Lounge for 17 dec 2011

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Saturday, December 17, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 51

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Facebook content and everyday opinions expressed on the site are shared by millions around the world.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH RÉMY MARTIN’S PATRICK PIANA >Page 9

FIRE AND SPICE EVENINGS

Despite its rich kebab tradition, India is not a barbecue nation. But that may be changing >Page 8

THE SIBAL SCHOOL OF

JUST AROUND THE CORNER

In this era of viral ‘public opinion’, managing online images is far more complex than ham­fisted attempts at controlling criticism, says Sunil Khilnani >Pages 10­11

PLAYING ONE OF FOUR ‘CAGED ANIMALS’

IMAGE MANAGEMENT THE GOOD LIFE

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

SHOBA NARAYAN

LOOK AT ART INTENTLY

P

rof. Brijendra Nath Goswamy is in Bangalore to deliver Tasveer Foundation’s inaugural lecture. I have been allowed to take him out for an hour.

Where does one take a man who is arguably India’s foremost art historian? I consider a ride in our new Metro to Angadi Silks or Vimor to buy a sari for his wife. This is a man, after all, who invited three of the country’s top dancers—Bharatanatyam’s Malavika Sarukkai, Odissi’s Madhavi Mudgal, and... >Page 4

NATASHA BADHWAR

Author Sam Miller recommends some easy day trips from his forthcoming ‘Blue Guide India’ about our historical monuments >Page 12

Kate Winslet gets close to a stage role with Roman Polanski’s new film, ‘Carnage’ >Page 16

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

DAUGHTER, FOLLOW TIME FOR A YOUR HEART BERRYFUL

R

emember that early 1990s film Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin? Pooja Bhatt’s fabulous big hair and boyish, lean Aamir Khan. In the climax of the film, Anupam Kher walks with his daughter, Pooja, towards the mandap where her groom waits to marry her. Throughout the walk, he tries to convince his daughter to run away right then and chase her lover, played by Khan. He will love her better, and truer. There is a white Maruti van he has arranged for the runaway bride.

“Bhaag jaa, beti, bhaag jaa,” he says... >Page 4

M

y love of the cape gooseberry, rasbhari, physalis or sometimes “Chinese lantern”, knows no bounds.

Every year at this time I can never quite get over seeing in abundance a fruit which at home is bought by the handful rather than the kilo. As well as being the most cheerful-looking of fruits, cape gooseberries are perfect for baking and I always have more ideas for recipes than I have time to make. Like old-fashioned varieties of apple and the green English... >Page 8

PHOTO ESSAY

A HISTORY OF THE TAJ

presents

The Mint Real Estate Conclave

REVIVING REAL ESTATE: TRIGGERS BEYOND MONETARY POLICY DATE & VENUE Friday, 23 December 2011, 6.30pm, The Leela, Gurgaon

Global economy is showing signs of a slowdown. As a result the Real estate sector is facing credit shortage and decrease in demand. How can the government ensure the recovery of the real estate sector? How to channelize investments for maximum benefits? To bring clarity to many such issues, Mint brings together a panel of industry experts and decision makers from leading real estate organizations at a debate.

Entry by invitation only. For invites, call at +91 9910015863 or email: conclave@livemint.com

Presented by:

Partners:

HOME PAGE L3

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

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R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE PREVIEW | PICASSO SOUZA

| iSKATE, AMBIENCE

LOUNGE REVIEW MALL, GURGAON

“Now that Picasso is dead, I am the greatest!”

—F.N. Souza, 1987

H

eels together, toes apart, bend your knees a little, now take tiny steps, very tiny ones...just like a penguin does on ice...” Learning how to skate on ice is a little like learning to walk like a penguin, or so the instructors at the just-opened ice skating rink iSkate, Ambience Mall, Gurgaon, would have you believe. If you have tried your hand at roller skating, this will be a piece of cake. If you have not, perhaps now is the time to sign up for those lessons too.

F

rancis Newton Souza, that wild child of Indian modern art, had a penchant for outrageous quotes. In March 1987, in an article in Goa Today, he announced that he was the greatest artist in the world. He was the “Picasso of India”; and Picasso had died.

It is in this context that the exhibition Picasso Souza, which opens at the Vadehra Art Gallery (VAG) in New Delhi today, is a seminal one.

Close to 100 works have been sourced from London’s Grosvenor Gallery for the exhibition which features Pablo Picasso and F.N. Souza—founding members of the modern art movements in Europe and India, respectively—side by side.

Over the years, the two artists have been shown together in a few group shows. In 1954, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London included works by a young Souza in an exhibition alongside Picasso, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. “However,” as Parul Vadehra, director, VAG, says, “this is the first two-person exhibition of works by the artists.”

Souza’s derived title as the Indian Picasso can be read as derogatory by some because he was creating a new artistic grammar in the milieu of 1940s India and deserves due recognition in his own right. The Goa-born artist was a dominant force in the development of Indian modern art, inspiring the Progressive Artists’ Movement in the country before going on to become an inspirational figure on the London art scene of the 1950s. Picasso, on the other hand, is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, known for cofounding the Cubist movement in the early 1900s along with Georges Braque. With three museums dedicated solely to his work, he is also the most sought after artist in the world today, with his paintings having sold for over $150 million, or around `780 crore. Souza’s works have sold for over $1.5 million.

Picasso Souza includes works by the artists in a whole variety of media—drawings, oil paintings, etchings, linocuts and ceramics—that display the artists’ versatility and genius. It explores the exchange of ideas, intellectual movements, and artistic trends between Souza and Picasso, and ultimately between India and the rest of the world.

The exhibition will also have photographs of the artists taken by various photographers.

“The works will be shown alongside each other to give the audience a chance to see the inspirations that Souza drew from, among other things, Western art, in particular Picasso and the Cubists,” says Vadehra.

At the time when Souza had started exhibiting his work in Europe, Edwin Mullins, the famous art critic, had observed that like Picasso, his (artistic) interventions had been thought outrageous because “the imagination that created them was discovering something about the visual world which no one as yet understood or which everyone had forgotten”.

The good stuff

Twin faces: (top) Picasso’s Femme au Chapeau, 1962; and Souza’s Untitled (Head of Picasso), 1961.

Nine years after Souza died, this is, in retrospect, a chance to understand it all.

Picasso Souza opens today at the Vadehra Art Gallery, D-40, Defence Colony, New Delhi, and will run till 14 January. Some of the works are on sale, priced upwards of £800 (around `64,800).

Anindita Ghose

LOUNGE LOVES | MSB GARDEN ACCESSORIES

Mini forests

CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “Making sense of the contemporary”, 10 December, the Georges Perec novel that is on display at the group show ‘Words: A User’s Manual’ is ‘A Void’, the English translation of ‘La Disparition’.

In the article on the show ‘Your Name Is Different There’, part of “Making sense of the contemporary”, 10 December, the Nakba refers to the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland by the Israelis.

A range of accessories to brighten your balcony, terrace or office garden

T

hese products are for those who don’t have enough space for an elaborate garden, but still have their hearts set on one. My Sunny Balcony (MSB), a Bangalore-based start-up that specializes in creating gardens in small spaces, is exhibiting its line of garden accessories in association with Fabindia in Bangalore. On sale at a 10% discount, the handcrafted, locally designed terracotta, wrought iron and bamboo accessories can brighten your balconies, terraces and or even your office garden, if you have one.

The philosophy behind the company’s design is to create gardens in limited spaces. “We had to innovate and bring new gardening techniques in order to satisfy the whole ‘it’s time to take the gardens up the elevator and into your homes’ idea that we are trying,” says MSB co-founder Sriram Aravamudan, adding that a lot of their inspiration has come from design ideas picked up from countries like Spain and Morocco. “For example, most gardens in this town called Santorini in Greece are up on the walls,” says Aravamudan, explaining the design concept of the Santorini-style, wall-mounted pots that come in bright colours with support holders made of wrought iron. There are also herb hoops that hold up to four pots in a hoop, giving sufficient space

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG

Innovate: Create gardens in limited spaces. for the growth of small herb plants.

Most pots have been designed keeping in mind the modern apartment. In addition to pots and pot holders, their water circulators are a big hit as ornamental features. The Zen garden water feature made from bamboo comes with a small motor that circulates water.

All the products are available in varied sizes, and range in price from `150 for a small painted pot to `3,500 for a mosaic-decorated urn.

MSB’s products are available at Fabindia, CMH Road, Bangalore, till 18 December, and then at Fabindia, Whitefield, in January. For details, visit www.mysunnybalcony.com Pavitra Jayaraman

As you waddle across the pristine white 36x14m surface, taking the tiniest steps possible on the skates, you cannot help but be thankful that the rink provides one-on-one training sessions with any of three skating instructors (for a fee, of course—`300 for 15 minutes). At any given point, there are foureight marshals keeping an eye out for those who might find it hard to navigate the rink on their own.

The iSkate rink is open 10am-10pm on weekdays and 10am-10.30pm on weekends and holidays, and since it has a café which will do breakfast specials, it is a great way to start your weekend before the shoppers take over.

The penguin-shaped skating aids for children are really cute and handy, and allow the tots to get on to the ice right away without hanging on to the railings or waiting for an instructor to take them for a spin.

Richard Rowland, the manager of the rink, says it will be resurfaced six times every day since a pristine surface reduces the chances of accidents. “Not many people are used to ice skating, so we have decided to resurface six times even though internationally rinks do it twice at most in a day.

Each resurfacing session takes

about 15 minutes.”

The instructors and marshals help people with lacing up the skates. And for those who do not have socks to wear with skates, the rink has pairs on sale for `50.

The not­so­good There is no equipment to measure your shoe size so that you get the right size of skates. Your best bet is to play guessing games or hand your shoes across the counter and wait for the instructor to carry on playing guessing games. Besides, it is a little tacky to hand your shoes over the counter when they have to be put in the cubicle where your skates come from.

We know Delhi cannot survive without Bhangra Rock and all other kinds of Punjabi music, but the deejays need to seriously rethink blaring these tracks backto-back. Also, the music is so loud that it is tough to hear what the instructor is saying.

Helmets are not compulsory.

Rowland claims that the international ice skating federation does not deem it necessary, but perhaps helmets should be made mandatory for young children or should be available on hire. Rowland says that in a couple of months they will open a merchandising arm where skating equipment, including helmets, will be sold.

Talk plastic You can sign up for a five-week course (which includes once-aweek, half-hour sessions in a group with an instructor and one-and-ahalf hours on the rink) for `2,500. A 2-hour session on the rink (minus lessons) costs `300 on weekdays and `400 on weekends and includes ice skates. For children, you can hire a penguin-shaped skating aid for an additional `150.

Seema Chowdhry

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Look at art intently, and with patience

P

COURTESY THE TAJ WEST END, BANGALORE

rof. Brijendra Nath Goswamy is in Bangalore to deliver Tasveer Foundation’s inaugural lecture. I have been allowed to take him out for an hour. Where does one take a man who is arguably India’s foremost art historian?

I consider a ride in our new Metro to Angadi Silks or Vimor to buy a sari for his wife. This is a man, after all, who invited three of the country’s top dancers—Bharatanatyam’s Malavika Sarukkai, Odissi’s Madhavi Mudgal, and Kathak’s Aditi Mangaldas—to perform at his wife’s 65th birthday. They agreed. I want a similar grand gesture when I turn 65, I tell my husband. He gives me a sceptical “are you worth it” look. Finally, I take Prof. Goswamy to The Taj West End, mainly because it is close to art collector Abhishek Poddar’s house, where he is staying; and because it has an “Art Corridor”.

Over cups of cappuccino, we talk about his lecture on rasas or aesthetic emotion that the Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi has helpfully uploaded on YouTube. How can my readers learn to be connoisseurs like you, I ask. Prof.

Goswamy spells out a few Sanskrit words in explanation. To appreciate art, you have to be an adhikari, he says; an adequate viewer. You have to be sahruday, or of the same heart as the maker. “It is not just empathy but much more than that,” he says. If you are able to cultivate this sensibility of “looking intently and with patience” at a work of art, it will speak to you. Look at all parts of a painting, he says. You never know where the artist has slyly left his stamp.

Be aware of your reactions when you observe a work of art: What emotions does it evoke? Perhaps it brings to mind a piece of music, or poetry.

I take Prof. Goswamy on a walk through The Taj West End’s Art Corridor, where a number of contemporary paintings are displayed. I want to see art through his eyes and he obliges. He stands before a Shuvaprasanna owl drawing that he likes. “Shuvaprasanna sees something in birds that you and I don’t ordinarily see,” he says. “There is something sinister and wise about this owl, and I like the fact that he hasn’t covered the entire painting with black and allowed some room for the painting to breathe.”

Thota Vaikuntam’s three paintings are dismissed with a “if you’ve seen one,

you’ve seen them all. It’s too laboured; all surface.” Before we know it, we have an audience which trails us.

Prof. Goswamy’s distilled aesthetic comes from art acquisition trips across India with C. Sivaramamurti, the National Museum’s first director, whom he calls a “savant who knew art from the inside”. In Cuttack, Prof. Goswamy was drawn to a painting in a private collection in which the Hindu god Krishna was carrying Mt Govardhan, except that the base of the mountain was shaped like a bow. Prof. Goswamy felt that the painter was connecting the Krishna avatar to the earlier Ram avatar.

He talks about a verse in the Krishna Karnamrutham, in which Yashoda puts a baby Krishna to sleep by telling him the story of Ram. “When I saw Mt Govardhan painted like a bow, I felt that the artist too had made such a connection,” says Prof. Goswamy . “It was like leaping across time and space to hear the whirring of the artist’s mind.

It was extraordinary.”

Prof. Goswamy’s facility with Sanskrit verse, Urdu poetry and Indian philosophy allows him to make uncommon connections between the Natya Shastra, the mother lode of all Indian aesthetic traditions, and, say, English poetry. He says that Abhinavagupta, who interpreted the Natya Shastra, talks about a chamatkar or miraculous effect that will occur in the mind of a rasika when a work of art “whispers” in her mind. “It is as if magical flowers are blossoming in your imagination. We call it adbhut pushpaani,” says Prof. Goswamy.

As someone who loves abstract and contemporary art, I am a little rattled by Prof. Goswamy’s obvious love for ancient Indian art. What am I missing?

Why can’t I enjoy miniature paintings or Chola bronzes as much as him? Why are today’s Indians so disconnected with our ancient artistic traditions? Two collectors—(Abhishek and Anupam) both sharing the last name, Poddar— have talked to me about how Prof.

Goswamy has infused his love of ancient art in them. If he has managed

Art walk: The Art Corridor at The Taj West End in Bangalore. to convert two of India’s top contemporary art collectors, who am I to fight his evangelism?

I think of this as I stand before the beautifully curated artworks at the Grand Hyatt Mumbai. It juxtaposes ancient replicas with contemporary originals by marquee names—Jitish Kallat, Anju and Atul Dodiya, among others. But the contemporary pieces don’t appeal to me today. Instead, I am drawn to a beautiful Ardhanari bronze sculpture tucked away in a dark corner.

I have seen such images countless times in temples. Their symmetrical limbs and serene faces are part of my subconscious. I take them for granted.

Today, I observe the quiet figures of Nataraja and Ardhanari through new eyes. These bronze sculptures don’t surprise and jolt me, particularly when compared with the nearby Anju Dodiya installation. Contemporary Indian art can be stunning. When viewed through Prof. Goswamy’s eyes, it can also be shrill, emphatic, in-your-face, fighting for your attention amid a barrage of visual stimuli.

Prof. Goswamy’s refined aesthetic belongs to a quieter pre-YouTube time but can be cultivated even today. He is

drawn to lightness and subtlety. He loves Urdu poetry, he says, and eschews harshness of any kind, even in words. “People say they get gooseflesh when they see a work, but that sounds like a skin disease. Even the correct English word, horripilation, sounds horrible. We call it roma harsh, or the fine hairs on our body standing erect in happiness. How beautiful and poetic that sounds,” he marvels.

Rasa or aesthetics is a topic close to his heart. Later that evening, he talks about the Pahari painter Nainsukh to a Bangalore audience that includes Yasmeen Premji, Sarukkai, Britannia CEO Vinita Bali, sculptor Balan Nambiar, and India Foundation for the Arts director Anmol Vellani, among others.

As I drop him back, I ask Prof.

Goswamy who his ideal dinner companions would be. Nainsukh the painter, of course, he says. Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “because I could spend a day reciting Urdu poetry”.

Musician Kumar Gandharva. And William Shakespeare, “because I am passionately fond of his work”. A scientist like Albert Einstein who “viewed light and space differently”. And lastly,

the maker of a Chola bronze because “I want to know how he thinks”.

Prof. Goswamy is not just an art historian. He is really a time traveller; someone who wants to leap through the centuries and into the minds of those anonymous artists who have created some of our country’s finest art. I envy his artistic sensibility. I think of him as I walk through the Chennai museum’s superb bronze gallery, containing rare Chola and Pallava bronze originals.

Speak to me, I tell the Parvati image.

What am I missing? Who created you?

What am I looking for? I peer hard. A certain chamatkar happens. As I watch Parvati unblinkingly, she winks and gives me a Mona Lisa smile. I swear it. I was not tripping on anything. I was merely high on art and glorious magical flowers blossomed. Adbuth Pushpaani!

Shoba Narayan winked back at Parvati.

And at the Shiva (Nataraja) at the Chennai museum. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

THINKSTOCK

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

RUN, DAUGHTER, RUN

R

emember that early 1990s film Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin? Pooja Bhatt’s fabulous big hair and boyish, lean Aamir Khan. In the climax of the film, Anupam Kher walks with his daughter, Pooja, towards the mandap where her groom waits to marry her. Throughout the walk, he tries to convince his daughter to run away right then and chase her lover, played by Khan. He will love her better, and truer. There is a white Maruti van he has arranged for the runaway bride.

“Bhaag jaa, beti, bhaag jaa,” he says, almost begging her. Run, daughter, run.

As parents of little daughters, Afzal and I sometimes indulge in idle conversation about how they might get married one day. He openly expresses violent feelings towards potential lovers. I like to think that I will be like Seth Dharamchand, the eccentric, liberated parent Kher plays in Dil

Hai Ki Manta Nahin.

“Run, daughter, run. Be impulsive. Follow your heart.

Make it big.”

Well, today our youngest daughter started school. I am getting my first dose of separation from her. She ran to the bus stop. She hopped, skipped and jumped. She sang.

She got on a bus for the first time in her life. By the time she sat in her seat, she no longer had a view or a sense of direction of which side we were standing.

She waved randomly. The bus took her away.

Seth Dharamchand be damned. I must go after my daughter.

“I’m going to sit in the school reception and write my column,” I say to Afzal.

“It will be better for you to stay at home,” he says.

“But it will be so peaceful, no? I can feel and write there.”

He gives me the look. “Go to

your Dosa Corner. Or the coffee shop,” he says. “Very peaceful, this early in the morning.”

“There’s such a nice aquarium in the school,” I say. “Big glittering fish in it. I will write well there.”

Another look.

“Okay. I’ll complain about you in my column,” I say to him. I’m feeling desperate. Very desperate.

“So what,” he says, “I’m not afraid of looking like a fool. That’s your problem.”

I don’t know how he knows, but that is my problem, you know. The fear of looking foolish.

Fear of being told not to be silly. I have been typing and un-typing lines for this column for six days now. Words have failed me. I have failed my words.

There is a tightness in my throat. As if someone is gripping it, not letting any feelings out.

That someone is me. “What’s the big deal, Natasha? Little children start school all the time,” says the voice of reason in my head.

This voice, however, isn’t reasonable at all. It doesn’t remember its lessons. Let me repeat them for you here, you dumb voice of reason: Just because I feel like crying, does not mean I am unhappy.

Just because I care for the

touch with their inner selves, are we? And then what will happen?

Another generation of mindless Facebook and Twitter updates, among other things. Take my word for it.

Coming together, then going our own way. Getting on top of things, then plummeting at top speed. Figuring it out, then forgetting again. Not always getting it, but being determined to deal with it.

It’s a lovely loop really. Life is never a straight road.

Meanwhile, the first day of school is almost over. I’m back at the bus stop to receive my baby.

The baby who is not a baby any more. It is a sunny winter afternoon and everything seems all right from this angle. Just that I feel like something has been yanked out of me.

Here comes the yellow bus.

Feel and talk: Be expressive for the benefit of your children. details, does not mean I have gone to pieces..

Just because I am jittery, does not mean I am not prepared.

These are feelings, man.

Feelings must be felt. And expressed. It leads to better

productivity. It unleashes creativity. It protects the ozone layer. And ultimately contributes to better sex lives.

Unless we allow ourselves to be expressive, we are not going to raise children who are better in

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

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

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011

L5

Play

LOUNGE GAMING

Things I read in ‘Skyrim’ It’s the best role­playing game this year as it lets you set your own priorities

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

···························· he Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, released in November, is one of the most lauded role-playing games (RPGs) in recent history. It’s the first game not made in Japan to score a 40/40 in the famous Famitsu magazine, and it’s also a game that will last at least 100 hours, if you’re not interested in simply exploring the world the way the developers intended you to. Set in what appears at first to be the standard J.R.R. Tolkien-derived fantasy world, Skyrim has a rich history to draw on, and not just from the events of the four games before it—the developers have seeded their world with richly detailed histories and economic treatises, along with works of fiction that players can choose to read or ignore. In the game, the world is under grave threat from dragons, and the player—who can set a lot of characteristics of the protagonist before the game begins—is the “chosen one” to save the world. Or,

T

like me, you can take your fantasy hero and explore a painstakingly detailed and beautifully realized world.

A few hours into the game, I discovered something that made me set out on a quest to read all the books I could find. Outside the town of Windhelm, in the cheerfully named Brandy-Mug Farm, I was stealing everything I found. Part of my loot was a book called The Daughter of the Niben, and my skill in Alteration—a field of magic— increased simply by reading it. I knew I would be reading many more books after that.

Rising Threat, Volume II, by

Lathenil of Sunhold The book was lying in a store in the capital city of Whiterun. It was an interesting account of the destruction brought about by the “Oblivion Crisis”. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what that was. I needed to find the first volume, and decided to keep the book with me. The shopkeeper didn’t like that, and called the town guards. I escaped, but I had to kill one guard. Now they try to kill me on sight. I decided to spend some time in the wilderness.

Rising Threat, Volume I, by Lathenil of Sunhold I’d paid fines and returned the second volume by the time I found the first part, in the city of Riften. It’s a small town, rife with

poverty, controlled by a mafialike organization. They wanted to charge a toll for entering Riften, but I bribed a guard. Inside, I killed a homeless elf when no one was looking and stole the book.

Now I know everything about the Oblivion Crisis. The book is an interesting account of how an army led by someone called Dagon destroyed the capital of the high elves. But I also feel guilty about killing the poor elf. I left the city and headed east towards a mountain pass.

Dance in the Fire: Book II, by Waughin Jarth I chanced upon the Haafingar Stormcloak camp, deep in Imperial territory. I’d chosen to side against these rebels, but I was now trying to end the civil war.

They weren’t too pleased to see me though—I’d killed enough of their comrades. In their camp, I found this book, and it improved my blocking. It’s also the most

Book smart: In Skyrim, you can even be a barbarian librarian.

enjoyable book in Skyrim so far.

Caught between two warring states, your party of merchants is ambushed first by one side and then the other, and it’s written with a wry sense of humour. No spoilers, but it’s the ultimate shaggy dog story. I followed a river south.

The True Nature of Orcs I was adventuring in the Bilegulch Mine when I came across a group of orc bandits. Since I play as an orc well, I thought we could sit around a fire and share some mead. Instead, they tried to kill. It was a pointless and brutal encounter. Then, in the back of the cave, I found a human body with the book on it. The book talked about the myth of the origin of the orcish race, and how we were once the best and brightest of elves before the corruption of our patron god. Explains why everyone hates me I suppose. I’d read about an orc invasion in another book—time to learn more about it. I headed to the ruins of the Nightcaller Temple.

An Explorer’s Guide to Skyrim,

by Marcius Carvain I found the perfect book for me in the temple. It had been the site of a terrible battle between the followers of Mara and an invading army of orcs. The priests poisoned the invaders, but they themselves were also affected, and both turned into monsters.

When I opened the door, priests and orcs both attacked me. Much later, I found this book on a shelf.

It’s a guide to the tourist sights of Skyrim. Perhaps it was a sign, to try something new.

Mint Media Marketing Initiative

W

hile countdown parties can be found all over town, thousands of people head for the harbour to witness the main New Year Countdown event.When the clock ticks down to midnight, a stunning pyrotechnics show will be launched from Two ifc and nine major buildings on Hong Kong Island, exploding in a radiant shower of lights to brilliantly illuminate the beautiful harbour. Join in the fun and salute 2012 with all the glamour and spectacle of a Hong Kong celebration.

HONG KONG WINTERFEST HIGHLIGHTS A Holiday of Tiffany Treasures:

It’s the time of the year to take a break and treat you and your family a holiday to Hong Kong! Asia’s world city, Hong Kong is celebrating Hong Kong WinterFest from now till 1 Jan 2012.

Victoria Harbour will live up to its role as the throbbing heart of the city.

This holiday season, Tiffany & Co. continues its tradition of spreading love with a glamorous centerpiece for Hong Kong WinterFest celebrations. Statue Square in Central will feature a beautiful 18 meter tall Christmas tree surrounded with a festive touch. Celebrate this Christmas in the city by taking a ride on the enchanting carousel.

Ice Wonderland: Presented by the Sino Group, the Ice Wonderland in East Tsim Sha Tsui is guaranteed to be one of the spotlight attractions in Hong Kong this WinterFest season.Featuring a number of elements, including colourful decorations and snow effect, the Ice Wonderland allows visitors and residents to soak up the festive ambience and experience the fun of ice-skating.

TOP HOLIDAY HAPPENINGS AT SIGNATURE ATTRACTIONS

the opportunities to learn to create your own Christmas chocolate pieces.The Ngong Ping 360 experience starts with a 25 minute cable car ride from Tung Chung to a culturally themed village high atop a mountain plateau on Lantau Island.

Ocean Park Hong Kong'sThrill Mountain: If rocking around the Christmas tree is not your idea of thrills and spills, head to Ocean Park's new Thrill Mountain, where five exciting thrill rides and a carnival atmosphere will knock your yuletide socks off!

Madame Tussauds Hong Kong’s Victorian Christmas (25 Nov 2011- 1 Jan 2012):

It’s a Victorian Christmas at Madame Tussauds Hong Kong and the world’s favourite idols are waiting to have their holiday snaps taken with you! A new likeness of Madame Tussauds will be there too, celebrating her 250 th birthday.

Hong Kong Disneyland’s A Sparkling Christmas (18 Nov 2011 - 2 Jan 2012): With the opening of the all-new Toy Story Land, Disney’s Sparkling Christmas is filled with more toys and playful experiences than ever before! Come immerse yourself in the fun of the season with shopping, dining and magic filled moments at Hong Kong Disneyland - Toy to the World!

Starlight Garden at New Town Plaza

(8 Nov 2011 - 15 Jan 2012):

Tokyo’s Midtown Starlight Garden provides a fantastic illuminations show with advanced technology, fabulous music and love and passion to New Town Plaza this Christmas.

PHOTO: HONG KONG TOURISM BOARD

HOLIDAY SHOPPING AND DINING

©DISNEY/PIXAR

Ngong Ping 360 Snowy Chocolate Christmas (8 Dec 2011- 2 Jan 2012): Spend Christmas with your loved ones in an enchanting snowy, chocolaty village! This year, Ngong Ping Village will turn into an amazing chocolaty winterland with themed decoration, soft snowfall, Christmas carols, free tasting of running chocolate fountain and

If ‘tis the season to shop and dine, then ‘tis definitely the season to be in Hong Kong.The city’s mind-boggling variety of shops will be running superb winter sales, and the equally diverse choice of restaurants will ensure you have the energy to stay jolly with a fabulous selection of festive menus and fantastic dining offers.

SPECIAL SEASONAL STAY With everything going on in the city this season, don’t forget you’ll need a place to hang your hat! Hong Kong WinterFest hotel offers give you a stocking-full of three-day-two-night packages with fabulous festive privileges.

Planning an outing for Christmas and New Year’s has never been this pocket friendly.

DiscoverHongKong.com/winterfest

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011

Parenting

LOUNGE

Say no to the eraser: Art­ works with ‘mistakes’ cre­ ated by children at Art1st classes. The children are asked not to start afresh if they make a ‘mistake’—the idea is to show them there is no right or wrong in art.

ART EDUCATION

Look Ma, Pollock is in the room!

Two organizations, in Mumbai and Delhi, are changing the way your child meets art B Y A NINDITA G HOSE & G AYATRI J AYARAMAN ···························· hen the boom hit the contemporary Indian art market earlier in the decade, Mumbai-based artist and collector Ritu Khoda watched sadly as speculators bought masterpieces and kept them in godowns, waiting for a time to sell.

Khoda, a 1995 graduate from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Calcutta, felt that to create a lasting change in the way people interfaced with art, she had to return to the basics.

“I went to see what was happening in schools,” says Khoda, who visited a few in Mumbai and Delhi and realized that art classes were still ancillary. “Teachers would tell the children to ‘draw something for Diwali, Holi’—every artwork looked the same even while the children were so different,” she says. “Nobody was interested in the way a child was thinking.”

In 2009, Khoda formed Art1st with a committee of eight, including artist Yogesh Rawal and Shampa Shah, a five-time recipient of the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society award. Their mission was to change the fundamentals of how children were taught art.

The committee has spent the last two years drawing up a curriculum. They have begun pilot programmes at the Gundecha Education Academy, Mumbai, and a few Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) schools. They’ve also set up labs at places like The Little Company, Bandra, and The Reading Tree, Thane. Their pilot workshop at The Shri Ram School, Delhi, will begin in July.

Their curriculum is a high-level cognitive tool, which uses specially-designed books for each age group. It starts with scribbles, goes on to doodles, paintings, colours, shapes, and within the basics, allows children to explore high art (S.H. Raza’s Bindu series is used for their understanding of shapes, for instance). At present, each of the pilot schools receives a monthly review from Khoda and her team, which also retrains teachers to look out for individuality. The curriculum, which will not be offered as an “extra-curricular” class, will enter the formal teaching methodology from the next academic year in these schools.

“The aim is to change the system, not add to it,” says Khoda, who

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conceives Art1st as transforming mainstream art education.

Here’s looking at art In New Delhi, Flow Associates, a UK-based organization, is also working to address this gaping hole. Flow, which set up an office in the Capital last December, was started in 2006 by Bridget McKenzie, former head of learning at the British Library, and her colleague Mark Stevenson, a science communicator and author. It provides a range of interventions to support academic enrichment in schools based on the Flow Creative and Cultural Learning model.

Though the organization has consulted internationally in countries such as Russia, Syria and the US before this, the New Delhi branch is its first international outpost.

The two directors of Flow Associates in India are Katherine Rose, a museologist, and Eliza Hilton, an educator. When the two friends first visited Indian heritage sites and museums a few years ago, they were taken aback by what they saw. “There were no families in museums...and definitely no children. We went to Ajanta and

Ellora and were appalled by how children were experiencing the place; it was a picnic,” says Rose, who has co-authored a definitive guide for teachers in the UK who want to use art galleries as learning resources: The Art Gallery Handbook: A Resource for Teachers (published by Tate Gallery, London, 2006).

Rose and Hilton are working at the ground level in India, conducting workshops for children as young as 5. One of their programmes, called Flow Families, takes groups of families for guided tours of museums such as the National Museumand the National Gallery of Modern Art. But like Art1st, their ultimate goal is on developing art and critical thinking modules for schools, for which they’re in talks with schools in and around Delhi.

How to shape a thinker Flow’s workshop for children between the ages of 6-9, in collaboration with the Delhi-based nonprofit Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (Fica), are designed to give free reign to a child’s imagination, while introducing them to art history. “Given that Flow has such great experience in education, especially related to the arts, we felt they were the perfect people to partner with,” says Parul Vadehra, who coordinates this programme for Fica.

The Flow-Fica “Young at Art” programme is a six-session workshop that takes children through 100 years of Indian art, focusing on 10 artists from different art periods, looking at their technique and Art and play: (left) Art1st’s Ritu Khoda (centre) with teachers; and Hilton (left) and Rose at the Flow­Fica workshop for six­ to nine­year­olds.

COURTESY FICA

creating artworks to match them.

Each workshop culminates with a gallery visit. “When we’re telling the children about the artist Ram Kumar, we make them create collage to understand his style,” says Hilton, who is a specialist in the Philosophy for Children methodology, a global movement of educational practice which started in the US in the 1970s and aims to teach reasoning and argumentative skills to children.

“By the end of the workshops, the children have the critical ability to recognize colours and styles specific to an era or artist. They can even recognize works by specific artists such as Amrita Sher-Gil or Jackson Pollock,” adds Rose.

Tarana Sawhney’s seven-yearold daughter Noor, a class II student at Delhi’s Shri Ram School, attended the workshop. She says the methodology helped her daughter internalize concepts.

“Days after the workshop, Noor saw a diary I had with an A. Ramachandran painting and remarked that it was probably from his Lotus Pond at Night series. She hadn’t learnt this by memory, she’d actually internalized the artist’s style!”

Khoda adds that the tools used in art appreciation shape a child to be a thinker, and build confidence.

They also help in building vocabulary and powers of description.

“Twenty years later, your child is not going to get out-of-the-box ideas if he or she hasn’t been encouraged to think that way early on. An art curriculum needs to give a child the self-confidence to own an idea and present it,” she says. For this reason, Khoda and her team are also against “colouring books” which embed an idea into a child’s mind and say this is the way to do it.

Both Art1st and Flow Associates are intent on putting their programmes through constant evaluations. “More than certifications, we’re interested in evaluating how the tools of art appreciation are helping children,” says Rose.

“Parents come up to us all the time and say things like: ‘Thank you for doing the sort of thing our child left behind in New York’,” she adds. “Parents have begun to realize the benefits of going beyond the cramming methodology.”

The Flow-Fica Young at Art programme costs `3,500 per child; a Flow Families museum visit is priced at `2,000 for a family of three. For details, visit Flow india.wordpress.com To get in touch with Art1st, write to ulka@art1st.co.in anindita.g@livemint.com

Let the words run riot The poet­lyricist on how to help your child become a storyteller

RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

Express yourself: Prasoon Joshi at the launch of the book.

B Y P RASOON J OSHI ····················································· hen I was first published at age 17, it gave a tremendous boost to my confidence to know that someone else imagined my work to be of value. Most often we don’t allow children to finish their sentences, “Shut up, kya bakwaas kar raha hai (what nonsense!)”. Nothing can be more dis­ couraging. At the Write & Read: By Us for Us series of workshops I took recently (organized by Hewlett­Packard and non­profit organization Katha in schools across six cities in July), I just ran the children through the basic structures of writing and then let them be.

Our education is becoming cut and dried and transactional. Everything is about “What am I getting out of it?” We need to get out of that mindset.

What makes things worse is the onslaught of technology. I’m a huge tech geek, but I recognize what it’s doing to creativity. When I first started tak­ ing the workshops I noticed that some children would finish a story in 10­15 minutes. Sure, we live in a Twitter­driven age but why should chil­ dren be in a hurry to finish a story? They need time to dwell on an idea, you can’t deep­dive into your imagination at one go. The other problem with technology is that it puts things on a platter. Earlier, when I was a child, my ghost was different from your ghost. Now, because of technology, children are seeing and experiencing the same things. The image of the ghost is now standardized.

A good story is something original, and feels like it springs out of the person’s own imagination rather than something that simply has the pre­ tension of being good writing. After imagination comes craft. Craft comes with ease of language. It reflects a certain confi­ dence, familiarity and bonding with language. Lan­ guage is like your mother. You can pull her hair, you can do what you want with her and get away with it. That’s the relationship you enjoy with language. That’s probably where the term mother tongue comes from. I enjoy that relation­ ship with Urdu and Hindi.

There’s no teaching in creativity. Creativity is about recognizing the individuality of each child and letting them express themselves.

Too many rules will make children formulaic writers. Children make stories out of things that we would never imagine to be a story. And they Write & Read— need to be given the confidence that the next time

By Us for Us: an outlandish idea enters their head, they should Katha, not be dismissive of it. They should pursue it.

141 pages, `375.

There is a story about traffic lights, where the traffic light is viewed differently by the beggar and the person who’s driv­ ing a car. To the beggar, the red light is an opportunity to make some money; to the driver it means slowing down. This is a big writer thinking; making something so profound out of an everyday thing.

At the workshops, I would push the children in a certain direction and let them enjoy the process. I would keep asking them if what they had written was indeed what they were feeling; if not, ask them to write the extra sen­ tence, or the paragraph. It’s also important not to shy away from drafts and redrafts. Or to fall in love with what you’ve written. You have to intro­ duce them to themselves. And tell them it’s not a race they have to win.

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The series of workshops has culminated in a book of 31 short stories.

As told to Shreya Ray. shreya.r@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011

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Health

LOUNGE DIETING

When you know you’re eating wrong Yaana Gupta shares her battles to remain thin—and how she finally learnt to eat healthy

How to Love Your Body (and Get the Body You Love):

By Yaana Gupta, Penguin Books India, 216 pages, `199.

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

···························· aana Gupta’s struggles with her weight could be the story of any teenage girl who wants to make it in the world of modelling or acting. As she writes in her forthcoming book How to Love Your Body (and Get the Body You Love), the pressure to stay reed thin rarely ever starts from the outside. The obsessive need to be thinner is stress that teenage girls often don’t know how to handle.

Gupta’s battle began as early as 16, after she decided to be a model. She had to maintain her weight on the lower side and she believed her healthy appetite was making her fat. She started smoking “because for me cigarette was something that I was allowed to have as it had no calories”. It reduced her appetite too.

Gupta writes how, when she was a teenager, she had to give up her favourite Czech food, duck with dumplings and cabbage, which she used to eat often. She ate it again after a long gap at Prague airport. She chillingly reminds readers that once you

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have an eating disorder or are a compulsive dieter, you never completely get over it. You always categorize food as healthy or unhealthy, and fattening or nonfattening. It’s a pattern you can’t break out of.

Her strict regimen led to dreams about food, cravings she could not control. After months of “non-eating”, she would often succumb to binges of overeating.

She compares her desire to binge-eat with an alcoholic’s desire to get that one drink after being denied for a long time. She also candidly admits that each binge-eating episode was followed by feelings of guilt, fear, anger and self-loathing.

Gupta’s journey became harder when she took on an assignment in Japan. Away from home, in a place where the food she was used to wasn’t available, she was forced to eat junk food like French fries, burgers and pizzas.

Gupta tried various diets. One of the first was the Atkins lowcarb diet, which she started at the age of 21 while in India; a second is the blood-group diet that a Taiwanese doctor in Goa introduced her to.

Gupta’s book reminds us that parents have to take on the responsibility of teaching their children to eat healthy from a young age—and also teach them to cook for themselves rather than rely on restaurants and packaged food.

Although Gupta’s advice on how to control and manage weight is useful, what makes the book really engaging is the honest personal account. She confesses in the book that there was a change in her attitude only after she realized that excessively controlling her diet had led to an eating disorder.

Towards the latter part of the book, Gupta dishes out tips: Eat small meals, set small targets, chew properly, eat away from the TV set, have positive thoughts.

This is where the book loses its appeal.

This information is readily available, and Gupta does not really go into the details of how she followed these principles herself.

Letting go: Gupta gave up her favour­ ite food, duck with dumplings and cabbage, for the longest time.

STAY­IN­SHAPE MANTRAS Small things that Gupta does on a regular basis to keep her diet on track. Edited excerpts from the book: u Drop a particular food group for two weeks and see how you feel. For example, totally stop all dairy products and monitor your energy levels day by day, the appearance of your skin and the overall feeling in your body. After the first week, you will be able to see the difference in your body. But I suggest you continue for one more week to be sure. After the second week has passed and you have noted the difference it has made to your body, reintroduce this food in your diet and again notice how you feel. Then you will be sure if this food is good for your body or not. u I use the alarm on my phone to

remind myself of meal timings. I set the alarm for every two­and­a­half hours, and when it buzzes, I take it as a cue to eat. I recommend this method to those who are not used to eating frequently or who get so busy during the day that they forget to eat. u The portion is important and so if you eat frequently as I suggest, you need to measure the size of the carbohydrates and protein portions according to the size and thickness of your palm. It is that simple. Now you will ask me how will the size and thickness of my palm help if I am eating chicken curry? With chicken curry, I look at the size of the chicken

pieces and compare them with my palm by just putting the chicken pieces all together on one side of the plate. Then I look at the amount and see that it kind of visually matches the size of my palm. You cannot weigh everything you eat. u The pH of water is important as the body thrives better on alkaline water. Our diet is often quite acidic, so when you drink alkaline water, it dilutes the acidity created in your body. There are a few inexpensive things you can do to make your water’s pH more alkaline, such as adding pH drops or natural calcium power to the water. But the easiest of all and always available is lemon

juice. It’s kind of a paradox because we think lemon or lime is acidic, but the fact is that lemon is very alkalizing to the body. u Take a picture of yourself before you start on a diet and exercise plan and then take one every three weeks.

The changes in your body will inspire you along the way and motivate you to keep going. u I sometimes use the opportunity to give my body extra love as I apply cream or oil on my body after a shower. It’s all about creating delicious rituals for yourself where you like being with your body and enjoy it.

How to get a bikini body Bipasha Basu on eating well, combining a variety of exercise routines and holiday workouts

Shock therapy: Basu says she devised a special exercise plan ahead of shooting Players.

B Y U DITA J HUNJHUNWALA ···························· ew Indian film stars have carried off a red bikini with as much confidence as Bipasha Basu. Seeing her glide out of the sea in the forthcoming film Players, it’s hard to believe she was a target of tabloid digs at her weight a few years ago.

In Abbas-Mustan’s Players, based on The Italian Job, Basu plays Rhea, an automobile expert and a femme fatale.

While her expertise on those two fronts will only be revealed

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on 6 January, when the film releases, her beach body is already under the spotlight.

To get the perfect bikini body, Basu collaborated with her long-time trainer Paul Britto from Gold’s Gym, Mumbai, to devise an exercise plan that alternated functional training with an abs routine, kick-boxing, cardio and stretching and normal weight training.

Britto says: “With the combination, your body does not get used to the routine for a

long time and burns calories faster. You have to shock the body. This is called muscle confusion and your body reacts to the surprise. But we were careful to give Bipasha a rest day.” He says Basu’s hard work and careful diet finally made it possible. “She has a balanced, low-fat diet with moderate carb intake. She has been training for years and it has not been easy.”

In an interview, Basu told us about eating good food and carrying her mobile gym wherever she goes. Edited excerpts: Tell us how you got the look for ‘Players’.

I have been into fitness for seven years now, and I find making my own routine is exciting. My weight is always between 57kg and 60kg. My body type changes a bit, depending on what kind of training I am doing, like my body takes to muscle fast and responds to weight training fast.

To look less toned and more curvy, like for Players, I have devised a six-week, beach body workout routine. In order to achieve a beach body, I had to intensify my cardio activities. I

had to pull down the weight training a little from my upper body and gain weight on my lower body. I have small, narrow hips, but for a bikini I had to put on weight and so had to do intense training for my quads and glutes.

I lose weight quickly because over the years I have trained my body, and my metabolic rate is fast. I have figured out my body type. I eat well but I really like a fit stomach. A fit stomach is not just important for men, but also for women. I have a 1-hour abs routine for my stomach.

I hope to put the routine on a DVD soon. It’s a combination of Pilates moves, balance moves, resistance band and Swiss ball training.

What does eating right mean for you?

It means eating good food all the time. If you go on a crash diet, it will show on your face as dark circles. The most important thing is to eat. To be toned you need to eat every 2 hours. Eat small meals, eat fish, have proteins, chapattis and brown rice in moderation and avoid fried foods and sweets. Sugar does not do much for the body. I love mithai and was depressed for those six weeks of training when I could not eat any mithai. It was freezing cold in New Zealand and I was upset

about not eating sweets so as soon as my shot finished, a plate full of cupcakes was waiting for me. Later my co-stars Omi Vaidya and Sikander Kher took me out for pizza and ice cream. For the next three days, I binged on bad food!

Do you have a special routine before shooting for a film begins?

No, I work out all the time. I only went on the intense diet and training programme before the New Zealand schedule. I work out no matter what, whether I am shooting or not. I work out on holidays because otherwise I will feel guilty that I am chomping on prawn curry, sannas, coconut, etc. Since I like to eat, I have to work out.

How do you manage to work out on holiday or on location?

Working out is all in the mind. I carry my gym with me. My trailer goes with my equipment, which includes my Swiss ball, trampoline, resistance bands, light weights and mat. I can train five people in a room with my equipment. In my first workout DVD Love Yourself: Fit & Fabulous You, I have only used light dumbbells and a mat, and I also say that you can substitute the dumbbells with 1-litre mineral water bottles.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE

GRILLS

Fire and spice evenings BBQ BASICS

Despite its rich kebab tradition, India is not a barbecue nation. But that may be changing

How to choose the cuts, and what kind of fire makes them the perfect bite u Chicken breasts are drier than legs. Don’t marinate them in yogurt—it’ll make them even drier. u Know your cuts. Marbled ones are best for grilling and the grilling time depends on the type of cut.

Pork goes on first, and needs about 15 minutes, sirloin about 10 minutes, tenderloin about 5 minutes. Vegetables need only a few minutes. u Start on a low fire. Finish off on high heat for a minute. u To flip steaks, use tongs, not forks. Forks will puncture the surface and let all the juices out.

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

···························· dash of wine, a burst of flames, an angry sizzle, and Sumit Cariappa pulls a rack of ribs off his new grill with more panache than a MasterChef contestant as friends crowding his balcony in a south Delhi apartment on a mellow winter evening raise a toast.

There’s something of a performance about the whole affair— precisely the reason Cariappa, a foodie but no kitchen wizard, loves barbecues. “It’s a cheerful, casual way of hosting a party,” he says.

“After the first couple of times, anyone can turn out a tolerably decent barbecue. As long as you remember to take it off the grill,” laughs the software developer who first tried his hands at grilling while living in the US. Despite a long history of kebabs, and the ubiquitous tandoor, India is not traditionally a barbecue nation. But that seems to be changing. Live grills and Japanese teppanyaki counters have become fixtures at five-star hotels and stand-alone restaurants. From pork, beef, chicken and lamb to vegetables, fruits and even polenta—everything is being put on the grill these days.

While the generic term “grilling” refers to the process of cooking by applying direct, radiant heat to the surface of the food, the texture and taste varies greatly depending on the type of grill and technique. On a teppanyaki, a large, flat iron griddle heated by gas from below, the meat or vegetable is lightly singed, and left juicy, not chargrilled, unlike in a tandoor or a barbecue

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Courtesy chef Jerome Cousin, P’tit Bar, Defence Colony, Delhi.

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

grill. On the other hand, the temperature in the enclosed clay tandoors can go as high as 450 degrees Celsius, and the meat is cooked fast. At such high temperatures, the meat becomes dry and loses flavour fast as it cools. A charcoal grill is somewhere in between. The cooking takes longer than a tandoor and is more uniform.

The growing interest in barbecues drew popular US grill brand Weber to the country three years ago. The company set up shop in Bangalore and collaborated with chefs as it set about wooing and educating the Indian epicure. “It was not about just selling the boxes. We got chef Manu Chandra of Olive on board. We designed menus, we came up with vegetarian preparations, experimented with Indian spices,” says Weber Grills India chief operating officer Aslam Gafoor. At the Weber Experience Centre in Bangalore, Chandra takes classes for barbecue

enthusiasts. Periodically, classes are held in other cities too.

According to Weber India managing director Sivakumar Kandaswamy, the India arm has sold around 9,500 charcoal and gas grills and grilling accessories so far.

Weber’s domestic range of grills is priced at `4,500-30,000.

Restaurants too are dedicating a large section of their winter menus to grills and barbecues from across the world. Last month, The Park hotel, Delhi, introduced a Lebanese grills section at Aqua, its poolside restaurant, and a barbecue grill at Italia, its Italian cuisine restaurant at the DLF Promenade mall in Vasant Kunj. On weekends, chefs even set up the grills in the open. “At Italia, we use a double grill, charcoal and gas fired, for our modern European grills. We do a lot of grilled fish, chicken frittata, lamb chops and T-bones. The marinades, of course, depend on the meat and cut. For a simple fish fil-

DIY: (clockwise from above) Manu Chandra demon­ strates grilling tech­ niques; Italia’s Polenta & Veg­ etable Skewers; lamb chops; and experiment with any meat or vegetable for your barbecue.

let, it’s enough to have some fresh herb, lemon juice and olive oil. For meats, we use red wines, tomato sauce and Worcestershire sauce to make heavier marinades,” says Anuruddh Khanna, executive chef at The Park. It’s not quite the backyard party, but watching the glowing coals work their magic on your dinner whips up quite an appetite.

At the Brazilian “churrascaria”-style Wildfire restaurant at the Crowne Plaza Gurgaon hotel, chunks of meat rotate on a horizontal axle 4 inches above a charcoal fire. As the outer layer cooks and the fat drips into the fire, it flares up and singes the meat, lending it the characteristic smokiness of a good steak. “It’s a technique that is a cross between roasting and grilling,” says Vikas Oswal, executive chef of the Crowne Plaza.

TK’s Oriental Grill at Hyatt Regency Delhi has evolved its recipes over the years, keeping in mind the local palate. But for its teppan-

yaki, it adheres to the original Japanese philosophy of subtlety and balance. “You need good fresh fish for a good teppanyaki. Lightly cooked and no marination. Only a little lime, salt and pepper to season,” says Dirk Holscher, executive chef. “The difference between Indian kebabs and grills are the marinades. Kebabs and tandoor are marinated for a long time in various spices. But a steak or teppanyaki is about enjoying the meat,” adds the German chef. He even serves vegetable grills with little sauce. “If you have to have some spice, serve a spicy chutney on the side,” he suggests.

Chef Dirk’s Barbecue Sauce Ingredients 330ml Sprite 25g garlic, chopped 5g each salt and pepper (crushed) 1 bay leaf 200ml lemon juice, fresh 100ml white vinegar 200ml dark sweet soy sauce 500ml gin 3g oregano, dried 850g ketchup Method Mix all ingredients well. Refrigerate in a tightly sealed jar (the sauce keeps for at least a week).

Polenta & Vegetable Skewers Serves 2 Ingredients 50g polenta 50g each of zucchini and bell pepper (diced) and broccoli florets 10ml extra virgin olive oil 5g Parmesan cheese 5g butter 200ml water Salt and pepper to taste Method Heat water in a pan. Add butter, Parmesan, salt and pepper. Add polenta, stirring constantly. Once it absorbs all the water, set it in a mould and cool. Marinate the zucchini and bell pepper with salt and pepper. Blanch broccoli florets. Take the polenta out of the mould and cut it into dices of roughly same size as the vegetables. Skewer the polenta cubes and vegetables. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and grill over low fire for 2 minutes on each side.

Serve hot.

Courtesy Italia, DLF Promenade mall, New Delhi. www.livemint.com For more barbecue recipes, visit www.livemint.com/barbecue.htm

DIVYA BABU/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

HAVE A BERRYFUL

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y love of the cape gooseberry, rasbhari, physalis or sometimes “Chinese lantern”, knows no bounds.

Every year at this time I can never quite get over seeing in abundance a fruit which at home is bought by the handful rather than the kilo. As well as being the most cheerful-looking of fruits, cape gooseberries are perfect for baking and I always have more ideas for recipes than I have time to make.

Like old-fashioned varieties of apple and the green English gooseberry, they lend a welcome tartness to otherwise over-sweet desserts. They’re perfect for all sorts of puddings, pies, crumbles, fools and compotes. In fact one of my end-of-year rituals is making a batch of Cape Gooseberry jam as the ultimate topping for morning toast.

Today, though, we’re letting them loose on the tarte Tatin, named after the Tatin sisters, who ran a hotel-restaurant in Lamotte-Beuvron, France, at the beginning of the 20th century. The original was a tart of caramelized apples cooked under a pastry lid, then flipped over so that the pastry is on the bottom and fruit on top, then served with lashings of crème fraîche. For some reason, in our house, my husband holds the tarte Tatin portfolio—I’ve never actually made one.

I always assumed they were a major French faff (perhaps that’s what my husband would like me to think!); in fact nothing could be easier—the only thing that requires some effort is the pastry but you can even use a ready-made puff pastry for the least strenuous dessert imaginable.

Cape Gooseberry tarte Tatin Serves 6 Ingredients Pastry 170g cold unsalted butter, chopped into small pieces 250g flour (maida) A pinch of salt 3 tbsp caster sugar 2 egg yolks 1 tbsp orange flower water or cold water Cape gooseberries 400g cape gooseberries, paper casings removed and washed 100g caster sugar 60g unsalted butter 1 vanilla pod Method You will need a 20-23cm tin or dish that is happy both on the stove and in the oven.

To make the pastry, sift the flour and salt into a large bowl.

Add the butter and rub into the flour with fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

Stir in the sugar, then add the egg yolks and orange flower water.

Stir to bring the mixture together.

If it is still dry and crumbly, add a little water, but don’t let the

French connection: Gooseberries lend a welcome piquancy to desserts. pastry get sticky. Knead the pastry gently to form a ball, cover with cling film and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.

In the oven-proof and flameproof shallow tin, melt the butter and sugar. Split the vanilla pod in half lengthways and scrape the seeds into the tin. Tip the cape gooseberries in and coat with the caramel. Make sure you use enough fruit so it’s tightly packed on the bottom of the tin—this will improve the appearance of the finished tart.

Let the fruit cook for a few

minutes to release some of its juice into the caramel. Then let the caramel bubble long enough to thicken, a couple of minutes—stop before the fruit darkens or gets soggy. Take off the heat and leave to cool.

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius. Lightly flour a work surface and roll out the

pastry to a little larger than the tin. Carefully lift the pastry and place on top of the fruit. Press the edges down to encase the fruit.

Bake the tart for about 30 minutes until the pastry is nice and brown.

Let the tart cool for a minute or two, then take a plate that is larger than the tin and place it face down over the tart. Carefully flip the tart on to the plate and remove the tin. The cape gooseberries should now have formed a wonderfully sunny, caramelized topping. If any of the cape gooseberries has rolled out of position, just push it back so that the fruit is evenly distributed over the pastry.

Serve warm with crème fraîche.

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 tarte Tatin, visit www.livemint.com/tatin.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011

L9

Business Lounge

LOUNGE PATRICK PIANA

The sweet smell of tradition The chief executive of Rémy Martin on refocusing on India, eternal optimism and cognac mojitos

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

···························· atrick Piana remembers coming to India 24 years ago as a backpacking college student on a budget—with one crucial difference to his visit in November. This time, he stepped out of his hotel only twice: on the way from the airport and on the way to the airport.

The chief executive officer of Rémy Martin, makers of fine cognac, wants to be able to do more in the future though: see more customers, more bars, hotels and restaurants. Also, he wants to be able to go to other cities besides Mumbai and Delhi. “There’s much more that needs to be seen to better understand the development in the country,” he mumbles.

Fresh into Mumbai from Delhi, off the next day to Vietnam and back in France by the weekend, Piana’s schedule offered no surprises as to why the most amount of walking for him on this trip would be from one conference room to another. Early on a Wednesday morning, he looks bleary eyed, from the travel rather than any discomfort at the Taj Lands End hotel in Bandra, where he meets me. It’s too early even for him to swivel a Rémy XO: “I don’t recommend drinking early in the morning,” he muses.

The 42-year-old does not fit into a stereotype, if there is any, as the head of a 287-year-old company.

Standing tall, with a gentle smile and a measured manner of speaking, he does, however, fit the description of the distinguished gentlemen who could be seen in an oak-lined bar, sitting on a leather chair, twirling a cigar in one hand and a Rémy in the other.

“Most cognac is not consumed

P

IN PARENTHESIS When Patrick Piana moved to the US from France six years ago, his wife Anne had to make the tough decision of quitting her job in a publishing firm. When the family moved back in 2009, it was difficult for the three children. “My daughter (Ines) hated me for six months,” Piana says. Unlike the older children, Oscar, the youngest, was born in the US and believes he is the only American in the family, though he is also the only one who does not speak any English. Now every time the four­year­old, who was 2 when they moved to France, sees a building that’s over five storeys tall in Cognac, he believes he is in New York.

as an after-dinner drink,” he corrects my archaic ideas. “It’s in parties and nightclubs, as cocktails in the US mainly, with water in China, among other combinations. I had this wonderful mojito in Germany recently with Rémy.

It’s important that as the maker, as the guardian of the temple, sometimes we explain how to taste, how to drink to be able to find the aroma, the subtlety. (But) if someone wants to put Red Bull or tomato juice or whatever…” he trails off before recovering. “Success for us is to be part of the social life of people.”

That’s how this nearly threecenturies-old product stays relevant. “If you think about the fact that we stand for quality, craftsmanship, energy…these values go back centuries and these values will express themselves differently now,” he says. “For instance, Rémy has been partnering with hip hop and R&B in the US for 15 years, that’s the way you make yourself relevant while still being true to yourself.

“The major danger for a brand is to try to be somebody you are not. People will see through that.

What is different is how you say it—using technology, iPads, you bring the story to life with the tools of the modern age. You don’t have to show them black and white pictures.”

The reason Piana was in India, minus the backpack but loaded with plans for the future, is because he feels the company, with a turnover of €486 million (around `3,400 crore), has not been fully committed to India in its two-year association with the country. “It’s time to start seeding; in a business like cognac, time is of the essence. Seeding does not mean getting in and quickly establishing the company, it’s to hire people who will develop the company for generations to come and to better understand the market.”

He says the economic downturn that began in 2008 helped Rémy rebound and refocus on priorities. So when the economy suffered, instead of moping and pulling back, “we said it’s just another crisis. At the worst time, in the middle of 2009, someone asked, ‘Where is India (in your plans)?’

We had to be here because if we are responsible for a 300-year-old company, we have to be in a market that’s going to be a leader for the next 100 years,” says Piana.

India, indeed Asia, also gives him a sense of hope for the future with its positive outlook. The Frenchman, born in England to an Italian father, is truly European in every sense but believes people of the continent aim only for stability instead of growth. “You see people are much more positive about the future here than in France or Spain,” he says. “It’s a key driver for success—to look at the future and try to see the world

as something that will improve.”

Piana, who joined as CEO of Rémy Martin in August 2009, started his career with Philip Morris before becoming the senior vice-president of Moët Hennessy USA. Since 2007, the postgraduate in marketing and strategy DEA from the Université de Paris Dauphine was the senior vice-president of Pernod Ricard USA, in charge of the development of Pernod Ricard Group brands in the US market.

Piana is now in charge of managing the brand, the communication teams, manufacturing, the development teams, the groups responsible for making the products, as well as the financial control teams of Rémy Martin’s cognac activities.

“When you think about cognac,” he pauses, every bit a person who likes what he does and loves talking about it, “it gives you the opportunity to work with an aromatic palate like a painter.

In painting, the colours are the same but talent and vision will make the next one different from the previous one. The high-end spirits industry is not a business—we don’t respond to a functional need but to an emotional, socializing need. At the end of the day, you don’t drink cognac because you are thirsty but because you want to enjoy an aromatic experience in your mouth.

That’s where innovation lies.”

Considering that he is constantly on the run, from one meeting to another, from one continent to another, Piana likes to run even when he gets time off work—usually the marathon.

Based in Cognac, France, he describes the joy of being able to run through vineyards, any which way he feels, sometimes along the river, 5km each way.

When at home with wife Anne, children Ines (12), Baptiste (10) and Oscar (4), his attention is completely on the family, and not on a computer or the BlackBerry. “My children are young but you cannot allow only half of yourself with them. They deserve, and know how to get, your full attention.”

I encourage him to drop his practicality for a moment and get philosophical: As a young leader of an old, successful company, what does he make of his future?

“As the leader of a company with products that are at the same time the fruit of tradition, know-how and conveyors of emotion, it brings me to meet lots of people that makes my life interesting. I didn’t know it would be like this five years ago. Life is about choices—some choices you generate, others you just have to make them because things happen to you. I am an optimist. I know good things will happen.”

Travel woes: Patrick Piana travels half the time but does not get to be the tourist that he wants to be sometimes. He says you learn a lot more from people than history books.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

L10 COVER

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COVER L11

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM ANUPAM NATH/AP

GURINDER OSAN/AP

Gag order? (clockwise from left) Kapil Sibal announcing the decision to monitor online comments earlier this month; Gandhi presented different aspects of his moral physique to different audiences; protesters outside Sibal’s residence in New Delhi; WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; an Assange supporter in London; and Sibal’s comments have drawn a flood of criticism on sites like Facebook.

KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

THE SIBAL SCHOOL OF

IMAGE MANAGEMENT PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY IMAGES

In this era of instantaneous and viral ‘public opinion’, managing online images is far more complex than ham­fisted, paternalist attempts at controlling criticism

I

rony is seldom so choice.

A Union minister of the “world’s largest democracy”—India’s self-promoted political brand—tries to control a medium that in the past year has proved an extraordinary tool for advancing democracy in other parts of the world.

Instead of demanding that India’s Facebook, Microsoft and Google executives filter out content that didn’t chime with his tastes, the honourable minister for telecom might have been better off (and certainly would have aroused less ire) had he discreetly logged on to the website of another tech company, Reputation.com.

“Control how you look on the Internet,” its website promises. “Promote yourself online so you look good to employers, banks and romantic prospects.” Online reputation management is serious business these days. In some circles of the very wealthy, total anonymity and invisibility on the Web have become as much a status marker as a private jet and exclusive airport lounges. But the usual goal of those who

seek to alter their online ego is to create a pretence of righteous behaviour.

The minister’s request was promptly exposed by anonymous executives, and rightly so. But as I read about the public censoring of the would-be Web censorer, I was reminded of the Gandhian hyperpublicity that now saturates our daily life.

We never know when we are being watched, or what aspect of our activities may be watched. Gandhi designed his life as a public spectacle and was famously the master of multiple audiences.

Whether communicating with peasants or with potentates, he was able to reach out to each by revealing to them carefully selected aspects of his moral physique. But we no longer have any idea who our audiences are, or even whether we are on stage or not.

How in the world to manage image, when there are more arenas than ever in which we are potentially exposed? It’s not just a problem for celebrities or corporate houses. It’s a problem faced by nations and

by governments.

Most of those governments have their own in-house versions of Reputation.com, their ministries of truth. The Chinese government is especially artful at image control. Its bureaucrats monitor Internet chatter to alert themselves to simmering problems. If people are complaining to one another about water supply or food prices, governments can seize the information and swing into action. To Chinese officials, this isn’t an intrusion.

It’s a testimony of their commitment to good, responsive government. Of course, it’s also a way of keeping demands for democracy at bay. And yet such intrusions by the Chinese government into their citizens’ Internet lives at least end up yielding some tangible benefits to the citizenry.

In the age of WikiLeaks, no government is entirely indifferent to the following two truths: that bad behaviour has a way of coming out, and that power is evermore dependent on how others view us.

Whether it concerns the deployment of military force or the price of money that markets require governments to pay, the efficacy of government actions depends as never before on their legitimacy and standing—not just in the eyes of their own people, but in the judgements of markets and of circles of public opinion often located far away. Consider the citizens of

Europe, who are discovering, brutally, that their personal futures are inextricably dependent on how their national economies are judged by ratings agencies and markets. In that sense the world is today a wide web of opinion, human belief, which has acquired an intensity and volatility that we are still only just beginning to grasp—and which we still imagine we can control by old, gatekeeper methods.

As images and stories circulate in a new international sphere of “public opinion”, the build-up and erosion of legitimacy has taken on a viral, instantaneous character. Individuals suddenly become celebrities, and the reputations of nations are irrevocably damaged overnight. As the marketers at Reputation.com like to point out, something doesn’t have to be true to wreak massive financial damage or to puncture status. In such a volatile time for reputations, the impulse to take control of India’s image, in paternalist fashion, is almost touching in its concern for India’s vulnerability. But when politicians are moved to act on that impulse, that’s not touching in the least.

Still, as I read the coverage

VIJAY VERMA/PTI

PETER MACDIARMID/ GETTY IMAGES

this week, I couldn’t help thinking that the sneaky things governments do to control information are nothing compared to what they do to obtain it, especially in the post-9/11 world.

When my wife flew in to Washington last month, authorities browsed the external hard drive she’d tossed in her luggage. It wasn’t a master spy operation. The operative left a USB

cord and other hardware in her suitcase, still plugged into the external hard drive. The USB cord was tagged red, white and blue.

Paradoxically, ham-fisted efforts to obtain and control information, in any country, may give its citizens a false sense of comfort. When officials are so clumsy at pursuing their ends—when their mental gears turn so

clunkily—we may think we’re living not in an Orwellian world, but in a gimcrack Inspector Clouseau movie. We may start to feel that we’re the ones watching our governments. That we have it in our power to hold them accountable and to expose and shame those officials who go too far.

We may even come to believe that in time, enough governments will make enough embarrassing mistakes to finally realize that acceptance of criticism, however ill-founded, is the

better state policy—not simply because it’s the politically right way for a democracy to act, but because it’s also the more effective form of PR and image management. After all, the offence the officials cause when they’re discovered trying to massage national image brings worse publicity than thousands of derogatory private websites.

As nations and economies compete against one another with ever sharper elbows, hoping to draw in capital and human resources, the

reputational stakes will spiral upward. Governments will get cleverer, and quite possibly stealthier, at working to make sure their nations’ reputations appear well scrubbed.

As for the public image of our political class, and the honourable minister’s image in particular: After having been assigned to handle the 2G scandal, and now this, perhaps we should all chip in to buy him a voucher for the $15,000-a-year (around `8 lakh) “ReputationDefender” subscription, the

top-of-the-range package. The image scrubbers at Reputation.com would have a logical place to start—that new Facebook page, “We Hate Kapil Sibal”.

Sunil Khilnani is Avantha Professor and 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

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM ANUPAM NATH/AP

GURINDER OSAN/AP

Gag order? (clockwise from left) Kapil Sibal announcing the decision to monitor online comments earlier this month; Gandhi presented different aspects of his moral physique to different audiences; protesters outside Sibal’s residence in New Delhi; WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; an Assange supporter in London; and Sibal’s comments have drawn a flood of criticism on sites like Facebook.

KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

THE SIBAL SCHOOL OF

IMAGE MANAGEMENT PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY IMAGES

In this era of instantaneous and viral ‘public opinion’, managing online images is far more complex than ham­fisted, paternalist attempts at controlling criticism

I

rony is seldom so choice.

A Union minister of the “world’s largest democracy”—India’s self-promoted political brand—tries to control a medium that in the past year has proved an extraordinary tool for advancing democracy in other parts of the world.

Instead of demanding that India’s Facebook, Microsoft and Google executives filter out content that didn’t chime with his tastes, the honourable minister for telecom might have been better off (and certainly would have aroused less ire) had he discreetly logged on to the website of another tech company, Reputation.com.

“Control how you look on the Internet,” its website promises. “Promote yourself online so you look good to employers, banks and romantic prospects.” Online reputation management is serious business these days. In some circles of the very wealthy, total anonymity and invisibility on the Web have become as much a status marker as a private jet and exclusive airport lounges. But the usual goal of those who

seek to alter their online ego is to create a pretence of righteous behaviour.

The minister’s request was promptly exposed by anonymous executives, and rightly so. But as I read about the public censoring of the would-be Web censorer, I was reminded of the Gandhian hyperpublicity that now saturates our daily life.

We never know when we are being watched, or what aspect of our activities may be watched. Gandhi designed his life as a public spectacle and was famously the master of multiple audiences.

Whether communicating with peasants or with potentates, he was able to reach out to each by revealing to them carefully selected aspects of his moral physique. But we no longer have any idea who our audiences are, or even whether we are on stage or not.

How in the world to manage image, when there are more arenas than ever in which we are potentially exposed? It’s not just a problem for celebrities or corporate houses. It’s a problem faced by nations and

by governments.

Most of those governments have their own in-house versions of Reputation.com, their ministries of truth. The Chinese government is especially artful at image control. Its bureaucrats monitor Internet chatter to alert themselves to simmering problems. If people are complaining to one another about water supply or food prices, governments can seize the information and swing into action. To Chinese officials, this isn’t an intrusion.

It’s a testimony of their commitment to good, responsive government. Of course, it’s also a way of keeping demands for democracy at bay. And yet such intrusions by the Chinese government into their citizens’ Internet lives at least end up yielding some tangible benefits to the citizenry.

In the age of WikiLeaks, no government is entirely indifferent to the following two truths: that bad behaviour has a way of coming out, and that power is evermore dependent on how others view us.

Whether it concerns the deployment of military force or the price of money that markets require governments to pay, the efficacy of government actions depends as never before on their legitimacy and standing—not just in the eyes of their own people, but in the judgements of markets and of circles of public opinion often located far away. Consider the citizens of

Europe, who are discovering, brutally, that their personal futures are inextricably dependent on how their national economies are judged by ratings agencies and markets. In that sense the world is today a wide web of opinion, human belief, which has acquired an intensity and volatility that we are still only just beginning to grasp—and which we still imagine we can control by old, gatekeeper methods.

As images and stories circulate in a new international sphere of “public opinion”, the build-up and erosion of legitimacy has taken on a viral, instantaneous character. Individuals suddenly become celebrities, and the reputations of nations are irrevocably damaged overnight. As the marketers at Reputation.com like to point out, something doesn’t have to be true to wreak massive financial damage or to puncture status. In such a volatile time for reputations, the impulse to take control of India’s image, in paternalist fashion, is almost touching in its concern for India’s vulnerability. But when politicians are moved to act on that impulse, that’s not touching in the least.

Still, as I read the coverage

VIJAY VERMA/PTI

PETER MACDIARMID/ GETTY IMAGES

this week, I couldn’t help thinking that the sneaky things governments do to control information are nothing compared to what they do to obtain it, especially in the post-9/11 world.

When my wife flew in to Washington last month, authorities browsed the external hard drive she’d tossed in her luggage. It wasn’t a master spy operation. The operative left a USB

cord and other hardware in her suitcase, still plugged into the external hard drive. The USB cord was tagged red, white and blue.

Paradoxically, ham-fisted efforts to obtain and control information, in any country, may give its citizens a false sense of comfort. When officials are so clumsy at pursuing their ends—when their mental gears turn so

clunkily—we may think we’re living not in an Orwellian world, but in a gimcrack Inspector Clouseau movie. We may start to feel that we’re the ones watching our governments. That we have it in our power to hold them accountable and to expose and shame those officials who go too far.

We may even come to believe that in time, enough governments will make enough embarrassing mistakes to finally realize that acceptance of criticism, however ill-founded, is the

better state policy—not simply because it’s the politically right way for a democracy to act, but because it’s also the more effective form of PR and image management. After all, the offence the officials cause when they’re discovered trying to massage national image brings worse publicity than thousands of derogatory private websites.

As nations and economies compete against one another with ever sharper elbows, hoping to draw in capital and human resources, the

reputational stakes will spiral upward. Governments will get cleverer, and quite possibly stealthier, at working to make sure their nations’ reputations appear well scrubbed.

As for the public image of our political class, and the honourable minister’s image in particular: After having been assigned to handle the 2G scandal, and now this, perhaps we should all chip in to buy him a voucher for the $15,000-a-year (around `8 lakh) “ReputationDefender” subscription, the

top-of-the-range package. The image scrubbers at Reputation.com would have a logical place to start—that new Facebook page, “We Hate Kapil Sibal”.

Sunil Khilnani is Avantha Professor and 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

L12

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011

Travel

LOUNGE

GUIDE

Just around the corner SHISHIR DHULLA

Author Sam Miller recommends some easy day trips from his forthcoming ‘Blue Guide India’ about our historical monuments

W Blue Guide India:

By Sam Miller, Blue Guides (represented in India by Penguin Books India), 888 pages, `899.

riter and former BBC India correspondent Sam Miller traversed India for three years to put together the Blue Guide India. In keeping with the tradition of the Blue Guides, the almost century-old travel guidebooks with a focus on art and architecture, he visited every major historical monument in the country, and many hundreds of minor ones, for what he calls the most exhausting and enjoyable assignment he has ever undertaken.

For Lounge, Miller picks five easy day trips from India’s great cities—places where you won’t be harassed by touts and are unlikely, for now at least, to meet other tourists.

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

SAM MILLER

Vasai (or Bassein) Just north of Mumbai and easily accessible by rail (Vasai Road is the nearest station) or road are the ruins of the Portuguese sea fort and city of Vasai. It was previously known as Bassein and has some impressive fortifications and no less than five beautiful ruined churches. Vasai was ceded to the Portuguese by the sultan of Gujarat in 1535, and stonework from older Islamic buildings was reused by the Portuguese. For two centuries, Vasai Fort was a place of fabled pros-

perity, inside which only the Portuguese aristocracy were allowed to live. But Vasai was relinquished by the Portuguese in the 18th century, and was forgotten.

It is now a place of many ruins, strangely under-visited given their proximity to Mumbai.

The 2.5km-long walls of the city are in excellent condition, a great example of 16th century defensive architecture, with steeply sloping ramparts, and sharply angled bastions along the sea face of the fort.

My favourite building is the Church of St Paul, which is with-

Bhoganandishwara Temple

out a roof except over the chancel.

It has an unusual main entrance with three arches resting on Doric columns. This leads into the nave of the church. A long low arch still spans the nave, and dozens of gravestones of Portuguese soldiers and migrants are set into the floor.

The most important of the churches, dedicated to St Gonsalo Garcia, is just behind St Paul’s and has recently been restored for Vasai’s large Catholic population.

Garcia, the first Indian Catholic saint, was born in 1556 in Bassein to a Portuguese father and an

Indian mother. He was one of the 26 “Nagasaki martyrs”, Franciscan missionaries who were crucified in 1597 in Japan when they refused to renounce Christianity.

The façade is in excellent condition, with Corinthian double columns on either side of the entrance arch, and an ornate rectangular window above. Notice the IHS monogram of Christ (the first three letters of Jesus’ name in Greek, transliterated into the Roman script), with accompanying cross and nails—on either side of the rectangular window.

Ambika Kalna

ring has only white lingams.

Then head into the Rajbari compound to visit the main group of temples. The first, a small Pratapeswar Temple (1849), has some of the finest terracotta decoration to be found anywhere in India. The modelling of the figures—humans, gods and animals, mainly in scenes from the Ramayan—are in excellent condition.

The Lalji Temple (1739) is within a walled compound, and the oldest in Kalna. Note the unusual vertical carved flanges around the fluted corners of the temple, with fine sculptures of animals and humans attacking each other.

This town overlooking the Hooghly, 70km north of Kolkata, has several temples grouped inside the old palace compound, or Rajbari, formerly belonging to the princely state of Burdwan. Once in Kalna, ask for the Rajbari, and you will be brought to a road that separates the main group of temples on the left, and the unusual circular Shiva Temple complex on the right.

Head first to the Shiva Temple complex (1809), consisting of two concentric circles made up of 108 small temples. In the outer ring, the temples have alternating white and black lingams, while the inner

The Nandi Hills, just 45km north of Bangalore, were used as a summer retreat by Tipu Sultan and the British—and are now a popular tourist resort. But few visitors stop at the Bhoganandishwara Temple (9th-10th century) in Nandi village, at the foot of the main hill. The temple has an unusual mixture of different architectural styles, including Chola, Hoysala and Vijayanagara, which date back to the Nolamba period. The complex is entered through a large arcaded outer courtyard with some minor shrines, mainly to nagas, or snake deities. A gateway leads into the main temple compound, which has some superb relief carvings, mainly of Hindu gods—with several images of triple-headed Brahma riding on a goose, Vishnu riding Garuda, and Shiva on his vehicle, Nandi. There are also some fine images of female water carriers, dancers and courtly scenes. Be sure to walk around the shrines’ circumambulatory passages to see some partially hidden relief carvings.

Narnaul Much-derided Haryana is full of undiscovered gems, and my favourite is Narnaul, just 130km south-west of Delhi. Among the fascinating buildings in this town are a water palace, a superb 16th century tomb, and an unusual example of 17th century Mughal domestic architecture. Close to the Rajasthan border, Narnaul was once a major administrative centre under the Mughals, and Akbar established a mint there.

On its southern outskirts, the Jal Mahal or water palace has been restored recently. A stone bridge takes visitors across a man-made lake to a two-storeyed palace with five rooftop chattris. When the lake is full, the palace is totally surrounded by water.

The mausoleum of Ibrahim Khan Suri, which is in the heart of Narnaul, is—in my opinion—one of India’s finest tombs. Ibrahim Khan was the grandfather of Sher Shah Suri, who defeated the Mughal emperor Humayun, and whose brief dynasty ruled in Delhi for 15 years. Sher Shah was born in, or near, Narnaul—and the tomb over his grandfather’s grave, built circa 1540, is in excellent condition.

Note the high plinth, white dome, the octagonal chattris on the four corners of the roof, and the mix of colours, mainly grey and red, that makes the tomb so impressive from a distance. Go close to see the remarkable carved stonework; in particular the corbelling over the main doorway, which prefigures some of the fine sandstone carving on the Jahangiri Mahal in Agra Fort. Some 750m to the north-east of Ibrahim Khan’s tomb, in the backstreets, is another fascinating building. Known as Birbal ka Chatta, this five-storey residential complex was actually built after the death of Birbal, Akbar’s best-known adviser. It now seems that this crumbling edifice was constructed in the 17th century for the local chief, Rai Mukand Das. It contains an elaborate arrangement of underground rooms, lit through a complex series of skylights.

JOE MANOJ D

Alamparai Midway between Mamallapuram and Puducherry, 95km south of Chennai, are the romantic ruins of the 17th century sea fort of Alamparai. It was constructed as a Mughal outpost and was used as a dockyard and trading port. It came under the rule of the nawabs of Arcot, who ceded it to the French before it was captured by the British—and allowed to fall into disrepair. Parts of it were swept away in the 2004 tsunami, and the sea continues to intrude into the ruins. Local fisherman can take visitors on a boat trip around and through the ruins.

Blue Guide India can be ordered online at www.blueguides.com.

It will be in book stores in India in January.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

TRAVEL L13

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

DETOURS

SALIL TRIPATHI

We remember you Plaques and sculptures that commemorate its students, and professors, tell the tale of Bangladesh

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othing sets apart one apartment from another in this professors’ colony off a busy road in downtown Dhaka where my friend Meghna has taken me. The colony has a quiet, residential feel, with mosquito nets covering the windows. Cars are parked in a disorderly fashion. An ancient guard rises slowly and salutes us as we enter.

Dahlias once grew here, Meghna says, but the garden is now desolate, as we walk along the path taking us to the back of the apartment on the ground floor. There used to be servants’ quarters here, but with growing prosperity, now there is a garage. There is a brown door, now shut, she says.

“That’s where they entered,” she adds, showing no emotion.

“They” were soldiers of the

Nationalist spirit: The Aparajeyo Bangla statue has become iconic.

Pakistani army, who came to the colony on the night of 25 March 1971, and began banging on all doors. When Meghna’s mother opened the door, an officer asked her in Urdu, “Where is the professor?”

Her mother asked why they wanted to meet her husband, Jyotirmoy Guhathakurta, who taught English at the university and was marking his students’ papers.

The officer said they had

come to take him away.

“Where?” Meghna’s mother asked. The officer didn’t reply.

They took him and other professors out of their homes.

“We turned around and heard the firing of guns,” she told me, adding: “And we saw all of them lying in a pool of blood. Some were shouting for water. We rushed out to the front part of the compound. I saw my father lying on the ground,” she says, pointing out the spot. He was bleeding and badly hurt. He died five days later. There is a tree near the spot where the good professor was shot. There is an abstract sculpture of a flame now, remembering the professors killed that night.

Later, Meghna, who is an academic and peace activist, takes me across the road to Jagannath Hall, the hostel for

RAQIB CHOWDHURY

Hindu students. The campus has an old-world charm, with colonial-era buildings. The hall has a cream wall, covered with moss. Someone has scrawled Brazil on one of the walls, cheering its football team.

Some of the earliest demonstrations demanding the right to be administered in their language, Bengali, had taken place at the university. In 1970, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman led the Awami League to a spectacular electoral victory. Instead of inviting him to form the government, General Yahya Khan began negotiations. At that time too, students came out in protest. Controlling the campus was a major strategic objective for the Pakistani army. Many students died; they are remembered today through plaques and statues.

The most prominent of these is Aparajeyo Bangla (Invincible Bengal) with two shirtless men, one carrying a large rifle in his hands, another with a rifle slung over his shoulder, with a woman in a sari walking a step behind, carrying what looks like a first-aid box. The image has become iconic, used often to rouse nationalist spirits. Nearby, at a place called Shirishtola, there is a quiet place to reflect: stone slabs in white, with intricately carved reliefs in red, narrating Bangladesh’s history. On adjoining panels, there are poems of Rabindranath Tagore and Nazrul Islam.

To commemorate the students, faculty and staff who died in the liberation war, a Tagore poem is inscribed: “Moronoshagor pare tomra amar, tomader shmori,/Nikhile rochiya gele apnari ghor, tomader shmori (You have crossed the ocean of death, becoming immortal—we remember you/You reside everywhere, we remember you).”

We look at the other sculptures scattered in and around the campus. One shows young men preparing to attack an enemy target, another has men with arms locked, determined not to use violence.

Almost all the statues are of men: They look upright, standing firm, their chests

filled out with pride, their faces turned skyward, like classic, Soviet-era sculptures extolling the supremacy of human endeavour over insurmountable odds. Women feature in few sculptures, usually in supportive roles, never with weapons. Only one controversial sculpture shows a woman being assaulted (rape was a weapon of violence and countless women were abused.

Many have remained silent; only in recent years have some begun to speak out, and their stories are still being written).

Meghna then brings me to a fenced-off area, with a solid base of bricks beneath. Flowers grow in that plot. It is a mass grave. A small plaque remembers the lost lives. Many mass graves remain to be discovered. There is a private initiative, led by entrepreneur Akku Chowdhury, advertising professional Aly Zaker, physician Sarwar Ali, publisher Mofidul Hoque, architect Rabiul Hussain, and banker Tanvir Haider Chowdhury and others who had fought for Bangladesh’s freedom in their own way, who have come together and built a small Liberation War Museum. It has taken four decades for them to get land from the government to build a proper world-class museum. Construction began in December 2010.

The museum will bring together stories, experiences, and mementos from around the country.

But the history of that liberation lives in Dhaka’s streets. The saga began on that campus, where students and teachers rebelled against injustice.

First they spoke, then wrote, then demonstrated, protested, marched, and finally, some among them took up arms.

Many paid the ultimate price.

The statues extol their heroism; by working unobtrusively for peace and talking about her heart-rending experience, Meghna ensures, through her dignity and humanity, that nobody will forget what happened 40 years ago.

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

FOOT NOTES | GAYATRI JAYARAMAN

Lumiere’s land A cinema tour of France is not merely about new places, but also about seeing them with new eyes

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hen a team of nine from Lowe Lintas went to France in June for a hard-earned incentive programme, they thought it would be much like the corporate camp/workshop affair that most companies organize for their executives. But the Cinema en France ReBoot programme organized by Alliance Media and Entertainment Pvt. Ltd, an entertainment and media solutions company, turned out to be so much more. “Inside every ad film-maker lurks a film-maker, and we wanted to create a programme to nurture that ambition such that money can’t buy,” says Sunil Doshi, founder and managing director of Alliance Media.

The nine-day trip kicked off with a visit to the Lumiere Institute, a screening and one-on-one with Thierry Fremaux, its director, and a lavish dinner at Tetedoie in the gourmet capital of Lyon. As each day unfolded, so did its

RICHARD F LYON/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

cinematic and gastronomic delights—a participatory slot at a workshop at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, a private tour of the Charlie Chaplin House and the Stanley Kubrick retrospective being just a few of its highlights.

Rexina Devraj, 30, an art director with Lowe Lintas, Mumbai, explains why the tour hit the highs for her. “You grow up hearing and watching idols of cult films like Kubrick and Chaplin, but to actually experience them in person is just awesome. I didn’t know about the Lumiere brothers’ contributions to the technical aspects of cinema until I visited the museum.

“The groundskeeper of the Chaplin house told us we were probably the last people to see it in its original state as it is now going to be renovated as a fancier museum. The detail with which he explained to us who Chaplin was as a person, his affairs, his thought processes, his life is not something you get even out of books. The tour upgrades you about decades of cinema in one go,” she says.

R. Balki, chairman and chief

The source: Institut Lumiere, Lyon, is a trove of technical innovation.

creative officer of Lowe Lintas, says he was all for the tour not merely because it was a cinematic journey, but because he wanted his team to draw inspiration where they could.

“The point is not even the cinematic references of the tour.

Advertising professionals are always attending camps and workshops, but you learn best when you are inspired to do so.

When people go on holidays they are too busy relaxing to learn and observe. Exposure can influence you deeply. It could be simply a pattern you pick to use in the artwork, or music, or art, or architectural detail, even food.

The overall influence is what provides the inspiration for a film-maker to give back to his craft,” he says.

Doshi explains that when Alliance Media observed high attrition rates in the advertising film industry often stem from professionals wanting to follow their passions, they devised the ReBoot programme to help nurture that ambition in a way that would allow professionals to give back to advertising while adding to their growth as film-makers.

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011

Books

LOUNGE

CRIMINAL MIND

ZAC O’YEAH

The Markham deception HEMANT PADALKAR/HINDUSTAN TIMES

An investigation into an astonishing case of literary kleptomania for which the publisher paid a fortune

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ow that I’ve gotten used to the book pirates who openly flog their wares on busy street corners, I sometimes stop to browse to keep myself informed of public taste and the current super best-sellers— self-help books, Not Without My Daughter and Harry Potter, mostly. I suppose it must be counted as some kind of a mark of arrival in the literary world to have one’s book selected for distribution on the pirates’ pushcarts.

According to reports, a typical roadside pirate may have a total stock of some 650 books at any given time, worth a paltry `25,000, which makes it a fairly small operation. But let’s examine this phenomenon of copyright theft a little more closely.

If one takes the romantic view, it could be seen as a cottage industry that brings low-priced books to people (after all, most neighbourhoods don’t have bookshops). One could even look at the pirate as a modern counterpart of the traditional travelling storyteller. The difference is that those rural raconteurs employ narratives which are free of copyright, and are artists in their own right; their retellings are spellbindingly dramatic.

Pirates, on the other hand, cut corners, use cheap binding that allows pages to fall out, and sometimes the smudged print is tilted sideways and words and phrases have fallen off the page.

It has been suggested that all these small-scale book pirates

Raiders on the storm: A romantic cottage industry, or a crime? Literary piracy by India’s street booksellers is a combination of the two. taken together cause a loss to the tune of `100-200 crore to the Indian publishing industry (figures for the volume of piracy anywhere on the planet are of course impossible to compute accurately, since pirates don’t report sales statistics. But, for comparison, in the US, media piracy is estimated to cause an annual financial loss of somewhere between $20-60 billion, or `1-3.1 trillion. This sum presumably includes illegal downloading; Hollywood’s big budget Avatar seems to top the list, with some 21 million illegal downloads internationally).

As I was brooding on this, just the other day, I heard some juicy gossip on the latest, much more bizarre case of literary kleptomania. It appears that a wannabe author who calls himself Q.R. Markham, and who is the co-owner of a bookshop in Brooklyn, has over the years been copying habitually from other writers—starting in his early 20s by plagiarizing bits and pieces

for his own short stories. Even the reputed The Paris Review fell for the scam and published, as early as in 2002 (issue 161), a short story of his called Bethune Street (into which the bookseller had inserted snippets from here and there, including a sentence stolen from Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana).

As no editor detected the bluff, the bookseller went on to craft an entire spy novel about a secret organization whose business model is to kidnap and exterminate spies. He pieced together bits from various thrillers, cannibalizing, for example, some five books of the post-Fleming 007 franchise (including License Renewed and For Special Services written by John Gardner), and two of Robert Ludlum (The Prometheus Deception and The Janson Directive). He even seems to have partly plagiarized his pen name, Q.R. Markham, combining his own initials with the pseudonym Kingsley Amis used to write a 007

Q&A | NINA GODIWALLA

pastiche back in the 1960s.

According to the reports, he wasn’t using Google Books and Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V. The bookseller actually sat at his kitchen table with original books by his favourite writers spread out around him, typing in the pages that seemed to fit into the story he had in mind (he has now confessed to the habit of always marking out, as he reads books, passages and lines that he wished he had written himself). He then made some minor changes, adjusting names and locations, to get the bits to fit together. Let’s look at just one example. Q.R. Markham writes, in a scene where his top spy Chase is bedding a new lady: “An odd nickname for the elegant, tall, and very efficient and liberated young lady with a taste for cocktail dresses and thigh-high boots. After a slightly shaky start, Chase and Frankie had become close friends and what she liked to call ‘occasional lovers’.”

In For Special Services, from the James Bond franchise, one reads: “An apt nickname for the elegant, tall, and very efficient and liberated young lady. After a slightly shaky start, Bond and Q’ute had become friends and what she liked to call ‘occasional lovers’.”

The weirdest thing is that this postmodernistic pulp collage apparently reads well enough for the author to have cut a deal with a major publishing house.

Markham’s audaciousness seems even more audacious if you know what literary contracts look like— any publisher of sound mind adds a page full of warranties and indemnities wherein the author has to guarantee that the work is an original, and “is in no way whatsoever an infringement of any existing copyright”.

The bogus novel, Assassin of Secrets, was published to great acclaim in November, and although reviewers smelt the scent of 007, the respected Publisher’s Weekly proclaimed

B Y S UPRIYA N AIR

a conversation:

supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· he now runs her own company teaching leadership courses focused on stress management and self-awareness, but in a previous life Nina Godiwalla worked on Wall Street. The child of a Mumbai Parsi family settled in Houston, Texas, US, Godiwalla’s double-diasporic origins added a third migration when she moved to New York as a Morgan Stanley analyst, and discovered a culture far removed from her warm, part-Asian, part-Southern roots.

Godiwalla writes about the experience in Suits: A Woman on Wall Street, a memoir about life in a shark tank of ambition, where anything can be traded for success. Edited excerpts from

S

At what point in your life as a young Asian-American did you think your story could become a book?

Once I realized investment banking was not the right route for me, I was quite lost since I had hardly spent time thinking about what I enjoyed doing. As part of my soul-searching process, I went to Dartmouth to do a master’s programme in liberal arts.

My thesis was the first draft of Suits: A Woman on Wall Street.

The book started with two short stories. One about growing up as a second-generation Parsi American and feeling I’d be a failure if I wasn’t a doctor or engineer, and another was about my journey from small-town Texas suburbs to

Zac O’ Yeah is most recently the author of Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan.

Write to Zac at criminalmind@livemint.com

RAYCHEL DEPPE

Bringing down the Wall A Parsi­American banker turned author writes about Wall Street’s toxic culture

that “the obvious Ian Fleming influence just adds to the appeal”. Shortly thereafter the hoax was exposed—where else but on the Internet—by hawk-eyed book watchers with stern blogs and inquisitive online forums. Assassin of Secrets was pulled off the shelves within five days of its release and the whole print run is in the process of being pulped.

But by that time, according to one of my sources, translation rights had already been sold for astronomical sums to European publishers. In Italy, where the publishing industry isn’t exactly rolling in cash right now, a publisher apparently paid so much for the fake novel that they can’t afford to translate, for example, Indian fiction into Italian for a long time to come.

Right after the scandal broke, Assassin of Secrets pushed itself up the Amazon sales list to 1,034, although now that the book has been pulled back it is down to No. 122,019 (last time I checked).

On the other hand, somebody has already put a collectible copy on sale online for $250.

And what happened to Markham? Well, in one of his online confessions about being addicted to plagiarizing, the 35-year-old mentions that subsequent to being exposed, he has lost his bookshop job and his girlfriend. But he seems to have reinvented himself as a literary cause célèbre.

It wouldn’t surprise me if he soon gets another publishing offer—this time for a semi-fake autobiography, perhaps titled The Crook of Books, which will probably soon take its place on the pirates’ pushcarts alongside Between the Assassinations and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Wall Street. In hindsight, I think my main motivation to keep writing was that I felt silenced during my investment banking experience and being able to write about it finally gave me a voice.

Could you tell us a bit about the process of writing ‘Suits’?

Were there writers whom you read who influenced you?

My true fascination is with people. Had I been encouraged to study whatever I liked as an undergrad, I would have chosen psychology. But that just wasn’t the kind of major that would have allowed my dad to sleep well at night. I could already anticipate his reaction, “What about electrical engineering or biochemistry? You can get solid jobs with good benefits with those majors.” Growing up, I had always avoided reading and writing, partly because I found it challenging and partly because my dad was much more focused on our math/science grades.

A book I really enjoyed was

Breaking the bank: Nina Godiwalla.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. It is because she articulated the complex feelings I had about being a second-generation Indian American before I even knew how to express it.

Do you think women on Wall Street now face the same issues you encounter in ‘Suits’? Is the culture changing?

After I wrote the first draft for my thesis, I went straight to get

Suits—A Woman on Wall Street: Hachette India, 350 pages,`395. a Wharton MBA. I assumed the same thing: Things must have changed. But I’d hear the same complaints from women and minorities interning in investment banks, which helped me realize that the issues I faced weren’t unique to me and not that much has changed. What was more eye-opening for me is to hear so many people across various industries—education, government, non-profits—say

that they’ve experienced a milder version of what I describe in Suits.

Your book gives us some human insight into the institutions that are now causing so much public anger in the US. To what extent can we link the culture of Wall Street with its technical mistakes?

During my Wall Street experience, I saw how detrimental it can be to have leaders who operate on fear.

One of the biggest fears is that of failure. There tends to be more blame than personal accountability. I’ve often called Wall Street a caricature of Corporate America. Many corporate cultures operate on fear but on Wall Street, the money, stakes and egos, are a lot bigger.

I’m confident the lack of personal accountability and the tendency to turn a blind eye are core issues that brought us to the financial crisis. After writing Suits, many former investment bankers have reached out to share the inappropriate behaviours they saw at various banks, and how they aren’t surprised by the crisis it ultimately caused.

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PORIBORTON! AN ELECTION DIARY | RUCHIR JOSHI

ROCOCO AND OTHER WORLDS | AFZAL AHMED SYED

Loose change

The acacia’s shade Two poems by one of Urdu’s finest living poets, translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi

ARIJIT SEN/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Scattered snapshots of the campaign for this year’s polls in West Bengal, stitched together into a book

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Poriborton!

An Election Diary: HarperCollins, 162 pages, `199.

B Y S OUTIK B ISWAS ···························· he evening before the Communists fell in Bengal, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee sat in a small room in her home near a stinking canal in Kolkata. In her off-white sari and rubber sandals, she appeared more calm and confident than I had ever seen her before. Sweaty, access-happy journalists, party functionaries and a portly, camera-toting city mayor kept her company. Didi fiddled with her BlackBerry and daubed paint on canvas.

“Why don’t you sing?” she suddenly asked a journalist. Suitably proud, the happy hack glowed, looked around in mock embarrassment, and broke into Rabindrasangeet. Soon, many other journalists in the room had joined the chorus. “Sing louder!”

Banerjee said. The crescendo rose, more people joined in.

Too many cooks usually spoil the broth, so the chorus inevitably went off-key. “Sing better,” Banerjee admonished the press pack playfully. Almost on cue a journalist launched into another Rabindrasangeet. “More aro aro aro dao pran (Give me more life, give me more life),” almost reflecting the popular mood.

Others joined in. Watching all this, I remember thinking: As long as the chorus continues, the Communists can stop dreaming of making a comeback. Outside, millions who had voted for Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress party awaited poriborton or change. It had been Banerjee’s clarion call during the campaign.

Banerjee succeeded in dislodging the sclerotic Communists and pulled off a historic regime change. It is too early to say whether she will now bring in the poriborton people really want—more jobs, improved services, depoliticized institutions and better governance. But when Ruchir Joshi went on the road in Bengal this summer to file a bunch of pithy dispatches on the campaign for Kolkata’s The Telegraph newspaper, poriborton was already in the air.

T

RAJ K RAJ/HINDUSTAN TIMES

Instead of the white jasmine we proclaim the acacia as our national tree It does not line the campuses of US colleges is nowhere to be found in tropical gardens remains untouched by the ikebana practitioners Biologists do not classify acacia as a tree because it does not support hangings Acacia is the shrub with which our cities, our deserts and our poetry is replete

Change we can believe in? Children during this year’s West Bengal election; and (right) Ruchir Joshi.

Travelling in Kolkata and the countryside, he captures some of this desperate yearning for change and brings to life the heat and dust and slogans of a momentous campaign set against the ennui and “slow motion bustle” of life in Bengal.

Joshi’s dispatches from “Waste-Bungle” are witty and perceptive. He writes about a Mamata-baiting apparatchik who rants against her with much “revolutionary pelvic thrusting” at a public meeting. The veteran Communist betrays the vulgarity of the bhadralok, and helps his party lose several thousand votes in the process. He meets a Maoist sympathizer with a Sai Baba ringtone on his mobile phone.

There are fleeting references to a newspaper debate in Kolkata in the run-up to the election, an exhibition of paintings by Banerjee, a public meeting of Blighted Bengal’s flotsam and jetsam, whose lives will possibly never change despite a regime change, and a trip to Darjeeling to look into the resurrection of a muddled statehood movement.

There are even goats fornicating on the sidelines of a campaign

TABISH KHAIR

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT .S. Madhavan’s Lanthanbatheriyile Luthiniyakal (2003), now translated into English as Litanies of Dutch Battery by Rajesh Rajamohan and published by Penguin, is an important novel and, to be honest, would have received much more international attention had it been written originally in English. It fits the bill for such writing, with its sweeping expanse, its mixture of the personal and the public, myth and history, culture and idiosyncrasy. Post-colonial critics would have made much of its fantastical social landscape, historical-mythic

Rococo and Other Worlds:

By Afzal Ahmed Syed, Translated from the Urdu

by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Wesleyan University Press, 108 pages, $22.95 (around `1,190).

Our National Tree

THE READING ROOM

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orn in Ghazipur in 1946, trained as an entomologist and now resident in Karachi, the reclusive poet Afzal Ahmed Syed is a master of the classical and contemporary Urdu poetic forms. His translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi calls him “the best Urdu poet of his generation”.

The poems in Rococo and Other Worlds explore the myths and realities of South Asia and West Asia. “Their bold imagery creates narratives of voluptuous perfection, which remain inseparable from the political realities that Syed witnessed as a young observer of the violent separation of East Pakistan and emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 and of the Lebanese civil war in 1976,” Farooqi writes.

sweep and its humour. More colonial critics would have been flattered by its clever references to old colonial bridges. Epithets like “hybridity” would have been bestowed on it in England, much to the chagrin of narrow nationalist critics back home.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), Madhavan writes in Malayalam and lives in Patna, Bihar. This means that his “hybridity” and “post-coloniality” are just not visible to a lot of Western critics.

After all, how many of them know what languages are spoken in Bihar or on the Malabar coast? This has, I fear, cost Madhavan’s novel the international attention it

meeting—Joshi feels they may be already celebrating the impending poriborton.

There are some callow, unidentified political pundits talking about the darker and grimmer future for Bengal: one in which the “Red Gang” is imploding because it is out of power and can offer no patronage, and the “Green Gang” stands discredited after their venality and ineptitude has been thoroughly exposed. Politics all over India has become increasingly lumpenized, and Bengal is no exception. Are Bengal’s problems the problems of its politicians alone? Or are they symptomatic of a society in slow decline?

Don’t look for any insights in Joshi’s book. His diaries work as scattered snapshots of a campaign written to stingy newspaper deadlines. Stitched together in a slim book, they are less effective than what they were when I first read some of the pieces in The Telegraph.

The biggest pity is that Joshi doesn’t meet the dramatis personae—the dour, José Saramago-loving Stalinist and “chief

bookkeeper of Leftist grievance” Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the spitfire populist and amateur painter of “childlike” paintings, Mamata Banerjee. That could have made for two interesting chapters.

After the votes are counted and “that woman”—as the commissars loved calling Banerjee—has won, a taxi driver tells Joshi and his friend that nothing will change in Bengal. Banerjee is an obdurate politician with a lot of spunk. But her early days in power show that she continues to revel in the politics of grievance and opposition and proffers no vision for a beleaguered state in the way, for example, her peer in neighbouring Bihar, Nitish Kumar, does. Without a larger vision, poriborton, as Joshi suspects, will remain a chimera.

deserves, though it has been well-received in India.

But what of that? Read it as the “outstanding” work of fiction that, among others, Khushwant Singh has rightly called it. This excellent English translation of Madhavan’s novel was also shortlisted for The Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2011.

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.

A biography of the recently deceased entrepreneur, based on 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years.

Killing Lincoln, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard.

The commentator looks at the events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Being George Washington: The Indispensable Man as You’ve Never Seen Him, by Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe.

How Washington turned himself into the indispensable (if imperfect) man.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand. An American Olympic runner’s story of survival as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, by Chris Matthews.

Oh well, maybe I am an

Look books There was a time when books were supposed to expand your horizons. Perhaps they still do; I know that some excellent books of that sort, fiction and non-fiction, are written every year. Yet, why is it that when one looks up any major Western list of best-selling books, one comes across books that seem to be so nationally located?

Here are the first five best-selling non-fiction hardbacks listed by The New York Times:

Soutik Biswas is the India editor of BBC News online.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS On the road during Bengal’s election

We are much taken with the spinous acacia that kept our soil from being washed away into the Arabian Sea.

Rococo and Other Worlds Elias Canetti maintains Goya was a partisan The one who made the Maja Nude the Maja Clothed, and the Majas on a Balcony His Rococo world disappeared in Third of May in a dark Madrid alley He became oblivious that parasol carriers had adorned his canvas and his bed The source of light in his canvas is a floor lantern troops whose faces remain hidden discharge fire on unresisting civilians everyone resolves death in his own manner the white shirt has his chest thrust out in defiance Successive generations of painters shall revisit the theme The subject of his last oil the Milkmaid of Bordeaux would have been claimed by some revolution In the passing it may be mentioned Goya sided against Napoleon with the people of Spain Musharraf Ali Farooqi is an author and translator.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

idealist, but how about just one book on a non-American up there?

Devilish angels Steven Pinker’s new data-infested tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, claims that violence has declined drastically across history. Pinker is right when he critiques the media-influenced belief that we are living in increasingly violent times. He is also right in his claim that many kinds of physical violence have declined in recent centuries. But his thesis is largely invalid because he does not fully contextualize the ways in which violence has changed with changing modes of production.

As Judith Butler puts it in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Silence, “To the extent that we commit violence, we are acting on another,

putting the other at risk, causing the other damage, threatening to expunge the other.”

Obviously, in societies where capital empowers, and states are committed to creating “wealth” by aiding capital, it is often not necessary or even desirable to opt for physical violence. Your boss needs to fire you, not to beat you up. The state needs to move those “tribals” out, so that their ancestral lands can be “developed”. Actually, it is you who—on being fired or “relocated”—might want to beat someone up, and would be rightly restrained by the police from doing so.

So much for our better angels.

Tabish Khair is the author of the poetry collection Man of Glass and the novel The Thing about Thugs.

Write to Tabish at readingroom@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2011

Culture

LOUNGE

Q&A | KATE WINSLET

Playing one of four ‘caged animals’ CONTOUR/GETTY IMAGES

Kate Winslet gets close to a stage role with Roman Polanski’s new film, ‘Carnage’

B Y E LLEN G AMERMAN ···························· ot long into Carnage, the new film by Roman Polanski adapted from the Tony Award-winning play God of Carnage, Kate Winslet projectile-vomits with spectacular gusto. The scene—with books, coffee table and clothes all caught in the crossfire—offers a rare moment of extreme physical action in a movie that otherwise keeps a tight focus on the dialogue, just as the play did.

This part is as close to a stage role as Winslet has gotten in a career focused on the screen. This year, the 36-year-old Academy Award winner played the title role in the TV miniseries Mildred Pierce and an infectious-disease expert in the film Contagion (where again she appeared a little under the weather).

Carnage is confined mostly to

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an upscale Brooklyn, US, apartment where two couples slowly submit to their savage inner selves while navigating the aftermath of a playground brawl between their young sons.

Polanski built the drama around the ensemble cast—which includes Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly—rather than location shots or flashbacks.

He also insisted on two weeks of rehearsals before shooting began.

Winslet portrays a nervous woman filled with rage but eager to keep up polite appearances.

When the play ran on Broadway in 2009-10, it starred Hope Davis in Winslet’s role.

Polanski, who fled the US in the 1970s to avoid sentencing following a statutory-rape charge, could not go to Brooklyn to film.

Instead, the outskirts of Paris served as a stand-in. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Zookeeper: Actor Kate Winslet; and (left) Christoph Waltz plays Winslet’s husband in Carnage.

What were the rehearsals like?

I think at various different points we all had said to Roman, “Look, would you like us to learn (the script)?” Because it is based on a play and when it’s Roman Polanski, one wants to be as prepared as possible. And he categorically said, “Oh no, no no”—very blasé—“no need to learn it.”

So none of us learnt it. And by Friday afternoon of Week 1, Roman said, “OK, I think it would be really handy not to have our scripts in our hands on Monday, don’t you?” And there was this deathly silence, and I could see everyone sort of looking at each other like, “Well, what did you have planned for the weekend?” I actually just laughed my head off because even though we’d only really known Roman for a week, I could tell this seemed to be a

If I met this woman, I would want to kill her...and I would certainly sort out her wardrobe. very typically Roman thing to do, like suddenly come out with some grand thing like, “Go away and learn 110 pages of script in two days.”

How did it go?

We came back on Monday shattered but absolutely ready to go.

Search. Buy. Online art sellers are making it easier to know what you like, and pumping up sales B Y S AMEER R EDDY The Wall Street Journal

···························· uilding an art collection often requires cultivating relationships with a global network of dealers, gaining an understanding of the art galaxy’s internal politics, attending respected art fairs and auctions and, most importantly, educating oneself on the art of the art deal (or paying someone else to make the decisions).

It’s intimidating turf to novices, even those who think they know what they like but don’t necessarily know if their paintings, sculptures and multimedia installations will appreciate in value.

But now, a steadily growing genre of online ventures is seeking to streamline the process for both beginners and established collectors, facilitating keyboard access to fine art. The logic: Welcome a broader (and younger) audience by opening the gallery

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doors to more than just veteran art connoisseurs.

With high-profile investors and advisers—including Russian collector Dasha Zhukova, gallerist Larry Gagosian and Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy, as well as Wendi Murdoch, whose husband Rupert is chairman of Wall Street Journal parent News Corp.—Art.sy aims to become a Pandora (a popular automated music recommendation service) for fine art.

Art.sy is powered by the Art Genome Project, in which a team of art historians and experts assign relevant “genes” from a database of roughly 700 options, spanning stylistic qualities and artistic influences. For example, Andy Warhol has a “gene” associating him with Marcel Duchamp. Computers match specific searches with works that have the closest genome values, sifting through thousands of art pieces to offer a selection that anticipates a user’s interests and tastes. In essence, if you like this artist, you may like these ones too.

Sebastian Cwilich, Art.sy’s chief operating officer, says the website’s mission is “to make all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection”. It launched in beta to invited members in late

Driving up sales: Apart Push Lawn Mower by Todd McLellan, from $20 (around `1,050) onwards, at 20x200.com.

COURTESY TODD MCLELLAN,

20X200.COM

Why don’t more film directors insist on making time for rehearsals?

If directors don’t want to rehearse, you as an actor go home, do your homework, do your own rehearsal and figure it out. I’m used to doing that. But (on Mildred Pierce), I said to (director Todd Haynes), look, I’ve played a mother before, I’ve worked with children, and...we really had to have those children feel comfortable, because you can lose a fresh and glorious performance because a kid is nervous. That takes some time hanging out together.

Some directors don’t like rehearsal. I don’t ordinarily like pre-planning things. But sometimes things can really be revealed to you as an actor about your character that come out of an idea or a question that another actor has, and that’s fun.

November, and aims to cater to the general public by spring.

The art-marketing site Paddle8, which debuted in May, provides guest-curated “virtual exhibitions” accompanied by dossiers on participating artists, detailing their work and influences. The website has assembled more than 140 international galleries under one cyber roof.

Artspace, which launched in April, offers a more populist approach to collecting. Yes, it sells boldface names like Gary Hume, Jenny Holzer and Chris Ofili, whose pieces garner figures out of more modest budgets. But by leveraging an extensive network of partnerships with galleries, museums and foundations, Artspace is able to present exclusive limited editions—such as two photo works by the London-based duo Gilbert & George, priced at $4,000 (around `2.14 lakh).

If your bank balance is feeling the holiday pinch, the art site 20x200 might prove a better fit. It offers five pricing tiers (starting at $20-50), targeting nascent collectors, unseasoned in navigating art price points. “I see a huge opportunity in getting people who can easily afford more expensive pieces hooked with the lowerpriced prints,” says CEO Jen Bekman, “and then helping them make bigger purchases once they’re more confident.”

With more than 150,000 prints

I would happily rehearse for three days and never stand up out of a chair, just to be in a room with everybody.

Polanski wanted to film this in a theatre-like space rather than open it up. Were you ever wishing the movie could leave that apartment?

Absolutely not, actually, because it’s the claustrophobia of it that makes it so awful, you know, it’s the four walls aspect. It’s the sense that there are four caged animals, you know, that’s what really, really adds to it.

Can you relate any of the themes in this play to your own experience as a mother?

No. Normally I can say, “Oh yes, I could relate to my character in this way, blah blah blah.” The only way I could relate to her is that literally she’s a mother and so am I. But I am nothing like this woman. If I met this woman, I would want to kill her, I’d want to shake her, I’d want to wake her up, I’d want to tell her to go to child-parenting classes, and I would certainly sort out her wardrobe.

You’d seen the play on Broadway. Was it hard to get those performances out of your mind?

You can’t try and top it. When it’s on stage, everything has to be bigger because it’s theatre—that’s how you get the laughs, so in a way, I feel like those actors probably felt incredibly liberated. They were glorious, big and subtle performances. What the f... do I know but I thought they were all absolutely amazing, and obviously you can’t do that on film, it would’ve been too in-your-face, too over-the-top.

So what I tried to do was play my version of the character. No actor wants to play someone else’s performance.

Carnage released in theatres in the US on Friday.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

sold since 2007, 20x200 has clearly tapped into a relevant niche, and one not entirely comprised of newcomers. Bekman cites a client who sits on two major museum boards, but uses the site to buy more modestly priced works to mix with his blue-chip finds.

The art “e-tailer” Artsicle attempts to alleviate the risk factor in buying works from your laptop. Would-be collectors, including corporations, can lease works, often from master’s in fine arts graduates still cultivating reputations. Prices range from $25-65 a month. If a firm or an individual chooses to buy leased works, 50% of the rental price is applied towards the transaction.

“The primary advantage is being able to live with the work over a longer period of time before deciding to commit,” says Artsicle CEO Alexis Tryon.

To some, Artsicle’s Blockbusterlike tactics might seem to walk too fine a line between art and commerce. The prospect of buying a Beuys, say, while you’re bidding on a Balenciaga bag, is enough to make art snobs shiver, but there’s no reason why tactile acquisitions—like those made at Miami’s Art Basel fair (from 1-4 December)—can’t coexist with the digital sites. Like fashion before it, the art world is evolving into a more inclusive and accessible place.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

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Rider to the sea

Let’s dance with Delhi The Yellow Line Project makes the Capital’s public spaces a backdrop for short films RAMESH PATHANIA/MINT

B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

··························· he business hub of Nehru Place in south Delhi is no place to dance, surely not in the late hours. But Pune-based performer Rajyashree Ramamurthi could have been spotted there many nights over the last three weeks, rehearsing her steps. “Nehru Place bustles in the day and is deathly still in the night,” says Ramamurthi.

A choreographer, she is part of the Yellow Line Project under which six short dance-films have been made at public spaces in Delhi. A seventh film has been made by artist Sonia Khurana.

The films will be screened this weekend in Gurgaon and Delhi.

Conceived by the Delhi-based Gati Dance Forum, the project had six choreographers and six film-makers working as teams of two. The “media artists” were shortlisted for a three-week residency programme; each pair selected a public space to film a dance shaped by the aesthetics of the place. Each of the six films is less than 10 minutes long.

The artistes picked obscure locations to “engage with Delhi”. The city’s Navtej Singh Johar and Kyoto’s Ken Furudate tried to “engage” with the pavements of posh Green Park. Imphal’s Surjit Nongmeikapam and Berlin’s Frederic Lombard made the yard of Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station their base, while the Nehru Place shopping centre was taken oven by Ramamurthi and film-maker Desmond Roberts from Delhi.

The rickshaw parking in Nizamuddin East was occupied

by Pune’s Parimal Phadke and Mumbai’s Dhanya Pilo; Rakesh M.P.S. of Bangalore and Asim Waqif of Delhi sought meaning in a collapsed building on Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road.

A hospital construction site in Mehrauli became the dance studio of Bangalore’s Yashaswini R. and Chennai’s

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Collaborations: Susmit Sen (left) with his sound designer at Indian Ocean’s New Delhi studio.

The guitarist of Indian Ocean makes a solo record that reflects his classical inspirations B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· n 27 years, this is the first time any of us has done something on his own,” Susmit Sen, guitarist and band member of Indian Ocean, says about Depths of the Ocean, his first solo album, which released on Tuesday in New Delhi.

Those Indian Ocean decades have made it difficult for him to say when this new album even really began: Were the seeds of it sown before the band ever came together? Was it developing even as Sen was putting out those definitive albums, touring the country and then the world, and creating a new sound with one of the most famous groups in Indian music?

You ask because this contemplative, considered record, mostly made of collaborations between Sen and a variety of singers and musicians, is not a creature of whim. Its vibe is curious, but not experimental. Most of all, it clearly brings out Sen’s defining influence, Hindustani classical music.

Sen is self-taught, and says that what draws him to a classical piece is the meditative effect of a performance. Some of this

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is evident here: The sound of Sen’s guitar is clean, but not pure. Many of the pieces are long by popular standards; their progressions recall the unfolding of a raga, though Sen’s guitar itself is not classical in sound or method. The title song, which features Parikrama’s Nitin Malik, Gaurav Sajjanhar, Sudhir Rekhari and Anuradha Sajjanhar, is over 10 minutes long; City Lights, featuring a wonderful Shubha Mudgal performance, is over 11. All of them command attention from the beginning. The melodies are quiet adventures because of Sen’s aversion to repetition, and some passages of play are dazzling. Sen’s solo guitar track, Tribute, is perhaps its most moving piece, especially in its quiet, echoing early passages.

There are sections—particularly on the vocal collaborations—which walk a thin line between mood and atmospherics. But there are enough moments on the record that make your spine tingle.

“I was fortunate enough to grow up in a time when I heard the great masters of classical music,” he says. “Ali Akbar Khan saab, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Mallikarjun Mansur. One

Depths of the Ocean: Susmit Sen, on CD from EMI, `350. of the best things that happened to me recently was falling asleep in a room listening to Nikhil Banerjee and waking up to it the next morning.”

There are as many singers on that list as there are strings players (Khan played the sarod, and Banerjee the sitar). Perhaps that connects to the speaking sound of Sen’s guitar. He says the Blues bore him—“I think I find that typical 12-bar structure a little limiting,” he says—but the spirit of the crossover evokes such a strong, thoughtful sense of place, it’s difficult not to think of the human voice of the Blues guitar, in constant conversation with its singer.

All of Sen’s music on this album is a conversation with his collaborators. He calls on a range of artistes, “brilliant musicians and brilliant human beings”, in Sen’s view. They play, led by his guitar, and

sometimes engage in the sort of back-and-forth which characterizes the jugalbandi. This is not unequivocally dazzling: While City Lights with Mudgal and Rejuvenation, featuring the late Indian Ocean lead singer Asheem Chakravarty, are delights from start to finish, there is more predictability in his collaborations with artistes like Papon and Sari Roy—outstanding singers in their own right, but less attuned, at least on early listens, to the sort of improvisation that Sen pulls off so well on the other songs.

He even presents an interpretation of Jana Gana Mana, a small beauty called Six String Salute, which somehow relieves it of its patriotic burdens, and becomes a simpler, sweeter riff on Rabindranath Tagore’s music.

“I started thinking of recording in October 2009, when Indian Ocean finished a long tour,” Sen recalls. “Then Asheem fell ill. After his death in December, the next year was just about keeping Indian Ocean together and on the road.” Finally, earlier this year, with a new studio in Delhi’s Lado Sarai and some spare time, he found the musicians he wanted to work with, headed into the recording room while it was under construction, and started to play the songs that have been in the making for all these years.

In the fractal of a canvas Math teacher and artist Ilango plays with the energy of a straight line B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· ake a jet flying at 40,000ft. It appears to leave in its wake a straight line in the sky. But it is only ice crystals suspended in a cluster in space. The distance from the cluster is what determines its shape as a straight line.

This is the principle—fractals, and the energy within lines relative to space—which shapes the work of Chennai-based artist A.V. Ilango.

Ilango, 61, is self-taught.

Early in life, he balanced his art with his full-time job as a

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teacher of mathematics, but besides mathematics, rural influences—bulls and dancers, drummers and scenes from village life—have shaped his art.

His forthcoming exhibition, Mumbai: Rhythms 2011, at the city’s Jamaat art gallery is representative of his life’s work.

“This show is not specifically recent works, but in the new works I am exhibiting, I have changed my rendering,” Ilango says. While the artist earlier used a palette knife on canvas, he has now begun to work on canvases laid out on the floor on which paint is thrown. “This has brought more of a spontaneity and flow to the works,” he adds.

Ilango’s style is characteristic of lyrical abstraction, in which the line is of prime importance.

“When a line widens, it becomes a shape, a form. When it narrows, it becomes thinner until it

disappears. This creates space. Space expresses itself in line and conversely, space retreats into its being. When you bend a line, the stress and strain create energy. It creates strength, which is dependent on and vibrates off the space around,” Ilango says.

He also uses the yin-yang principle to create balance.

Visual energy shifts from the positive to negative spheres. The positive Swastika (as opposed to the negative one used by Hitler, he is careful to distinguish), used commonly in temple sculptures, creates a flow of positive energy.

His figures occupy exactly twothirds of the canvas space, and he uses sharp angles to denote movement in the turn of the line.

Dancing lines: Ilango’s Raja­Rani (2008).

These principles of space and line division punctuate his work.

Between the interplay of these two is where the realms of mathematics and art meet.

What supports this play-

Preethi Athreya.

“It’s an unfinished building with four floors of bricks and lots of sawdust,” says dancer Athreya, describing the hospital construction site she went to with film-maker Yashwini every morning at 5.30, returning only in the evening. Athreya is choreographing a contemporary dance form “derived from the body’s interaction with material on site”.

She says: “As the place became familiar, we got tuned to its rhythms at different times of the day. Being a building with lots of window frames and doors, the daylight entered making different patterns. Our film tries to understand what happens when dance meets such a space. A structure is not merely an enclosure of walls; its sensibilities are also affected by what happens within them.”

Before Ramamurthi and her film-maker colleague Roberts could choreograph, she had to make sense of chaotic Nehru Place. “It’s the centre for pirated software, while overlooking the market are high-rises, which house software MNCs. We have used subtle references to this irony by framing the towers in relation to the surroundings.”

The duo also befriended a labourer in the area who was “a brilliant mover”. He features in the film.

“We haven’t made Nehru Place just a backdrop. We have responded to it, creating original movements that resonate with its character,” says Ramamurthi. “Our film has turned out to be a collection of vignettes on the mundane and surreal happenings that we have observed, framed and also imagined.”

Gurgaon premiere 17 December, 7pm, Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon.

Delhi premiere 18 December, 7pm, KHOJ International Artists’ Association, Khirkee Extension, New Delhi.

KAROLIN KENT

Action: Frederic Lombard (left) with dancer Surjit Nongmeikapam.

ground of art and math is the spiritual dimension to Ilango’s thought. Thus, when a line sits seductively, it b e c o m e s a woman; when it sits heavily, it becomes a bull; and when it dances playfully, it becomes a dancer in his works. All his art is expression of, or a retreat of, linearity.

Art was necessary in his youth, he says. It helped him focus and overcome a traumatic childhood. It also helped him recover from the loss of his wife, which made him turn to teaching children art. “I taught adults mathematics for 38 years. Now, I want to teach children. Art calmed me when I was very disturbed. I used to suffer from severe anxiety attacks

when I was in my 20s, and I know that it can do the same for others,” he says. To this end, he began his venture Artspace in 2003 at the Lady Andal School premises in Chetpet in Chennai.

With around 60-70 students, it has a gurukul system and uses art to heal children with a variety of ailments—from physical to mental disturbances ranging from schizophrenia to multiple personality disorder. But even those children who just want to paint or sculpt go too.

“Even the most restless child can sit for hours if allowed to immerse himself in art,” the artist says. Children are taken on after a one-on-one chat with parents, but the space is not advertised as a remedial centre because Illango says parents and children are able to go there without any stigma being attached to them.

Mumbai: Rhythms 2011 is on display at the Jamaat art gallery, Colaba, Mumbai, till 7 January.

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PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

DELHI’S BELLY | MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI

In cold blood: (clockwise from left) A paan stall in Naya Bans; paan­stained walls in F­Block, Connaught Place; this is a common sight; and Iqbal Bano, an alms seeker at Fatehpuri Masjid who spends almost all her daily earnings on paan.

Painting the city red The betel leaf business in Delhi’s ‘paan’ bazaar is suffering, but users continue to leave their mark

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foreign art critic visiting Delhi’s Connaught Place may be forgiven for thinking its red-splattered corridors are a form of abstract expression. Although the dirty white pillars of the colonial-era arcade were repainted in time for last year’s Commonwealth Games, every column is again stained blood red.

If you are looking for a culprit, it’s paan, the edible betel leaf stuffed with supari (betel nut), tobacco (optional), lime paste, catechu and other piquant flavours. The oozing liquid fills up the mouth, and is either swallowed or—as is evident across the city—spit out. In Connaught Place’s F-Block, the wall that was temporarily white after the hasty makeover in 2010 is marked with the red saliva-ridden remnants of paan.

The autorickshaw driver, who is spitting out a mouthful of red fluid at a traffic light on Kasturba Gandhi Marg, sits at one end of Delhi’s paan chain.

The source of the operation is Naya Bans bazaar, behind Fatehpuri Masjid in the Walled City, which supplies betel leaf to the entire Capital.

While it also has a wholesale centre for spices, tea and matchboxes, the bazaar is the hub for paan traders: some dealing in leaves; others in supari. In their stores, the big-bellied traders sit beside locked tijoris (steel chests). The floors have dozens of baskets filled with leaves; rats run from one basket to another.

Three times a week, trains chug in carrying the cargo from Orissa, Bengal, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. The traders purchase on a commission basis; each basket, it is reckoned, contains 1,000 leaves.

Like any precious commodity, the price fluctuates weekly, depending on the supply.

In the bazaar, hundreds of men bargain, shout, curse, push and spit. This bustle is deceptive. “The gutka (smokeless tobacco sold in sachets) is slowly killing the paan,” says Gauri Shankar

Goyal, the pradhan (chief) of Dilli Paan Thok Vikreta Sangh, the bazaar’s association of paan traders. Blaming the packaged tobacco that finds more takers because of its low price and easy availability, Goyal says: “The paan business has gone down by 40% in the last decade. The bazaar used to commission 10,000 baskets daily. Now, we get half of that, three days a week.” According to Goyal, the bazaar’s daily turnover is `15 lakh.

In March, a cover story in the science and environment magazine Down To Earth attributed the paan’s “royal fall” to the “contagious spread of chewing tobacco, especially gutka” and “skyrocketing input costs, water scarcity and unpredictable weather”, which meant “betel gardens are no more lucrative”. In August, health concerns resulted in the Union government banning the sale of gutka and other chewing tobacco products.

With home-made betel concoction in his mouth, author R.V. Smith, Delhi’s once-famous flâneur, says, “Nowadays people eat paan as goats feed on fodder.”

It wasn’t always so. Author Khushwant Singh wrote in City Improbable: Writings on Delhi that the sons of Delhi’s rich patronized the tawaifs (courtesans) of Chawri Bazar, attending their mujras, bantering with them in flowery Urdu and receiving paan from their hands. Smith cites a passage in Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, which brings alive the world of the paan sophisticate: “Begam Nihal sits up, draws her dome-shaped paan-box, puts lime and katha on a betel leaf, then adds finely-cut areca nut, some cardamom, a little tobacco, rolls it up and puts it in her mouth. Then she lies down again and begins to fan herself, occasionally fanning her daughter too…”

In Mughal-era Delhi, writes historian Annemarie Schimmel

ODE TO THE ‘PAAN’

Persian poet Amir Khusrau’s verse and a riddle dedicated to the chewable leaf

Amir Khusrau’s verse on ‘paan’ A chew of betel bound into a hundred leaves, Came to hand like a hundred-petalled flower, Rare leaf, like a flower in a garden, Hindustan’s most beautiful delicacy, Sharp as a rearing stallion’s ear, Sharp in both taste and shape, Its sharpness a tool to cut roots, As the prophet’s words tell us.

Full of veins with no trace of blood, Yet from its veins blood races out, Wondrous plant, for placed in the mouth, Blood comes from its body like a living thing.

—From ‘Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800’, by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.

Khusrau’s riddle in The Empire of the Great Mughals, offering paan was a sign of friendship, as its acceptance was a gesture of commitment. If a business deal or wedding agreement was reached, paan, wrapped in flimsy layers of gold or silver, would be served from elaborately carved paandans.

Unlike the shoppers in Connaught Place, people would spit the juice in spittoons made of precious metal.

Paan civilization had already reached Delhi by the time the Mughals were making inroads from central Asia. In the book Society and Culture in Medieval India, 1206-1556 A.D., author A. Rashid says Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya was fond of paan. His great disciple, the Persian poet Amir Khusrau, composed verses and riddles in praise of “Hindustan’s most beautiful delicacy”(see box).

Among the many artefacts in

the new Islamic wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is a paandan from India.

The aristocrats devised a paan-eating etiquette that was followed in Delhi till as late as the 1960s. Smith says once the paan was accepted, the eater had to salute the person who had offered it. The gillori (the stuffed betel leaf) would be enclosed in a silver clasp that had to be removed before delicately positioning the leaf in the mouth. Kept to one side of the receiver’s mouth, the paan was not chewed but was expected to dissolve slowly.

When the liquid had to be expelled, the paan eater would cover his mouth with the palm of his hand and spit into the silver (or brass) spittoon without a sound.

Today, we have rejected these rituals. “Chew and spit” is the mantra, as the stained white columns of Connaught Place

A trickster came, and this was seen In a cage went a parrot which was green How amazing is what everybody said What went in green, came out red !

A: Betel leaf —From www.angelfire.com/sd/ urdumedia/riddle.html testify. “I’ve seen men spitting paan on the pillars,” says Vijay Pal, a New Delhi Municipal Council sweeper in Connaught Place. “But I’m afraid to stop them lest they beat me. And anyway this is India.”

What goes on in the mind of a paan spitter? “This act of splattering on what was a newly-renovated clean white space of Connaught Place shows the paranoia of the emerging society in which we are suspicious and dismissive of anything that we think doesn’t belong to us,” says Deepak Raheja, psychiatrist, and director at Hope Foundation,

New Delhi. “The urge to disfigure something that is so spotless depicts our pent-up frustrations. It also betrays a violent streak.”

Tell this to the paan-eating woman who has been seeking alms daily at the side entrance of Fatehpuri Masjid for 25 years. She doesn’t appear violent. “I earn about `40 every day and I spend all of it on paan,” says Iqbal Bano.

“Sometimes I ask for paan, not paisa.” Exposing her red-stained teeth, she grins and assures me, “I brush daily.” mayank.s@livemint.com