohit­brijnath

L12 COVER

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

MECHANICS

THE SPEED

STRATEGY

Exit Apex Turn­in point

Indian F1 driver Karun Chandhok of Team Lotus, and Red Bull driver Mark Webber on racing at the Buddh International Circuit

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

···························· he Buddh International Circuit in Greater Noida for the Grand Prix (GP) of India is a mix of fast and slow corners, with each corner featuring either a downhill or an uphill slope, with a straight stretch that’s over 1km long, one of the longest in the Formula One (F1) calendar, where cars can hit up to 320 kmph.

“This mix of corners in itself is a challenge, you need a car that’s fast on the straight, but has great downforce and grip on the corners,” says F1 driver Karun Chandhok of Team Lotus.

Turns 3, 4, 16 are extra wide to promote overtaking, according to the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile’s (FIA’s) new policy to make races more exciting, so expect to see a lot of jostling at these turns.

Chandhok’s favourite parts of

T

3

the track are turns 10 and 11.

“It’s an uphill parabolic turn which you have to take blind,” Chandhok says, “and then there’s a right-hand corner where you approach at 250 kmph, and take the turn at 200 kmph. You really have to believe in yourself and your car to go through that.”

At some corners, drivers face 4-5G (g-force) of pressure, which means the body feels the weight equivalent of fourfive times that of gravity due to the acceleration.

“If your head weighs 5kg, at 4G, it becomes a 20kg weight,” says Chandhok.

“Imagine trying to move your head with two 10kg dumbbells stuck to the sides of your head while controlling a car at 200 kmph!”

2 1

RT A ST

15 6

The twists in the track

5

7

When you are inside the cockpit of an F1 car, there really is just one fun­ damental question—just how well can you handle the twists and turns of the track?

Decoding the circuit

14

“Even an amateur driver can hit 300­320 kmph in an F1 car on a long, wide stretch of road. It’s what you do at the corners that makes you an F1 driver,” says Chandhok.

Cornering is an exacting skill that can be simplified by breaking it down into three parts: the turn­in point, apex and exit. The turn­in point is where you start braking and turning the wheel; the apex may or may not be the geometric centre of the corner, but it’s the point where you begin easing out on the brake; and the exit point is where the car is straightened out and the throttle is released.

“Where will you brake? Where will you turn the wheel?

How much will you turn? Where will you accelerate? It’s this combination that makes a good driver,” says Chandhok.

To make sure you are turning at the optimum speed without losing control of the car, you need to pick a braking point before the turn that’s millimetre perfect. “Then you go down hard on the brake pedal at that point,” says Chandhok. “When we push on the brake, we are exerting the equivalent of 120kg of weight on the pedal with just one foot. Through the noise of the engine, the incredible heat inside the cockpit, the g­force, the blur of speed—your mind needs to be cool, cold even, to execute turns perfectly.”

4

16

13

8 9

ANDREW HONE/ GETTY IMAGES

12

F1 champion team Red Bull’s Mark Webber, who won four races in 2010 and finished third in the Drivers’ Championship that season, has gone through the Buddh International Circuit several times on a simulator to get ready for the race. He breaks down the driving strategy for the track:

Turn 3

Blind apex corner—one of the most important corners of the track to get right because it leads on to the long straight, where you want to reach your top speed as quickly as possible.

in opposing directions), so they will be pretty impressive on the g­forces because of the fast change of direc­ tion. We’ll probably pull around 4G. Speed­wise, we’ll be going around 240­260 kmph.

Straight

Turns 10, 11

We will hit a top speed of around 315 kmph.

Turn 4

10

11

One of the slowest corners on the track, I think. We’ll approach this at probably 315 kmph, brake at the 100m board and go around the corner at 100 kmph. We’ll probably pull around 4.5G under brakes and 2G around the corner.

This is also a crucial overtaking area because it’s a wide corner.

Turns 8, 9, 13, 14 GRAPHIC

BY

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

Very fast chicanes (back­to­back turns

RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

MISSION

CONTROL

A leading racing team gives an inside look at the nerve centre of an F1 race, the pit perch

BY A N U P A M K A N T V E R M A anupam1.v@livemint.com

···························· ilton Keynes, around 80km to the north-west of London, houses a building within which, on certain weekends, 18-odd people can be seen hunched before rows of computer screens engrossed in reading and creating data.

“There is a Nasa-like (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) atmosphere in the room, with tiers upon tiers of desks, and all those people,” says Anthony Ward, brand head for Formula One (F1) team Red Bull Racing.

This Operations Room—the “mission control”—its eyes and

M

ears seldom wavering from the F1 race in progress, works upon a strategy for the team’s drivers to conquer the racetrack, wherever in the world they might be driving. Streams of data is transferred to the pit perch located on the race track itself, where the head of race strategy (HRS) culls this information to formulate a strategy appropriate to the driving styles and the race situation. He discusses his strategy with the engineers specific to the two drivers on the track and then, along with the HRS, relays the information to the drivers.

As soon as the news of a driver’s entry into the pit lane is announced, it ricochets

across the garage, alerting the 20-odd crew. This bunch of people, the veritable lubricant that keeps the racing team’s engine oiled to perfection, practise around 80 pit stops a day to prepare for the races.

The car approaches the pit lane, slowing down by the metre, and the crew springs into action.

The car is guided into its pit by the “lollipop man”, named so because of the distinctive shape of the long “stop/first gear” sign he holds in front of the car.

Everyone in the crew, from those responsible for the chassis, gear box and hydraulics to sundry mechanics, converge on the car. It is hauled in from the pit lane towards the garage, jacked up and checked for any signs of trouble. Fans are put into the radiator to cool them down, while some crew members change tyres as quickly as possible. Others change the wing settings and check the balance of the car, all to the satisfaction of the driver. Three

CLIVE MASON/ GETTY IMAGES

It’s always a good feeling in an F1 car to have elevation changes on a track, as in many cases, it gives you a good sensation of speed. But when eleva­ tion is combined with a section of track with corners, this can make our job more difficult, although very rewarding too.

Turns 15, 16

The penultimate corner is pretty blind, so you’ll need to be accurate with turn­in points, and turn 16 is again a wide corner, so it will be a crucial over­ taking area.

NITIN AKOLIA/MINT

Grease lightning: Changing all four tyres of an F1 car during a race sometimes takes just 3 seconds; and (left) mechanics work on the stripped­down chassis. mechanics work on changing a single wheel—one removing and refitting the nut with a high-speed air gun, another removing the old wheel and the third fitting in the new one.

Time is of the essence, and while the Red Bull crew is known to change tyres within 3

seconds, the entire operation can take well over 10-15 seconds before the driver is flagged off the pit lane out on to the racetrack.

Somewhere in the pit perch, a pair of eyes scans the entire operation, jotting down any lag in the whole procedure or the

performance of the car. The head of car engineering thus prepares for the next race inside his head. He, along with the crew of 49 people present at the pits during the venue, is always on tenterhooks, running a race as furious as the one on the tracks.

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L13

Style

LOUNGE MENSWEAR

Cracking the URM code ALAMY/WSJ

A look at the rough­and­tumble type offers insight into what ‘real men’ actually wear

B Y T INA G AUDOIN ···························· ecently I have come into contact with a number of unreconstructed males (URMs). In my line of work, these men are few and far between; metrosexuals being the prevailing order of the day. When I say “unreconstructed”, I’m talking about appearance, not value systems. Mine is not to judge whether the URM thinks a woman’s place is in the kitchen (though, I have to say, I’ve never met a URM who thinks that). In fact, I’m actually rather keen on URMs, because they have a rather unique, oldschool personal style that informs most of the menswear that’s out there today, from Thom Browne’s fitted trousers to Paul Smith’s striped ties and Ralph Lauren’s blue blazers.

The URM is reassuringly earthy and tweedy in an unassailable muscular Jason Bourne meets James Bond by way of Sir Ernest Shackleton sort of a fashion. He has a limited awareness of clothing and sartorial signalling, but he knows what he likes. For example, I recently asked one of the URMs I know if he, in fact, owned more than two T-shirts. He looked perplexed. “Of course, I do,” he said. “I just don’t wear them because they never reach the top of the pile.” The URM is a particularly British phenomenon (though I’m not saying they don’t flourish in other parts of the globe, think West Point and the French Foreign Legion). He pays £15 (around `1,140) for a haircut and shave at the local barber’s, looks askance at anything with a label that doesn’t have Oxfam attached to it and, when asked where he got his jacket from, is proud to say “it was my grandfather’s”.

URMs don’t do cologne, but they might do what they perceive of as aftershave, strictly manly stuff like Acqua di Parma (from £35), Christian Dior’s Eau Sauvage (from £57) or Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet (from £66).

Rather bizarrely, they have a unique fascination for soap, mostly Imperial Leather (68 pence for a bar) and their sham-

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Reassuringly earthy: (clockwise from right) Cord Chinos in brown, from Next, £38; Ernest Hemingway; Ralph Lauren Black Label Herringbone blazer, £1,040; Land Rover Defender; Loakes Savoy brogues, £180; and Acqua Di Parma Cologne, £95.

MR PORTER (RALPH LAUREN); HARRODS (ACQUA DI PARMA); YOUSUF KARSH/CAMERA PRESS (HEMINGWAY); MARTIN PRICE PHOTOGRAPHY (LAND ROVER)

Man among boys: (clockwise from left) Daniel Craig as James Bond; Tod’s iconic Winter Gommino ankle boot, £275; the URM can walk miles with his pet; Barbour’s classic Bedale jacket, £189; Thomas Pink Aj boxers, £20; Turnbull and Asser pink end­on­end shirt, £135; Geo F Trumper lemon shampoo, around £13; and Gieves & Hawkes silk ties, £80.

poo is almost always something

by Geo F Trumper (a Tennessee Williams favourite, incidentally; around £13), The Body Shop (from £4) or Head & Shoulders (from £2.50).

URMs are good with their neatly nail-clipped hands, turning them to sculpting, shooting or manual labour, “I built my own garden shed”, in their spare time. Married or not, they climb mountains unroped, jump out of planes into Scottish lochs (yes, really. A friend of mine is doing this as you read) and walk miles with just their dog and a neatly folded Ordnance Survey map for company.

The URM’s idea of a good time

GETTY IMAGES/WSJ

usually involves pitching a tent, downing a pint and wearing the same set of clothes for, at minimum, a week (because “extra kit just takes up too much room in the backpack”). URMs like pork pies, pork scratchings and anything else containing bacon (sensing a theme here yet?). They have a bizarre choice in music, which generally harkens back to “their best days”, often in one of the armed services. Think Bob Marley, Coldplay and Toploader.

URMs can surprise you with their cultural awareness, art exhibits and political debates and even the odd romcom isn’t out of the question. But really, the URM’s great loves are Twickenham Rugby, public-school class reunions, anything curried and their beaten-up Land Rover Defenders. Their icons include Ernest Hemingway, Winston Churchill, Mowgli and Oliver Mellors.

URMs are not Luddites. They own a computer, usually an outmoded Apple, and an iPhone, though they never pick up.

Much of their dedicated desk time is spent texting the latest round-robin URM joke, watching YouTube videos of themselves pulling off deeds of derring-do and reruns of Dad’s Army and Baywatch.

URMs’ pockets are full of old Polo mints, string, roll-up papers, fivers that went through the wash and ingenious looking tools that double as a compass and an implement to remove stones from horses’ hooves, like the Silva field compass (from £13). A URM always carries a compass and he is never without a tie (Gieves & Hawkes silk, £80), fishing it from the inside pocket of his Barbour “Bedale” (£185.95) at a moment’s notice.

URMs are almost always runners (Nike or New Balance only) and thus in good shape, but you probably wouldn’t know it on account of their slightly baggy cords (Next, from £35; or RM Williams, £100) or old Levi’s jeans, their frayed collared shirts and their tweedy jackets or antique blazers (for new see: Ralph Lauren, Gieves & Hawkes, Austin Reed or Aquascutum).

URMs are surprisingly in touch with their feminine side and will, without flinching, don a pink or baby blue shirt (Turnbull & Asser, from £135, if they are flush, or Charles Tyrwhitt, from £69, and TM Lewin, from £79, if less so). The URM never met a logo he liked that wasn’t regimental or attached to a share option. He religiously “debadges” everything he owns, though he will admit to a sneaking desire for a pair of Tod’s lace-up ankle boots, with their virtually invisible logo (£259).

Sweaters are Guernseys (£56.30, from Guernseyjumpers.gg),

cashmere V-necks (see Marks & Spencer’s Autograph, £69; John Lewis, £79; or John Smedley, £255), Aran (Burberry Prorsum, £550) or fishermen’s (YMC, £175). The URM is mindful of his footwear, lest he give the impression of having small feet (the gravest of insults for a URM). On his feet are brogues (Barkers, from £150, or Loakes, from £100), beaten-up Converse All Stars (from £34.99) or, during the winter, RM Williams Chukka boots (385 Australian dollars, or around £240).

Apparently you will never see a URM in matching pyjama top and bottoms. In fact, according to my sources, you will rarely see a URM in a top of any description in bed (the opportunity to show off the six-pack is just too good to miss). Pjs are the one sartorial arena in which the URM can really let his hair down, boxers, the traditional male “zany” fillip, are strictly cotton and striped (see Thomas Pink, £20, or Gap, £8).

Fleecy pyjama bottoms with arctic camouflage are reportedly not unheard of. Ditto pink polka dots and Father Christmas motifs (see Next’s selection of pjs, from £18).

The URM rarely doles out gifts or compliments. After all, his unapologetically attired presence should be enough. Your payback is that you get to live out your James Bond/Daniel Craig fantasy. The difference being that this particular URM probably really could keep you safe from harm on a dark night.

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Books

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CRIMINAL MIND

ZAC O’YEAH

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Why did the queen die?

Mythos: An engraving for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, circa 1800; and (below) plot was first codified in Aristotle’s Poetics.

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Plotting a spy novel is the best way to trace the mechanics of literature’s basic tools

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ay you’re writing a detective story. Should you give precedence to the characters and allow them to do what they need to do? Even if that means dilly-dallying in a private investigator’s office, sipping tea and doing admin work (which is what a real detective does much of the time)? Or should you be harsh and bend them to fit the plot, send them out into the mean streets and get them to push the story forward?

Plotting is one of our major literary conundrums of the day.

Most writers aspire to create a fictional world peopled with believable characters going about their day-to-day activities in a realistic manner. But if these characters just potter like normal humans habitually do, you don’t really have a crime novel (though you might have an experimental theatre classic).

Even though plot in the conventional sense isn’t crucial to a great novel, especially if you

happen to be Marcel Proust and your project is to remember the flavour of some obscure cookie (and the many things associated with it), it is imperative to have a solid plot in a crime novel.

But, and this is a very big “but”, if the characters only serve the plot requirements, then one may discover that they lose their verisimilitude.

A writer like Stephen King says (in On Writing, a Memoir of the Craft) that plotting is the good writer’s last resort, because a plot is like a noisy jackhammer that forces characters to do things that they wouldn’t. On the other hand a great writer like Vikram Chandra found that using professional project management software was the best way to keep track of all the characters, times and places in his masterpiece Sacred Games—and that is one novel peopled with amazingly lifelike characters.

Mind you, plot is not the same thing as story. But what exactly is this thing called plot then? E.M.

Forster, although not a crime writer, gave the clearest explanation (in Aspects of the Novel): “The king died and then the queen died” is a story, says Forster. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot—because it shows us that there is a connection between the two events seemingly unrelated in the story. To turn this plot into a mystery, Forster suggests the following: “The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.”

However, the confusing thing with plot, as literary critic Jai Arjun Singh pointed out in a recent blog I came across, is that almost all works of literature—provided that they employ a plot—can be reverse-engineered to a point where their plots are revealed to be exactly the same.

True? Let us take an example.

Take a typical detective story about a guy who returns to his hometown to find that somebody once close to him is dead.

Suspecting foul play, he goes out of his way to prove that a seemingly unimpeachable person is the murderer. The story ends in a gruesome massacre. Now you think that this is the plot of a Clint Eastwood B-movie. If I tell you that there are ghosts and quite a bit of madness in the story, you change your mind and think of Friday the 13th Part II. Wrong again. I’m actually talking about Shakespeare’s Hamlet—frequently referred to as the first modern detective story (which incidentally had lifted its plot from Thomas Kyd, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, who in turn copied it from an old Danish chronicle, in turn probably swiped from an Icelandic saga).

The essential plot components in a crime novel are: 1) a misdeed; 2) an investigation; 3) a solution; and 4) some suitable explanations. When seen like this a detective novel isn’t different at all from a classical Greek drama or Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Already, way back in the 300s BC, Aristotle, who felt that plot (mythos) is the soul of any tragic story, pointed out that the ideal artistic wholeness has all its parts “so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any

one of them will disjoint and dislocate the whole” (Poetics).

The professional crime writers of today would say: You must always kill your darlings.

Or your darlings will kill your plot. All the characters in a well-crafted detective novel will have to serve the plot in their functions as victims, witnesses, suspects, red herrings, criminals, policemen and so on. There is, according to my findings, little room for superfluous elements (unless you’re writing a deliberately bad detective novel).

Plot cannot be substituted by an excess of flying bullets, although Raymond Chandler is supposed to have said that when you lose track of your plot just throw in one more guy with a smoking gun. He did get away with lots of half-baked things, it is true, and we forgive Raymond because of his expertise in complicating plots by the use of unpredictable, volatile characters that don’t always have each other’s best interest in mind.

So a good crime novel has an underlying, almost invisible, mechanism to organize the various components into a coherent system, which can be reduced to the formula—A does B and therefore C happens. This may appear ridiculously simple.

But then again there are new crime novels published every day, and each of these comes with the potential to stun and surprise, so that at the end of a good read a reader is left with a momentous sense of revelation—“oh, so C happened because A did B!” For every morsel of well-plotted story, there will be a pay-off in some form that will cause a feeling of enlightenment, whether a mind-bending eureka or a minor key “aha”. That’s what a fictional plot is then—it’s a demonstration of our daily travails to make sense of a complex world. I dare say that no other modern genre of fiction does it better than the detective novel.

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

Write to Zac at criminalmind@livemint.com

ITHACA | DAVID DAVIDAR

Among these barren crags The classical strain runs strong in this publisher’s novel about publishing

B Y M ATT D ANIELS ···························· nybody expecting a novel about publishing to be a comedy can only be unfamiliar with the terrain. Nor is David Davidar’s Ithaca a biting satire; faithful as it is to describing publishing’s milieu, Ithaca doesn’t settle scores in the manner of a roman à clef (though Davidar’s agent, David Godwin, makes a cameo, as do several real-life authors).

These days, the global publishing trade is stumbling around, one hand shielding its eyes from the daylight, the other groping for another drink to dull the insistent throb. Where Ithaca succeeds is that it is a stirring apologia for this incontinent industry. We will always need stories, asserts Davidar’s stand-in, speaking modestly for the human race.

Of course, publishing has a lot in common with academia, about which the joke goes that the egos are so inflated and the

A

fights so bitter because the stakes are so low.

And here the dramatic stakes are indeed low.

A bright if feckless youth with a love for books, Zachariah Thomas finds his way from Delhi to London where, after his studies, he joins a publishing house at the bottom rung. Sifting through the slush pile, Zach stumbles upon an author named Massimo Seppi who, after a false start or two, hits on an idea that launches the next literary craze. As wise as wizards, as fearsome as vampires, and friends with God almighty, angels are apt enough candidates for the next big thing; Zach throws himself into the task of making it so.

Seppi soon becomes the sort of anchor franchise that firms dream of, subsidizing with its revenues all the mid-list literary authors they’re actually proud to publish.

By the time we meet Zach, he is in decline. Having ascended the professional ranks, he has reached a position of responsibility for the bottom line just as

Seppi’s production begins to peter out. Not much of a people person, Zach reluctantly visits his star author, only to find him terminally ill. To rescue his firm from the clutches of a rapacious conglomerate, Zach will need a miracle—and gets it, in a fashion fleetingly reminiscent of Dan Brown.

Looming still larger in Zach’s mind is the recent departure of his wife, Julia, for whom Zach’s obsession with work is the ostensible deal-breaker. But their relationship, at best, seems to have survived on titbits of publishing gossip—or on a shared passion for books, a more generous observer might say. Zach stumbles through his personal life, clinging to another woman he doesn’t even like, even as he longs for Julia’s return.

Zach’s flaws as a moral agent are the same as those he exhibits as a character. Sketchily drawn, he is difficult to invest in; even the close narration ultimately strays from his point of view and

Ithaca: Fourth Estate (HarperCollins), 280 pages, `499. veers, as though heading out for a nightcap, into satire. Chronically insecure, he has a habit of reaffirming his values by drawing contrasts with figures in the publishing world he sees as less admirable, as well as by lunching with, and lionizing, the field’s éminences grises. Davidar’s previous novels (The House of Blue Mangoes, a rural family saga, and The Solitude of Emperors, an urban novel of communal conflict) have been characterized as

labouring under dull narrators; in Ithaca it is rarely a privilege to be let in on Zach’s thoughts.

To draw, briefly, the inevitable comparison between the author and his main character: As an original editor and publisher at Penguin India, and later at Penguin Canada, Davidar was responsible for publishing the biggest names in Indian writing. As Zach considers a return to India, so Davidar has returned, under a cloud of scandal, to found his new imprint, Aleph. While the geographical and professional trajectories of Davidar and his double diverge somewhat, their resolution is that of Homer’s epic: arriving home, after trials and peregrinations, to a woman.

Ithaca, to great relief, does not lean heavily upon its heroic framing to provide allegorical heft. But the impulse to cast oneself in an epic mould is, as Zach might say, universal. We need stories. They are our way of arriving at reconciliation—the sorting of our life narratives into a prefigured arc of voyage, wandering, return.

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SPIN BOWLING

The wrist of the world

CULT FICTION

R. SUKUMAR

THE REBOOT UPDATE

EVENING STANDARD/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

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Bishan Singh Bedi’s biography and an English analyst’s book celebrate the art of spin

B Y N IRANJAN R AJADHYAKSHA niranjan.r@livemint.com

···························· ishan Singh Bedi took 266 Test wickets. One of them remains etched in my memory, because it illustrates how spin bowling is as much a cerebral art as a physical one.

The wily old fox was bowling to the twinkle-toed Kim Hughes, a batsman unafraid to step out of the crease to meet the ball. Bedi had at first kept the young Australian rooted in his crease, making him a bit edgy.

Then the magical over began.

The first ball was tossed up in the air. An impatient Hughes finally saw his chance, stepped out and hoisted the ball over Bedi’s head for a six. The next ball was also given air. Hughes drove it away for a four. The third ball was pitched slightly short of a good length. An overconfident Hughes leaned back to cut for another boundary.

But the ball was not a slow turner. It dipped sharply, hurried off the pitch and crashed into the off stump—an armer. Bedi had planned the elaborate sequence, a mind game against a very talented batsman. Hughes walked off, a slightly wiser man.

Watching Bedi bowl was an aesthetic pleasure: the minimalist trot to the wicket, the swivel of the body across the ample girth, the arm held beautifully straight, the eyes looking at the batsman from over the right shoulder, the fluid delivery action. In a well-known remark, the great English offspinner Jim Laker has said that his idea of heaven was a summer afternoon at Lord’s, with Ray Lindwall bowling at one end and Bedi at the other.

Such a combination of deception and beauty has been a hallmark of every great spinner: lulling the batsmen into a false sense of comfort, beating him both in the air and off the wicket, the endless variation in deliveries. Bedi was one of a great quartet of spin bowlers that served India with distinction in the 1960s and 1970s. Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar and Srinivas Venkataraghavan were central players in the emergence of India as a team that could win Test matches. It was Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi who first saw the potential of building a winning bowling attack around outstanding spinners.

Suresh Menon’s new biography on Bedi does full justice to the legendary bowler. Bedi wanted to be a fast bowler, till Gurpal Singh, his college captain in Amritsar, convinced him to turn to spin. He owed his strong and supple fingers to the games of marbles he played as a boy in the streets of his hometown. Add to that the long hours of practice in the nets every day, which gave him immense variety. “He could pitch six balls in an over on a fiftypaisa coin, but the batsman seldom realized that each time it came from a slightly different direction,” writes Menon.

The spin quartet had its detractors, who pointed out that they bowled on wickets tailor-made for their art and whose bowling averages are yet not out of the ordinary. Menon himself points to criticisms about how an earlier

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Give it a twirl: Spin legend Bishan Singh Bedi; and (left) Shane Warne, at the vanguard of cricket’s spin revival.

HAMISH BLAIR/ ALLSPORT/GETTY IMAGES

Bishan—Portrait of a Cricketer:

By Suresh Menon, Penguin India, 236 pages, `299.

Twirlymen—The Unlikely History of Cricket’s Greatest Spin Bowlers:

By Amol Rajan, Yellow Jersey Press, 400 pages, £16.99 (around `1,300).

trio of Vinoo Mankad, Subhash Gupte and Ghulam Ahmed would have been as impressive if they had better catching support from butter-fingered fielders and more helpful wickets than the flat tracks from the defensive 1950s.

The art of spin bowling is inadequately appreciated. The spectator who sits in the stands does not realize that the ball tossed innocuously in the air has immense potential. It can be held back as if by an invisible string or can gently swerve in the air before spinning the other way or dip a few inches short of where the batsman expects it to. It can turn viciously or not at all. A great spinner can make the ball float in the air but pick up considerable pace once it hits the ground. The sheer variety can leave batsmen trapped in doubt. There is also pain, thanks to the act of gripping a hard cricket ball across the seam and giving it a vigorous tweak. Spinners often end the day with bleeding fingers.

But that vigorous tweak also ensures that the batsman can hear death approaching, as the ball whirrs ominously in the air.

Amol Rajan brings the art alive in Twirlymen, his magnificent history of spin bowling. Rajan was a spin bowler himself, but one who never made it to the top grade. He brings the natural admiration of a cricketer who knows how difficult it is to bowl top-class spin. Rajan has deep knowledge about spin bowling, describing both the intricacies of how the ball was gripped by various masters and also the tactics they brought to the bowling crease.

Spinners have been among the most innovative cricketers, and Rajan provides a delightful tour of innovations such as the googly, the flipper, the carom ball and the controversial doosra (which is a chucked ball, going

by traditional parameters of what constitutes fair bowling). On the way, he also questions the widely held beliefs about who was responsible for these innovations. For example, he shows that there were bowlers before B. Bosanquet who bowled googlies.

Rajan also writes with charm about the greatest bowlers, including the incomparable Sydney Barnes, of whom John Arlott wrote: “A right-arm fast-medium bowler with the accuracy, spin and resource of a slow bowler”.

Barnes bowled at a brisk pace, and spun the ball both ways. His bowling record is as unmatched as the batting record of Don Bradman: 189 wickets in 27 Tests at an average of 16.43 and 1,432 wickets at 8 runs per wicket over 22 seasons for Staffordshire.

My one grouse against what is otherwise one of the finest cricket books in recent times is the relative neglect of many Indian spinners. There is no mention of P. Baloo, the star of the 1911 tour of England. Mankad gets less space than he deserves. And, considering the space given to some of the lesser English and Australian spinners, Rajan would have done well to at least mention superb spinners such as Padmakar Shivalkar, V.V. Kumar and Rajinder Goel, who were unfortunate to be bowling at the same time as the great quartet.

What about the future? Spin bowling was considered dead in the 1980s, but then came Shane Warne, Muttiah Muralitharan, Anil Kumble, Daniel Vettori, Graeme Swann, and (till their skills went into inexplicable decline), Saqlain Mushtaq and Harbhajan Singh. A new generation of spin artists will continue to thrive even in this era of heavy bats, short boundaries and Twenty20 mayhem.

here are stories known to everyone, yet it’s possible to tell them afresh. These are a bit like remixes (which I don’t particularly like because of the obvious bastardization they involve) and a lot more like cover versions, which usually involve reinterpretation. When I was younger I used to enjoy listening to Bill Withers every now and then. One of the two songs he is known for is Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone, popularized in its original form in the vacuous but enjoyable Notting Hill and in remixed rap form in some Steven Seagal B-movie. I recently listened to Umphrey’s McGee and John Oates (from Hall and Oates) covering this song and couldn’t help but think (with due apologies to Withers) that it was so much better than the original.

Which brings us to the fate of the famed DC reboot. It’s been a few weeks now, so how has the attempt to do cover versions of comic book heroes everyone knows gone?

Like with all hugely ambitious exercises, the reboot (or The New 52 as DC calls its effort) seems to have worked in parts. And it doesn’t seem to have worked in others.

Unfortunately, my day job has prevented me from following all 52 threads (DC may not even have finished releasing Issue 1 of all) but I have been following a few that I usually read on the same day the comics are released, thanks to the comiXology app.

The first admission I have to make is that The New 52 has rekindled my interest in Superman, just as I am sure it has in several other readers. Now, this is no small achievement.

Superman’s story is, arguably, among the best known in comics and retelling it is no easy task.

Fortunately, the retelling this time is done by one of the finest writers in the comics universe, Grant Morrison.

Rather than tweak the story, he has (from what I can make out from the first two issues) decided to tell it Makeover: The new avatars of DC heroes. afresh, starting somewhere in the middle rather than the beginning or the end. And, at least so far, the new Superman has avoided characterizing uber-villain Lex Luthor as a caricature of deranged bad men through the ages.

The writing is equally good in the new Batman, Detective Comics and Swamp Thing. Scott Snyder authors both Batman and Swamp Thing and while his take on Batman is not as unique or striking as Jeph Loeb’s, Frank Miller’s, Brian Azzarello’s and Paul Pope’s, it is still a competent depiction of the caped crusader. His Swamp Thing is a different story altogether. Maybe because there have been fewer retellings of this tale, Snyder has been able to create an entirely new story that somehow manages to evoke the spirit of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing.

I have been following a few more threads, including Animal Man and Justice League of America, but thus far, there’s nothing unique or even vaguely gripping about these. Still, thanks to the app and the writing of Morrison and Snyder, there is something to look forward to every few weeks. And who knows, maybe the other threads will start looking up as well.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

FREE VERSE | ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA Except that it robs you of who you are, What can you say about speech?

Inconceivable to live without And impossible to live with, Speech diminishes you.

Speak with a wise man, there’ll be Much to learn; speak with a fool, All you get is prattle.

Strike a half-empty pot, and it’ll make A loud sound; strike one that is full, Says Kabir, and hear the silence.

(KG 61) Excerpted from Songs of Kabir by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, published by Hachette India.

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Culture

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FILM

Easy island dreams

COLUMBIA/THE KOBAL COLLECTION/AFP

Picturesque locations and renewed support from the government make Sri Lanka an attractive destination for film­makers B Y S MRITI D ANIEL ···························· oviemakers have coaxed Sri Lanka into costume more than once—that’s her masquerading as a small Indian village that needs Harrison Ford’s whip-cracking assistance in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and there she is again, looking like Thailand and the site for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). In Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981), you’re supposed to mistake her dense forests for those of Africa, and in Deepa Mehta’s Water (2005), she slips by as the banks of the Ganga in Varanasi. This chameleon-like adaptability and its strategic location should have made Sri Lanka one of the most popular film location destinations, but a 30-year war ensured that big productions weren’t willing to risk bringing actors and crew into the country. With the island’s relatively tenuous new political stability, that has begun to change.

Mehta recently finished the production of Winds of Change, her adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s controversial Midnight’s Children—shot primarily in Colombo.

The most dramatic sign of this change is the making of what is being billed as Sri Lanka’s first crossover film to star an Oscarwinning actor. Earlier this year, Sir Ben Kingsley was in Colombo for 25 days of filming A Common Man. The movie, written and directed by local film-maker Chandran Rutnam, also stars actor Ben Cross (of Chariots of Fire fame) and is scheduled for release worldwide in early 2012.

The director says he wrote the script with Kingsley in mind. In it, the actor plays “the Man”, a mysterious character pitted against the police forces led by Cross. Once you’ve heard this, the film’s tag line will tell you the rest: “Five bombs in the city. The clock is ticking.”

Rutnam is best known as a producer and the head of Sri Lanka-

M

based Asian Film Location Services. However, his most recent film, an adaptation of Nihal de Silva’s award-winning book, The Road from Elephant Pass, won him international recognition when it made the final five in the Best Film category at the New York Festivals 2011 Television and Film Awards. “It was Road from Elephant Pass that really opened doors for me,” Rutnam said in an interview, adding that he hoped to recreate some of that magic with A Common Man. The latter’s success will hinge on the intensity of the onscreen rapport between his two leading men. “They’re opposites, and they finally meet in the last scene,” says Rutnam. “You’ll see it on the screen...their chemistry was excellent.” According to the director, the movie is a thriller, and the dramatic tension is likely to be generated as the audience finds their loyalties bouncing back and forth between the characters of Kingsley and Cross. The two men play hide and seek across several locations in the environs of Colombo, with one particularly tense scene taking us 17 storeys up on to the rooftop of a high-rise still under construction. Other scenes were shot near the airport and in a local college and so there isn’t a patch of rainforest in sight. This is a movie that, for better or worse, won’t be relying on all the visual clichés associated with tropical islands.

For most foreign film-makers, however, the stunning scenery found outside the city remains the main attraction. Rutnam himself has capitalized on this more than once. The director claims George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg as friends, and his company has supported almost every notable foreign film production in Sri Lanka. Now that he has taken the director’s reins himself, Rutnam is moving at a steady trot and even has his next project lined up: a film adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Toomai of the Elephants featuring Pierce Bro-

A land of different worlds: Sir Ben Kingsley in A Common Man which was shot in Colombo and will release in early 2012; and (top) a still from The Bridge Over River Kwai.

Sri Lanka’s geography allows film­makers to hop locations in short periods of time—from beach to forest...

snan and Omar Sharif will begin filming in March. For the film, Rutnam intends to import a cast of animal actors from Hollywood (among them a venerable, experienced star will be chosen to portray the character of the old elephant Kala Nag). However, Rutnam intends to use Sri Lanka’s beautiful jungles as a backdrop.

As the action heats up, his company has begun to see new challengers. Among them is The Film Team—the production company that recently facilitated the making of Mehta’s Winds of Change.

The filming of the film version of Midnight’s Children was an extraordinary marathon of 60-odd locations, shot over 70 days with more than 200 people on each set.

It may have just made the reputation of this fledgling company. At the head of the company is the well-connected actor Ravindra Randeniya. “The sheer magnitude of the film was a challenge,” he says. Shooting took place primarily in Colombo, in locations ranging from the golf club and a prison to the stately colonial homes

found in some of the city’s oldest districts. More than a few scenes were shot down narrow, “ghetto like streets”, hedged in with residences and thick with people. It meant that the team had to work hard to recruit the local populace to their cause.

By altering the signage and the appearance of the extras, the same train station was made to masquerade as a station in India and then as one in Pakistan. Elsewhere, entire houses were built to bring Rushdie’s vision to life. The basement where Nadir Khan (“the Hummingbird’s” personal secretary) cowers for years, was constructed under the premises of a Colombo school and a Magician’s Ghetto with 50 homes was erected in a playing field in Applewatte (complete with flat roofs for star gazing at night). In the film’s final scenes, the ghetto was dramatically razed to the ground—a key scene that Mehta had to capture on her first try.

With Winds of Change scheduled for release in late 2012, The Film Team says they’re now in talks to begin work on three other

American and European projects by the end of the year. “What we’re selling is the beauty of an island,” says Randeniya, explaining that the diminutive scale of Sri Lanka’s geography allows filmmakers to hop between very distinct locations in very short periods of time—from beach to forest to mountain, nothing is more than a few hours away.

For most part, film-makers tend to be warmly welcomed here. The economic development deputy minister Lakshman Yapa Abeywardene recently told AFP, “We are encouraging foreign artists and film crews to shoot in our country to experience its beauty.”

For those who accept the invitation, the first order of business, getting the National Film Corporation of Sri Lanka to approve a script, can take as little as two weeks, says The Film Team. That certificate, once issued, will get your production the cooperation of the armed forces, the police and any other government body you care to call upon, explains Randeniya. Add to this a populace not prone to protests, and you

have a space where even controversial film-makers can go about their business with relative ease, he believes. Yet, the most obvious partners seem the least interested—Indian film-makers remain wary of Sri Lanka.

When Mani Ratnam visited Sri Lanka in August 2008, it was to meet The Film Team and scout for possible locations for his movie Raavan. His original intention was to film the bulk of the movie here, says Randeniya, but a storm of negative publicity driven by politics in south India put a stop to that. For Randeniya, it’s a frustrating situation: “From our point of view, we have the world’s biggest film-making industry next door, but we’re isolated from them.” His only compensation is that the Europeans and Americans appear more enthusiastic, with some of their post-production outfits even considering opening Sri Lankan branches.

Boris Clavel of the Paris-based Luxart is among them, and says he hopes to set up shop in Sri Lanka within the year. While travelling can be expensive and illconsidered development often robs scenic sites of their virginal air, the main complaint for would-be film-makers is that the country’s post-production facilities are still poor. Boris believes the right technology will take it up “one step...maybe even two or three”. Like Randeniya and his colleagues, Boris is optimistic. He sums up the mood well when he says, “It’s very exciting. Everything is happening now in this part of the world.”

Write to lounge@livemint.com

CULTURE L17

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TELEVISION

MUSIC MATTERS

Make and dew

SHUBHA MUDGAL

DRUM AND SOUL KUNAL KAKODKAR

A

In ‘The Dewarists’, musicians from diverse backgrounds come together to find common ground in one song

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

···························· ho are The Dewarists?

Independent music fans in India may remember the video of British electronica act Dub FX spontaneously jamming in a fishing village in Mumbai that went viral a couple of years ago, or one of the concert stages at last year’s NH7 Weekender festival in Pune called The Dewarists Stage (pronounced “Do-er-ists”, as in Dewar’s Whiskey, which sponsors these projects). They now include a bunch of local and international musicians taking part in what may be the most visible platform for the Indian independent scene yet.

In the spirit of the YouTube videos and the concert stage, a new show of the same name goes on air on Sunday. The first episode, shot at the Samode Palace near Jaipur, unfolds with a glimpse of film music composer and rock idol Vishal Dadlani singing his early Hindi smash hit (in partnership with Shekhar Ravjiani, as the composer duo Vishal-Shekhar), Allah Ke Bande from the movie Waisa Bhi Hota Hai: Part II. The moment seems like it’s caught off-the-cuff, quietly reflective, and the dreaminess lingers in the dizzyingly beautiful alto of British singer-songwriter Imogen Heap, who travelled down to collaborate with Dadlani on an original song.

The episode follows them through the process of that songwriting, and how their individual stories and musical styles come together in collaboration. In the following episode, Pakistani musicians Zeb and Haniya will jam with Shantanu Moitra and Swanand Kirkire—on a BEST bus, among other locations—to produce their own song.

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Mobile music: Zeb and Shantanu Moitra (on left), and Swanand Kirkire and Haniya (on right).

Each part of The Dewarists is a sort of documentary-travelogue.

Musicians like Heap and Dadlani (with Ravjiani, who couldn’t travel to Rajasthan and contributes to the episode remotely), or Parikrama and Shilpa Rao, who retreat to Panshet and Pune in a future episode, are asked to break out of their comfort zones, taken away from their home base and “everyday” sound, and their process documented.

The result is a crisp, vibrant series, attractively filmed and perfectly pitched, which mixes the excitement of the “making of” videos with some interesting original music. Perhaps the best thing about it is its minimalistic focus on a single end point—not a set or a mix of tracks, but just one song, worked on by musicians who come from diverse genres to find common ground.

Produced and directed by people who have worked for years with independent music—director Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy is himself the lead singer of metal band Scribe—the feeling on the eve of The Dewarists’ debut is that this is a show which finally gets it.

“For the musicians, there was a sense of a ‘fellow scene person’, creating something legitimate,” Krishnamoorthy says.

“Everyone on the crew has been involved with indie movements in some way before.”

Monica Dogra, who collaborates with British electronic

artiste Shri and the folk group Rajasthan Roots in Jaisalmer on a later episode, is also the show’s anchor. “I joined the show quite late in June,” she explains. “I don’t consider myself a ‘host’, but I was excited about being a part of something that is just so—elegantly beautiful.” As with Krishnamoorthy behind the camera, Dogra in front of it gives most musicians a chance to feel like they are in a familiar environment, working on their own terms, and not towards delivering a product that has already been designed.

“We wouldn’t know where to begin if we were telling them what to do,” Arvind Krishnan, director, marketing, Bacardi India (Dewars’ distributors in the country), says about Dewars’ hands-off approach to their “movement”. “We just wanted to bring these musicians together because we thought, ‘This seems to be a connection point—storytelling, and musicians’ stories’.

We weren’t looking for a particular genre of music at all, just for a story worth telling.”

Dadlani and Heap’s collaboration culminates in them marching through the lanes of Jaipur, singing their song. Zeb and Haniya, together with Moitra and Kirkire, perform their own collaboration—the stunning Kya Khayal Hai—in an empty auditorium in Mumbai’s historic Capitol Theatre. Future episodes will take musicians to

Goa, Delhi and Jaisalmer.

But in spite of this diversity, the feel of The Dewarists doesn’t seem like patchwork.

“Every collaboration is different, but each creative decision on the show has the same simplicity,” Krishnamoorthy says.

“Visually, each episode has a serenity; everyone working on it has the same sort of aesthetic conscience.”

The emphasis on the final output being “one complete song” also keeps the show’s aural palette clean. Dedicating their whole collaboration to just one song frees up room on the series for musicians to talk about themselves, explore each other’s music—and discover their surroundings. Heap and Dadlani’s song, a Hindi-English jam called Mind Without Fear in which Heap’s dream-pop musical sensibilities permeate Dadlani and co-composer Ravjiani’s bright, sharp folk-‘n’-bass, features a 200-year-old harmonium which Heap found in a Jaipur antique shop.

Dogra sums up the sense of singularity that characterizes the show. “It offers us a chance to completely step away from our lives, and immerse ourselves in our music,” she says. “No distractions; I am isolated here in my being as a musician.”

The Dewarists airs on Star World India starting 16 October, every Sunday at 8pm.

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

···························· unded by the Narayana Murthy family, the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) will release its first set of six Indian classics translated into English in 2013.

A hundred years ago, James Loeb had visualized that everybody should be able to pull out books of Greek and Latin literature from their jacket pockets and read a few lines whenever they pleased. That’s how the Loeb Classical Library, sponsored by Loeb, a banker by profession, was created. It was first published by William Heinemann and Co. starting 1911. Loeb handed the series over to Harvard University in 1933.

The Harvard University Press (HUP) has developed it since and increased the number of books published (518, and growing) substantially. The books from the Loeb series come with the original Greek or Latin text on the lefthand pages with an English translation on the right. The books with their bright green and orange col-

F

oured jackets have come to be easily recognizable over the years on many library shelves.

The team at MCLI, a unit of HUP, is working with a similar vision: It aims to fit all of India’s classical literature into your phones, iPads and computers and any new technology that the future might throw up. Though all the books will first be out in print—in the same format as the Loeb series—the team believes that universal accessibility can be achieved only by digitizing the text.

The MCLI project was set up in 2010 with a gift of $5.2 million (around `25.5 crore now) from Rohan Murty. “I went to school in Bangalore and studied Shakespeare as part of my school curriculum but never got any exposure to Indian classics,” says Murty, a computer science PhD student at Harvard and Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy’s son.

The project took off when Murty met Columbia University Sanskrit professor Sheldon Pollock (who now heads the editorial board of MCLI), who at the time was already

BIKAS DAS/AP

Festive beat: Dhakis with their feather­decorated drums.

As the drumming continues, a series of stunning dissolves and morphs bring you vignettes from Durga Puja that could make even the most hard-hearted turn gooey-eyed—the beautiful image of the goddess looming above the devotees who gather around to worship, lovely women in saris with red borders elegantly covering their heads, a dhunuchi dancer swirling the flaming incense burners above his head, the brass gong or kanshi keeping time with the dhakis, and lots more.

There is almost a sense of disappointment when the film ends, which is fortunately avoided in the nick of time by the appearance of a little boy merrily trying to imitate the dhakis with his own toy drum. Finally, when the film ends, I almost invariably end up wondering if we can’t all somehow persuade Rajesh Chakraborty to give us more such stunning work.

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Back to the future The Murty Classical Library of India will make two­mil­ lennia­old Indian literature available

ural memory must, without doubt, affect our responses to specific situations and perhaps that is why we associate different sounds with pleasant or unpleasant experiences from the past. For me, the sound of the dhak is quite indelibly linked with the festivities and rituals that mark the celebration of Durga Puja.

One of the countless drums found in India, the dhak is a big two-sided drum that is played by traditional drummers, usually from Bengal, called dhakis. Despite rapidly changing times, when recorded music often replaces live drumming and music, dhakis remain an integral part of Durga Puja festivities. But this time, I am writing neither about the drum itself, nor the drumming, but about a little animation project I saw several years ago, rather pragmatically titled Dhak. Only about 3 minutes and 8 seconds in duration, Dhak by Rajesh Chakraborty was his student film made while he studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

You can find it on YouTube. The accompanying comments inform me that it was made in 2002, and yet nine years down the line, it remains as charming and riveting as it was when I first saw it.

It is the minute details that make the film really special for me.

Take, for example, the sequence where the dhakis prepare to hoist the drums on their shoulders before they start playing; a segment that includes details that make it a visual treat but also share with you minutiae that many of us may have never noticed while listening to the heady beat of the dhak. From the tightening of the skin top to tune the drums, to the swishing sound of the drummer’s hand on the skin as he checks its tautness, or the strip of cloth that the dhakis wind around the drum sticks to make a grip, or even the one last thump with which one of the drummers checks the sound of his drum, each step has been observed with an eye for fine detail. Better still, each detail has been drawn, sketched and animated so tastefully that the viewer actually waits almost impatiently for the drumming to begin.

When the drumming in the film finally begins, with the bare-bodied dhakis clad in white dhotis dancing to their own drumming, the plumed bird feathers that festoon their drums gaily bobbing up and down, it is nothing short of a “wah” moment ! Or call it a “wow” moment, if you will.

Access to classics: N.R. Narayana Murthy (left) with his son Rohan. producing the Clay Sanskrit Library, which had published more than 50 new translations of Sanskrit classics over a decade.

The archive is a series of translations of books in the classical languages of India: not just Sanskrit, but all the ancient Indian languages. “The idea was to put all the linguistic diversity in a shelf,” says Sharmila Sen, executive editor-atlarge, HUP, who announced a logo and jacket design competition for the books on 1 September. “The aim is to find talent that will be able to envision a design that will be rel-

evant not just in 2011, but also a hundred years from now,” says Sen. The design will also apply to the digitized versions of the books.

The winner of the design competition will get $10,000 in addition to credit for the design on every book published in the series.

The first set of six books will tentatively include the Tamil Kamba Ramayan, Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama, Punjabi Sufi poet Bulleh Shah’s collection of poems, the works of Waris Shah, Surdas’ Sursagar, part one of the Bengali Hindu religious texts Mangal-Kavya, composed

somewhere between the 13th and 18th centuries, and also the Therigatha in Pali which is known to be the first recorded writing of literature by women in any language in the world.

The biggest challenge of the project so far has been to find translators who can also write idiomatic English. Part of the project also includes creating new Indic fonts for the Indian languages.

“Our design team is working on that. We will soon have a series of fonts known as the Murty Indic Tamil, or something on those lines,” says Sen, adding that fonts will be given free to any organization and individual working with Indian languages. “It is, in a sense, a gift to the world.”

Though most publications by HUP have been marketed in the US and UK, this project will set up the challenge of marketing the books in India, and that too at affordable prices.

“India is the third biggest consumer for English-language books across the world after the US and UK, so this also works as a great way to enter the market,” says Sen. Visit www.murtylibrary.com to register for the jacket design contest.

Entries are open till 1 December.

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PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

BANGALORE BHATH | PAVITRA JAYARAMAN

Colonial diaries Two Bangalore residents record tales of a period when IT hub Whitefield is said to have hosted Winston Churchill

D

uring the making of a series of six films titled Whitefield Diaries, capturing the nostalgia of Whitefield and its inception in the 1880s, conservation architect Krupa Rajangam and Jaaga Media Centre founder Archana Prasad, along with cameraperson Clemence Barret, rediscovered the colonial history of the area.

They found parts of the village still exist in the urban suburb that it has become now, as do several old-time residents with stories to tell.

It all began in 1882 when, in a generous moment, the then maharaja of Mysore, Chamaraja Wodeyar, granted 3,900 acres for the creation of a settlement where the European and Anglo-Indian communities could build homes and raise farms. So Whitefield was born, named after D.S. White who came up with the idea of the settlement and also lived there.

“Over time, it became a village with beautiful villas and orchards that attracted those who worked in Kolar Gold Fields and Bangalore to come there for short holidays,” says Rajangam, indicating that Whitefield, not Bangalore, was the original pensioner’s paradise. “I wanted to get away from the noise of Bangalore to a more rustic place,” says Merlyn D’Souza, a resident of Whitefield, who moved to the area 21 years ago.

The inner circle of the township, hidden within the IT suburb that is now host to the International Tech Park Bangalore (ITPB), created in 1998, and a string of multinational companies, was about 3.5 sq. km that stretched between what is now Forum mall and Hope Farm Junction.

Theatre person Arundhati Raja, who moved to Whitefield in

Past perfect: (clockwise from above) Little Gem, owned

by Shirley Davis, is said to have been the village police station; Vivian D’Souza’s home was once Waverly Inn; and Paul D’Souza’s parents bought the century­ old house 21 years ago.

1973, recalls that even at that time, life here was semi-rural.

But that began to change in 1998 with the opening of the tech park. “It changed in the main shopping area where new shops began to come up and the original Mir Sahib’s General Store took a back seat,” says Raja, who rode the wave of change by entering into a joint development of her 3-acre farm with a builder in 2004. The deal enabled her to finance the building and running of a theatre space called Jagriti that opened in 2010 and shares the premises with the apartment complex. The marking of the Export Promotion Industrial Park zone in 1994 in Whitefield brought with it residential development in the surrounding areas. Palm Meadows, a gated community with roads lined with decorative palms, houses with similar facades, clubs and gyms, was one of the first to provide corporate heads, moving into the country to explore new business, lifestyles they were familiar with.

From then on, there was no stopping the development.

Farmers from the surrounding villages sold acres of land to give

way to high-rises and IT companies. Today, Whitefield is a beacon of Bangalore’s “technology city” status, providing new opportunities for business every day. Young residents of the area with disposable incomes have encouraged the opening of new malls in the past decade, while several hospitality brands have entered the area with business hotels to cater to the corporate traveller. “In time, we realized that it made no sense for expatriates and other travellers to stay in Bangalore city and drive to Whitefield every day for business,” says Mahesh Aiyer, general manager, Vivanta By Taj, Whitefield, about the opening of the business hotel in 2009.

Despite these changes, the village continues to co-exist in a quiet corner.

We took a walk with Paul D’Souza—Merlyn’s son and our guide—a resident of 21 years in the area. “The locality was planned so there would be an inner circle that has a playground and greenery with an outer circle that has colonial bungalows,” explains D’Souza. “Most people know the new Whitefield in all its

urban grandeur. What is not known is the old, and that had to be documented,” says Rajangam.

Though several people have moved out since, first during the time of independence and then again during the 1960s and 1970s, there is chatter among the current residents that some of the families that left are keen to move back.

The Whitefield Memorial Church Built in 1886, it was one of the first public structures in the settlement. It was unique in that it was non-denominational and held services both for the Church of South India and The Anglican Church of India. Later, a second church for Catholics was built, leaving this as a place of worship for Protestants and Anglicans. Its structure, like other buildings, is in colonial style, but has seen several renovations over time.

The church was recently in the news when the city’s corporation, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, started breaking its compound wall to widen the road.

Residents managed to stop the breaking of the wall.

Little Gem Located on the main road or the outer circle, the colonial house with a high-tiled roof that was built in the early 1900s is hidden among lime and custard apple trees. Little Gem, the home of Shirley and Brian Davis, is perhaps the first sign of old-style architecture that you will chance upon when driving into Whitefield. Built by a William Charles Johnson, it was originally named Rencot, but the name changed every time the house changed hands.

The building is said to have been a police station in the 1930s and 1940s, with one room used as a prison cell. While there is no official documentation to support this claim, letters and correspondence suggest this to be true. Also, there is a large space in front of the house that protrudes a bit on to the main road, and is said to have been used for police parades.

Waverly Inn The most told story among Whitefield residents is of the time when Winston Churchill, the former British prime minister, stayed at Waverly. Rumour has it that Churchill also courted Rose Hamilton, the daughter of the innkeeper. But while that story has no backing, it is true that Waverly was the only inn in the area, and transport to it from Whitefield Railway station could be arranged by writing a letter to Hamilton’s wife days in advance.

Originally owned by James

Hamilton, the inn, which is now home to Vivian D’Souza, is perhaps the only building that retains its original structure. “It is one of the oldest houses, the core is original from the 1800s and then things have been added on over a period,” says Rajangam.

Perfect Peace Merlyn and her husband bought their house 21 years ago from an old-time resident. Built at least 100 years ago in the inner circle of Whitefield, the building occupies only one-third of the plot it is built on; the rest is dedicated to plants and fountains. Though the high-tiled roof and the antique curios in the house retain the original flavour of the house, the front portion was renovated 30 years ago to add a room with a low ceiling that stands out from the remaining structure. Paul, who is an avid collector of antiques, is always on the lookout for furniture and decor from the previous century to maintain the rustic look.

Whitefield Diaries documentaries, funded by the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach) UK, are the first set of films from a larger project called Neighbourhood Diaries that will explore histories of architecture of locales in India.

The films can be viewed at http://neighbourhooddiaries. wordpress.com/ pavitra.j@livemint.com

US JOB FAIR

2011

New Jersey: 5th-6th Nov California: 12th-13th Nov