Lounge for 17 Mar 2012

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

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Saturday, March 17, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 11

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE Peter Abraham (left) and Sameer Rattonsey promote tournaments through their Indian Poker Championship brand.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH VOLVO’S TOMAS ERNBERG >Page 11

POP UP AND OUT

A coffee table with slide­open shelves, side tables that hide a bar inside—multi­purpose furniture that lets you store in style >Page 6

India’s poker boom is fuelled by its young professional class, drawn to the game for its reliance on strategy and mathematics, as well as its luxe associations >Pages 12­14

SHUFFLE UP AND DEAL GAME THEORY

ROHIT BRIJNATH

THE BEAUTY OF GENIUS IN DECLINE

V

irat Kohli is caught in an intriguing place, the sporting ascent of man. He is fine potential starting its long-term translation, his very beauty lies in uncertainty, in the idea that he is the maybe great, and this possibility leads us to want to journey with him. We are impressed by his toughness—which is the bedrock of any greatness— yet how far it extends is still a presumption. Novak Djokovic has travelled from ascent to arrival. He has erased the “maybe” that prefixed his great. People will insist it... >Page 4

THE GOOD LIFE

In an age defined by pointed talk and aggressive opinionating, what is the value of ideas and the self­effacing thinker? >Pages 8­9

CULT FICTION

SHOBA NARAYAN

R. SUKUMAR

BANGALORE’S GOOD MAN

CARTER’S COORDINATES

H

T

ow does a bystander become a stakeholder? That’s what this column is about. Some time ago, I got an email from a woman who lives in my building. Tara was supporting a Lok Satta party candidate, who is contesting the Bangalore Graduates Constituency in the Karnataka legislative council (MLC) elections to be held in a few months. She invited me to meet the candidate, Ashwin Mahesh. I had heard of Mahesh. >Page 5

IN DEFENCE OF THE QUIET

here have been several criticisms levelled at Disney’s John Carter of Mars movie. Some critics appear not to like the acting. Others have problems with the way it has been directed. Still others have complained about the quality of special effects and 3D. And a few have actually been churlish enough to lay the blame at the door of the late great Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose first John Carter story appeared exactly a century ago. As this article is... >Page 21

EYE ON THE SPY Sriram Raghavan’s ‘Agent Vinod’ turns the spotlight on the spy thriller, a slim and neglected genre in India >Page 16

REMEMBER THE SHOES Budapest grows around the reminders of its horrific Holocaust history, which is poignantly retold in each new setting of the present >Pages 18­19

HOME PAGE L3

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE LOVES | BASILUR TEA

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Ceylon tea at your doorstep

CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “An ace of movie moguls”, 10 March, the film ‘Sliding Doors’ is about a woman and two stories about her.

In “Port­o­Call”, 3 March, almost every special sight in the city is punctuated by either the river or the ocean.

A new venture allows you to get a Sri Lankan import home­delivered and aims to educate on tea etiquette

MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

I

t started as a gift idea ahead of his wedding last year—Raghav Gupta wanted to give people something different. Because of his familiarity with Sri Lanka and what it’s famous for, the island’s favourite beverage became a natural choice. Gupta designed wedding boxes with tea in them and sent them out with the invitations.

That was also the seed of an idea and since November, Mumbaibased Gupta has been distributing Basilur Tea in India. But more than just making it available in shops and supermarkets, Gupta wants to make Basilur some sort of a lifestyle choice. “We realized that the market in India is not yet as developed as expected,” says Gupta, director, SVA India Ltd, which has the distribution rights for Basilur in India.

“We realized people don’t know how to make leaf tea. So we have also organized tea tastings.”

Customers can order through the website (http:// basilurteaindia.com) from anywhere in the country and out-

station delivery comes with no extra charges for shipping, within twothree days. Besides, the tea is also available in Mumbai’s retail stores like Food Hall and Godrej Nature’s Basket, at the restaurant Smoke House Deli and the gourmet food store Country of Origin. Gupta says they also have a “tea of the month”, which changes with every season, and is made available to subscribers of the “club” every month. For `7,999 a year, they deliver a box of tea every month. You can subscribe through their website.

There are about 100 flavours of tea available—like cherry, cranberry, melon, mango, pineapple, raspberry—and some in exotic combinations. For instance, “Magic Fruits” has flavours of papaya, pineapple, sunflower, mango, passion fruit

and strawberry, while “Fruit and Flowers” includes cornflower, marigold, safflower, mango, pineapple with Earl Grey, cinnamon and vanilla flavouring. In some, there is also a choice of the region in Sri Lanka where the tea comes from, like Dambulla, Kandy and Nuwara Eliya.

A tea service can be organized at weddings and private parties, with a specialist serving tea at the event.

“It’s an exciting concept,” says Gupta. “Our team will make some 10-15 varieties of tea at different strengths. You get to realize what sort of tea suits your taste.”

Basilur Tea is available in containers of 100g at a starting price of `699—it can make about 50 teacups (some varieties are also available in smaller quantities). For larger orders, there is also the option of 500g containers.

Arun Janardhan

Tea off: Basilur is available both as tea leaf and in bags.

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ROHIT BRIJNATH GAME THEORY

The beauty of genius in decline

V

irat Kohli is caught in an intriguing place, the sporting ascent of man. He is fine potential starting its long-term translation, his very beauty lies in uncertainty, in the idea that he is the maybe great, and this

possibility leads us to want to journey with him. We are impressed by his toughness—which is the bedrock of any greatness—yet how far it extends is still a presumption.

Novak Djokovic has travelled from ascent to arrival. He has erased the “maybe” that prefixed his great. People will insist it was inevitable, which is nonsense, for no MRI of the brain reveals attitude. He amputated mimicry, glutens and a weird service action, he wore the bruises of Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal defeats as a student might a wooden ruler from a teacher. Then, with no set clock to time him, he emerged, to the point where Djokovic elevates precisely when he is pushed. He will lose now and then, but he does not believe he can lose. His mind has long triumphed over his mechanics.

Tiger Woods, Federer and even Sachin Tendulkar—irrespective of whether he has scored his 100th century by now and no this is not some veiled call for his retirement—are past ascent and arrival and into different stages of the sporting descent of man. Not done yet, not themselves either. This is not about argument, but about fascination. Of all athletic stages, the genius who falls below his own exalted standard of great, who is warding off the inevitability of “was” great, is most compelling. How do you reconcile yourself to a new standard, what deals do you make with yourself (is three tournament wins a year acceptable when once it was eight?), what frustration creeps across the brain wherein you know how to make the shot, you’ve done it in your sleep, when hungover, when tired, but now it won’t *&^%$ come?

Woods has not won a Major since 2008, Federer not since January 2010.

Michael Schumacher, not quite in this company right now because he isn’t able to contend, has an idea of their predicament; V.V.S. Laxman, while not quite of that calibre, will find some commonality with them. They are in crises laced with irony, for the clarity of thought which shaped them has been replaced by clutter. One might say Yogi Berra’s absurdly brilliant words of “Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical”, which all sport swears by, is haunting them.

Tennis isn’t swimming, golf isn’t rowing, cricket isn’t sprinting, and this is not to diminish other sports but separate them. In sprinting, so wonderfully elemental, you just go. In golf, you have time to over-think, in cricket and tennis you wield a creative instrument and respond to idea. In these sports, the mind is broken into a series of excruciating mental moments of decision making and nerve. We can measure the body’s functions, but the mind has no real measure like lactic acid. So like archaeologists sifting the dust, we feed on signs.

Clearly, these men make more mistakes.

Even as the evocative part of genius is the sublime shot, in effect greatness is also the absence of error.

Woods, in the lead, could play like an auditor. Federer won 6-0 sets in

Grand Slam finals with just a higher form of consistency. Laxman’s bat is like a quill writing incomplete verses.

Tendulkar’s staggering reliability has diminished for now.

Woods enforced his will on the game and the ball. When it came off his putter, it did not fall in simply because of technique but as if it was ordered to. But perhaps he, like the others, is having more conversations in his head than he once did. The putt is golf’s closing shot and Woods was golf’s closer. Now he misses five-footers everywhere. At Doral, Florida, recently, he said: “I don’t know; I hit pure putts. I hit them right on my line, and they were just lipping out.” He is astonished and resigned all at once. Now even his body, once an advertisement for golf’s new muscular world, is falling apart. He must think, what next, and it is like a bruise on the concentration.

It is an unfamiliar world. Once it just seemed to happen, now it’s as if they’re attempting to make it happen.

Woods had a sports psychologist when he was young, a fellow named Jay Brunza, who once said as if speaking for this entire tribe of genius: “Like all great champions, Tiger has the ability to raise his game when he has to.” But now it has gone. At their best, the difference between them and the rest, and the rest and amateurs

like us, is trust: When I hit a ball in tennis I cannot fully commit, I am too scared, too unsure, too unpractised, but they did, they had the required faith. But it has partially leaked away and what is occurring to them happens to all men, except they succeeded simply because they refused to believe they were all men.

A former Australian Tour pro told me last week: “It’s a nerve thing. The young golfer is not scared to miss, but when you start to miss you are scared of the ramifications. Woods won everything as a golfer and didn’t have to deal with what happens when you miss. But now you think about it a little more, you’re thinking about your mechanics more than you should be rather than thinking of the feel and the desire which made him hole those putts”.

Woods has lost his complete control.

Federer has Majors on his mind. He is slightly different from these men because his sport is more athletic. He was superb against Andy Murray in Dubai and at times he looks the same, all polish and invention, but in Majors, under pressure, his strokes can resemble an uncertain prayer. There was, when he won in Dubai a fortnight ago, a fine moment, almost tragic in a way, when he said, “Any title is a good

one, I’ll tell you that.”

As much as I am watching Kohli’s rise, this is my favourite story in sport, all this Dylan Thomas stuff about Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Maybe because my own whisky/tobacco body moves like a wheezing steam engine, they have become my emissaries in the fight to be relevant on a field. I like their rage against youth, their refusal to know their place, the way they take refuge in practice, their smartness in managing Scotch-taped bodies, their conditioning which forces them to scrap, their holding on to dignity, their constant reinvention of themselves.

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

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

Of a glorious past: (from top) Sachin Tendulkar, Roger Federer and Tiger Woods are not done yet, but not themselves either.

AIJAZ RAHI/AP

MARK J TERRILL/AP

JOE SKIPPER/REUTERS

There is enough left in them, you suspect, for the inspired week, but this is the thing, it is not enough. They have to find the inspired week in the right week. Men in decline, yet somehow able to make the ultimate ascent. And if they look around they will find literal proof of its possibility.

The brilliant pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva hadn’t won a major title since 2008. Then, this year, she set a world indoor record and then won gold at the world indoor athletics championships. Evidently, you’re never too old to fly in sport.

COLUMNS L5

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Does Bangalore’s Good Man stand a chance?

H

JAGADEESH NV/MINT

ow does a bystander become a stakeholder? That’s what this column is about. Some time ago, I got an email from a woman who lives in my building. Tara was supporting a Lok

Satta party candidate, who is contesting the Bangalore Graduates Constituency in the Karnataka legislative council (MLC) elections to be held in a few months. She invited me to meet the candidate, Ashwin Mahesh.

I had heard of Mahesh. Bangalore, like most Indian metros is—in the end—a small town. A colleague had seen the traffic camera system Mahesh had installed for the Bangalore police and had come away impressed.

Cameras at this city’s intersections are able to zoom in on licence plates and catch offenders, stopping speeding taxis in their tracks. I had heard that Mahesh was involved in the development of Bangalore’s 180-odd lakes and had designed the Big10 bus system (which connects 10 major Bangalore roads to the city’s outer ring roads) along the arteries of Bangalore.

Even so, I was hesitant to go. Frankly, I had enough on my plate and helping an election campaign was not something I wanted to do. How do you become a good citizen? What are your rights and responsibilities?

I struggle with this idea—erratically enthusiastic. Mostly, I feel impotent because I am not sure that my ideas or efforts will carry weight. For example, about 75 people from the community where I live rallied around to clean Ulsoor Lake. We had the lakes commissioner visit our building and talk about the sewage and stench of the lake. The beleaguered man said the money was available to clean the lake if someone from our community would take charge of the project. No one did.

Being a good citizen is something that we urban elite think about and struggle with—along with exercise, flossing teeth and—this may apply to you but not me—not reaching for that fourth samosa. Our intentions are good. We join civic action groups,

neighbourhood resident welfare associations (RWAs), building committees and community affairs groups. We contribute to non-profits that are improving our neighbourhoods, and occasionally go and meet the politicians in charge of our ward. There is one challenge that flummoxes even the most ardent volunteer: The problem never stops.

You can clean up a lake but the garbage keeps coming.

I anchor my building’s recycling project but it fell apart when I went away for the summer holidays. I am helping a woman in our neighbourhood who wants to develop a composting system. I am an enthusiastic volunteer but I am not sure about whether her efforts will bear fruit. We have bought Daily Dump’s composting bins but even if the system is in place, someone has to supervise. I don’t want to be that person. How do you sustain your enthusiasm and effort towards finding a solution when the problem never seems to go away?

Over dhoklas at Tara’s house, a group of us, including some scientists from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, met Mahesh. The candidate is remarkable. He speaks with the slang of someone who has spent time in Silicon Valley. His campaign is run

by Indians who have returned to India and are working for Sun Microsystems, Oracle and other technology companies. They are people like us.

Mahesh talked about why he—a technocrat, scientist and professor at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore—decided to contest. I am used to new ideas but even jaded old me was impressed by his notion of how to scale. Scaling, he said, was not simply about replicating a good idea across the nation. It is about involving local problem solvers who can take an idea and modify it to suit their

Visionary: Mahesh seems sincere and is clearly competent in getting technology projects done. But will that translate to politics? community’s needs. It is about increasing the surface area of citizenry who want to participate. Mahesh’s way to do this is by proving to his constituents that they have a voice and that their solutions will be implemented. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Governance is hard. It requires consensus, long-term thinking and dogged, relentless effort to tackle problems that never seem to end: road safety, traffic, garbage. After some haphazard volunteering, I have started thinking that maybe such efforts are best left to professionals.

The trick is to vote in the right people who have the expertise, energy and time to do their job. Ergo my interest in Ashwin Mahesh.

Mahesh has a website (www.ashwinmahesh.in). He seems sincere and is clearly competent in getting technology projects done. Will

that translate to politics? I don’t know.

Then again, the stakes are not high.

Last term, the winner of the MLC elections garnered 11,000 votes.

Weeks later, I heard that Wired magazine had picked Mahesh for their Smart List 2012: 50 People Who Will Change The World. Tara told me that Mohandas Pai, previously with Infosys, was endorsing their candidate. I cold-emailed Pai to check if this was true.

Yes, Pai replied. “My support is my endorsement, a small contribution to his election fund and my personal vote.” As for why he was supporting the candidate, Pai gave a long list of the usual reasons: impeccable integrity, deep understanding of urban issues, great vision. “He is the right kind of person to represent the highly educated class in the legislature. He is liberal, very modern and symbolizes

all that is best about Bangalore.”

When does a bystander become a stakeholder? So far, I have been a bystander in Mahesh’s candidacy.

He has made the first cut. People I know and trust are supporting his candidacy. What Mahesh needs now are registered voters and the buzz of a winning team. He has his work cut out for him. Scratch that. We have our work cut out for us. I guess I just went from being a bystander to a stakeholder.

Shoba Narayan is a closet Formula One (F1) driver but Mahesh’s traffic cameras are cramping her style. 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

THE LITTLE PRINCESS

I

know the meaning of Sahar, Aliza and Naseem, but what is the meaning of Natasha?” Aliza asked me.

We were sitting on high stools around a round table in a café.

Leftovers of pasta, pizza and pastries on the plates.

“Natasha means one who is loved by all,” I said. I make up whatever I feel like when I have to answer this question.

Ali got off her stool and came to me. She put her arms around me and said, “That’s why all of us love you so much.”

I had an instant out-of-body experience. This is real, this is real, a voice reassured me. Aliza and my early stories flashed in my mind.

There is so much about our children that we find ourselves unprepared for. I don’t mean colic and diaper rash. I mean personality traits.

World-view things.

Aliza has some gifts and talents that were actually unfamiliar to me. I could see them but it was not easy for me to recognize them. Even as a toddler, she seemed to have a clear version of

how things should be and she would demand it. She would confront, protest, negotiate, dig her heels in.

She would celebrate the world as if it had just been invented.

As a second-born child, Aliza had been eager to start school.

When she moved from playschool to nursery, however, our world cracked open.

We had a newborn baby in the family. Afzal and I had just exchanged work roles. He started travelling and I was new at home.

I was dazed. I had been ill for months. I had lost and gained too much too soon. Exhausted, I needed to restore order.

Amid all this, Aliza started school. A week later, she stopped.

Every new nursery class has inbuilt chaos. Some children arrive crying. Some want to go home before time. Everyone and everything is new. The anonymity is scary.

“I am okay in school,” Ali said to us, “but I don’t like to see other children cry.” I reasoned with her, trying explanations that she might accept. I consoled her.

Aliza was unconvinced.

Trying traits: Are you unprepared to answer your child’s questions?

In retrospect I can see that Aliza’s relationship with school and her sensitivity to the harshness of it was related to Aliza’s life at home.

A four-year-old caught between two siblings, Aliza was already feeling lost in the crowd at home.

The atmosphere of school exaggerated that. She was desperately missing the love and protection of her parents and here she was even more alone with new adults in school.

Ali fought back. She became a princess, a fairy. She insisted on

wearing glittering dresses with gold borders, frills and diamonds on her sandals.

Where is my magic wand? I demand my wings.

She refused the life we offered her.

Aliza and I became estranged and confused. We love each other so passionately, so why could we not reach out to each other? She threw tantrums. I started throwing tantrums in response. I hit her to make her stop screaming. I said horrible things. It would leave me in

shock for days.

It must have been worse for her.

Sahar cowered in fear. The baby watched. Sometimes she responded with anger and crying.

She put her thumb in her mouth.

Why is Aliza so fragile, I would think. The answer came to me as another question. Why are you so fragile, Natasha?

Our recovery started when I calmed down and accepted Aliza’s way. We shut down all other voices to listen to her.

After a few days of staying at

home with me, Aliza started self-schooling. She agreed to the rule of not watching any cartoon film during school hours. She started painting, drawing and colouring. I labelled her works of art and put dates on them, hanging them on a string across our room. She started wearing pretty cotton frocks and forgot all about the billowy satins with lace, the nets with red and gold roses that she had received as gifts. She began to be okay to belong with us. We were both happy. Happier.

The child needed the security of a calm, loving home. She had felt neglected, she had witnessed injustice and she needed to heal. She knew she wanted time off and she fought for it till we came around.

The same Aliza, two years later, hugging her mother in a café and making her feel like a queen.

Parenting. You’ve got to learn when to run and when to walk. Ears are useful. Hold them and look sorry when the need arises. Listen.

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

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

L6

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Pop up and out A coffee table with slide­open shelves, side tables that hide a bar inside—multi­purpose furniture that lets you store in style B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

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u L­shaped coffee table: It comes with two pull­out drawers and can be separated into two L­shaped tables, at The Delhi Design Store, Sau Phoota Road, Chattarpur hills, Chattarpur, New Delhi, `58,000.

p Side table and storage unit: These single pieces by Kartell can be overlapped using a simple joint to create multifunction units, available in round and square, and red and silver, at Pallate Design Studio, Badamia Manor, 34, Clerk Road, off Race Course Road, Mahalaxmi, Mumbai, `7,000­15,000, depending on the finish and the number of elements.

t Study table: This classic study table opens into a writing surface and storage for books and journals, at The Teak House, Noida (Theteakhouse.in), `10,000.

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

u Deco suitcase: Silver stool with storage inside, at Furniture­ Walla, 416, Mehrauli­Gurgaon Road, New Delhi, `24,700.

SUSHANT JAIN

t Functional coffee table: Available in black stained, oak veneer, dust­grey glass and brushed steel look, by Occa, at Bo Concept, Palladium, High Street Phoenix, Lower Parel, Mumbai, `59,750.

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

p Piano bar cabinet: Black lacquer­finished bar cabinet

by Maitland­Smith, at International Furniture Brands, The Gallery, Mehrauli­Gurgaon Road, New Delhi, `7,70,000.

t Bedside table: Cylindrical bedside table with pull­out drawer at Visage, A 48/40 DLF Phase­I, Gurgaon, `61,000.

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012

L7

Play

LOUNGE GAMING

Games people want to take on board PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Online shopping is giving us options in board games that allow us to look beyond Ludo B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· n increasing number of people interested in board games in India are discovering that there is a world beyond Ludo and Backgammon. The reason is that a number of board games coming out of Europe and the US, which are practically impossible to get in your neighbourhood stores, can now be bought from online sites such as OLX, HomeShop18, eBay.in, Amazon.com and specialized retailers such as Thinkgeek.com.

There is both a demand for, and awareness of, board games in India, says Umesh Hora, managing partner at The Mind Café in Gurgaon, Haryana, the first board-games café in India which opened in November. Hora says: “We’ve seen a lot of walk-in crowd from the day we started our café. People are coming because they are curious about what we are doing, or because they are already aware of the kinds of games we have and want to play them.”

He adds: “On the day we opened, we thought we would have to teach people about the games. But some people came in, asked for Dominion, and started a game without any help.

There are a lot of game enthusiasts, because people travel more these days, and are already exposed to games which you just don’t get in India.”

Since The Mind Café is an international franchise, the headquarters in Singapore ships 10 new games to Hora every month, so they don’t have to deal with these issues. “While we’re not looking at retailing the games, if the demand continues then we will look at the option, as a sort of thank you to our regulars,” he adds.

Until recently, there were no options for gamers unless they knew someone who lived abroad.

Today, sites like eBay and OLX

A

give access to second-hand buyers and sellers, while direct shipping from Amazon, or even sites such as ThinkGeek, lets you buy brand new board games, at a small premium.

Varun Sharma, a Chennaibased freelance video-game design consultant, says, “I grew up in the UK with my parents, and when we moved back to India around 15 years ago, we brought back a bunch of board games.”

“As a gamer, and a designer, I was interested in these games even when I got older, because board games represent pure gameplay mechanics. If the rules aren’t well made, the game is not well made. So I keep trying out new games. Nowadays, it’s become a lot easier because most of the good games have digital versions on the iPad,” Sharma says. “But if I play a game that’s really good, and want the physical version, most times you’re out of luck in India. I usually get my games whenever I travel abroad, because it’s much cheaper, but I’ve also discovered the joy of finding something great at a huge discount on eBay.in, which I think is a great way of getting rare and used games cheap,” he adds.

The retail sector, however, is still sticking to the familiar games, and even though the board-games sections of stores such as Crossword and Landmark have grown, they are still mostly limited to familiar American board games, which usually depend a lot on chance and luck, compared with European-style games which tend to be more strategy-based.

While the biggest Indian sites such as Flipkart are not addressing this space yet, websites such as eBay.in and Olx.in, which allow anyone to place an ad, do have toys and games. The selection can be a little hit-andmiss—if you have something specific in mind, then these are probably not the best options.

Tabled: Board games at The Mind Café, Gurgaon.

But if you are willing to browse, there are amazing finds to be made, such as a copy of Ticket to Ride in near-mint condition for just `1,500.

Anannya Baruah, 25, who has moved back to Assam after an MBA from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi University, says: “Games like Risk are now available in India for `1,000.

Importing them doubles the cost because of shipping. But even today, you can’t get most of these games in markets. European games like The Settlers of Catan involve a lot more strategy and planning. Maybe that is why people feel it isn’t worth bringing them to India, and we have to order them online instead.”

The catch is that the online route, particularly for new games, is an expensive option.

For example, the Discworld

board game, which launched in mid-2011, promotes strategic planning mixed with rich lore and art, and is the kind of game most gamers would want. The price of the game is $35 (around `1,750), but it costs double that because of shipping. Bringing the game to Delhi from the UK costs almost `4,000 after shipping, via Amazon.com.

The same is true for Ticket to Ride, one of the most popular European-style board games, and winner of the Spiel des Jahres award. It’s a high-profile game, and buying it on Amazon costs around `4,000, at the cheapest shipping. If you want it sooner, the express delivery option (three-four days) will set you back by as much as `6,000. In comparison, buying from OLX or HomeShop18 can save `2,000-3,000.

Art, with augmentation New technology brings digital alternative art to the streets of Khirki Village B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· oncepts such as virtual worlds and augmented reality (AR) have long been part of the realm of science fiction, but while the former still lies beyond the reach of most, AR at least has reached the mass market through smartphones.

Simply put, AR is any technology that uses live inputs to add computer-generated information to a real-world scene. That is to say, technology is used to enhance our current perception of reality.

For example, with Google Goggles, Google uses a smartphone’s camera to do a visual search. You can point at an artwork, have it identified, and even pull up Wikipedia information. You can point

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to text in a foreign language, and get a translation.

Many brands have also invested in building augmented reality experiences to reach out to the audience. Tissot has a a website where you print a paper watch and put that on, then hold it in front of your webcam.

It overlays an image of different watches, so you can ‘try’ out various looks while sitting at your computer.

The Khoj International Artists’ Association in Delhi, which has its office in Khirki Village in south Delhi, is using AR technology to create a living showcase of its art projects. The group was established in 1997, and according to project coordinator Charu Maithani, they have been carrying out experiments and art workshops at the street level in Khirki Village.

“Over the years, Khoj has had various contemporary art residencies, experiments and workshops all around Khirki Village.

They’ve ranged from paintings and installations to live performances. Each of these initiatives has been carefully documented, with images, project reports and

some videos,” says Maithani.

However, after a project ends, so do the street-level installations. Maithani says, “While these records remain intact, the artwork, over time, has been replaced, removed or remade when a particular project was finished.”

To connect these documented images with the spaces they had once occupied, to show people how things would have looked before they were removed years earlier, and to create a window to the past, which could be instantly compared to the present, Khoj created an AR project called 1SAM, or 1 Square Augmented Mile, in August.

The idea came from Delhibased media-tech consultancy BlueAnt Digital Intelligence.

“They came to us and suggested this as a way of showcasing our work differently. We immediately felt that this had a resonance with the work we are doing, and funded the project, giving them access to our content, and they put together the back-end of the project,” says Maithani.

Arun Kumar, research and

Past forward: Viewing the Khoj layer on a smartphone. development lead at BlueAnt, says: “We came up with the concept some time ago, of using Layar (a free app) to enhance art.

We did not have the content for it though, and when we heard about the work that Khoj does, we realized it was a perfect fit for what we had in mind.”

Sites like eBay.in, OLX and Quikr all have listings for games, but it’s still hard to navigate these sites and find exactly what you want. Serendipity is a big part of the process. Landmark and Crossword didn’t always stock the European-style games. Most collectors, such as Baruah, get their games through friends and relatives who are travelling.

Listing sites such as OLX are not too useful for enthusiasts looking to build a collection, since finding something there depends on people selling their own games. Play-Asia and ThinkGeek are specialized sellers that have board-games sections; they usually offer both better deals and shipping options compared to Amazon.

While they are a good alternative, they don’t have the same range though as Amazon.

But even if you’re willing to pay a premium for shipping on Amazon.com, they won’t sell some games.

Despite the costs, the growing popularity of events like Board Game Nights at Mocha and the launch of The Mind Café show that there is enthusiasm for board games beyond the ones a generation grew up with. Hora says: “Card games like Dominion are popular because they’re easy to learn and don’t take long. Otherwise, we’re also seeing a lot of interest in Ticket to Ride, and The Settlers of Catan. In general, we see a mix of young and old people, both well-informed people and those who haven’t played most of the games but are enthusiastic to try now. The mix is a positive sign to us that the interest in board games in India is going to rise.”

Implementing the project to work properly on different devices was not without challenges. To experience 1SAM, you need to run Layar, which works with both iPhones and A n d r o i d phones. When you walk around Khirki Village, the phone figures out your location, and displays pict u r e s o f installations at their old locations. There’s a map in the app as well to give you a guided tour of the different installations. Kumar says: “We used Layar and set up the different pictures of the installations, gave all the text information, and managed the overlays to look good. Then we tested it again, and nothing worked properly.” The overlays would work properly on some phones and not at all on others.

To get around this, BlueAnt

had to work closely with Layar’s developers, and redo a lot of the work, changing settings repeatedly to make locations and images sync properly. The whole process took over a month of testing and tweaking. After creating multiple versions for different handsets, BlueAnt finally ended up with a layer that displayed properly across devices in December, so Khoj could showcase it to the public in December.

The Layar layer that Khoj has put isn’t limited to installations either. The group is now working on using a new technology, Panoramio, which allows anyone to create AR tags which can be uploaded to the 1SAM servers. “We have over 3,000 images from 35 projects. These range from structures of the area to personal moments. Through crowd sourcing, we hope to increase that significantly, and to keep updating frequently, so that each walk with a smartphone will reveal new and unexpected vistas,” Maithani says.

The 1SAM project is currently unavailable to the public while the group upgrades its servers, but they say it will be live again in a couple of weeks—and, says Maithani, will be extended to different locations in the country.

L8

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012

Life

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SOCIETY

In defence of the quiet In an age defined by pointed talk and aggressive opinionating, what is the value of ideas and the self­effacing thinker?

G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· t the office of television news channel Times Now in Mumbai’s Lower Parel, editor-in-chief and news anchor Arnab Goswami’s voice booms across from the studio.

He has cricket commentator Krishnamachari Srikkanth pinned with his unflinching gaze and locked in verbal combat. Goswami asks: “Is (Virender) Sehwag being rested to allow...Sachin (Tendulkar) to score his record?” Srikkanth, caught unawares, gasps at the brutality of the hit. Goswami carries a knowing half-smile.

Srikkanth answers, and Goswami fires again.

Goswami’s questions are not questions, they are weapons of an age that constructed him: basic, lethal, direct, and stockpiled with a personal measure of accountability. His are the questions-elect of those being deployed across social media forums, at rallies, propelling a shoe-throwing, politician-slapping generation to demand answers. For whom flow the hash tags: #FTW. #Score. #Win. And then there is the deafening quietness of those being out-shouted. Those unfollowed on Twitter because we expect of them quicker repartee, a sharper wit, a smoothly punchlined fragment of breaking news, all in a retweetable quotable quote, and who disappoint. Where the prototype is aggression, those who go against the norm are perceived to be failures.

A study, Recognizing Creative Leadership: Can Creative Idea Expression Negatively Relate to Perceptions of Leadership Potential? jointly conducted by the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, US (published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, March 2011), defined the paradox of the bias: Leaders valued “innovation”; the most and yet, by definition, “innovative” men, who must think against the grain, are rarely attributed leadership qualities. They are often nonconformist, unorthodox, uncertain, even tentative, like their untested ideas. The study found organizations typically biased towards leadership, and against creativity.

What this means is diligent men, like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whom we once

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‘THERE IS EVIDENCE THAT EXTRA­ VERTED LEADERS ARE PERCEIVED AS MORE EFFECTIVE IN THE WORKPLACE. OUR RESEARCH SUGGESTS THAT THERE IS MORE TO THE STORY.’

ILLUSTRATIONS

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JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

admired for the supposed genius of their ideas, are often “proven” inadequate for the lack of a pithy quote and a pumping fist.

Francesca Gino is associate professor of business administration in the negotiation, organizations and markets unit at Harvard Business School, US, and author of the ongoing study, Stop Stealing the Spotlight: The Perils of Extraverted Leadership. Gino is researching the effects of quietness on teamwork, and she explains: “There is evidence that extraverted leaders are perceived as more effective in the workplace. Our research suggests that there is more to the story.”

How powerless, truly, are the quiet?

In Bombay House, the south Mumbai power centre jocularly known to insiders as South Block, is the cloistered, minimalist office of reticent industrialist Ratan Tata. The Tata group has just projected an estimated revenue of $500 billion (`25 trillion) by 2022.

Ratan Tata is probably the only victim of the Radia tapes who feels more personally violated by the intrusion than alarmed by the contents of his speech made public, and still has a plea to protect his privacy pending in the Supreme Court.

His Twitter account in 2011 sat at 750 followers for about a month, before he was discovered online. In June 2008, when the Tata Motors acquisition of Jaguar Land Rover made headlines worldwide, Ratan Tata issued a five-line quote in a one-page press release. There was no press conference. The bid for the UK-headquartered Cable&Wireless Worldwide is expected to go down with similar reserve.

In November 2008, when The Taj Mahal Palace hotel shook with terrorist attacks, pushing every onlooker to tears, shoulders slumped, despair creasing his face, Ratan Tata at his most defeated, even with the maximum provocation to shake his fists and demand answers for various failures, stood a picture of quiet dignity at its burning door.

This is the Tata way. It is inherent, his office points out: It was Jamsetji Tata who quietly responded to the promise to “eat every pound of steel the Tatas make”, by making it. In whatever way the new heir to the throne, Cyrus Mistry, nephew of noted reclusive industrialist Shapoorji

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Pallonji, may differ from his mentor, Ratan Tata, it will not be in the quality of his reserve, admits the company. “From Jamsetji Tata’s time, the Tatas have valued the quality of reserve. It is a philosophy we follow to this day,” says Tata Motors’ spokesperson Debasis Ray. “It is, in fact, the culture that is encouraged within the company and that we look for, and it is followed by Mr Tata and Mr Mistry. Mr Tata always says ‘Let your actions speak louder than words, and if in evidence your actions have truly spoken, then you will have no need for words.’ Also, he feels, how can he talk about himself?

Such words, if at all, must come from others.”

Résumés that have the least to say, say the most, Ray points out, recalling a Financial Times column (“The Fine Art of Penning Your Own Brief Bio”, by Lucy Kellaway, 19 February) that made the distinction between the résumés of famous men. “Ronald Reagan’s CV (curriculum vitae) just had one line on it: President, United States. It’s the people who have to explain a lot who do the most talking.”

Industrialist Azim Premji practises a measured engagement with the media. Ahmed Patel is Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s almost-mythical political secretary. As is designer Shahab Durazi in fashion circles, and Vikram Seth in writerly ones.

Within the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, “we scientists just don’t really know how to talk about what we do”, confesses TIFR director Mustansir Barma. When author Amitav Ghosh recently wrote—“As a child I was drawn to books because they were a refuge from a world that seemed to be at war with the very idea of an inner life.

That world has become today exponentially more noisy, crowded and intrusive than ever before”—he was begging off from modern-day chaos and reflecting psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s first classification of his theory of temperaments at the turn of the 20th century. Jung’s distinction was that “extraversion is the outward flow of energy and introversion, the inward flow of personal energy”, and there was space for the merits of both.

Yet, ever since Dale Carnegie launched a career out of making friends and influencing people, gregariousness has been the mantra capitalism has kowtowed to. The Harvard Business School model is the can-do spirit of the extrovert, mirrored across the world, churning out armies of gregarious men and women.

Arun Pereira, a faculty member at ISB, says, “Given that the objective of most B-schools is to produce business leaders, they will actively encourage the extroverted individual rather than a shy, introverted one.”

The introvert, on the other hand, is the guy who is repeatedly told to “snap out of it”.

Geetha Krishnan, director, centre for executive education at ISB, embodies the pressures of speaking up. “Having grown up in a small town, I did not possess the language and tone of urban India.

And the confidence to believe that I can carry on without it. This made me conscious of speaking out in a group. It did not help that my English was mid-20th century Brit. So for a long time, I just kept quiet. Gradually, I guess I did not do anything conscious about it, but perhaps the need for me to speak out became more prominent because my silence was drawing more attention. I also looked much younger than my age, and a client thought my executive, who reported to me, was

{ my manager. So I started growing a beard. Which survives even now, 13 years on,” he says.

Today, Krishnan has acquired the confidence to be his quiet self. “I would tell students, don’t worry about it. Unless you are in show business, your social personality is not a big ingredient in your success. A lot of people attribute Apple’s success to Steve Jobs. Without discrediting the man, would he have been half as successful if Apple products were not so outstanding? The people who create those products are perhaps as socially uncomfortable as most of us.”

In her new book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, former Wall Street lawyer Susan Cain explains why it is necessary to define the introvert’s ability to influence: “If we assume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good and bad ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day…” Cain’s research suggests the introvert is the guy who prefers a one-on-one conversation, gets people, works with their limitations, and thinks out of the box. Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Larry Page, Bill Schwab and Bill Gates all followed the quiet road to success. All change, it would seem, depends on the recognition of the quiet ideas: the ones that are not always shouted out.

That extroversion is not the absolute in temperamental aspiration is self evident. Gita Piramal, business historian and author of Business Maharajas, gives the example of “the failure of Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher airline. By extending the Kingfisher alcohol brand to an airline and himself, the airline’s problems have not only cast doubts on the financial viability of the group’s alcohol business, but also dented Mallya’s image.

Howard Hughes (1905-76) exemplifies extreme introversion. The intrepid aviator, in his later years, was an eccentric with a reclusive lifestyle, caused partly by an obsessive-compulsive disorder and chronic pain. Despite the pain, Hughes established a major aircraft manufacturing company and ran a premier airline, TWA (Trans World Airlines).”

The danger lies in that bowing to the demands of the age, those who are unable to achieve extroversion, coach themselves to be what they are not. The social mediator steps in to spark the transformation. When political scion Rahul Gandhi first emerged on the scene and proved his rawness in the arena on a number of occasions, he was hastily pulled out of the limelight and coached into submission by a newly established crack team, known in Delhi’s political circles as “the think tank”, headed by the suave 33-year-old Wharton graduate Kanishka Singh.

When Gandhi campaigned in Uttar Pradesh for the 2012

MIDDLE­CLASS INDIA TOO BUYS INTO THE MYTH THAT IT IS NECESSARY TO WEAR THE MASK. HORDES OF STUDENTS AND YOUNG EXECUTIVES SET OUT EVERY DAY TO OVERCOME THEIR INHIBITIONS

assembly elections, he took on taboo subjects like foreign direct investment and took swipes at his rivals like a pro. “The shy persona with a self-declared, back-office role has been replaced by a more aggressive and bolder Gandhi—less averse to taking political risk…

When he entered active politics in 2004, Gandhi was uncomfortable in his political role. This awkwardness was thrown into relief by sister Priyanka Vadra’s ease with the public...” said the “Will the Reinvention of Rahul Gandhi Do the Trick?” article, in Mint, 21 December. Singh’s team is credited with the Gandhi makeover. It made him fit into the existing political scenario, but would Gandhi have been better off being himself?

The role of the political “image consultant”, who takes charge of what is known as the “back office”, is precisely this transformation. Abhinandan Thorat, a well-groomed and patient man in a beige safari suit, with whom we catch up at his Grand Hyatt, Kalina, Mumbai, hotel room, is such an adviser to former chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and power minister Sushilkumar Shinde in Maharashtra’s political circuit. There are others too on his list—some formerly known for the things they shouldn’t have said—but he is not at liberty to list their transformation publicly.

Thorat insists on speaking only in Marathi. The following is a translation: “People like (corporate lobbyist) Niira Radia have given us a bad name. That is not what we do. Our role is far more subtle and far more demanding. Many, once they come to power, don’t know how to speak. Many don’t know how to hold a room, or be commanding. Many are unnerved by cameras and mikes thrust in their faces. The same guy may be brilliant with ideas and in speaking to one person. My role is to coach them to deal with this changing world.” Thorat offers a comprehensive service, which begins with sending out news

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SMSes, to keep his subject informed—and ranges from insisting his clients set up home libraries with must-reads in Marathi, Hindi and English, as well as gyms, to helping them pick their clothes, conducting mock interviews with timed bites, training them in wit, crispness, language, even suggesting books for politicians to gift to each other, and introducing them to Twitter and Facebook.

Middle-class India too buys into the myth that it is necessary to wear the mask. Hordes of students and young executives set out every day to overcome their inhibitions. On his promotional video, confidence-builder Shiv Khera throws keywords at a seated audience in the hundreds at top corporate firms, and in public sessions. At Dadar in Mumbai, the old chawl building Madhav Wadi is just one of the many rows of buildings that has been turned into a beast of another kind. From floor upon floor hang signboards: Prime English Academy, Focus English Academy, SpeakWell, and so on.

Each lures students, children, housewives and sales executives to fork out thousands with the promise of speaking better, “confidence” and “personality development”. Inside, in plywood-partitioned rooms, frantic lessons for groups that average 10 motley students are under way by teachers who can barely get by themselves. Further down the road, Bindas Bol, with centres across Mumbai, states: “We offer courses that help people build on their strengths and limitations.

Through this course you will know that it is your attitude that determines your altitude.”

Goswami believes bluntness of speech is a generational shift. “I represent a generation that is direct, and that demands answers. The older generation believed in certain lines not being crossed with certain people. I have no delusions of grandeur. I am not here to pontificate and socialize with the people I interview. The question people should be asking is not why I am asking my questions loudly, but why no one else is,” he says.

Much of the translated bravado that Goswami bears for his viewer, explains his TRPs. The constant pressure of an unrelenting age does not bash the introvert into extinction, though, rather it forces him out in unquiet ways. When Guy Kawasaki, venture capitalist and former Apple evangelist, tweeted in 2008 that he was an “introvert”, nobody believed him. When actor Shah Rukh Khan states he is in fact a loner, it is dismissed. The quiet guys reach out, repeatedly, and at some point, either break through the pretence, carrying a mask for life, or eventually give up. Cain writes: “Introverts are more likely than extroverts to express intimate facts about themselves online… and to spend more time on online discussions. The same person who would never raise his hand in a lecture hall of two hundred people might blog to two thousand, or two million, without thinking twice.”

This uncharacteristic behaviour is what causes the same recluses, like Ratan Tata, to tweet pictures of the unseen parts of their lives—their dogs, their interests and details of their day. Because there is no such thing as saying too much in an age of aggression, and while the quiet man is patient enough to try everyone else’s way, it is rare that the noisy world is willing to try his.

L10

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE

PALATE

The best dim sums in Hong Kong On the hunt for the plumpest dumplings and sweetest spare ribs, this Asian city offers options from a cart, basket or porcelain plate

B Y G EORGIA F REEDMAN ···························· ity Hall Maxim’s Palace is a ballroom-like restaurant decorated with crystal chandeliers and white carvedwood screens—not the most obvious spot for breakfast, yet totally in character for dim sum. I arrived relatively early, hoping to beat the Sunday morning rush, only to find the enormous room already full of eager diners.

I was, after all, in Hong Kong, a city where eating ruffled siu mai dumplings, pork buns and meatballs early in the day is as much a way of life as having an afternoon cup of tea is in Britain. As I waited (and waited) for a table, I could hear through the open doors the clinking of china and the chatter of families enjoying brunch.

Finally, I was seated at a linendraped table. As I gazed out at the boats crossing Victoria Harbour, a waiter appeared with a silver pot of jasmine tea. More servers came, pushing steaming carts piled with baskets of plump har gow, shrimp dumplings in delicate wrappers; cheong fun—tender rice-noodle sheets—tucked around minced beef flavoured with scallion and preserved orange peel; and fatty, sweet spare ribs. I grabbed a helping of everything that looked good, savouring a meal that seemed to capture the very essence of the city.

Maxim’s is arguably the most famous dim sum spot in town, a 32-year-old restaurant in the middle of packed Central district that serves classic Hong Kongstyle dishes to locals and visiting dignitaries. It’s far from the only place to find traditional bites: Dim sum is served in upscale hotels and back-alley tea shops, in tourist traps overlooking the harbour and the basements of shopping malls. But in Hong Kong little stays the same for long, and in recent years, chefs have begun taking fresh approaches to native-style dim sum, bringing a dash of extra excitement to a meal that wasn’t exactly lacking in popularity in the first place.

Dim sum, as we know it, developed in Guangzhou, the cultural and commercial centre of southern China, in the 18th and 19th centuries, says Maria Tam, an anthropologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Back then, businessmen would meet in teahouses in the late morning to yum cha (drink tea). The restaurants originally served up simple snacks, but as the city grew, they began competing for customers by improving the variety and quality of their dishes.

The practice also became

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popular in Hong Kong, where chefs followed Guangzhou’s culinary lead.

In the 1940s, when mainland China closed itself off from the rest of the world, chefs in British-controlled Hong Kong began developing their own dim sum styles. They emphasized smaller portions, lighter ingredients and more elegant presentations. They also incorporated Western techniques such as baking, developing now-classic dishes like baked pork buns and sweet egg tarts.

Over time, chefs began to include dishes from other parts of the country (Shanghainese soup dumplings, for instance, were popular with émigrés who had fled the Communist revolution).

They added foods associated with holidays and festivals, like rice and meat wrapped in lotus leaves, part of the early summer dragon boat festival, says E.N. Anderson, author of The Food of China.

Along the way, dim sum evolved into a family affair, becoming popular for breakfast and brunch.

Though dishes like shrimp dumplings and egg tarts are what most Westerners think of as dim sum, many locals still enjoy the old Guangzhou style, which is served at a number of restaurants. The oldest and best of these is Lin Heung Tea House, which opened in 1923. The res-

taurant is packed every day with locals reading the newspaper, drinking astonishingly strong pu’er tea and eating dishes heavy with roasted, fatty meats.

“Dim sums used to be bigger, heartier dishes that people ate to keep them full for a hard day of work,” explained Amy Ma, a local food writer and former Wall Street Journal staffer, when she introduced me to the restaurant. Dishes like pork and shrimp dumplings topped with a hard-boiled quail egg are so popular that diners will crowd around as soon as carts enter the dining room.

Some chefs have begun reviving old techniques, creating updated versions of the kinds of dishes offered by Lin Heung and its peers. Chef Pui Gor of Tim Ho Wan, a cheap, hole-in-the-wall, dim sum-only restaurant with a cult following, makes a contemporary version of a bean curd skin roll, filling it with light shrimp rather than the traditional fatty minced pork. He nods to the past with a dessert called “chicken oil pancake”, which uses lard and evokes old menus that often used “chicken” in the names of dishes (even meatless ones) because it was considered a delicacy.

A handful of high-end restaurants have also been incorporating top-shelf ingredients, including foie gras and morel

THE SEVEN WONDERS A guide for the must­visit spots for dim sum lovers visiting Hong Kong PHOTOGRAPHS

mushrooms. One of the best examples is Lung King Heen, the Michelin-starred restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong, where chef Chan Yan Tak has added duck liver and black truffles to pork dumplings, and invented new dim sums, like abalone baked in a cup of flaky puff pastry. The dish is so popular, he says, that he hasn’t been able to take it off the menu since he opened six years ago.

Most of these restaurants have made another big change in how dim sum is eaten: They’ve done away with serving trolleys, mainly to give chefs more control over cooking and presentation.

“Already steamed dim sums that were put on a steamer to keep warm would end up overcooked,” chef Chan explains.

With the quieter atmosphere that has resulted, Hong Kong’s businessmen have rediscovered the joy of making deals over dumplings. Dim sum has become popular for business lunches again, bringing the tradition back to where it started.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

BY

PHILIPP ENGELHORN/WSJ

The classic

City Hall Maxim’s Palace The glittering ballroom at Maxim’s is a timeless place to experience trolley dim sum. This is the spot for familiar dishes like fried shrimp wontons, baked buns stuffed with sweet roast pork and steaming bowls of ‘congee’ (rice porridge). Be prepared to wait for a table and leave plenty of time for a leisurely meal so you can try a little of everything.

City Hall, Low Block, second floor, Central. For details, call 85225211303.

The empire builder

Mong Kok Lei Garden Restaurant This restaurant boasts branches across Asia, but the original location, a cozy space with brick walls and thick carpet on the Kowloon side of the city, is still the best. It provides an elegant, traditional meal, despite the absence of trolleys. Try the turnip­filled pastry puffs, one of the best dim sums in the city, as well as the excellent Shanghai­style soup dumplings and smashed cucumber in garlic sauce (see picture). 121, Sai Yee Street, Mongkok. For details, visit Leigarden.hk

The old faithful Lin Heung Kui

This utilitarian eatery, crowded with glass­topped tables and low stools, is an extension of a Hong Kong favourite that has been around for nearly a century. The real treats are old­fashioned Guangzhou specialities such as ‘dan siu mai’ (a dumpling topped with a boiled quail egg) and ‘ma lai gao’, a lightly sweetened steamed cake made from a yeast starter that the restaurant has been cultivating for decades. 2­3/F, 46­50, Des Voeux Road West, Sheung Wan. For details, call 85221569328.

The ugly duckling

Fu Sing Shark Fin restaurant It’s a favourite of local expats despite (or maybe because of) its kitschy light fixtures and gift wrap­like wallpaper. Fu Sing offers Cantonese twists on old dishes like taro­filled spring rolls with a clove­scented dipping sauce and soft cubes of tofu topped with minced melon and shrimp (deep­fried bean curd; see picture).

1/F, Sunshine Plaza, No. 353 Lockhart Road, Wan Chai. For details, call 85228930881.

The posh plate Lung King Heen

The logic behind this restaurant’s three Michelin stars is evident in everything from the delicate china and attentive wait staff to the jewel­like quality of each dumpling. Try one of everything on the short menu, focusing on innovations such as steamed lobster and scallop dumplings (see picture), and finish with a sweet snack from the dessert list.

4/F, 8, Finance Street, Central. For details, visit Fourseasons.com/hongkong

The holdout

Luk Yu Tea House Luk Yu retains the elegance of an old Parisian brasserie, and its food is equally old­school. Skip the recognizable dishes, which can be poorly prepared, for traditional recipes such as the hearty steamed chicken bun and crispy fried dumplings with sweet­and­sour sauce.

24­26, Stanley Street, Central. For details, call 85225235464.

The divine steal Tim Ho Wan

Old school: Dim sum developed in Guangzhou in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Often referred to as the “world’s cheapest Michelin meal” for its one star awarded in 2009, this tiny dim sum specialist filled with laminated tables is so popular that guests often wait upwards of 2 hours to order the flavourful turnip cakes and superb fried roast pork buns. Dishes cost as little as $1.50 (around `75). Luckily, the restaurant has opened two new branches, in Central and Sham Shui Po, where most of its signature dishes are also available.

2­20, Kwong Wa Street, Mongkok. For details, call 85223322896.

THINKSTOCK

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L11

Business Lounge

LOUNGE TOMAS ERNBERG

The discreet charm of selling luxe The new managing director of Volvo Auto India on driving the sales of luxury cars

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

···························· n the crisp and sunny February day we meet, Tomas Ernberg has a lot on his plate. It’s been less than eight months since the 41-year-old managing director of Volvo Auto India took over the top post in the Swedish car maker’s India operations, and he is lining up a series of new announcements and initiatives, including the launch of new variants of their cars, a couple of hours after the interview. They will be his first salvo at getting Volvo a bit of traction in the luxury car segment in the country, where it is still a fringe player, more than four years after it entered the market.

“In 2010, we sold 130 cars, in 2011 we sold 320,” Ernberg says. “We almost tripled the volumes and ended up with zero cars in stock. This year, we are more ambitious, and we want to sell 800 cars.”

Over coffee at The Oberoi hotel in New Delhi, Ernberg, tall, athletic and immaculate in his tailored suit, quickly lays out his plans, both short- and long-term, all aimed at one objective— breaking the stranglehold of BMW, Mercedes and Audi, the trinity of German auto giants that has become synonymous with luxury cars in India.

BMW, for example, sold 972 cars in September 2011 alone, the latest period for which figures are available, more than three times what Volvo sold in the entire year (Mercedes notched up 745 units and Audi 555 in the same month).

Ernberg won’t be rushing headlong into the fight though. His approach is more measured, more geared for the long haul.

“Our expansion will happen in a controlled way,” he says.

“India’s growth potential for luxury cars is

O

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

Polyglot: Ernberg is fluent in four languages, and conversant in a fifth.

huge. In that context, the German car makers are only still tapping the surface. In 2007, the penetration of luxury cars was 0.2% of total car sales. Last year, there were around 20,000 cars sold, a penetration of almost 1%. So it’s grown 10 times. By 2020, we are talking 150,000 luxury cars being sold.” By that time, Ernberg reckons, Volvo will be selling 20,000 cars per year, with around 50% of the market share in luxury cars in India.

The first move was to bring prices down.

“We figured that a lot of the volume that Germans had got was for competitive pricing,” says Ernberg.

“We had cars with bigger engines and we started at higher prices. So we got a smaller 2-litre diesel engine called D3, with a high torque, and now our cheapest model, the S60, will come for `24 lakh.” The original entry-level D5 variant of the S60 saloon, with a 2.5-litre engine, costs `27 lakh.

Later in the day, Ernberg unveiled the D3 variant of three Volvo models available in India.

The smaller engine is the only concession in Volvo cars being sold in India. Everything else, including their signature laser-driven “city safety” feature, will be in place. In this feature, the car’s sensors activate the brakes automatically if they sense that a collision is imminent but the driver is not reacting.

“It’s only available in Volvo cars, and it came about after a big survey done in Europe a couple of years back found that almost 70% of car

accidents in Europe happen at lower than 30 kmph (kilometres per hour), and 50% of the time, it’s because the driver has not reacted,” Ernberg says. “We also have lane departure warning, so if you leave your correct lane, the car gives you a warning. In India, you’ll have to switch that feature off, of course,” he adds, smiling.

Ernberg says that by January, Volvo will also launch a new car simultaneously in India and Europe, putting the two markets symbolically on a par—“though I can’t talk about the car yet”.

The other Herculean task Ernberg and Volvo face in India is to make their brand’s presence felt in the luxury car segment, and again, the approach is neither conventional nor head-on. “We are looking to get away from traditional advertising,” Ernberg says. “It is difficult to gauge what results advertising in newspapers or magazines have. So we want to directly reach the high net-worth individuals, around 250,000 people in India, who can afford a Volvo easily, a lot of one-to-one customer relationship management.”

It’s a model Ernberg understands intimately. He began his career in Volvo with the responsibility of selling tax-free cars to diplomats and embassies in Turkey. But his reason for joining Volvo was not a love for cars, but love for a woman.

In 1994, after finishing his economics degree from the Middle East Technical University in Ank-

IN PARENTHESIS About 18 years ago, I was travelling in a tiny city in Spain. Me and my friends went out for a couple of drinks and ended up in a small café/bar where a Spanish group was singing. We all enjoyed their singing so much that we ended up talking with them after the show. Two days later, I left for Sweden, for my annual summer visit to my family’s home in Båstad, which is an even smaller town with a population of around 5,000 people. So one night we decided to go out and, to my biggest surprise, I saw the same Spanish group playing the same songs in a bar in town! It was an incredible coincidence, and it just shows you that the world can be a very small place.

ara, Turkey, Ernberg’s priority was to find a job that would keep him in the country, because he had a Turkish girlfriend he had no intention of parting with. “I applied to the 25 Swedish companies which were established in Istanbul, and one of the first positive responses I got was from Volvo. So I grabbed the chance and began working there the same year,” he says.

In 1998, he married Shubnam, his Turkish girlfriend, and the couple now have two daughters.

Ernberg, who has three brothers, makes an annual trip to his parents’ home in Båstad, an idyllic town bordering a sheltered bay, 250km from Gothenburg (where Volvo’s headquarters are located), Sweden. This is where the entire family comes together.

“My brothers all married different nationalities—Spanish, Argentine and Ecuadorian,” Ernberg says. “So it’s a babble of languages and cuisines. We love coming together in the kitchen to cook elaborate meals. Every year we do this, and it’s very special.”

Ernberg, a polyglot, is fluent in Swedish, English, Spanish and Turkish and has a passing knowledge of Arabic—a result of his globetrotting childhood. Ernberg’s father is a retired diplomat, so Ernberg, who was born in Spain, went to junior school in Lagos, Nigeria, and Buenos Aires, Argentina; middle school in Malaysia; and high school in Sweden. And, finally, college in Ankara, Turkey—“my most exciting years. Ankara has a lot of students, lots and lots of cafés, an active nightlife, and during long weekends, we would go skiing, and of course, I met my love there.”

Though the thrills and romance of such a country-hopping childhood were considerable, there were some serious drawbacks too.

“You go to school, make friends and settle down. Then your dad comes and tells you OK, get up and pack, we’re leaving in a couple of months, and you lose all your friends,” Ernberg says. But now he is discovering a new, happier side to this. “With the help of social media, I’m finding so many old friends from many years back,” he says. “I’m finding friends with whom I never thought I’ll be able to make contact again—just a few days back, I reconnected with an old friend in Argentina on Facebook. It’s thrilling and entirely unexpected.”

Ernberg spends a lot of his free time playing sports—volleyball, tennis and golf. Soon, he’ll be seen on the greens with increasing regularity. Volvo has been hosting the Volvo World Golf Challenge for 24 years now. This year, the championship will also come to India, in partnership with the Professional Golf Tour of India.

“Volvo and golf fit well,” Ernberg says, “and it’s a lovely way of making people conscious of the brand.”

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RAKESH MUNDYE/MINT

India’s poker boom is fuelled by its young professional class, drawn to the game for its reliance on strategy and mathematics, as well as its luxe associations CARDS

SHUFFLE UP AND

DEAL B Y D AVID S HAFTEL david.s@livemint.com

···························· atan Rao* describes his underground poker games as the most frequent, best attended and, dare he say it, the classiest in Mumbai. He is in a profession that feeds on “fishes”, or unseasoned poker players, often wealthy businessmen, doctors, engineers and lawyers with money to burn.

“There is poker everywhere in this country, just not as much as in Bombay. It’s a game that depends on disposable income, and Bombay is a place where there is a huge amount of disposable income,” says Rao. “Inexperienced players are the bread and butter of the regular poker player.”

Through his vast poker network, Rao, 29, is one of the most connected men in Mumbai’s suburbs, having come into contact with show business celebrities, hedge fund managers, students, aspiring models and the occasional shady operator with underworld ties. An unassuming young man in baggy jeans, T-shirt and hooded sweatshirt, with an overactive BlackBerry and a long weekend’s worth of stubble, Rao’s rumpled appearance and relaxed demeanour don’t immediately call to mind the budding casino magnate that he is.

Like many Indians, Rao was introduced to cards through teen patti or flush, a simple three-card poker game favoured at Diwali and weddings which takes more guts than guile. Rao fell in love with poker—specifically, Texas Hold’em, a seven-card game in which players share five common cards—on his honeymoon

R

in Macau, the former Portuguese colony-cum-Chinese gambling mecca. The idea of promoting his own games came on a trip to New York City, when he and a friend planned to travel to Atlantic City to play poker. When a friend overheard them moaning about the 2-hour commute, he invited them to one of the many underground games in the city, Rao says in an interview at a coffee shop in Mumbai’s western suburbs.

Rao determined that he could run a similar operation in Mumbai, where the closest legal opportunity to play cards is at the end of a similarly inconvenient commute to one of Goa’s offshore casinos. Along with a partner, Rao opened his first game about two years ago.

Unlike casino games like roulette and blackjack, where gamblers play against the house, usually at unfavourable odds, poker players play against each other, using not only their math skills to determine what cards are in the other players’ hands, but also their powers of perception to look for “tells” or physical ticks or giveaways that indicate whether or not a player is bluffing. From the winnings, Rao and his partner take a 1% commission, or “rake”.

Their overhead was expensive, and at first, they lost money. But as poker boomed, so did their business, and new poker rooms launched in April and August last year in the suburbs. In December, they opened a high-stakes game in a tony south Mumbai neighbourhood. “We have to expand our business to match the pace of the increase in the poker sector, which is growing at such a fast pace. If we don’t match that

pace, someone else will step in,” says Rao, playing with an unlit cigarette.

Rao says his family and friends are “cool” with the fact that he is, technically, an organized criminal. Poker is accepted in society, he says, and it’s not like he’s killing anyone. “Just show me a way to pay taxes and we’ll pay taxes,” he says.

The high stakes Televised international poker tournaments led to increased promotion through social media and a plethora of Internet poker sites—especially the popular Poker by Zynga app available on Facebook. India is experiencing a poker boom, its young professional class drawn to the game’s reliance on strategy and mathematics, as well as its luxe associations. But with betting on poker illegal in all but a few isolated pockets within the country, specifically Sikkim and Goa, new devotees have few options. Stepping into that void are black market entrepreneurs like Rao, who will open a fifth game in Navi Mumbai in April, and has plans to expand to metros such as Pune, Kolkata and New Delhi.

According to Jay Sayta, a lawyer who writes a blog, Gaming Laws in India, on Indian gambling laws, playing poker in home games where a promoter makes a profit is illegal. Though guidelines differ from state to state, a typical punishment could be a fine or up to a few months in jail.

Punishment for the promoter is

RAKESH MUNDYE/MINT

likely to be higher, Sayta says.

One must be a friend of a player to be invited to one of Rao’s games, which rotate every two-three months to keep a step ahead of the police. Games are held in members’ homes, usually nondescript flats of students or Bollywood aspirants, which Rao rents for `8,000-15,000 a day. The three suburban games run Thursday-Sunday, but the high-stakes game in south Mumbai is a daily affair. Rao adds at least 10 new names to his database each week and sends a weekly SMS invite to around 1,500 gamblers. From the rake, Rao pays for rent, security, food, alcohol and drivers, who deliver large cash winnings and ferry home drunk patrons. After expenses, Rao says, the

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

house earns about `20,000 per night per low-stakes game.

Until early February, Rao says he was the “head of marketing for a corporate”, but promoting poker paid him much better, he says. His day job was just a public “face”, giving his lifestyle a whiff of legitimacy, and he applies the same principles he used on that job to his poker business, such as promotion through social networking.

Now with poker monopolizing most of his time, he often doesn’t rise till the afternoon. Rao’s partner, he says, works in his family’s construction business in Mumbai, from which he was already “decently wealthy”. While Rao favours understatement, his partner is flashier. “He likes to show it off, to drive expensive cars,” says Rao. “I like to keep a low profile. I don’t want my customers to feel ripped off.”

Not ready for a close­up?

Craig Wildman, who manages the Royale Card Room at the offshore Casino Royale Goa, w h e r e c a s i n o gambling is legal, has also witnessed the poker boom firsthand. Wildman, a professional poker player, relocated to Goa three years ago to “teach

the great game” and manage the poker room at Casino Pride, another offshore vessel. When he arrived, Casino Pride would struggle to get three or four people into a cash game per night, he says. Now, at Casino Royale, whose poker room opened in March 2010, the 10 poker tables are full each night. A new ship with 20-25 tables will drop anchor at Goa by the end of the year. Wildman says: “A lot of players have shifted to Goa to play on a regular basis. They’re turning professional now in great numbers.”

Indian law prohibits foreign investment of any kind in the gambling sector, but many international poker promoters are eager to get in, should the laws change. “India is an enormous market,” says Steve Heller, CEO of World Poker Tour (WPT), a series of international poker tournaments, in an email interview. “While we have not currently announced any WPT events in India, we recognize the size of the market and could envision an event there in the future,” he says.

Still, many gamblers and poker players feel Goa is not quite ready for its close-up. “Goa has never pushed itself into the mainstream, never promoted itself as a gambling destination because of moral and societal concerns. Goa has a lot to offer, but the infrastructure really needs to improve, as do the frequency of flights from (the metros),” says Peter Abraham, a director of marketing of the Indian Poker Championship, a Mumbai-based company that promotes poker tournaments at casinos in Goa. Abraham, who is a voice-over artiste by day, says that because

the game is so new to India, many players in Goa don’t observe the proper etiquette at the table, and that standing on a jetty waiting for a skiff to ferry you to a ship where steep entry fees are charged doesn’t make one feel like a high-roller. “You need to feel like you’re worth a million dollars, even if you’re a small-stakes player. Las Vegas succeeds tremendously at that.

India doesn’t even rank.”

However, Manik*, a player of some renown on the Mumbai circuit, sees amateurism in India as a boon, rather than a problem. “India has the softest games

in the world compared with any other place where poker is a developed game,” says Manik, who plays in illegal rake games.

“People here are just learning the game. They’ve come from teen patti and have that gambling mentality. If you are a pro, it’s the best possible place to play,” he says, adding with some regret that the casinos in Goa have become “infested” with seasoned players of late.

Licences for land-based casinos attached to five-star hotels are allowed in remote Sikkim.

In June, Casino Mahjong, a tidy little establishment attached to

the Mayfair Spa Resort and tucked into a mountainside, opened. On a recent visit, there were more people playing marriage—the rummy-like Nepalese card game popular among aunties—than poker. Manik says the casino thrives by organizing high-stakes cash games and flying in rich businessmen from Kolkata and pros from Goa. At the cash games in Sikkim, says Manik, there is typically a `1 lakh buy in, “but players sit much deeper than that.

Once guys have been at the table L14® TURN TO PAGE L14u

Ante up: (clockwise from top) The Casino Royale Goa, India’s largest floating casino; an increasing number of poker players at the Casino Royale Card Room are pros who have relocated to Goa; and Craig Wildman, manager of the Casino Royale Card Room.

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

RAKESH MUNDYE/MINT

India’s poker boom is fuelled by its young professional class, drawn to the game for its reliance on strategy and mathematics, as well as its luxe associations CARDS

SHUFFLE UP AND

DEAL B Y D AVID S HAFTEL david.s@livemint.com

···························· atan Rao* describes his underground poker games as the most frequent, best attended and, dare he say it, the classiest in Mumbai. He is in a profession that feeds on “fishes”, or unseasoned poker players, often wealthy businessmen, doctors, engineers and lawyers with money to burn.

“There is poker everywhere in this country, just not as much as in Bombay. It’s a game that depends on disposable income, and Bombay is a place where there is a huge amount of disposable income,” says Rao. “Inexperienced players are the bread and butter of the regular poker player.”

Through his vast poker network, Rao, 29, is one of the most connected men in Mumbai’s suburbs, having come into contact with show business celebrities, hedge fund managers, students, aspiring models and the occasional shady operator with underworld ties. An unassuming young man in baggy jeans, T-shirt and hooded sweatshirt, with an overactive BlackBerry and a long weekend’s worth of stubble, Rao’s rumpled appearance and relaxed demeanour don’t immediately call to mind the budding casino magnate that he is.

Like many Indians, Rao was introduced to cards through teen patti or flush, a simple three-card poker game favoured at Diwali and weddings which takes more guts than guile. Rao fell in love with poker—specifically, Texas Hold’em, a seven-card game in which players share five common cards—on his honeymoon

R

in Macau, the former Portuguese colony-cum-Chinese gambling mecca. The idea of promoting his own games came on a trip to New York City, when he and a friend planned to travel to Atlantic City to play poker. When a friend overheard them moaning about the 2-hour commute, he invited them to one of the many underground games in the city, Rao says in an interview at a coffee shop in Mumbai’s western suburbs.

Rao determined that he could run a similar operation in Mumbai, where the closest legal opportunity to play cards is at the end of a similarly inconvenient commute to one of Goa’s offshore casinos. Along with a partner, Rao opened his first game about two years ago.

Unlike casino games like roulette and blackjack, where gamblers play against the house, usually at unfavourable odds, poker players play against each other, using not only their math skills to determine what cards are in the other players’ hands, but also their powers of perception to look for “tells” or physical ticks or giveaways that indicate whether or not a player is bluffing. From the winnings, Rao and his partner take a 1% commission, or “rake”.

Their overhead was expensive, and at first, they lost money. But as poker boomed, so did their business, and new poker rooms launched in April and August last year in the suburbs. In December, they opened a high-stakes game in a tony south Mumbai neighbourhood. “We have to expand our business to match the pace of the increase in the poker sector, which is growing at such a fast pace. If we don’t match that

pace, someone else will step in,” says Rao, playing with an unlit cigarette.

Rao says his family and friends are “cool” with the fact that he is, technically, an organized criminal. Poker is accepted in society, he says, and it’s not like he’s killing anyone. “Just show me a way to pay taxes and we’ll pay taxes,” he says.

The high stakes Televised international poker tournaments led to increased promotion through social media and a plethora of Internet poker sites—especially the popular Poker by Zynga app available on Facebook. India is experiencing a poker boom, its young professional class drawn to the game’s reliance on strategy and mathematics, as well as its luxe associations. But with betting on poker illegal in all but a few isolated pockets within the country, specifically Sikkim and Goa, new devotees have few options. Stepping into that void are black market entrepreneurs like Rao, who will open a fifth game in Navi Mumbai in April, and has plans to expand to metros such as Pune, Kolkata and New Delhi.

According to Jay Sayta, a lawyer who writes a blog, Gaming Laws in India, on Indian gambling laws, playing poker in home games where a promoter makes a profit is illegal. Though guidelines differ from state to state, a typical punishment could be a fine or up to a few months in jail.

Punishment for the promoter is

RAKESH MUNDYE/MINT

likely to be higher, Sayta says.

One must be a friend of a player to be invited to one of Rao’s games, which rotate every two-three months to keep a step ahead of the police. Games are held in members’ homes, usually nondescript flats of students or Bollywood aspirants, which Rao rents for `8,000-15,000 a day. The three suburban games run Thursday-Sunday, but the high-stakes game in south Mumbai is a daily affair. Rao adds at least 10 new names to his database each week and sends a weekly SMS invite to around 1,500 gamblers. From the rake, Rao pays for rent, security, food, alcohol and drivers, who deliver large cash winnings and ferry home drunk patrons. After expenses, Rao says, the

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

house earns about `20,000 per night per low-stakes game.

Until early February, Rao says he was the “head of marketing for a corporate”, but promoting poker paid him much better, he says. His day job was just a public “face”, giving his lifestyle a whiff of legitimacy, and he applies the same principles he used on that job to his poker business, such as promotion through social networking.

Now with poker monopolizing most of his time, he often doesn’t rise till the afternoon. Rao’s partner, he says, works in his family’s construction business in Mumbai, from which he was already “decently wealthy”. While Rao favours understatement, his partner is flashier. “He likes to show it off, to drive expensive cars,” says Rao. “I like to keep a low profile. I don’t want my customers to feel ripped off.”

Not ready for a close­up?

Craig Wildman, who manages the Royale Card Room at the offshore Casino Royale Goa, w h e r e c a s i n o gambling is legal, has also witnessed the poker boom firsthand. Wildman, a professional poker player, relocated to Goa three years ago to “teach

the great game” and manage the poker room at Casino Pride, another offshore vessel. When he arrived, Casino Pride would struggle to get three or four people into a cash game per night, he says. Now, at Casino Royale, whose poker room opened in March 2010, the 10 poker tables are full each night. A new ship with 20-25 tables will drop anchor at Goa by the end of the year. Wildman says: “A lot of players have shifted to Goa to play on a regular basis. They’re turning professional now in great numbers.”

Indian law prohibits foreign investment of any kind in the gambling sector, but many international poker promoters are eager to get in, should the laws change. “India is an enormous market,” says Steve Heller, CEO of World Poker Tour (WPT), a series of international poker tournaments, in an email interview. “While we have not currently announced any WPT events in India, we recognize the size of the market and could envision an event there in the future,” he says.

Still, many gamblers and poker players feel Goa is not quite ready for its close-up. “Goa has never pushed itself into the mainstream, never promoted itself as a gambling destination because of moral and societal concerns. Goa has a lot to offer, but the infrastructure really needs to improve, as do the frequency of flights from (the metros),” says Peter Abraham, a director of marketing of the Indian Poker Championship, a Mumbai-based company that promotes poker tournaments at casinos in Goa. Abraham, who is a voice-over artiste by day, says that because

the game is so new to India, many players in Goa don’t observe the proper etiquette at the table, and that standing on a jetty waiting for a skiff to ferry you to a ship where steep entry fees are charged doesn’t make one feel like a high-roller. “You need to feel like you’re worth a million dollars, even if you’re a small-stakes player. Las Vegas succeeds tremendously at that.

India doesn’t even rank.”

However, Manik*, a player of some renown on the Mumbai circuit, sees amateurism in India as a boon, rather than a problem. “India has the softest games

in the world compared with any other place where poker is a developed game,” says Manik, who plays in illegal rake games.

“People here are just learning the game. They’ve come from teen patti and have that gambling mentality. If you are a pro, it’s the best possible place to play,” he says, adding with some regret that the casinos in Goa have become “infested” with seasoned players of late.

Licences for land-based casinos attached to five-star hotels are allowed in remote Sikkim.

In June, Casino Mahjong, a tidy little establishment attached to

the Mayfair Spa Resort and tucked into a mountainside, opened. On a recent visit, there were more people playing marriage—the rummy-like Nepalese card game popular among aunties—than poker. Manik says the casino thrives by organizing high-stakes cash games and flying in rich businessmen from Kolkata and pros from Goa. At the cash games in Sikkim, says Manik, there is typically a `1 lakh buy in, “but players sit much deeper than that.

Once guys have been at the table L14® TURN TO PAGE L14u

Ante up: (clockwise from top) The Casino Royale Goa, India’s largest floating casino; an increasing number of poker players at the Casino Royale Card Room are pros who have relocated to Goa; and Craig Wildman, manager of the Casino Royale Card Room.

L14 COVER

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PHOTOGRAPHS

® FROM PAGE L12 L13

for 5 hours, there could be as much as `50 lakh to `1 crore on the table at any given time,” he says.

A land-based casino in Daman, operated in partnership with Delta Corp. Ltd, the parent company of Casino Royale, is set to open soon, though no date has been finalized, but flights to nearby Diu are relatively infrequent.

An attractive alternative for India, says Abraham, would be following the example of the Philippines, which has legal poker rooms. Such a system could work in India’s metros, he says. “The government controls these rooms strictly, but there is a lot of structure and things are done the right way. You can see the cards properly, you can get food and drinks, and it’s safe,” he says. Until then, the best option for an increasing number of serious players is underground games.

Out of the shadows Bangalore’s IT professionals and university students were early adopters of poker, says Nitin Sood, a founder of the non-profit Indian Poker Federation (IPF), which is campaigning to legalize poker in Karnataka. Sood says home games in Bangalore are less formal than Rao’s Mumbai games, and there is no rake for the house. “There is a huge circuit here. There are 50 or 60 home games every weekend, easy,” he says.

Sood, a Bangalore-based investment banker, sees poker as a tremendous marketing vehicle for luxury brands in India if only it could shed the taint of illegality.

“Poker has become a lifestyle thing in Bangalore. Some groups combine it with their golf games and there are even two or three poker clubs formed by house mothers. Poker players are a discerning audience. As a medium for luxury brand promotion, it’s huge, if only it didn’t have the stigma of gambling,” he says.

The IPF’s solution is to take poker out of the shadows by classifying it as a game of skill—much like rummy has been—and, therefore, legalized. To that end, the IPF has submitted an application for a permit for a poker tournament which, Sood says, is the purest format for the game. If the application is denied, as they expect it to be, they plan to sue the state of Karnataka on the grounds that poker is a game of skill, not

Fair deal: The Casino Royale Card Room (above) is one of the few places in India where high­stakes betting on poker is legal; and Peter Abraham (left) and Sameer Rattonsey promote tournaments through their Indian Poker Championship brand at Casino Royale Goa. chance. “Poker should be played in a sober, controlled environment. It’s a game that needs to be played in public,” says Sood.

Because there is no limit to how much a player can win or lose in a cash game, says Sood, Bangalore’s home games are beginning to drift into the realm of base gambling.

Since players in home games can continue to buy more chips as they continue to lose or even take on debt to keep playing, irrational betting has become rampant. The result, says Sood, is huge debts and hurt feelings over big losses.

The solution, he says, are legal tournaments, in which players buy in and can thus win or lose a finite amount, reducing emotional betting.

A website in West Bengal, www.adda52.com, is also challenging the status quo on the grounds that poker is a game of skill, not chance, according to Sayta. In Bengal, poker is exempt from the definition of gambling as defined by the West Bengal Prize Competition and Gambling Act, 1957, and is thus legal to bet on, Sayta says. But since it’s not classified as a game of skill anywhere else in the country, it’s unclear whether gambling on the site from other states is legal. Should various other states decide to pursue it, they could embargo players’ ability to gamble from those states, Sayta says. “Adda52.com is taking a risk and the law will be tested if this matter goes to the courts,” he says.

Managing their way Many poker enthusiasts say the poker boom started in earnest in 2003 when an accountant, Chris Moneymaker, won $2.5 million (around `12.25 crore now) in the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas, the game’s premier event, after qualifying through an online poker site. Moneymaker’s success, along with the rise of Internet poker, has democratized the game globally. This year, a contingent of more than 20 players from India will attend the

BY

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

MAKE A TURNAROUND A beginner’s guide to playing poker

T

World Series of Poker in September in Las Vegas, according to Rao. Before that, their skills will be sharpened in underground home games and rake games—there are around 10 each of these in Mumbai alone on any given weekend, according to Rao. One poker player who has attended Rao’s games and wished to remain anonymous says he prefers the more casual home games to rake games. “Home games are friendlier,” he says. “I know they will be quieter, more fun. And you can invite accordingly, per the reputation of the player. There is more respect at home games,” he adds.

Manik says that after two rake games in the suburbs were raided by the police about six months ago, the frequency of rake games has gone down. He says, “A lot of the Bombay regulars I used to play with became pros and shifted to Goa.” Rao was dismissive about the threat from the police, saying the raids were the result of a dispute over territory between rival promoters, who tipped off the police to the other’s game, rather than the result of a law enforcement initiative. “It was a blessing in disguise for us because we got their market share,” says Rao. “Now, they cannot reopen. The

cops know about it. Nobody will give them places to rent because people know they have been busted. Players still rent us their houses because they know we’re clean,” he says.

Neither does Sayta. The gaming law expert believes there is not much police interest in gambling. “There are card games going on on a huge scale, but the police are not keen to enforce gambling activity because the punishment is relatively low and the cases can take a long time to prosecute,” he says.

Likewise, Nisar Tamboli, Mumbai’s deputy commissioner of police, told Lounge that his division only investigates “real crimes”, not gambling.

Anyway, says Rao, the two poker promoters arrested during the raids in the suburbs were able “to manage their way out” of a conviction by paying a bribe. Players in Mumbai say that if the police come upon an underground game, it’s the result of happenstance, not enforcement.

Nosy police are easily placated with a bribe, poker players say, but the game must be moved to avoid repeat visits from the police.

Himanshu Roy, joint commissioner of police (crime), Mumbai, did not respond to calls requesting comments on the prevalence

of illegal poker rooms in Mumbai.

Still, Rao and his partner are thinking about making at least a part of their business legitimate.

They recently made a trip to Malaysia to discuss investing in a poker room at a casino in the Genting Highlands hill station and have plans for a “full-service poker consultancy” that provides dealers, chips and instructors at weddings, parties and Diwali celebrations, where poker is increasingly edging out teen patti. They’d also like to use their money to bankroll talented players at highprofile international tournaments.

The pair has invested in legal businesses such as ice-cream franchises. “Places where we can do money laundering,” Rao says.

Rao plays poker most nights, but while the games go into the small hours of the morning, he tends to retire by 11pm in order to not gamble away his profits. As a poker player, Rao says, he has a lot of improving to do before he is an elite player. But he doesn’t need to gamble to win. On a recent night at one of his games, a player lost `42 lakh in one evening. Another, he says, won `28 lakh. Rao had a piece of it all. *Names have been changed on request.

exas Hold’em is the most popular form of poker in the world. As such, it is the game of choice at Ratan Rao’s games.

In a hand of Texas Hold’em, each player is dealt two cards, face down. Then three community cards—called the “flop”—are dealt face up, followed by another (the “turn” or “fourth street”) and another (the “river” or “fifth street”). A player’s hand consists of the five best cards among his or her two private cards and the five community cards.

The stakes at a particular game are determined by “blinds”, or rotating mandatory opening bets that two players must make at the start of each hand, which set the tone for each hand’s betting. At Rao’s low­stakes game, the “small blind” is `50 and the “big blind”, `100. At his high­stakes games, the blinds are `500 and `1,000, respectively.

At each stage of a hand, a player can match other players’ bets or raise them, depending on how their hand comes together. Or if a good hand doesn’t materialize, they may bluff, betting as though they have a great hand in the hope of scaring off other players.

A common format of play­at­home games is “No Limit” Texas Hold’em, in which there is no limit to how much a player can bet on a particular hand. In tournament play, players buy in with a specific amount and thus there is a finite amount which players can win or lose.

David Shaftel

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012

L15

Culture

LOUNGE PREVIEW

Athletic consciousness Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic narratives will be one of the four public art projects during the London Olympics

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

···························· arnath Banerjee is a high jumper—only for the day we meet, though. The artist and graphic novelist is trying to play out the life and times of an elite athlete (and failing). “Last week, I was a pole vaulter,” says Banerjee, who’s been studying the lesser-known Olympic sports over the last few months.

One of the four artists selected to produce public art projects curated by the Frieze Foundation for the London 2012 Festival, Banerjee is working on a project he refers to as the “narrative history of losers”. His graphic narratives will appear on 48 billboards across east London as well as in community newspapers during the London Olympics, which will open on 27 July.

Playing sport has been part of the artistic process. Banerjee’s training schedule and diet are an attempt to get “under the skin” of an athlete. “It isn’t reportage,” he insists, though the fictional narratives do work in iconic figures such as Brazilian judoka Douglas Vieira and the French table tennis player Jean-Philippe Gatien.

Cutting across what he calls the “loser” sports—high jump, long jump, pole vaulting and javelin, among others—Banerjee’s commentaries are pseudo-autobiographical, inked with humour and irony.

As Sarah McCrory, Frieze Foundation’s curator, says, his commission taps into a collective consciousness of sporting near misses or partial successes. It’s about the people who almost made it, resonating with both

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local communities and visitors to the 2012 Games.

The series of four public art projects, called Frieze Projects East, commissioned for the London 2012 Festival, will be put up in six east London host boroughs for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games: Barking and Dagenham, Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest. Other artists

include the Britain’s Anthea Hamilton & Nicholas Byrne and Gary Webb and Turkey’s Can Altay, who’re all working on independent projects, including sculptural works and architectural installations.

McCrory had come across Banerjee’s work in a presentation made by his Mumbai gallery, Project 88, at Artissima, an art fair in Turin, Italy, and

recommended him for the Frieze Art Fair in 2009. “Later, I investigated and found that he had studied in London (Goldsmiths College)—which was great because all the artists making projects have lived in, or have a strong relationship with, London in some way—I felt that was important for the context of the work.”

East London, Banerjee

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

···························· t was a simple premise: Everything emanates from the art, we are about the art, and raising consciousness about possibilities in art. As a gallery, you are always waiting for people to make the effort to come to you. Here, we are making the effort to take art to people,” says Abhay Maskara of Gallery Maskara, Mumbai.

This coming together of nine Colaba galleries—Chatterjee & Lal, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Gallery Maskara, Chemould Prescott Road, The Guild, Lakeeren, Project 88, Sakshi Gallery and Volte—in one soon-to-be-annual show, under the collaborative corporate funding of Citibank and Taj Lands End, from 31 March-1 April at the Taj Lands End, Ban-

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dra, Mumbai, is a first. Indian contemporary art, which has hitherto extended the courtesy of clinking champagne glasses at each others’ openings, has not quite held hands at one.

Geetha Mehra of Sakshi Gallery explains the need to find a new audience: “There is this great divide between south Mumbai and the suburbs and there is always this idea that art is elitist. The nine of us have been extending gallery hours and staying open on Sundays so people from other parts of town can come across, so the aim is to allow a new audience in.”

Not all the artworks are on sale. Some are especially commissioned works, while others are drawn from private collections. Maskara says, “It is more a gesture than a sales pitch.”

But why nine of more than 20 galleries in Colaba? Some, like

Chemould, are around 50 years old, and others, between two years to a decade old.

Arshiya Lokhandwala, of Gallery Lakeeren, says: “It’s come together quite organically. It comes from a basic respect for each other. The nine of us represent the avante-garde in terms of contemporary art practice, so in terms of criticality itself that links us.”

The banquet room of a fivestar hotel is not exactly a space conducive to art. So the collective has invited Rooshad Shroff, who has a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University, US. Shroff walks around marking flexi-walls or measuring the distance from an artwork that makes for optimum viewing. “It’s not a trade fair, so people are going from artwork to artwork rather than from gallery to gallery,” he says.

The gallerists eschewed a curator, depending on their own synergy, and the show has no specific schema.

Tushar Jiwarajka of Volte is

On track: Work­in­ progress sketches of Banerjee’s billboards, which will be installed in East London during the Olympics. your best shot. Instead, his narratives are about the thoughts in a boxer’s head when he’s cornered against the ropes. “How many more of those do I have to dodge before I hear the sweet sound of the final bell?” our protagonist asks. In another, about Gatien who’s facing match point—the French player is thinking about the eerie silence of the indoor stadium in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. He goes on to ponder on the spelling of “e-e-r-i-e”.

Not all of Banerjee’s subjects are “losers”: Gatien won a silver in 1992. Later, in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, he won a bronze. It’s just that he didn’t make the gold.

Banerjee’s art project is about the people who don’t win, not just in the Olympics but in life. During the London Olympics, his gallery of nonperformers will play to a gallery of non-performers.

Not all is fair in sport.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Dressed to the Nines Nine Mumbai art galleries break their silos to host a show of their collective works

observes, “is full of people who’re disenfranchised; people who’re wondering what the Olympics shenanigans might mean to them. I’ve never been one for large conceptual gestures. My art has always been deeply rooted in the middle class.”

Will his brand of humour and cultural references work with the residents of East London?

McCrory believes so. “I think what’s important about Sarnath’s work is that he deals with universal themes. There may be cultural specificities in there, but the overall picture is one we can all relate to—success or failure, family relationships, personal endeavours...” she says.

Banerjee is working hard to finish his billboards by the end of May. The works will also travel to the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, later in the year.

The billboards and newspaper inserts, each about a different sport or sportsperson, are connected by a larger narrative—not the clichéd rhetoric of large sporting events. Banerjee’s artworks are a foil to those countless jingles about victory and honour, about giving “it”

Art merchants: The Colaba gallerists have come together in solidarity. celebrating Bandra’s Bollywood connection with the moving image with artists Ranbir Kaleka and Sheba Chhachhi, and celebrity photographer David LaChapelle. Mortimer Chatterjee from Chatterjee & Lal—which is showing Sadanand Shirke, along with artists from other cities in mediums and formats such as photogra-

phy and tabletop—says, “There is a common language visually which we all speak, so there should be lots of talking points between the works.”

For Shireen Gandhy of Chemould Prescott Road, who lives down the road from the venue but has never transacted art in that space, the city itself became a trigger. “I found that I had a

work by Gigi Scaria, and it just fits in, and that was a starting point for me.”

Lokhandwala is excited by one of her larger works: “Anita Dube is doing a new work for me—a photograph with root works on it about Hiroshima, which is a 11x7ft installation.”

Project 88 has stayed minimalistic. “We’ve chosen works which are spare and experimentative. So we have a video art, a painting on a new material like Duraline, a graphic artist like Sarnath Banerjee and Tejal Shah, who lives in Bandra,” says Sree Goswami of Project 88.

Usha Mirchandani of Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, who has overseen the project along with Maskara, points out coves and niches along the passageway which have lent themselves to activation by newer works. “As we began to work, the space itself began to suggest itself for works, and we’ve commissioned accordingly,” she says.

Mumbai Gallery Weekend is on view at Taj Lands End on 30 March (by invitation), 31 March (1-8 pm) and 1 April (11am-6pm).

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FILM

Eye on the spy

‘Agent Vinod’ puts the spotlight on the spy thriller, a slim and neglected genre in India B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com

···························· n agent dies, there are cryptic clues to the cause of his death, a mysterious girl appears and reappears, the canvas shifts from one part of the world to the other. The Bond or Bourne schema. Director Sriram Raghavan builds upon these unfailing crimethriller templates for his new film Agent Vinod.

Raghavan is an astute practitioner of the genre, which is rarely considered lucrative in Hindi cinema. He combines a stylized cinematic language, rooted in Bollywood theatrics, song and dance, with realistic acting and storytelling. His last film Johnny Gaddaar is a consummate example of that mix.

Raghavan wrote Agent Vinod along with Arijit Biswas, a writer by hobby, over many months, and the making of it, including filming in six countries, took around two years. “The story takes place in Afghanistan, Russia, Morocco, Riga and Karachi, and I have not repeated one location twice. There is a nuclear theme to it, but the plot itself is quite simple. What happens in each episode, and then how they are related to the big story, is more my concern,” Raghavan says.

“After having watched it, you’ll probably forget the details of it, so it

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will be still fun to go back to it.”

The story and its arc have similarities with the Alfred Hitchcock classic North by Northwest, starring Cary Grant. There is Hitchcockian playfulness to Saif Ali Khan’s peripatetic operative and his exciting route of spies and counter spies across lands and milieus drastically different from each other. Director Vijay Anand, whose films Raghavan has admired, was also influenced by Hitchcock, especially in North by Northwest. As Raghavan says: “In the Hitchcock film, the character who does not exist fools the villains. But Cary Grant is also not aware of it.”

The lead romance between Khan’s character and that played

Two eras: (above) Saif Ali Khan plays the lead role of a peripatetic spy in Agent Vinod; and a still from Vijay Anand’s Jewel Thief.

by Kareena Kapoor also takes up much of the film. “Vinod is not the slick, invincible spy and the casanova like Bond. He does not have gadgets, so he has to put his mind to his hustling.” And he gets beaten up. On his adventures, Vinod has to strike deals and fool oddball characters, including a set of colourful villains played by actors such as Ram Kapoor, Ravi Kishan and the golden baddie of Bollywood Prem Chopra. In the density of characters and its expanse across faraway lands, Agent Vinod is Tintinesque.

Khan also produces the film under his banner Illuminati Films,

Anupam Kant Verma contributed to this story.

Agent Vinod releases in theatres on 23 March.

Imaginary homeland PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

India helped Israeli artist Achia Anzi heal from the spiritual crisis he felt in his homeland B Y S HREYA R AY shreya.r@livemint.com

···························· sculpture of a decapitated bird, with its barbed-wire insides spilling out of its throat, is among the exhibits of a room themed “exile”. In the room below, at about the same spot as the decapitated bird above, is another sculpture, of an injured bird with an accompanying script in red ink on the floor: “Peaceful be your return O lovely bird, from warm lands back to my window.”

The theme here is “return”.

The 13 artworks in New Delhi’s Gallery Threshold—mostly sculptures in iron, plaster, tin sheet and scrap material—convey pain, disturbance and destruction. This is after a decade of “healing”, says the artist Achia Anzi, who teaches

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in the process resuscitating a genre ignored in India. “Saif is a Bond encyclopaedia. On shoots, we would remember scenes from obscure Cary Grant movies and do the referencing in our heads,” Raghavan says.

The director’s own films, Ek Hasina Thi and Johnny Gaddaar, Navdeep Singh’s charming noir caper Manorama Six Feet Under, Vijay Anand’s Jewel Thief and Teesri Manzil, Satyajit Ray’s Feluda films (his son Sandip Ray recently directed a Feluda thriller in Bengali, which failed commercially, and also received harsh criticism) are the few, but pioneering, Indian films that send the spy on riveting exploits. A random Facebook and Twitter survey revealed that for lovers of crime thrillers, the favourites are still Jewel Thief and Teesri Manzil, both breathless capers that depend heavily on background sound, music and a dapper hero.

A clever crime thriller is inherently demanding of a writer’s skills. Any writer will vouch that in the creative hierarchy of most Bollywood set-ups, writers are at the bottom. They often write keeping a star in mind, which makes the rigour of crafting plot and density in a story redundant. The classic crime thrillers, as well as the most experimental ones, require rigour and precision, besides an adventurer’s curiosity.

Author Surender Mohan Pathak, celebrated for his crime novels written in Hindi, rues the lack of interest in the genre, unlike in some other countries where novelists and screen writers are part of a creative universe and feed off each other. “Over here, nobody is looking out for crime stories... There is a fundamental concern about the box-office potential of mystery thrillers.”

Pathak says he has had bitter experiences with producers who have asked him to make changes to his stories, most of which have been best-sellers with several print runs. Rakesh Khanna, editor of the Chennai-based Blaft Publications, which has brought out anthologies of Tamil pulp fiction, says the spy in Tamil crime thrillers has become one of us. “New directors and screen writers are interested in the genre, but the screen investigator is often a journalist or photographer, rather than a detective by trade.”

Raghavan’s achievement, before the film’s merits are discussed threadbare, is in creating an Indian spy and making a world-roving film with him.

Hebrew at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi.

Anzi, 32, left his homeland Israel in 1992 to live in India. In his first solo show, also titled Peaceful be your return..., he addresses the spiritual crisis Israel is experiencing.

Born into an orthodox Jewish family, Anzi grew up in a country where religion is a public statement. The unpleasant accompaniment to religion is militarism. “The army is everywhere. As a young Israeli, you are literally born into the army,” says Anzi. Like every young Israeli, Anzi served in the army for a year, after which he had a one-year stint in Jerusalem as a security personnel. By then, he had already decided to leave his country. He travelled, finished a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in fine arts from Rajasthan University, before taking up the teaching stint at JNU. At no time before creating these works had he imagined how deep-rooted Israel was in his psyche, he confesses.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, images ubiquitous to the Israeli

Healed: Artist Achia Anzi. landscape—military boots (an ironic ode to Van Gogh’s epic labourer’s boots), sandbags and barbed wire—recur. The theme of living beings caught in barbs is a constant: The exile section has a ball of rolled-up barbed wire with butterflies caught mid-flight.

The barbed wire is also the main-

stay of an hourglass installation in the “return” section. It is surrounded by sandbags, a common sight in Israel. Etched on the bags, in Arabic, are the verses of poet Mirza Ghalib.

What changed for Anzi in the last 10 years, he says, was his exposure to a new brand of spiritualism—which he experienced in India. Coming from an orthodox family (“We think that the one-two million of us are the only people who are worshipping God the right way”), it was hard for him to understand how spiritualism is viewed in India. “In India, there have been so many saints like Meerabai, Kabir, Khusrau; so many approaches to spirituality.”

Tunty Chauhan, director, Gallery Threshold, says she decided to show his works because of their “pure, raw energy”.

Anzi’s works show that there isn’t a drastic difference between exile and return, they’re both equally problematic. But given the spiritual equanimity he has experienced in India, he prefers exile now.

Peaceful be your return O lovely bird, from warm lands back to my window is on exhibit till 30 March at Gallery Threshold, Lado Sarai, New Delhi. For details, visit Gallerythreshold.com.

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

SAME DIFFERENCE

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ajshri Productions has a lot to answer for—the revival of the cloying joint family drama, preternaturally clever Pomeranians—but let’s give praise where it’s due. The banner has produced and distributed several interesting Hindi films over the years, many of which are now available for free viewing on its YouTube channel. Agent Vinod, whose namesake opens on 23 March, is one of them. The tiny screen afforded by YouTube is sufficient to watch the Mahendra Sandhu-starrer—it reins in the film’s grand ambition to make a James Bond-style spy thriller on an Indian budget and makes the watching of the po-faced Sandhu much more tolerable.

Although Agent Vinod has its fans—a few of the faithful maintain the website www.agentvinod.com—it is usually derided as an example of an Indian-style “B-movie”. Such movies are dismissed as poor cousins of the more lavishly produced star vehicles. Their cheesiness—especially given their earnestness—is the subject of countless YouTube forwards, usually accompanied by “it’s so bad that it’s great fun” comments. We don’t actually have a tradition of “B-movies” in India, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The phrase originated in the US and referred to the low-budget second movie that followed the more prestigious main feature at a double-bill screening. It now applies to any film that is trying very hard to be the real item.

New avatar: Actor Saif Ali Khan in Agent Vinod.

Agent Vinod isn’t actually too different from other spy movies that came before it or existed alongside it—or, for that matter, that followed the movie’s release in 1977. Its plot gets increasingly preposterous and there are many unintentionally funny moments, most of which have to do with Vinod’s irresistible magnetism. But this isn’t the first time that women have clung to a thick-waisted man who doesn’t seem to have done anything to merit the attention. Sandhu was no thespian, but several other—and far more successful—leading men too had strictly serviceable acting skills.

Even before Agent Vinod, Indian intelligence agents were wearing ill-fitting suits, fiddling with gadgets that resembled outsized toys and trying to appear at ease in foreign climes.

The cardboard sets and far-out developments in Agent Vinod aren’t unique to that film. Take Don, which came a year later and is now revered as a classic. If you ignore the sharp dialogue, the funky soundtrack and the sense of fun that inhabits every frame, Don is pretty tacky. What does Don have that Agent Vinod didn’t? A certain Amitabh Bachchan.

If there’s a star of Bachchan’s wattage in the foreground, who cares about how tacky the background is? Stars can make all the difference between glory and ignominy, between so-called A- and B-movies. Everybody on the sets seems to pay more attention if a star is part of a project. The women are more glamorous, the action improves, the dialogue is better, the costume department sweats more. The overall quality improves but only up to a point—the plots remain formulaic and undeveloped. It’s more important to fire away memorable dialogue than to change the language of cinema.

Achieving stardom is a matter of luck—look at Rajesh Khanna and Rajendra Kumar, for instance. There’s no telling which film or which actor will catch the fancy of viewers.

Disco Dancer is the subject of several spoofs and satires, but the movie was also a big hit, which means that a few hundred thousand people were either very prescient about Mithun Chakraborty or plain stupid. The Navketan Films movie Prem Pujari is an example of how star power can confuse viewers.

Dev Anand’s head-nodding tendency had already reached frightening proportions by 1970. In Prem Pujari, which he wrote and directed, Anand plays an Indian spy who gets briefly entangled with a Chinese agent, played by Zaheeda.

Hindi cinema is littered with examples of prestige pictures in which men and women with distinctly Indian features play Chinese characters. However, Prem Pujari isn’t referred to in the same language as Agent Vinod simply because of the respect for Dev Anand.

The new Agent Vinod, by Sriram Johnny Gaddaar Raghavan, is nothing like its 1977 predecessor. Raghavan is respectful to the spirit of the movie with which his globe-trotting spy adventure shares a title. His Agent Vinod has high production values, a healthy budget and Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor. Raghavan has, however, taken care to embed a few tributes to the original movie. Watch out for a Mahendra Sandhu reference and a strategically placed tattoo.

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

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

CULTURE L17

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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

WESLEY MANN/CONTOUR/GETTY IMAGES

Q&A | SUSAN SARANDON

Sarandon and Sons Older lover, sex offender, and more than one son living in her basement—so it goes with the actor’s current career graph

B Y R ACHEL D ODES ···························· n Jeff, Who Lives at Home, which released on Friday, Susan Sarandon plays the mother of a 30-year-old slacker (Jason Segel) and his financially challenged brother (Ed Helms). Sarandon, ever the activist, sees societal underpinnings in this theme.

“I’ve gotten at least six scripts about stoners living in their mother’s basements, so there must be something going on,” she says.

Now 65, Sarandon may be playing different characters than she did in the days of Thelma & Louise and Bull Durham, but she’s got plenty of work. In Arbitrage, she plays the wife of a corrupt hedge fund manager (Richard Gere), and in the futuristic drama Robot & Frank, with Frank Langella, she plays an alluring librarian whose job is about to be taken over by automatons. She also will appear with Laura Linney in Showtime’s The Big C next season.

The eldest of nine children from Edison, New Jersey, Sarandon was nominated for an Oscar for her role in the film Atlantic City. She eventually won a best actress award for playing a nun in Dead Man Walking.

Recently, she has been cast as a sexy mom, a trend that seems to have intensified after she appeared with Justin Timberlake in a 2009 Saturday Night Live skit about inter-generational lovers. On 30 Rock, she will reprise her recurring role as a schoolteacher-turned-registeredsex-offender.

At a private club in downtown Manhattan, Sarandon, wearing skinny jeans, combat boots and a striped cotton top, sipped tea as her fluffy dog, a Pomeranian mix named Penny who has her own Twitter account, cuddled up by her feet. Edited excerpts:

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What attracted you to the ‘Jeff’ script?

Jay and Mark Duplass (who wrote and directed it) are pretty brave. It’s rare when I can start reading the script and not know in the first 10 pages what is going to happen. And I love New Orleans (where the film was shot).

In ‘Jeff’, all your character wants for her birthday is for her son to go out, buy some wood glue and fix the shutters.

Do you think parents these days expect too little from their children?

I am actually going on Dr Phil to discuss this because of this movie. You look around at the high rents and the lack of jobs— you can understand why kids are coming home. It’s discouraging out there. If you’re not lucky enough to fall into a job, if you have a liberal arts college education, what do you do with it when you get out? Even if you do have a job and you’re starting out as a low-level writer, or a publicist, or certainly anything in the arts, you’re not going to make enough money to pay your rent in a major city.

You’ve said that you like to do films that take you out of your comfort zone—what was it about this film that made you uncomfortable?

I think the thing that made me the most uncomfortable was this woman who is so drained of any hope whatsoever, in a job that she hates, with kids that she is suddenly hating. How did things go wrong? What happened to her dreams? Being that person was very uncomfortable.

Have your children seen it yet?

No, not yet. I am excited for them to see it. We don’t have a basement, but the dynamic is somewhat similar. Well, they’re still young, so it’s not really true.

‘Arbitrage’ is about a hedge fund guy, but in the end it

doesn’t really have as much to do with the financial crisis as this film does.

Arbitrage was kind of a whodunnit, and does this guy get his comeuppance? It was a peek into this world of really nice suits. Richard’s an old friend, and I love giving a first-time director (Nicholas Jarecki) a shot. But for me, what was most interesting about that film was the story about the daughter (played by Brit Marling). He robbed her of her values and her idealism.

You’ve been playing a sexy mom in a lot of films lately. Do you think that the ‘Motherlover’ skit on ‘SNL’ made people in Hollywood see you in a new light?

Well, White Palace was 20 years ago, and that was an older woman and a younger guy. So I guess I have been cast in that role before, and continue to be now. In the (coming) Adam Sandler film, my daughter has this really funny cameo playing a teacher in a high school. She has sex with Adam Sandler when he’s a student, gets pregnant and has a baby who grows up to be Andy Samberg. And then she goes to jail, leaving Adam Sandler to raise Andy Samberg.

At the very end, they visit her in prison, and it’s me. I’ve also got this arc on 30 Rock where I’m a teacher who had a relationship with Judah Friedlander when he was in middle school. It’s crazy.

So, yeah, it seems to be haunting me.

Tell me about your role in ‘The Big C’.

I was shooting that this morning.

I’m playing a motivational speaker who is a cancer survivor and has figured out merchandising and all kinds of things. I did this whole thing where I had all these big cardboard cutouts of myself. I changed my name to Joy. I had my book.

So many shows on cable these days centre on actresses.

Would you ever want to do your own?

I feel like it’s something I am saving for old age, which I guess I am creeping into, but it’s a big commitment. It can be seven years. Maybe I’m a commitment-phobe. If it was

A hero for all quadrants The marketing challenge for ‘The Hunger Games’ movie: how to appeal to men as well as women B Y R ACHEL D ODES J OHN J URGENSEN The Wall Street Journal

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···························· or the producers behind The Hunger Games, a movie based on a young-adult novel about a teenage girl fighting for survival and struggling with a love triangle, the guys matter.

The movie doesn’t open until 23 March, but soothsayers are already predicting an opening-weekend gross in excess of $100 million (around `500 crore). Barclays Capital estimates that the movie will generate $275 million domestically, on a par with the most recent instalment of the Twilight series. The studio, Lionsgate, is hoping to launch a multibillion-dollar franchise.

Expectations have already sent

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its stock price soaring.

To avoid falling short of such lofty predictions, Lionsgate has been picking its way through a minefield of gender issues: reeling in male movie-goers without alienating core female fans.

Set in a dystopian future, The Hunger Games centres on Katniss Everdeen, a 16-year-old girl who is called upon to fight 23 other teens to the death in a twisted annual survival competition that is televised to the nation of Panem. The quick pace, strong characters and blood sport of author Suzanne Collins’ trilogy helped attract a robust male readership.

From the start, the books were aimed at a crossover audience.

The publisher, Scholastic, considered dozens of cover designs, including portraits of Katniss, before settling on a more “iconic” image of a bird pendant that plays a role in the story, says Rachel Coun, Scholastic’s executive director of marketing.

When the book was first released, young male readers were targeted with a promotional video game online. A viral campaign to get fans to become “citizens” of Panem drew a sur-

prisingly large number of males, says producer Alli Shearmur.

“We always saw this as a fourquadrant movie,” says Lionsgate vice-chairman Michael Burns, meaning that the film would appeal to boys and men, girls and women. “We never thought this was going to be Twilight, ” the vampire-romance franchise produced by Summit Entertain-

Yummy mummy: Sarandon is increasingly finding roles that invest older women with a new seriousness. something incredible, maybe.

But it’s not really high on my list right now. I really value my freedom. Now, I’m like a temp.

‘Thelma & Louise’ was the breakout role for Brad Pitt 20 years ago. Could you have predicted what a big star he is today?

It’s like the dumb blonde: You can sell somebody short because they are so good-looking. What’s amazing, besides the sexiness and the sense of humour— everyone was all abuzz about the

love scene with Geena (Davis)— was the scene where he’s pulled in (by the police), and is taunting the husband. You could really tell there that he was something special.

You’re into table tennis and have a chain of ping-pong clubs, right?

I love ping-pong. I don’t really play particularly well. I like that it cuts across gender and age and body type. We have clubs in New York, Toronto and Milwaukee and we’re talking

about opening in hotels in Los Angeles and Miami.

Do you still keep your Oscar in the bathroom?

I didn’t have an office or a screening room in my apartment, so yes. The kids call it the “famous bathroom”.

Now the tub is full too. The awards are on the walls and in the tub. If I ever sell that apartment, I don’t know what I will do with everything.

ment, which Lionsgate acquired in January.

Still, some guys could be turned off by the perception that female cult fandom has sprung up around the movie, reinforced by the boisterous crowds—predominately girls—that have gathered at malls where Hunger Games cast members have appeared on a promotional tour. The mall strategy is pure Twilight.

After a Hunger Games trailer was posted on YouTube, one commenter wrote: “Please I beg

you don’t turn this into another Twilight. It will be very hard, as a male fan, to walk into a theatre without getting embarrassed if there are 13-year-old girls yelling ‘Team Peeta!’ or ‘Team Gale!’ ” (Peeta and Gale are the two male characters that circle Katniss.) On 8 March, Summit announced plans to debut its first trailer for the next Twilight movie, Breaking Dawn—Part 2, on screens showing Hunger Games.

According to a recent tracking report, 73% of young women surveyed had a definite interest in seeing the movie, a “staggering” figure on its own, according to a former studio executive. But male interest could boost the box office for The Hunger Games exponentially, with 48% of young men saying they’re definitely interested in seeing the movie. The movie has sold more advance seats than any film in online ticket-seller Fandango’s 12-year history, and has sold out 47 opening-night shows at IMAX theatres.

The tracking figures are “up there with Twilight and Harry Potter,” says Jeff Gomez, chief executive of Starlight Runner Entertainment and a producer who has consulted on such films as Avatar.

In the promotional trailers for The Hunger Games, Katniss,

played by 21-year-old actor Jennifer Lawrence, can be seen volunteering as “tribute” to save her younger sister from having to compete, after which she is shown shooting at a humanshaped archery target. “They’ve taken away the love story and focused on the hero who, by virtue of her altruism and fire, is going to stand up against this situation,” says Vincent Bruzzese, president of Ipsos MediaCT’s Motion Picture Group, which does market research for movie studios and film-makers.

“What they are doing is marketing the archetypal themes that are gender-neutral.”

Producer Nina Jacobson, who optioned the books, says she has long been aware that Hunger Games resonated with younger guys. She was first introduced to the books in 2009, when Bryan Unkeless, a young male colleague at her production company Color Force, gave her a copy. At the time, the book had sold about 150,000 copies and was hardly the best-selling sensation it is now, at 23.5 million.

The older male demographic, however, “feels like the latest wave”, says Jacobson, adding that her daughter’s soccer coach recently asked her if she had an extra copy of the book.

MURRAY CLOSE

Puzzle: Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games.

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Travel

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PERIOD PIECE | NEHA PUNTAMBEKAR

Remember the shoes

Budapest grows around the reminders of its horrific Holocaust history, which is poignantly retold in each new setting of the present

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udapest has many stories, and many scars, the deepest of which runs along the Danube. It was here, towards the end of World War II, that the fascist Arrow Cross Party (Nyilaskeresztes Párt) lined up the city’s remaining Jewish population. Thousands of men, women and children stood on the ledge above the water, shoes discarded, waiting to be shot. They say the river ran red for days.

I find those discarded “iron” shoes, sculpted, during a walk along the river. Like me, they are passed by morning joggers who weave around their course, not wanting to stumble into them. In the distance, Budapest’s bridges are busy dealing with morning traffic, and across us, on the other side of the bridges, is the Castle District, where this story actually started centuries ago.

The Jewish history of Budapest is as rich as it is turbulent—Jews were the single largest visible minority in the country. And while they contributed significantly to the local culture through trade, science and art, they were perennial outsiders.

Jewish life was marred by oppressive taxes and social discrimination, especially under Ottoman and Habsburg rule.

Jews were also systematically pushed away from the administrative centre of Buda, where they had first settled. Then World War II broke out, and brought with it something much worse.

There are around 60 pairs of iron sculpted shoes, worn out and barely holding together.

They still face the Buda Castle, like they did all those years ago.

This time though, as part of the memorial Shoes on the Danube Promenade, they have cameras trained on them, not guns; the water is full of dinner cruises plying—laughter and music drift about, and the benches by the water are a place for young lovers and exhausted tourists. It’s a nice change from 1944.

The war was getting very com-

PHOTOGRAPHS

TRIP PLANNER/BUDAPEST

BY

NEHA PUNTAMBEKAR

Budapest is well connected by trams, buses and an underground metro system. Go for the Budapest Card, available at the tourist office, which allows public transport access and entry to many local attractions, including museums and baths, for a three-day period. For locations and special tourist offers, visit www.budapestinfo.hu. You need a Schengen visa to travel to Hungary. Apply for one at the Hungarian embassy in New Delhi (http://www.mfa.gov.hu/emb/newdelhi).

Current airfare to Budapest from Indian metros:

Swiss/Lufthansa (Star Alliance) Air France/KLM/Aeroflot (SkyTeam) Jet Airways Qatar Airways Fares may change.

Delhi R44,930 R34,590 R53,430 R46,360

Mumbai R39,050 R50,830 R46,740 R45,630

Bangalore R47,400 R50,620 R42,800

Consult your travel agent about transit visa requirements.

Budapest

Varosliget (City Park)

HUNGARY Kiraly Bath

Danube river

Castle Hill

To Lake Balaton

Hungarian State Opera House

B U D A P E S T Budapest Royal Palace Stay

Do

Budapest’s luxury hotels are either along or close to the river. And for about €90-100 (around R5,850-6,500) a night, they are a good deal. There are also a number of budget options available, including hostels and holiday apartments around the city.

The Shoes on the Danube Promenade is located between Roosevelt Ter and Kossuth Ter, Pest, close to the Hungarian parliament.

Tip: Take a guided tour of the parliament building (www.parlament.hu) and then carry on to the Danube promenade.

The Great Synagogue is located on Dohany Street. There is an entry fee to the temple complex. The ticket includes access to the cemetery, memorial park and museum (www.dohanystreetsynagogue.hu). Rumbach Sebestyen utca Synagogue is located on Rumbach Sebestyen 11-13. The Carl Lutz Memorial is a block away from the synagogue.

The House of Terror is located on 60, Andrássy Avenue (www.terrorhaza.hu).

The Holocaust Memorial Centre is located on Pava Utca 39.

Other Budapest attractions: Castle District: Head to this Unesco World Heritage Site for great views of the city, castle and cobblestoned medieval streets. It can be reached by bus or via a funicular cable car service.

Thermal baths: Budapest is known for its baths. In addition to the thermal pools, it also has saunas and massage services (www.budapestbaths.net).

Currency: The local currency is the Hungarian forint (HUF). Many of the bigger institutions (including most hotels) accept euros, but expect change in local currency only. All major credit and debit cards are accepted.

GRAPHIC

plicated for the Axis armies by then. The Allied forces were catching up, air raids were becoming more forceful and the shortages were crippling. There was also that logistical problem of having to dispose of all their dead Jewish victims. It was around this time that the Arrow Cross started rounding up Jews “to have a swim”. Once the deed was done, they stood over the edge, watching the bodies sink and their crimes wash away. The gun-wielding militiamen made

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

sure to save the victims’ shoes though—shoes were a luxury item at this point in history.

Shoes would keep you warm in the harsh winter; they could be bartered for other essentials.

Shoes were important.

The march of the Arrow Cross Ironically, it was Hungary’s support for Hitler’s Germany that kept Hungarian Jews away from the concentration camps, at least for a while. With Hungary

Capital view: (top) Shoes on the Danube Prome­ nade in Budapest; and the Star of David. on their side, the German forces didn’t have to micromanage.

The local leadership implemented a number of severe antiSemitic laws. But they didn’t condemn Hungarian Jews to the gas chambers. In fact, through the first years of the war, a number of Jewish refugees from central Europe made their way to Budapest, looking for a shadow of safety and sanity.

That changed in March 1944 with the German occupation of Hungary, led by Adolf Eichmann.

In what is now known as Operation Margarethe, the Germans replaced a wavering local regime with a new, more compliant force—the Arrow Cross Party. Overnight, the hostile anti-Jewish policies morphed into something much darker.

Like elsewhere on the conti-

nent, Jews were forced out of their homes, and their properties seized. They were despatched to labour camps and to the war front. The Star of David became less about faith and more about branding the different. Of the Jews who remained in the city, about 80,000 were forced into the inhuman conditions of the newly infamous Budapest ghetto.

The ghetto was isolated from the rest of the city. Nothing was allowed to come in, including food. And nothing was allowed out, including garbage. Within three months, filth, starvation, disease and marauding fascist mobs raged through the ghetto.

Every passing day, more and more bodies piled up in courtyards, corridors and in the streets adjoining the most iconic of Jewish institutions in the city, the Great Synagogue.

The Great Synagogue I am visiting the temple with an Israeli friend, Naomi. I have never

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visited a synagogue before, and I throw a barrage of questions her way; my curiosity amuses her.

She explains that this synagogue is unique: Built in the 1850s, it was designed to fit in with the city’s cathedrals, which is why it is far more ornate, with two Moorish-styled dome towers and lattice-like patterns along the façade, and lavish basilica-like interiors. The white metal detectors and X-ray machines are, of course, a modern addition.

Our guide has red hair and a very strong accent. I have to concentrate as she shares facts, trivia and yarmulke (traditional caps) for the men in the group. We are an English-speaking group, mostly Americans. Around us, I can hear a buzz of foreign tongues, each explaining the same stories, the histories that I am absorbing.

This is the largest synagogue in Europe, and has been at the forefront of Hungarian Jewish society since it was built. Our guide explains the significance of every element within the temple and the temple complex—the bright geometric frescoes, the woodwork, the organ (composer Franz Liszt played the original organ here), the ornate bimah (the central podium), the hall where the men pray, the gallery where the women and children congregate, as well as the adjoining Heroes’ Temple (honouring the Hungarian Jewish victims of World War I) and the Jewish Museum. In addition to exhibiting a number of historic and religious artefacts and documents, the museum was built on a plot of land where the father of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, was born and grew up.

The amount of history wrapped around this temple complex is overwhelming.

‘Remember’ Judaism doesn’t customarily allow for burials at a place of worship. It also asks that the dead be buried within 24 hours. As the death toll in the ghetto spiked in those last few months, the temple garden had to become a burial ground nevertheless; there are still 2,000 people buried here.

Slim, grey headstones, engraved with the Star of David, lean up against the flower beds, green foliage drapes around their base, cradling them. The guide points out well-known names carved on the headstones. The one I recognize is Garfunkel—singer Art Garfunkel’s grandfather is buried here. Despite being tainted with so much horror and pain, this cemetery manages to retain a sense of peace and calm.

As conditions in the ghetto deteriorated, tens of thousands of Jews managed to escape the ghastly fate that awaited them

there, thanks to the efforts of humanitarian diplomats like Swede Raoul Wallenberg and Swiss Carl Lutz. Despite the growing dangers, these men issued protective passports and bought buildings and designated them as neutral diplomatic property, creating safe havens within a war zone. They used all their influence, and their protected status, to save as many lives as they could. In the cobbled courtyard behind the synagogue, in the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park, the actions of these men live on,

as do the memories of victims of the Holocaust.

The focal point of the memorial is a shimmering silver Tree of Life.

Designed by Imre Varga, this weeping willow is an inverted menorah, or a traditional Jewish lamp. The menorah branches hold delicate silver leaves that dance in the soft breeze; each leaf is engraved with the names of Hungarian Jewish Holocaust victims. The names catch the morning light, between curves and lines, and glint brightly. There are many here who have come

because of personal history.

They are the quiet ones; the ones who do not take photos; the ones who place small stones next to the memorial, a Jewish tradition that says the departed are remembered.

Next to the willow stands another monument that commemorates non-Jewish Hungarians and foreigners who fought against the fascists to save Jewish lives: The most prominent name here is that of Wallenberg.

Among the silent prayers, the stories, the histories, stands an

original brick from the Budapest Ghetto. It bears a simple, powerful inscription: Remember.

Fading stains and repairs Stepping out of the synagogue, on to the pavement surrounding the once ghetto, I take in the street, the buildings, the windows. This is the Jewish Quarter. It runs from Andrássy Avenue to Rákóczi Street. Once a thriving Jewish neighbourhood, it now looks disjointed, like a poorly assembled jigsaw puzzle with the wrong pieces forced in.

Unfortunately, this is a fate shared by many iconic Jewish institutions in the city, including the Rumbach Sebestyen utca Synagogue. Located 5 minutes from the Great Synagogue, this beautiful 1872 structure was converted into an army barrack during the war. It suffered great damage and is still undergoing restoration.

Walking through the quarter, there are several standing war memorials. Some were instituted to honour victims and heroes—like the Carl Lutz Memorial—and others document the history. The House of Terror, the former Secret Service headquarters, is now a museum chroniHeart of the city: (from left) The Great Synagogue; the weeping willow Tree of Life; and Castle District.

cling the actions taken there through the war. On a similar note, but with a stronger focus on personal stories, is the Holocaust Memorial Centre, full of photo exhibits and first-person accounts documenting the lives of the persecuted Jewish and Roma communities through that war.

The ruined pubs and slow revival Before the war, there were around 200,000 Hungarian Jews living here. Almost half died in the years between. After the war, returning Jews found their family and friends gone, and their homes occupied by local encroachers. A heavy sting of hostility sat in the air.

The area still looks a bit off.

Unlike the glossy centre of Budapest, with its Austro-Hungarian grandeur, the Jewish Quarter is more of a patchwork doll. Walking under awnings and newly renovated archways, I uncover shadows of a world that once existed here: fading Stars of David and Hebrew signs—some are just stains, blending into old walls.

Things are changing though.

Over the last few years, many Hungarian Jews have returned home, some as tourists, others in search of their roots. Both sets are changing the economic dynamic of the area. Once again, there are a number of synagogues, a number of Jewish schools, new Jewish businesses, new families (though really, they are old ones), booked out heritage tours and a number of Jewish summer festivals in Budapest.

Previously abandoned spaces are re-emerging as lively centres, fuelling a new energy into the area, which is now known for its art studios, bistros and kitsch pubs (known locally as ruined pubs, szimpla). During the daytime, it’s the falafel and kebab kiosks that add sizzle and spice to the air, but as night descends, it’s the ridiculously young beats pouring out from the ruined pubs that define the city.

Exhausted from all the day’s history, I step into a cozy bistro not too far from the Great Synagogue. A sign on the window tells me they are kosher. The menu is in Hungarian, Hebrew and English, and has a strong West Asian tilt. There’s a bowl of hummus on every table. This is where I will (happily) end my tour, with a plate of falafel salad and a shot of pear Pálinka, the local spirit. An odd combination anywhere else, but a perfect one here—one part Jewish and one part Hungarian.

Period Piece is a monthly series of long-form travel writing that connects the past and present.

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Books

LOUNGE ALAIN JOCARD/AFP

Change artist: Moebius, whose fans included Federico Fellini and Neil Gaiman.

OBITUARY

Adieu, Moebius A science fiction geek and comics fan pays tribute to one of the most influential graphic artists of the last century

B Y A BHIMANYU D AS ···························· he geography of my undeveloped imagination was first terraformed by Jean “Moebius” Giraud’s grungy stylings when I was eight years old.

My parents, blessedly unaware of the path they were putting me on, had handed me a book about the making of Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction classic Alien, and inside lay Giraud’s conceptual art—a vision of what Hell might look like in 2122. The primary colours of my internal headspace were drowned in a sea of oil, rust and blood, faith in utopias turned into fascination with dystopias and I took my first step into the teeming landscape of

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science fiction fandom.

Last weekend, generations of fans composed similarly sentimental openings to obituaries for the universally admired Giraud, who succumbed to cancer on 10 March. We each have our longembraced Moebius moment; there is no realm or medium of science fiction/fantasy that was not influenced by the visionary artist. Born in a Paris suburb in 1938, Giraud started drawing comics at 16. These early efforts spawned his first great success, the Western serial Blueberry, which began in 1963. However, his dark star truly reached its ascendancy with his co-founding of famed French comics anthology Metal Hurlant (English edi-

tion: Heavy Metal) in 1974, under the Moebius moniker. The magazine represented the evolution of sci-fi aesthetics from the quaint pre-1970s rayguns-and-aluminium-foil look to the detailed, soaring and frequently dark designs we take for granted today.

While Heavy Metal was a collective effort, it was Moebius who defined its look with a dreamlike cross-pollination of science fiction and fantasy (SFF), further characterized by epic scales, adult-oriented imagery and meticulous attention to detail.

His art was dystopian before that became a sci-fi buzzword, cyberpunk before there was such a thing as cyberpunk, equal parts awe-inspiring and unsettling.

Heavy Metal’s influence was far-ranging, giving rise to a new breed of gritty, experimental SFF that combined the genre’s pulpy fringe roots with a renewed dedication to its cosmic aspirations.

The unique visual style, as pioneered by Moebius in spectacular, almost wordless early com-

ics like Arzach, has inspired countless comics icons today, including Frank Quitely, P. Craig Russell, Charles Burns and Frank Miller. His increased popularity led to work commissioned by the American comics giants (most notably, a collaboration with Stan Lee on an Eisner-winning Silver Surfer twoparter) and the escalating visibility afforded him by admirers in other artistic mediums.

Scott, already a fan, hired Moebius to create the now legendary look of the Alien franchise. He contributed key visual concepts to zeitgeisty hits like Tron and The Empire Strikes Back, injecting pop culture with a dose of down-anddirty futurism that endures to this day in cinema, comics and video games. William Gibson, lauded as the pioneer of the cyberpunk sub-genre, credits Moebius’ art for inspiring Neuromancer. The production design of Blade Runner, possibly the seminal work of late 20th century cinematic science fiction and the last word on

the dystopian aesthetic, was also deeply influenced by his work.

Manga and anime artists swear

by Moebius’ work as a template.

Hayao Miyazaki claimed to have made Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind with Giraud’s shade looking over his shoulder. Cult film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, Santa Sangre) admired him so much that they went on to collaborate on one of Moebius’ most famous comics works from the 1980s—the sprawling L’Incal saga, set in the now celebrated Metabarons fictional universe.

Federico Fellini wrote him a fawning fanboy letter in 1979. A 14-year-old Neil Gaiman examined his artwork on a school trip to Paris and dreamed of making comics just like that when he grew up...

What I could have just said, without setting myself up for accusations of hyperbole, is that the science fiction of the last three decades—whatever the medium—could not have existed in its current form without the ministrations of Jean Giraud. Possibly the greatest Frenchman ever to have lived.

You will notice that I have attempted little in the way of describing Moebius’ artwork.

This is because you cannot try to describe Moebius’ artwork in words and live with yourself afterwards. All you can do is try to wrap your head around it and gibber endlessly till you create at least one more hapless supplicant.

My own engagement with Moebius’ oeuvre continues far beyond that first glimpse of an Alien world. The first time I read L’Incal. My only near-religious experience: a solitary midnight screening of Blade Runner in a Boston theatre.

My earliest fumblings as a “comics critic”, spending sociology classes poring over the Moebius-inspired art of friend and classmate Dean Hyrapiet, who went on to become one of India’s best comics artists before his tragic death last year. Moebius took the Disney characters in my head and replaced them with chest-bursting xenomorphs. He is, therefore, in the most inclusive sense of the word, responsible.

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AND ALL IS SAID | ZAREER MASANI COURTESY PENGUIN BOOKS INDIA

At home with the Masanis A son’s memoir about his parents’ flawed marriage is honest, painful and elegant B Y A ADISHT K HANNA ···························· hushwant Singh’s blurb on the cover of Zareer Masani’s And All Is Said: Memoir of a Home Divided claims that it is a beautifully written memoir that reads like a novel. This was an assertion that I found myself disagreeing with soon into the book.

It is beautifully written, but it is so far ahead of the vast majority of novels that the comparison does it no justice.

Zareer is the son of Minoo Masani, one of the founders and members of Parliament of the classical liberal Swatantra Party in the days when the Indian National Congress dominated Parliament, and Shakuntala Masani (neé Srivastava)—heiress, society lady and, later, bureaucrat.

The book is a memoir not of his father’s political career, which is well known, but of his parents’

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personal lives, which were far more painful and messy than their careers. Minoo’s career is covered through the perspective of a son who was sidelined by it. Here, Minoo is no free-market hero, but a political Don Quixote, forever tilting at windmills but never able to bring them down. His transformation from communist to socialist to liberal is shown less as political transformation than as personal constancy—Minoo’s determination to always stand up to the prevailing wisdom.

In the course of telling their stories, it manages to be a history of the independence movement, and of newly independent India too.

The book also has a third aspect—of confessional, or mea culpa. Zareer confronts his own role in the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, never explicitly accusing himself of playing a part,

but always returning to the possibility that he contributed.

It is easy to be in love, but to behave with kindness is terribly and tragically hard. His parents had managed the easy part of being in love, but had faltered on the hard part. Reading through Zareer’s fears of having played a part, and the pain of this guilt, I felt like finding him, and dashing over to comfort him and reassure him that changing his behaviour wouldn’t have made any difference. No matter Zareer’s willingness to join in the elder Masanis’ power games, they might have played those games anyway.

Zareer has also written about his parents’ large egos, insistence on mixing the personal and the political, and emotional insecurities.

That is a terrible cocktail.

This is made all the more tragic because the book shows us how deeply in love Minoo and Shakuntala were when they first met. And All Is Said often breaks away from narration to present whole and unedited diary entries or letters. Shakuntala’s love let-

And All Is Said—Memoir of a Home Divided: Penguin India, 264 pages, `299. ters to Minoo during their courtship at the height of the Indian independence movement are embarrassingly personal and giddily in love, so much so that I found myself blushing as I read them and worrying that I was breaching their privacy.

They did have a happy marriage for a few years, but it was not to last. Minoo resumed his philandering lifestyle, but Shakuntala had her affairs too.

The couple fought over money,

It’s complicated: Masani was one of the founders of the Swatantra Party. over Zareer’s upbringing and manners, and eventually over politics, with Shakuntala and Minoo campaigning for rival parties during the 1977 general election. Minoo’s stubbornness in standing up to the status quo infected his marriage, and he confronted and challenged Shakuntala in all things.

After the 1977 election, they stayed separated through the 1980s. In 1989, when Shakuntala finally agreed to a divorce, Minoo

was going blind and she had started a slow decline through old age and possibly mental illness.

In the introduction, Zareer writes that the memoir was to give his mother the dignity that her final years denied her. He has succeeded. The writing is slow, personal and emotional without being overwrought, and achieves the level of excellence that any tribute should.

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FISH IN A DWINDLING LAKE | AMBAI

CULT FICTION

Multi­part harmonies ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Strange worlds: worlds: Ambai’s stories often feature women in Mumbai.

The Tamil short­ story writer tells women’s stories with great breadth and compassion

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

···························· here is much truth to the contention that many Indian stories cannot be told in English. But at least, as this collection by Ambai proves, they can be translated.

Ambai is the pen name of C.S. Lakshmi, a historian, feminist, and the current director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women) in Mumbai.

She writes in Tamil, and as the stories here prove, is something of a translator herself, within the space of her stories. In Fish in a Dwindling Lake, her protagonists, all female, go on journeys, find their bearings in polyglot cities, negotiate life and fortune with people who speak different languages, and end their narratives with more questions than answers.

Many of the stories in Fish in a Dwindling Lake are simply titled Journey, and are tales of varying lengths about the travels Ambai’s women undertake, and the people they meet at bus depots and on

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busy trains. In Journey 4, the narrator meets another young woman on the bus, seeing the sea at Kanyakumari for the first time and carrying a secret in her pregnant belly; in Journey 5, two women visiting Puducherry face unsettling hostility, and wander into the home of a stranger and his friend, who end up telling them a tender love story.

Some of the women in this book belong to a rural world, bound by tradition and patriarchy, while others have lived long lives, sometimes travelling the world, sometimes making their homes in small three-room flats. Many stories take place in Mumbai, where Tamilspeaking women acquire new neighbours, find themselves talking to strangers, and discover that they, themselves, are strangers in the oddest of ways.

Still others are told in Tamil Nadu, as narrators find themselves going back in time, remembering mothers, midwives, childhoods and marriages. Rather beautifully, though, most stories happen in both locations.

The greatest pleasure of this collection is Ambai’s wonderful grasp of how a character can contain several histories, in several different languages, and be at home—or more often, disquieted—in more than one landscape. Her characters are ordinary people whom the author realizes so fully and richly, that the attention makes their lives extraordinary. In the lovely Journey 7, an older Tamil-speaking woman finds herself helping a young north Indian woman adrift in the crowds at Bandra station in

Fish in a Dwindling Lake: Penguin India, 149 pages, `250.

Mumbai. At one moment in her first-person narration she finds herself thinking of Nirmala Putul’s Santali-language poem: “Baba,/ Don’t get me married at a place so far/that you can only come to see me/by selling your goats.” Kumud, one of the lead characters in the title story, is an academic of international experience whose own journey contains several tangled strands—a damaged but loving family, a disastrous early marriage, and a friend who has become a holy woman.

Fish in a Dwindling Lake is an important story, and one of the longest in the collection, but its sentimentality runs contrary to the bracing, open-ended spirit of several other stories here. In general, this happens to be true of the longer stories, where an unexpected

ending colours the whole narrative in retrospect. In Ambai’s hands, it isn’t as cheap a trick as it can sometimes be, but on the whole, I preferred the choppier slice-of-life stories, which drop us into the middle of a character’s internal monologue and pause, rather than bring about an end to the tale. Several of the Journeys are terrifically well-paced and full of quiet, unspooling tricks of character and insight. There are stories like Kailasam, about an unrequited love, where pathos and romantic tragedy are used to moving effect.

Lakshmi Holmström’s translation brings smoothness and delicacy to most of the language here, awkward in brief instances (and one can imagine the translator’s dilemma in trying to decode, say, famous Tamil film songs, or rapid exchanges in Tamil and Hindi in the original stories) but non-intrusive and instinctive through most of the text.

Ambai’s author biography says that she writes about love, relationships, quests and journeys.

The stories in this collection prove how much the first two resemble the last two, at least in the way they are recollected. She writes bitter stories with unusual compassion. Perhaps this is why we are left with the impression that the characters in this book are not happy or unhappy—only watchful, thoughtful, and constantly looking forward.

IN SIX WORDS In big cities, women in translation

R. SUKUMAR

CARTER’S COORDINATES

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here have been several criticisms levelled at Disney’s John Carter of Mars movie. Some critics appear not to like the acting.

Others have problems with the way it has been directed. Still others have complained about the quality of special effects and 3D. And a few have actually been churlish enough to lay the blame at the door of the late great Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose first John Carter story appeared exactly a century ago.

As this article is being written, on the last day of the opening weekend of the movie, John Carter is on its way to doing business of around $30 million (around `150 crore) at the box office, less than a tenth what it cost to make and market it. All indications are that the studio will make a loss and shelve two proposed sequels.

I have only one complaint about the movie, which I think is a moderately good B-movie: It could have been a great B-movie, even a B-movie classic. The first Tron was. So were the Dino De Laurentiis-produced Dune (great cast including a young Sting in leather underwear and an almost steam punk interpretation of the Frank Herbert novel), Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer.

When I first read that Michael Chabon was writing the script for the movie (he’s a fanboy too, like this writer), I was thrilled. One of the contemporary greats of what’s called literary fiction, Chabon has a great pulp-fiction-B-movie mind, but he seems to have used it with some restraint in this screenplay. It fills the gaps in Burroughs’ narrative, ensures a cogent narrative and is more than competent, but it stops short of doing what Oliver Stone’s screenplay did to Conan the Barbarian, bestowing it with the near-philosophical subtext that makes Robert Howard’s Conan books (on which the film was based) all-time sword-and-sorcery classics.

I first read the John Carter books in the early 1980s, courtesy Chennai’s famed Easwari Lending Library. I didn’t know it at the time, but the covers—which were what drew me to the books— were by the legendary Frank Frazetta, although he didn’t illustrate the comic-book versions of the books (there have been a few, including an ongoing series from Dynamite Entertainment that has prompted a court case and 1970s efforts by both DC and Marvel).

John Carter also makes brief appearances in the first two volumes of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Missed opportunity: John Carter could have been a B­movie classic.

What Burroughs’ books lacked in science, they made up in detail, characterization and momentum. The influence of his books can be seen in SFF (science fiction and fantasy) books and movies. George Lucas has acknowledged the influence of the John Carter books on Star Wars, and James Cameron, on Avatar. Howard’s own Conan books were inspired by John Carter, as were the Flash Gordon comic books. That may have worked against the movie to some extent, as may have the fact that there aren’t many John Carter fanboys around.

Still, readers interested in either comic books or the SFF genre would do well to read either Burroughs’ books, available on the Amazon Kindle store for a steal, or comic-book adaptations. This, to my mind, is when it all began.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

Q&A | LAKSHMI HOLMSTRÖM

The Norwich Tamilian The award­winning translator on why she doesn’t miss being on the Indian literary scene B Y R AJNI G EORGE rajni.g@livemint.com

···························· t is strangely fitting to see Lakshmi Holmström, one of the greatest translators of Tamil literature, in her adopted place of residence—the very English, very bucolic literary city of Norwich, where she is evidently at home, elegant in her salwar-kameez.

The award-winning translator of short stories, novels and poetry

by Tamil language writers has given us such contemporary giants as Ambai and Sri Lankan poet Cheran; classical greats such as 12th century poet Kambar.

I

Holmström most recently published Fish in a Dwindling Lake (2012), a translation of short stories by Ambai; A Second Sunrise (2012), poems by Cheran translated and edited with Sascha Ebeling; and Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight (2009).

Holmström has been a steadfast voice for quality and perseverance in the rather spare field of contemporary translation.

She is involved with the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia and is one of the founding trustees of the South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive in London. Does she miss being in the literary community in India?

“But I am there,” she smiles. We caught up with her at the Norwich Showcase, an international platform for British writing and literature development run in partnership with the British Council, from

9-13 March. Edited excerpts from an interview: What is it like to work with an author who is present in the act of translation?

The theory provides the rigour and the critical discipline which you need to have. But the actual practice of translation throws up particular challenges. It’s nice when the writer is there; then you can refer to them for textual problems. Salma was wonderful to work with because her world (a small-town, Muslim woman’s world) was completely new to me. She uses a vocabulary that was not easily understood by standard Tamil speakers. It’s a splendid first novel.

I would sit her down and make her take me through a number of words, concepts to do with workshops, prayer, Muslim festivals, practices, family ideas and notions. I couldn’t have

Unique voice: Holmström says a translator brings her interpretation. entered that world without that interaction. You need, when you’re translating, to be precise about words.

What does a translator bring to the work?

You bring your interpretation, but you also have to make your work stand up on its own. It always takes on its own life. It is competent, but it doesn’t have a life of its own.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on an English edition of Cheran’s poems which Navayana brought out. It’s a

slightly different edition, and dual language, which is wonderful.

I’m also working on a collection consisting of work by Kutti Revathi, Salma, Malathi Maithri and Sukirtharani.

They’re all women writers and the book is being published by Sangam House and a group of small publishers.

Who are some of the translators you admire?

Gita Krishnankutty is excellent and (A.K.) Ramanujan did some fantastic translations, not only from the classics, and in Kannada. In Tamil, we’ve had

Vasantha Surya, Subhashree Krishnaswamy, Malini Seshadri.

I’ve been looking at The Oxford India Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing, which Oxford University Press (OUP) brought out this year.

How do you deal with the publishing market and its trends?

Some publishers will market extensively. For example, the two books by Bama, Sangati and Karukku, have done well internationally. It has quite a lot to do with the publishers, and also with the ways these books have had a particular readership: People wanted to learn about Dalit writing. Part of this is Dalit writing by women—a particular kind of feminism. Universities use translated works a lot now, and that has also helped.

There is support, people are aware that translations are widely available, and that there are awards which make these books visible. (Salma’s The Hour Past Midnight was longlisted for the $50,000, around `25 lakh, DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, 2011.)

L22 FLAVOURS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

The new avatar: (clockwise from extreme left) The new tattva Art & Fresh Organic Kitchen; Amour —The Patio Restaurant, Cafe & Bar; Sylvain, co­owner of The Rose, the new boutique hotel; and the main street of Hauz Khas Village.

DELHI’S BELLY | RAJNI GEORGE

Change comes to the village The future of Hauz Khas Village is being determined by how it takes on a host of unlikely new arrivals

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here’s an incongruous new building in south Delhi’s incongruous Hauz Khas Village (HKV). If you turn left by Bagel’s Café into a lane full of chaiwallahs (tea shops) and vegetable carts (more typical to the gritty village it started out as than the New York City-style West Village it today aspires to be), the now iconic village reveals a large white property which marks a milestone: The Capital’s Bohemian quarter has got a proper boutique hotel.

Run by French owners Francois Servant and Sylvain, who uses only one name, as part of the independent Colaba House group—which also owns a boutique hotel in Delhi’s Safdarjung Enclave and a garden hotel in Tamil Nadu—The Rose overlooks a quiet aspect of the village. Surrounded by forest and watched over by peacocks and monkeys, it opened last month even more quietly. The guest house contains 11 rooms in four categories, ranging from a tiny Cabin (`3,500) to larger Junior and Grand Suites, to a charming

Loft room (`6,500). A gallery-worthy lobby full of high-design lamps leads to a restaurant which will open “this month or the month after”, says Servant. “We plan a holistic healing and massage centre on the first floor and a rooftop bar later this year.” One of the eight functioning rooms already has a long-term guest.

Last month’s other new HKV arrivals range from cricketer Ashish Nehra’s breathlessly named De Villa Lounge Bar Brick Kitchen, which calls itself “a culinary and mixology venture”, to tattva Art & Fresh Organic Kitchen, an expensive organic food delivery service which accidentally became a restaurant, 5 minutes from The Rose. In the last six months, a new wave of fancy, commercially hungry entrants—Café 2 2 Tango, Fukuyama, Amour: The Patio Restaurant, Cafe & Bar, Boheme and many more internationally aspirational establishments— have encroached on the village’s scruffily prosperous homespun vibe.

Is the village selling out? New properties have added cultural capital through music and art spaces and their cultivation of a creative community which doesn’t admit flash. But there is overdevelopment and hype around a manufactured Bohemian lifestyle.

The first “restaurant with bar and bouncer”, live music venue Out of the Box, was swiftly resurrected after it caught fire last Diwali, an example of the vitality of village business. “There is no weekend concept at HKV, even

on Monday, your establishment is packed,” says owner Priyank Sukhija, who is bringing in six new restaurants this year, two in the next two months. “Things can only get better here.”

For restaurateur Ritu Dalmia, who brought Diva Piccola a few weeks ago, it’s more complicated.

The smallest of her five high-end eateries, Piccola is an addition to the casual village restaurant scene, where service can take up to an hour. “It was here that I started and then closed an authentic Italian eatery, MezzaLuna, my first restaurant,” she says. “It might be a risk to come back, but if you’re in the restaurant business, you want to have a place in the village today.”

Piccola is a pizzeria with a limited menu that doesn’t allow Dalmia to show off her full range. But its smallness reduces risk, she says; the risk of not being able to cover

swelling village rents.

M. Mishra, a Hauz Khas broker, says there are over 200 establishments in HKV—20-25 in the pipeline in total, says village landlord Mange Ram Gochhwal—in this buzzing strip.

They call for a considered look at whether unchecked development will destroy exactly what the village strives to create.

While small-time property owners are content with standard 10% increments, tenants (who asked not to be named) complain of aggressive landlords who harass them and raise rent from `10,000-20,000 for a terrace which they then hear some businessman is willing to pay `3 lakh for. “Landlords are getting rid of tenants every three months, but soon they will find out there are no takers,” says one aggrieved tenant. “Who can sustain themselves at 60 grand a month?

Half the people who come here are backpackers.”

But an affluent clientele has also found the village: Embassy people, multinational firm employees and bankers are lavishing their money on HKV’s many establishments. This makes it worth the investment for the right business. If you look hard into the basement next to Kunzum Travel Café, you will see the washed walls of hipster firm Ultraconfidentiel, a French creative design studio with a select, mostly European, clientele.

“It’s part of our identity to be here,” says Pierre Arnaud Cassin, its business developer. “Here we could be anywhere in the world, in the village.”

While it is designed to become yet another unique village institution, The Rose also marks this increased expatriate presence.

The stylish guest house hotel

would be more at home in Delhi’s Khan Market or a quiet lane in Friends Colony, but it couldn’t afford the rent in those tony neighbourhoods; instead, it operates out of this more affordable location with above-average rates and caters to a ready customer.

Independent businesses appear to be operating like bigger establishments, to survive in an increasingly difficult market— only taking advantage of the lowered price tag. “We didn’t want to be on the main street,” says tattva owner Anuradha Madhusudhanan. “We were looking in Shahpur Jat as HKV is too expensive, and then someone told us about this place in the back lane.”

However, several businesses such as early HKV entry Cotton Curio, unable to afford the rent, and art space The Greenhouse have shut down.

But humbler establishments like Thadi, a hookah joint which functions almost like a college canteen, and Ziro, a cozy new café, are still opening: the essential HKV. These establishments are banking on careful, low-cost business models and a loyal clientele to stay afloat.

At Ziro’s homey kitchen, serving mushroom crepes and salads at less than `200, you are encouraged to stay all day and devour dressed-up Maggi.

Co-owner Anup Kutty says: “The issue of rising rents is a bit of a problem. There’s a lot of competition within the property owners which makes them treat the village as some sort of a gold rush.”

Many regulars and indie business owners believe there is a need for regulation, yet the money is just too substantial; many deals are made on rooftops overlooking the village’s lake. So when does an indie haven become a big business hub?

“They should be focusing more on the idea than just buying power, they should be forming their own collective and looking at HKV as a single entity and then figuring out their tenants,” says Kutty. “Right now, it’s just the one with the biggest offer regardless of what the establishment is about.”

An inner circle of appreciative creatives carry this sense of community; the relaxed Flipside Café, for example, celebrated the completion of its first year with a party for 40 faithfuls, many of whom visit a few times a week.

“First of the new wave of pioneers, that’s us,” grins Raavi Chowdhury, the café’s 27-year-old owner. He, like other café owners, feels the clientele has changed.

“You now get people who might never have come to the village before— which is good and bad.”

In this city of multiple, individual villages, it remains to be seen if Delhi can sustain the saleable subculture of its most prominent village. rajni.g@livemint.com