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Saturday, September 17, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 38

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

ON A BITTER TRAIL

FOUR SEASONS IN YOUR CLOSET >Page 5

‘JOL’ IS ALWAYS ‘PAANI’ The PM’s Bangladesh visit was marked by a historic agreement. But people reveal how two Banglas segue into one >Page 6

THE ALGEBRA OF INFINITE CRISES

Why has DC Comics restarted its storylines? A comics nerd explains why ‘The Man of Steel’ is getting a suit of armour >Page 12

India is now the third largest exporter of coffee in the world. So why can’t you find a good cup to drink? >Pages 1011

THE GREAT ASSEMBLER Keshav Dev, proprietor, Devan’s South Indian Coffee & Tea, at his New Delhi retail outlet and roastery.

THE GOOD LIFE

CULT FICTION

SHOBA NARAYAN

TURN YOUR FLAWS INTO ASSETS

he most disconcerting—and oddly delightful—scene at the stunning new Oberoi Gurgaon’s lobby is the sight of a blue-uniformed man with his mosquito-killer racket crouching down amid the stylish fuchsia furniture, clap-clapping his way through the fleas and bugs that dare enter this pristine white haven that the Oberois have created among the hazy high-rises of Gurgaon. The hotel should make performance art out of this quaint character—dress him up as a man in the bowler hat... >Page 4

MUSIC MATTERS

R. SUKUMAR

FLASHPOINT BATMAN

SHUBHA MUDGAL

No artist engages with disparate strands of contemporary India like Atul Dodiya does. Is that why instant international attention eluded him? >Pages 1415

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

TRAVELLING FOR MUSIC

SATURDAY Q&A

RAYMOND N BICKSON

HOME PAGE L3

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

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

inbox

FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

OF WIVES AND LOVERS

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com

“Bharya, that is Wife”. The eighth canto of ‘Raghuvamsa’ by Kalidasa is known as ‘Aja’s Mourning’, where Aja, the prince of Ayodhya, mourns the untimely death of his wife Indumati. He describes her as “grihini, sachivah, sakha”—meaning, she was a homemaker, adviser and constant partner or friend. G GURURAJ

EQUALITY ABOVE ALL ELSE

PITCH PERFECT

PTI MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

he sordid past weekend of 34-year-old popular Kannada actor Darshan Tugudeep clearly captured the struggles that go on in modern-day relationships. On Friday, Kannada Big Gun beats wife, stubs cigarette butt on her, whips out his registered .32 and threatens her. Battered wife files a five-page police complaint in which she says Big Gun is a habitual abuser. She also mentions that he is a serial womanizer and is currently having an affair with a hottie co-star. Big Gun is arrested, but manages to swing it so that he eventually ends up in hospital, not jail, like most celebrity criminals before him. On Saturday, wife withdraws the complaint. On Sunday, the Karnataka Film Producers’ Association orders a three-year ban on the colleague who is allegedly “distracting” Big Gun. A few days later the association revokes the ban. What does this illustrate apart from the fact that even single girls have cheerleading squads and that the Kannada film industry (like most film industries world over) is run by hypocritical, sexist—and practical—men? Don’t forget, macho heroes are almost always a bigger box-office draw than their female colleagues; more money rides on biceps than boobs. “Our message to women artistes is that don’t destroy others’ families for selfish gain,” the industry organizaDEBATE tion’s president Munirathna Naidu (a contractor who was once held responsible for the death of a teenage girl when a wall collapsed) told The Times of India. Besides, this slut in question was just an outsider, a Mumbai model-turnedsouthern siren, the producers probably reasoned. Karnataka tops the bigotry charts almost every year. Remember 2004 when the state attempted to ban new films not made in Kannada? Bangalore residents were forced to see Veer Zaara under police protection. Shortly after I relocated to the city earlier this year, the state government said immigrants would have to clear a Kannada test if they wanted to stay in this city. I have since learned to say politely: “Kannada gothilla” (I don’t know Kannada). As for our women? Has nothing changed in New India? Though domestic abuse is not a phenomenon that’s unique to this country, studies have estimated that one in every three women here is a victim—pretty much the same as in China. In fact, the same weekend Darshan’s misdemeanours were revealed, Li Yang, the founder of Li Yang Crazy English (The New Yorker magazine once called him China’s “Elvis of English”) admitted that he had abused his wife and children. He said he never expected his wife to reveal so publicly that she was a victim of domestic abuse (she posted pictures of her bruises online) because it was not Chinese tradition to share family conflicts with outsiders. Unlike their poorer counterparts, most middle class and upper middle class Indian women still believe that abuse is a

It was heartening to read Aakar Patel’s piece, “Vedic rituals recognize the marriage of equals”, 3 September. Rarely do such subjects come up in print these days as educated Hindus, like me, delve into the space of rationality and in the process question every ritual and practice that has been passed on to us. In an era of women’s empowerment, it is pertinent to note that Vedic marriage rituals considered women on a par with their male counterparts—present societal understanding is largely in deviation from the ancient scripts. I take less pride in knowing that my faith and values are the most revered than I do in the fact that the values prize equality above all. It was a lovely read. RAJ

ADVISER, PARTNER, FRIEND Villain? Darshan with wife Vijayalakshmi. private issue, one that they must keep under wraps to maintain “izzat” in the community, says sociologist and author Shalini Grover who has documented contemporary marriage among the urban poor. “In a basti, everyone knows what’s going on in your marriage. There are no secrets, everyone can hear the shouting,” says Grover. So why do some of us work so hard to keep the horror of marital abuse under wraps? Maybe women are brought up to believe that abuse is an integral part of a long-term relationship like marriage. Maybe we think it’s “natural” because we have seen our mothers and aunts abused. Maybe our sense of self-worth will remain diminished as long as we grow up in a country that gets rid of its girl children like garbage. Maybe we are so reluctant to give up the perks of being married to Big Gun, we put up with infidelities and the occasional beatings. A large chunk of educated Indian women don’t work and despite their fancy degrees, have no way to support themselves. Besides, even though divorce rates are rising dramatically in urban India, friends and family still recommend “adjusting” over “destroying your marriage”. A recent study of 21 large companies across Asia found that many Indian women who do work, drop out of the workforce before they become senior executives. If you’ve ever worked with Indian women you already know the one- word answer to this puzzle: marriage. Many women still join the workforce to find/until they find a man who can take care of their material needs. Self-reliance is not a quality India teaches its men or women. Besides, economically independent or not, negotiating India as a single woman is not for the faint-hearted. With no male buffer, you’re only one step less accessible to abuse than all those “foreigner” ladies, right? Big Gun’s story then is hardly exceptional. It is the everyday story of the way men and women negotiate relationships in New India. Write to me at lounge@livemint.com

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “Food that never boars”, 10 September, Chandra Shekhar Pandey is executive chef at the Courtyard by Marriott, Pune City Centre. In “Colonial cousins”, 10 September, Rajyasree Sen’s name was misspelt.

Aakar Patel must be complimented for focusing on the meaning of the Vedic ‘mantras’ relating to marriage (“Vedic rituals recognize the marriage of equals”, 3 September). According to the Vedic concept, a man and woman, when joined together in matrimony, become not just husband and wife, but friends or partners in life. It is interesting to trace how this idea developed further in the epic and literary periods. In the famous Yaksha Prashna episode in the Mahabharat, the Yaksha asks Yudhisthir, “O Dharmaputra, God has given man a number of friends in this world. Who is the best among them all?” Dharmaputra’s reply is

I’m writing in just to say “thank you” to Shoba Narayan for her excellent articles in ‘Lounge’. It is always refreshing to start a weekend reading her column. I particularly like the underlying sense of the coexistence of “Indianness” with a modern, scientific thought process in most of the articles. Dare I say, she sounds like a perfect blend of the south Indian ‘mami’ and the marriedbutinteresting nextdoor babe. Stay young and keep writing! PRASAD

BOOK DETAILS, PLEASE Apropos the column, “Vedic rituals recognize the marriage of equals”, 3 September, by Aakar Patel, I would like to request the author to share the name of the book and the publisher he refers to in his piece. S NAGESH

NOT JUST RITUALISTIC I am writing to express my appreciation for Aakar Patel’s “Vedic rituals recognize the marriage of equals”, 3 September. It’s amazing how many of us get married without really understanding the significance of the ceremony. A marriage ritual is like any examination where the couple is programmed to act and behave in a certain way (in short, rote learning). ANUPAMA

IN THE SATURDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER, ISSUE OF

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SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Embrace the flaws, turn them into assets

DIVYA BABU/MINT

he most disconcerting—and oddly delightful—scene at the stunning new Oberoi Gurgaon’s lobby is the sight of a blue-uniformed man with his mosquito-killer racket crouching down amid the stylish

fuchsia furniture, clap-clapping his way through the fleas and bugs that dare enter this pristine white haven that the Oberois have created among the hazy high-rises of Gurgaon. The hotel should make performance art out of this quaint character—dress him up as a man in the bowler hat dreamed up by René Magritte in his painting and later enacted by sexy Pierce Brosnan in the movie The Thomas Crown Affair. No other hotel, as far as I can tell, has incorporated performance art into its premises. The Oberoi Gurgaon’s general manager, Kapil Chopra, is an art lover. He should know how to do this. Dress the mosquito-swatting men in outfits as distinctive as the paisley saris and fire-engine red bindis that smiling receptionists named Rebecca wear as they welcome guests who alight from the BMWs that the hotel has in its fleet. I loved the bright red bindis, mostly because bindis—save for Bharti Kher’s artwork—are a dying icon in modern India. You watch actor Sharmila Tagore’s old movies and realize with a start that nobody in India wears bindis any more, not even Kher, who pastes serpentine bindis on elephants and canvases. I wear bindis, both straight and serpentine, more as a statement. But I am an anomaly, even in semi-traditional Bangalore. There are no perfect hotels in the world. What differentiates the fabled ones from the merely luxurious—be it The Peninsula Tokyo; Mandarin Oriental New York, where Nita Ambani reportedly got the architectural inspiration for her Antilia; the Post Ranch Inn in California where

Hollywood stars go to act normal; Villa D’Este in Lake Como, Italy, where actor George Clooney summers; Hotel du Cap in France, which takes payment in cash, not credit card; or the Tawaraya Ryokan in Kyoto—is that these hotels have figured out a way to embrace their shortcomings; to make their flaws seem part of their story. Sonu Shivdasani, who founded Six Senses Resorts & Spas, does this to masterful effect with his Soneva Fushi resort in the Maldives, touting his resorts as paragons of sustainable tourism without mentioning the cost savings and favourable press that are collateral benefits. The Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, California, has fabulous ocean views, but no more fabulous than R.N. Shetty’s RNS Residency hotel in Murudeshwar, Karnataka, built halfway into the ocean. The difference is that RNS Residency is kitschy and has nothing to distinguish it save the view from its rooms, and the Post Ranch Inn has taken the American notion of casual-but-anticipatory service to a fine art. The Peninsula Tokyo, like many other top Japanese hotels, has heated Japanese-style toilets. Western travel editors can’t stop gushing about them. Entire articles are written about these toilets. Few of our top hotels have adapted the Indian health faucet and taken it to the next level for customers who prefer water to paper in their toilets. Great hotels co-opt their flaws into their brand identity. Building an Oberoi in Gurgaon was a brave act. Power is erratic; electricity is hit-or-miss. Delhi in the summer is damp and humid. Naturally, bugs thrive. Sentosa in Singapore, which has more bugs than we

Minimalist: The Oberoi Gurgaon’s allday diner Threesixtyone buzzes even on weekdays. do in India, sets it spas outdoors and allows bugs to be part of the environment. So do most spa-hotels in Kerala. The best leg massage I have had was at Somatheeram in Kerala in an outdoor spa pavilion. It was damp and hot, but I could smell the flowers and hear the waves. Bugs and butterflies were all around but I felt part of nature. Luxury is what you cannot have in your everyday life. For many Indians, luxury is not about the frou-frou stuff that hotels lay on. We want uninterrupted air conditioning, silence, and a good bed—things that we cannot guarantee in normal life. The Oberoi Gurgaon attempts to give its guests that. It hasn’t yet fully succeeded. There are power outages accompanied by explosion-like pops but that is not the hotel’s fault. The property itself is quite stunning. The `14,000 online rack rate that I paid is not as low as the `8,000 per night that The Imperial charges but reasonable for an Oberoi. They have used sculptures and paintings throughout the hotel to good advantage. My standard, base-category room felt like a suite. The restaurant, Threesixtyone, has buzz,

nice proportions and decent food. It was full, even on the Monday night that I was there. Housekeepers appear magically when you need them and do a fine job. My clothes that were stained by the dust of Kargil came back perfectly laundered and pressed. The corridors smell divine. The Forest Essentials saffron-based toiletries are packaged in distinctive royal blue containers. To drive around the back roads of Gurgaon in a BMW is a trip. Best of all, the staff are genuinely warm and want to make you comfortable. The Oberoi Gurgaon’s intent is ambitious. It wants to be a minimalist haven that is more suited to Basel or Berlin. In attempting to rid its hotel of every vestige of Delhi, the Oberois are attempting to transport you to a place outside India; which is all well if you want to go there. Me, I like Dilli, with all its bugs and butterflies; with all its peacocks and screaming parakeets. Biki Oberoi is a great hotelier. He just needs to figure out if he wants to embrace the flaws in his Gurgaon property and turn them into assets. To do that, he needs creativity and chutzpah. They had the acreage to make

a spectacular garden hotel with cross-ventilation to alleviate the nearly constant power cuts. They chose instead to close it all in. Too late now. What about Mr Mosquito fly-trap? As I see it, there are four choices. One, get rid of the small floral arrangements on the tables which is where the bugs congregate. Two, use neem, citronella or other natural bug repellents as part of your table floral arrangements and market the hell out of neem being an Indian air purifier, which, according to our ancestors, it is. Three, buy those funky square plant boxes and stick them on the high ceilings to attract these critters. Four, embrace your flaws. Realize that Gurgaon will never be Basel and welcome these flying creatures into your hotel. Give us butterflies, Mr Oberoi. Shoba Narayan didn’t stay at The Oberoi Gurgaon to be insulated from Gurgaon; or for that matter, Dilli. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shobanarayan

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

Style

LOUNGE TREND TRACKER

Four seasons in your closet The Van Heusen India Men’s Week showcased looks that will tide you through till Spring Summer 2012

B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY & K OMAL S HARMA ···························· he recently concluded Van Heusen India Men’s Week 2011 saw a mix of seasons showcased on the ramp, somewhat unusual for a fashion week. Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) president Sunil Sethi says the men’s fashion market is not so big or mature that it can afford

two seasons. FDCI saw no problem in letting designers showcase what they were comfortable with. Knee-length shorts, details on cuffs, big bags and brogues aside, we spotted some trends likely to tide your wardrobe through Autumn-Winter 2011 and prepare you for a stylish Spring-Summer 2012.

Muted colours:

One colour combination that ruled the ramp was shades of muted blues coupled with dull reds. Shantanu and Nikhil used the combo in most ensembles, be it jackets, scarves or ‘kurtas’. Muted gold was also visible in many collec tions, and appeared in small print motifs or embroidery rather than the whole garment. We especially liked Troy Costa’s use of gold ‘butis’ on a dinner jacket.

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Arjun Khanna: Regimental emblems.

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Varun Bahl and Karan Johar: Cowl neck.

Troy Costa: Cropped pants and gold butis on a dinner jacket.

Shantanu and Nikhil: Blue and red combo, scarves, emblems.

For a diamond like Liz’s Here’s your chance to acquire some bling history from Liz Taylor’s jewellery collection B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· ctor Elizabeth Taylor was once walking out of a hotel in New York when the doorman said, “Wow. That’s a beautiful ring, it should be in a museum!” Liz Taylor promptly replied “Would you like to try it on?”, as she always did. Then she explained, “If you put it in a museum, nobody actually sees it. When you wear it, it goes much farther.” Mumbai boy Rahul Kadakia, who heads the jewellery department at Christie’s America and is the curatorial specialist of the Elizabeth Taylor collection up for auction in December, narrates the episode. This is why he is not sad that the collection he calls “the crown jewels of Hollywood” will soon be scattered, and not remain a single collection.

Tarun Tahiliani: Ysilhouette pants.

Taylor was never photographed without a piece of jewellery. “We (at Christie’s) would visit her house in Los Angeles once a year to catalogue the collection, and it was not one thing that she said or did; her eyes would just light up as each piece was pulled out. She lived with each of these pieces, she knew them intimately. They were not gems in a cupboard somewhere; she wore them every day,” he says. Taylor was insistent her collection would one day be auctioned, taking “a part of her” with each piece. The Christie’s collection of Taylor’s jewellery is on a world tour. Having started from Moscow’s Red Square on Thursday, it will be exhibited in London, Dubai, Los Angeles, Geneva, Paris and Hong Kong before heading for a 13 December auction in New York. The collection features 269 jewels,

some of them historic pieces. While actors like Marlene Dietrich were also known for their jewels, Taylor built her collection consciously, asking questions of jewellers, wanting to know how each piece was made and why it was special. As Kadakia puts it; “Hers are the finest rubies, the finest sapphires, the necklace La Peregrina (estimated price at auction, $2-3 million, or around `9.56-14.34 crore) is the most historic natural pearl necklace in the world and dates back to the 16th century crown jewels of Spain. The Taj Mahal diamond is the original heart-shaped diamond gifted by Shah Jahan to Mumtaz Mahal on her 35th birthday, which was refashioned on to a Cartier gold and ruby thread ($300,000-500,000) as a gift from (Richard) Burton on Taylor’s 40th birthday. There is simply no other collection like it in Hollywood.” Fascinating pieces accumulated through the years, sparked off by Burton’s whimsy—“If it’s Tuesday, let’s buy you some jewellery,” he

Regimental emblems:

Pockets were highlighted this season with double flaps, zips, canvas strips, silk piping and regimental emblems. These emblems were prominent on upperarm sleeves in some cases and some designers also used armystyle decorative chains around the shoulder. Abhishek and Rohit, Khanna and Costa were among those who dis played these signages.

Cowl neck: From Anky by Ankita and Anjana Bhargav to Varun Bahl and Karan Johar’s collections, cowl necks were hot on the ramp. While Anky’s designs incor porated twothree folds and included both jackets, Johar and Bahl went in for multiple folds and cleavage/chestdis playing tees with leather straps and buckle details.

Scarves:

They are a musthave for any stylish male wardrobe in the coming seasons. And how you wear it will make all the difference. Are you likely to wear it as a sliver of scarlet silk peeking from behind your dinner jacket, as Costa showed, or as headgear, as Rajesh Pratap Singh favoured? Do you want to make your scarf/shawl a showcase a la Tarun Tahiliani or Shantanu and Nikhil, or wear it with a single knot around your neck, like Mehta and Manoviraj Khosla pre ferred it? Take your pick but make sure you have one.

Cropped pants: There was hardly any designer who did not use cropped pants in his collection. A lot of design ers used a single fold to add to the cropped look effect. We especially liked Shantanu and Nikhil’s detailing on sin gle folds on all cropped trousers and Rohit Gandhi and Rahul Khanna’s use of contrasting colours on the fold to high light the cropped look. Abraham and Thakore worked with narrow pyjamafit trousers which ended between the ankle and the knee while Khosla incor porated both folds and the narrow pyja mafit in his collection. Another trouser shape that made its presence felt was the Ysilhouette. Not really in the same genre as the classic jodhpurs, these trousers were not snug fit drainpipe below the knees. Abhishek and Rohit showcased this silhouette with detailing, while Tahiliani had some what similar shapes.

GETTY IMAGES

A gem of an affair: (extreme left) Elizabeth Taylor; and the Taj Mahal diamond. would say. At their home in Gstaad, Switzerland, when he lost a table tennis match to her, he bought her a set of three diamond rings today named “The Ping Pong diamond rings” ($5,000-7,000). While shooting for Cleopatra in Rome, Burton bought her Bulgari’s Egyptian revival motif mirror ($8,000-12,000). The collection changed and grew along with her list of husbands. While Burton had an eye for historic jewels, filmmaker husband Mike Todd sur-

prised her while she was swimming, gifting her the Cartier Ruby suite ($430,000-620,000). He gave her a crown ($60,000-80,000) “because you are my queen”; she wore this to the Academy Awards in 1957. Taylor’s own tastes evolved too. She designed the green, blue and violet JAR sapphire ear clips with Joel Arthur Rosenthal ($100,000-150,000) to match the constantly changing colour of her eyes. While the collection up for auc-

tion will feature iconic pieces like the Burton wedding bands ($6,000-8,000), Taylor’s journey through jewellery was intensely personal; there were Christmas gifts, jewellery celebrating films, births and marriages. While not the most expensive, the most charming jewels are these personal mementos. When Edith Head, the eighttime Academy Award-winning costume designer of films such as Roman Holiday and Sabrina, a second mother to Taylor, fashioned a necklace out of 19th century Victorian ivory theatre tokens, Taylor made her promise she’d leave it to her in her will ($1,500-2,000). Together, Taylor’s five charm bracelets, built up since she was a teenager, form her autobiography. Tags on them range from an engraved clapperboard for The Taming of the Shrew to a gold sphere locket with four medallions, each engraved with her children’s names. The auction from 13-16 December at Christie’s, New York, will feature Taylor’s couture, jewellery and film memorabilia. Catalogues and instructions to bid are available at www.christies.com/elizabethtaylor

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

Spotlight

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

PAVEL RAHMAN/AP

COMMUNITIES

‘Jol’ is always ‘paani’

Ferrying across: Bangladeshi migrant workers heading home to Dhaka for Eid, across the Buriganga river, last month; and (below) workers putting finishing touches to Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh’s and Sheikh Hasina’s posters earlier this month.

The PM’s visit to Bangladesh was marked by a historic agreement. But people reveal how two Banglas segue into one

B Y S HAMIK B AG ···························· apan, an autorickshaw driver who has lived in Bangladesh his entire life, still drinks jol. Hamid, the friend seated next to him, drinks paani. They are engaged in friendly banter, debating which is sweeter, jol or paani. Till realization strikes. Jol is paani, paani is jol. Jol is the word for water commonly used by the Hindu minority in Bangladesh, whereas Muslims use the word paani, even though Bengali is the shared language for both communities. Most times, the friends drink from a common water source, the village tubewell. What started it was my mentioning jol. I was immediately identified. “From India, dada?” It was no longer possible to disappear behind the common colour of skin, language and physicality shared by people crudely separated in 1947 along Radcliffe Line. A fascinating exchange ensued for the rest of our journey between Tapan, the Hindu-Bangladeshi from Jessore district bordering West Bengal, where the term jol is still used, and Hamid, the Muslim-Bangladeshi from Chittagong district. This happened days before my Bangladeshi visa was to expire—a couple of months before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to the country last week, when a historic agreement was signed on the demarcation of the boundary between the two countries, which resolved the status of 162 adversely held enclaves of Indians in Bangladesh and Bangladeshis living in India.

Over the month that I was in the country, the two Banglas, Bangladesh and West Bengal, had seemed to segue into one. Never mind the fencing at the border, concurred the wellknown Bangladeshi artist Mahbubur Rahman at a farewell party hosted by film-maker and photographer Molla Sagor. Sagor also edits the absorbing cross-cultural Bengali website Shapludu.com, where film-maker Ritwik Ghatak and singer-songwriter and politician Kabir Suman from Bengal share Web space with the likes of film director Tareque Masud and poet Jasimuddin of Bangladesh—a cyber residence for people who have kept their art out of the narrow alleys of the parochial and communal. At the party, the drink burned down the throat with potent intent. In a nation where prohibition is enforced and bootleggers demand three times more than the MRP (maximum retail price), here’s the riposte: chemical-free, homemade brew, distilled at home, intensity assured. This is vehemently secular terrain. The rant against Bangladesh’s inclination towards Islamization, sacrificing the secular credo on which the country was founded in 1971, was repeated here too. I reached out for jol to dilute my drink. And I got paani in return. “I want to organize an art show at the Bangladesh-Bengal border,” Mahbubur continued, while his artist wife Tayeba Begum Lipi nodded. It was not mere alcoholspeak. Mahbubur repeated this a week later at the Akar Prakar gallery in Kolkata during a get-together to celebrate his receiving an award from a Kolkata-based TV channel. “Let artists from both Banglas assemble in front of the border fence and interact over art,” the artist added with conviction. Lipi nodded again. Masudur Rahman, a fine arts graduate from Charukala—the hallowed art institute established in 1948 with the renowned artist Zainul Abedin as principal, which has been at the forefront of Bangladesh’s art movement—has a different take on the border. He fears a day might come when practising art will be deemed immoral by fundamentalists and

Masudur will have to cross the border and settle down in Kolkata. At our first meeting at Imon’s tea stall opposite Charukala, where young intellectuals in Dhaka exchange ideas of dissent over cups of black tea, Masudur had shared his sense of dread. His Bangladesh is clearly in danger—the collapse of healthcare, mindless consumerism, widening income disparities, and above all, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. For Masudur, all these are a negation of the original spirit of a country founded on the basis of the Bengali language, culture and secular pluralism. Some years back, Masudur, along with friends from the Charukala Institute and University of Dhaka, fiercely resisted the right-wing forces of change, even indulging in street skirmishes around the sprawling university area. Masudur’s wife Ishrat Zahan (popularly known as Kakon), a painter and singer, recounts the adrenalin rush on seeing a police vehicle go up in flames on a Dhaka road. When we first met, Masudur and Kakon, who met as students of Charukala, had extended the kind of hospitality that defies reciprocation, sparing their bed for the “mehmaan (guest) from India”, sharing their food. Kakon sang gloriously and deep into the night, Masudur read out his poetry. Nearing dawn, Masudur spread his recent paintings on the floor—works reflecting his fear and rage, metaphors of society’s mutilation and transmutation amid the flamboyance of colours and symmetry. But I wasn’t there to visit Dhaka, with its mind-numbing traffic snarls, the army of rickshaws flaunting graphic handpainted kitsch art, glass and granite skyscrapers, Japanese sedans, Korean restaurants, streetside kebab stalls, admirable public art installations, conformist mores and Islamic hospitals. I was in the country to spend a month in a land where my maternal roots run deep. I was there to unravel the simplicity of my maternal grandmother’s (Sarojubala Mukherjee; dida to her grandchildren) past in the river-veined district of Barisal. It’ll be two years this November since dida died, taking with

her much of the ease of existence she carried over from Barisal. As the matriarch of my uncle’s home—mamar bari—dida ensured that the front door would always remain ajar, bolted in an upright fashion only late evenings—and even then it could be unbolted with a light jerk of the door by people familiar with the house. This measure of magnanimity ensured that everyone was welcome, barring thieves, though they too occasionally paid a predawn visit. These unwanted visits would often be materialistically futile, for mamar bari would invariably be teeming with guests—near and distant relatives, friends of relatives and relatives of friends forming a constant stream of visitors from Bangladesh, Assam and Bengal. None left without food and a good night’s sleep at a home that, with its L-shaped construction, tulsi plant circled by a courtyard, jackfruit and mango trees, nearly approximated dida’s village house in Barisal. Indeed, to dida, like so many others of her generation, 1947 would always be remembered as the year of “desh bhaag” (Partition) rather than the year India won its freedom. Months before my visit, most people in Kolkata would open up with an “Ah, Bangladesh!” when they heard of my plans. Ah, Bangladesh—how much emotion has been invested in that utterance. I could somewhat fathom the entire

range of sentiments attached: the longing for a land—bhitye—that has been permanently lost, yet which is remembered through a prism of love. Loss, longing, love. Take, for instance, the story of an old lady displaced by Partition, recounted to me by documentary film-maker Sudeb Sinha. Even 50 years after she arrived in Kolkata as a refugee, and right till her death, the lady refused to participate in the city’s Durga Puja celebrations—Durga, she would reiterate, got left behind in her village in Bangladesh’s Khulna. For Avik Bandyopadhyay, the poet, Barisal was remembered through the memory of another poet, Jibanananda Das, who sought answers to life’s complexities from the abundance of nature in Barisal. In Kolkata, Sumeru Mukhopadhyay, film editor, writer and friend, hurriedly completed his representative painting of Bangladesh for me to see—a shining hilsa fish on a straw mat-like background in red and yellow. He is a foodie too, of course. The hilsa would come up again. Radharani Mukherjee, my mother’s 85-year-old aunt, with roots in Barisal, recalled how her brother was slaughtered in the post-Partition riots. She lightened up at the mention of the fish. “Along roadside bazaars, the silver of the fish would stun the eyes. There was abundance. The cats would get a few pieces too.” Minutes before our early-morning Volvo bus left for Dhaka, Arup

Roychowdhuri, an IT professional with whom I have spent many invigorating evenings, dropped in at the Salt Lake bus stand carrying a photocopied version of Jibanananda Das’ novel, Karubasona. The bus moved along Jessore Road—a road lined by old arching trees, sentinels from the time millions took the road to flee the communal fires of East Pakistan. For many of my generation, the traumatic past of Jessore Road came alive through singer Moushumi Bhowmik’s heartrending rendition of a song inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s poem, September on Jessore Road. It was as if I was carrying the load of loss, longing and love of a people who could not return, but only covet. A week later, I was on my way to dida’s Barisal. Parabat 9, the three-storeyed launch, was packed. Masudur and Kakon had come along. Masudur was returning to his hometown after many years. He yearned for the Barisal of his childhood, when he would go fishing on the Kirtonkhola river with friends, spending nights on swaying country boats. The Kirtonkhola is there, but most of his friends have left, certainly most of his Hindu friends. As Parabat 9 got ready to leave Dhaka, from my earphone rang out Bangladeshi singer Ornob’s placid voice: “Ekta Bangla bhenge adhkhana acche/Adhkhana swaad niye adhpeta baache (only half exist of a Bangla divided/On half a wish is life half lived).” As the launch left the Buriganga river and headed towards the mighty Meghna, Masudur looked expectant. We stood on the upper deck as the vessel hit the rolling Meghna waters. In the dark, distance were flecks of light from fishing boats. The breeze carried with it the gentle brush of a drizzle and hints of a popular Lata Mangeshkar Bengali tune. Somebody in the launch was playing the song on his mobile phone. Kakon sung the missing parts when the breeze carried the tune elsewhere. I kept my eyes fixed on the jol, Masudur on the paani. Jol is paani, paani is jol. And everything seemed fine. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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BASKETBALL

Who’s got game? Will Punjab produce the next Yao Ming? A concerted effort is under way to change the profile of the sport in the country

PHOTOGRAPHS

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Courtside: Courtside: The Indian basketball team at practice; (right) coach Kenny Natt; and (top) NBA India’s Troy Justice.

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

···························· enny Natt’s booming voice cuts through the incessant thud of basketballs bouncing off the floor—“CLEAR, EXCHANGE, CLEAR, EXCHANGE, STEP FORWARD, BRING IT!” Twelve players from the national basketball team are swirling around an indoor court at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium in New Delhi, practising offensive drills. They spread out in groups of three, feinting, passing, shooting, constantly in motion. Natt, 52, the team’s American coach, is prowling with a notepad in hand, calling the shots, pressing the players. “Create options—YOU create the game!” Natt bellows. Amjyot Singh swivels past his marker, and passes wide to the onrushing Jagdeep Singh. Jagdeep releases the ball in a flash to Amrit Pal Singh, who squares up, springs from the floor, and shoots. The ball rolls around the rim, teasing, like a silver sphere on a roulette wheel, and then drops in for a basket. Just three months ago, when former US National Basketball Association (NBA) coach and player Natt signed a two-year deal to coach the Indian team, his focus was to just get the basics right. That stage is past. “We are better physically and mentally,” says Natt. “We are continuing to make progress every single day at practice. We are far ahead of the basics now, and we’ve put in all our offensive and defensive strategies. We are ready to compete today.” The squad is now in Wuhan, China, for the Fédération Internationale de Basketball’s (Fiba) Asian Championship, which started on Thursday. Three months is like the first 10m in the marathon of sports development, but the signs are clear—Indian basketball is in a development frenzy. Natt is the first head coach for the Indian team who has also held the same position for a NBA team. His nine seasons as assistant coach for Utah Jazz saw the team reach the NBA finals twice. The Indian women’s national team

has roped in Pete Gaudet, 69, a veteran US coach with over 40 years’ experience at the collegiate level. As assistant coach at Duke University, Gaudet won two National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Championships, and coached 12 NBA draft picks. Zak Penwell, 31, a certified coach from the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) of America, has been signed on to hone the fitness of both the men’s and the women’s teams. In basketball language, this is called a full-court press—an allfronts attack to change the profile of the sport in India, from the grassroots all the way to the national teams.

On the offence In June last year, American sports and entertainment company IMG Worldwide and Reliance Industries entered into a 30-year deal with the Basketball Federation of India (BFI) for all commercial rights to the sport in India, including sponsorship, advertising, broadcasting, merchandising and franchising rights, as well as advising BFI on managing school and college leagues. IMG was clear about the agenda—to own the next Indian sports league after the runaway success of the Indian Premier League (IPL), which IMG helped establish in 2008, and which is now valued at over $4 billion (around `18,800 crore). On the ground, the effects are already being felt at every level of the game. The BFI is building a gym for the national teams, and a residential academy in New Delhi is nearing completion, in addition to the academies in Punjab, Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu. Eight under-15 players from these academies won scholarships to train at the IMG’s basketball academy in Florida in the last one year. In 2010, the BFI kicked off school leagues in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai. Next month, BFI’s first college league will begin, featuring 80 teams, and a city franchisebased pro-league is in advanced stages of planning. “We could never have afforded

these programmes without IMGReliance funding,” says BFI secretary general Harish Sharma. “We could not have hired these coaches or afforded the gyms and machines or kits.” The NBA too features prominently on the scene, targeting India as its next big overseas market. The NBA had previously focused on China to expand its global reach, and after the success of Yao Ming, a 7ft 6 inches player from Shanghai who became a star with the Houston Rockets, the league attracted hundreds of millions of new fans in China. The sport’s relative simplicity and the fact that it does not need elaborate infrastructure or equipment makes it an ideal choice for fast-track development. In 2010, NBA tied up with Mahindra and Mahindra to start the Mahindra NBA Challenge, a communitybased programme spread across five cities. Now in its second year, the programme features 600 participating teams. “The Mahindra NBA Challenge has a waiting list in every city,” says Troy Justice, NBA’s director of basketball operations in India. “Over 800 coaches enrolled for our Junior NBA/WNBA programme too, which works to improve basketball at the school level for both coaches and players.” Justice also works with the BFI, conducting clinics and workshops with both coaches and players, as well as assisting in talent scouting.

A boy, a ball and a basket At 20, Amrit Pal has already shown enough court savvy to be drafted straight into the men’s national team without ever having played for an age-group side. The 6ft 9 inches Punjab player had only passing knowledge of the sport till two years ago, when a coach from the Ludhiana Basketball Academy saw the lanky and athletic teenager at a bus stop and approached him. “He asked me if I had ever played basketball,” says Amrit Pal. “I said no, I play kabaddi. He offered me a two-month training

stint at the academy, and then if I did well, I’d be taken in for full training as well as schooling.” In 2010, with just two years’ training, Amrit Pal was in the Punjab squad. Satnam Singh Bhamara, a 7ft 2 inches giant, shares a similar story. At 15, he is the youngest member of the Indian team. In 2005, when the Ludhiana Basketball Academy inundated local papers in Punjab with an ad with the tag line “Tall? Give basketball a try”. Satnam’s father Balbir Singh, a farmer in a village called Ballo Ke, responded to the call. Satnam was 9 at the time, and already 5ft 9 inches. Balbir himself is 7ft 2 inches, Balbir’s mother is 6ft 9 inches. No one in Ballo Ke, a tiny farming village with a population of roughly 500, had heard of the sport before Satnam. After five years at the academy, Satnam’s sheer presence on the court created such a stir that IMG gave him a scholarship to train at their academy in Florida, and Natt decided to draft him into the national squad straightaway. The three senior coaches, Natt, Gaudet and Penwell, have also expanded their mandate with missionary zeal, taking on coaching, training and scouting duties for age-group teams, as well as Indian coaches and trainers. “Coaching is not a 9-5 job,” says Gaudet. “Good coaches realize that they need a whole network of coaches to feed them from the grass-roots level to be successful, and that’s what we are trying to put in place.” When the BFI bagged the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium facilities for its teams in early 2011, the floor of the massive basketball complex was covered in pigeon shit, the nets were ripped and there

was no padding on the boards. “It took time to get things right,” Gaudet says. “The government is trying to give us all the help it can, but I’m not Anna (Hazare) that I can go on fast every time I want something badly.” Gaudet, Natt and Penwell are working on a schedule that will take them from city to city, holding coaching clinics all over India. Penwell says he was aware of India’s poor sporting culture, barring cricket, when he took up the job, and that was part of the excitement, but that the nuances of the challenge still surprise him from time to time. “When I first came in, players used to come to me often complaining of stomach bugs,” Penwell says. “Then I found out that they had no soap in the hostel, and that they regularly ate after practice without washing their hands. I went out and bought soap for all of them. Then the soap got stolen! So I went out and got more.” Gaudet says his most pressing priority is to identify and develop young talent as quickly as possible. “There’s a saying which goes, ‘a boy, a ball and a basket’,” says Gaudet. “In the US, anywhere you go you will see a basket pinned to a garage, a wall, a park. We need to get some of that spirit here.” Over at the court, Natt is still pushing the men’s team, trying to extract that last ounce of energy. A high, long pass is caught by a player who reaches out his hands to the full extent, arching back in the air. He regains his balance on landing and passes the ball. “That’s it, that’s it,” Natt hollers, “that’s a champ.”

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LOUNGE ALOK KEJRIWAL

From socks to software The CEO of Games2win.com talks about his holy triangle—creativity, technology and the Internet

B Y P .R . S ANJAI pr.sanjai@livemint.com

···························· am waiting for Alok Kejriwal, a serial digital entrepreneur, at Gallops restaurant at the racecourse in Mahalaxmi, Mumbai. Clear sky. Green surroundings. Breath of fresh air. I make a mental note to thank Kejriwal for his choice of venue as he walks in in a black T-shirt with a Star Wars logo and jeans. “I am late by 2 minutes,” he says with a smile. Kejriwal specifically requests table 14, which is a few yards from the race tracks. “I am obsessed with details,” he says. “It’s a disease. Whether a hotel room or a restaurant table, I avoid trial and error. So I remember all numbers and locations, either it’s in my head or in my iPhone,” says the chief executive officer and cofounder of Games2Win. This is Kejriwal’s fourth company—his previous ventures include Contests2win.com, Mobile2win.com and Media2win.com. Mobile2win was bought out by the firm Walt Disney Animation Studios in China and private equity firm Norwest Venture Partners in India.

Games2win reaches out to over 25 million visitors a month. His first company, Contests2win.com, handles SMS contests for various TV shows and other contests organized by companies. “It’s all about being happy,” he explains his enthusiasm for new ventures. “I love what I do. Age will catch up fast when you start hating what you do,” says the 42-year-old, who in 10 years has never missed his daily meditation, inspired by the Art of Living Foundation. As we settle for fresh lime soda and paneer tikka, Kejriwal explains his connection with Art of Living: “I am a spiritual, hippy Marwari. I am inspired by Zen philosophy. To me, the pursuit of money is noble. The way of getting money or the journey to money is important.” He says he is not interested in raising public money for his companies or in taking short cuts. “I look at the iPhone, FarmVille or Angry Birds with divine distillation. I love creating things from nothing. I am willing to do an unconditional Zen-like surrender to achieve that,” he says, between sips of his fresh lime. “I was born in a Marwari family. Entrepreneurship is in the DNA of a Marwari,” he says in a mix of English and Hindi. Deftly mixing the tikka with gravy, he adds: “Money is literally the gravy that makes life tasty for a Marwari.” Kejirwal was brought up by his grandparents in Mumbai, who lived close to his parents. He recollects spending most of his time in the office of his maternal grandfather, L.C. Gupta, who ran a transport company, during his school days. Those days, he was also in love with science. “That was my only regret, I could not focus on studies (he was more involved with the business). You never know, I

IN PARENTHESIS Alok Kejriwal blogs on topics ranging from advertising, business models, Internet, media and startups to entrepreneurship and venture capital. He writes on http://rodinhood.com—inspired by Rodin, who sculpted ‘The Thinker’, and Robin Hood, who “got things done”. He says it’s a thinkermeetsdoer concept. Kejriwal runs his own social networking site— http://therodinhoods.com—to share his experience with aspiring entrepreneurs. This also explains the ‘Star Wars’ Tshirt. Though not particularly interested in movies, Kejriwal has a miniature of Yoda, a character from the film, in his office. Yoda has the task of training soldiers, says Kejriwal—much like him and the entrepreneurs.

may have been designing space shuttles in Nasa (the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) had I been a diligent student,” he says, chuckling. “The negative side of being born in a Marwari family is that your report card is your balance sheet and nothing counts beyond money,” he adds. In the Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics, Mumbai, where he studied accounting, Kejriwal remained smitten by the idea of doing business. At 21, he joined father Anand Kejriwal’s socks manufacturing company, Hindustan Hosiery Industries (the company wound up three years ago). “I was fortunate as fate intervened with (then) finance minister Manmohan Singh, who devalued the Indian rupee, making my father’s sock factory export competitive,” Kejriwal says, ordering a vegetable biryani after checking if I was okay with the choice. The socks factory is also the place where Kejriwal had his first brush with technology. In 1990, Anand Kejriwal wanted to buy a socks-manufacturing machine from Italy and asked his son to check it out. The Italian manufacturer, Mauro Cecconi, invited Kejriwal to Florence to learn how to operate the machine first. “Cecconi insisted that he would sell only if I learn,” Kejriwal recalls. He was surprised when he was given just a chassis, not a machine, to work with when he flew into Florence. The idea was that if he learnt how to build it, he would know how to operate it as well. Kejriwal considers this the first turning point in his life. The next came soon after when he started making socks with flowers imprinted on them with the help of the new, `9 lakh machine in 1991. His second discovery—creativity. The third and critical twist came quickly. On just its fourth day in India, the machine stopped working. “It was unimaginable to fly down a technician from Italy. The manufacturer hinted that it could be an issue with the fan,” he reminiscences. Kejriwal searched the website of Siemens AG, the company which had manufactured the fan. He found that he could fix it with a washer that would cost him `2. “That was the third—Internet. It was a holy triangle: Technology, creativity and Internet,” he says. Entrepreneur Kejriwal was born out of this discovery—and partly out of boredom with manufacturing, though the company managed to earn `27 lakh from the machine from Italy in the first year. The “holy triangle” started haunting Kejriwal when Sabeer Bhatia sold Hotmail to Microsoft in December 1997 for $400 million (around `1,856 crore now). “You need something beyond the obvious to satisfy your intellec-

tual meta level. I was desperately thinking how could I become Bhatia. Create something out of nothing,” he says. “It was a Sunday in 1998 when, sitting in a temple, I found a newspaper advertisement for a contest to win a car. But the contest form was so small that I could not cut it through the scissor mark,” he recollects. “The next day, when I could not find the paper, it became a trigger—an online contest platform.” Kejriwal used to get a stipend of `25,000 a month from his father—he would give `20,000 to wife Chavvi for the house and their daughters Anushka (now 15) and Amaya (now 11). He needed `5,000 for the investment and borrowed the money from his wife. “I registered the domain name and borrowed a laptop from my wife’s brother to show demonstrations. In a year, India’s top brands became my customers,” he says. In 1998, private equity firms ICICI Ventures and eVentures, promoted by News Corp. and Japan’s Softbank Corp., a private equity firm, picked up a stake in Contests2win.com. It was just the beginning. Softbank Corp. invited Kejriwal to China—the Internet was spreading faster there than in India. “They said just come with your brain and clothes and we will take care of the rest. I did not think twice.” But soon he realized that it is not the Internet, but the mobile phone, which would be the new growth story in India. The second company, Mobile2win.com, was set up in 2003. Mobile2win.com managed to handle many contests and voting through text messages, including one of the most popular reality shows, Indian Idol. In 2006, as the Chinese government started imposing restrictions on media, including mobile phone contests, Walt Disney wanted everything Kejriwal had. “I have a non-disclosure agreement with buyers. But we sold our company for six times more than what we had invested,” Kejriwal adds. I pose a tough question—about his forced exit from Mobile2win.com in India. Norwest Venture Partners acquired Mobile2win.com in India on the condition that Kejriwal would exit. He remains silent for a moment and then orders a Diet Pepsi with lots of lemon in it. “It was very, very painful. The company was created passionately. It is painful when a

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

Tech guru: Alok Kejriwal wants to be an ‘incubator’ for aspiring entrepreneurs.

promoter himself is asked to leave. I was not allowed to start anything similar to Mobile2win.com. Even as the company was sold for at least 12 times more than what we had invested,” he recalls. A year later, the company was sold by the venture capital firms to a Chandigarh company called Altruist for a non-cash deal. “That says it all,” adds Kejriwal. “I got the cash. But I had to create something magical. I found out that my daughters are hooked to browsers for finding games. I got the trigger,” recalls Kejriwal. With friend Mahesh Khambadkone, he founded Games2win.com, which is now one of the top 20 online gaming businesses in the world, according to the online tracking firm comScore. Kejriwal’s company earned `35 crore in revenue in 2010-11, compared with `4 lakh in 1998. He wants to take its worth to a

billion dollars. Any regrets, I ask? “Yes,” Kejriwal is quick to answer. General Electric was keen to invest in Contests2win.com just before the dotcom bust in 2000. “I was ready. But General Electric revised the term sheet following the meltdown. I refused to agree. The decision was foolish, ignorant and egoistic. That stopped me entering the US market for the next 10 years.” He is now in the process of building infrastructure for new entrepreneurs. His idea is to pick up a small stake in a company and also offer infrastructure to the entrepreneurs to enable them to avoid the initial hiccups. “I am planning to float a fund for aspiring entrepreneurs. I am just telling them what Softbank told me years ago—come with your brains and clothes. We will take care of the rest,” says Kejriwal.

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

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From bean to cup: (from far left) Coffee varieties on display at Devan’s; green beans being washed; and coffee berries being plucked at a plantation in Kodagu.

Caffeine kickstart

The how and where of great coffee in India You don’t need to sip your coffee to tell if it’s good. Look out for the “crema”—that frothy layer on top which holds on to the flavour volatiles. “The crema should have staying power. It shouldn’t disappear when you take a few sips,” says coffee quality con trol expert Sunalini Menon. In a perfect scenario, if your coffee has been wellbrewed and wellex tracted, a good crema will be mottled brown and look like leopard skin. To start, there are several espresso makers, French presses and “pourover” cof fee makers available for home use. Here are two recommendations: Sunalini Menon, founder and CEO, Coffeelabs: A French press (`275 in a Café Coffee Day outlet). Pour hot—not boiling—water over a halfinch layer of coffee. Stir with a wooden spatula. Pour the rest of the water till 80% full. Brew for 45 minutes and plunge for a light, fla vourful brew. You’ll need coarse ground coffee. Keshav Dev, proprietor, Devan’s South Indian Coffee & Tea: A stovetop espresso maker from the Italian brand Bialetti (`1,5002,500). Brew for 8 minutes for a strong concoction. You’ll need finely ground coffee for this.

Experts recommend buying coffee in small quantities if possible, and storing in glass or plastic containers. New Delhi Devan’s South Indian Coffee & Tea, 131, Khanna Mar ket, Lodhi Colony. Most premium: Organic Arabica from Balmuri, Karnataka, `550 a kg. Mumbai Philips Coffee & Tea, opposite Colaba post office, Colaba. Most premium: Highlander (80% Arabica, 20% Robusta blend), `420 a kg. Bangalore Kalmane Koffees, outlets at Forum Mall, Mantri Square Mall, and in Jayanagar, 4th Block, near the BDA (Banga lore Development Authority) complex. Most premium: Mysore Nuggets, `640 a kg. Chennai Naturally Auroville Boutique, outlets in 8, Khader Nawaz Khan Road and 64/38, Rukmani Road, Kalakshetra Colony, Besant Nagar. Available online at Auroville.com. Most pre mium: Julien Peak beans, `366 for 250g. Pavitra Jayaraman and Amritha Venketakrishnan contributed to this listing. PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

COFFEE

On a bitter trail

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

···························· nondescript row of provision stores in New Delhi’s Lodhi Colony can be distinguished by the bittersweet aroma that envelops it. The culprit is a single source—one that other store owners know as the place author Arundhati Roy visits once a month, as do a sundry list of the city’s intellectual and artistic cognescenti, the likes of Upamanyu Chatterjee, Roshan Seth and Anjolie Ela Menon. It’s the only place in the Capital that sells fresh coffee—roasted, ground and packed on site. Keshav Dev, who runs Devan’s South Indian Coffee & Tea, a retail outlet started by his father in 1962, says his clientele is typically above the age of 35, comprising a small number of south Indian tradition-

alists, expatriates and “well-travelled” Indians. When Aman Rai, a retired civil engineer, walks in, he only has to say “three kilos” to have Dev send one of his employees to a back room with a large vintage grinder. “We have a small and dedicated clientele,” says Dev. “I know what most of them buy.” According to New Delhi-based research and consultancy firm Technopak Advisors, around 1,000 of roughly 1,500 cafés in India have opened in the past five years. Meanwhile, international chains such as the UK’s Costa Coffee and Australia’s Gloria Jean’s have set up shop. By 2012, American coffee giants Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts will both enter the Indian market. Dev believes his clientele will remain unchanged, though. “Cafés are mushrooming across the country because the young

crowd needs a place to meet. We have no coffee culture to speak of,” he says. Across the country, closer to the coffee-growing south, Peter Philips of Philips Coffee & Tea, a 70-yearold Mumbai establishment, echoes this. “People come over all the time and complain that our coffee didn’t ‘mix’ well. They think all coffee is instant coffee!” Partly to address his own irritation, Philips, who hails from Kerala, started stocking coffee-brewing equipment, including south Indian metal coffee filters, a decade ago. He stopped in 2007 because of low sales, logistical wrangles and what he calls “too much effort for too little sales”. What Philips does concede is that his customer base has widened. For a long time, it was only Mumbai’s large south Indian population, a few Parsis and diplo-

mats, apart from hotels and restaurant chains. “Now, there are more locals...the curious ones.”

Cup of contention Despite the brouhaha over Indian speciality coffees in the heavy coffee-drinking Scandinavian countries, India isn’t branded as coffee-literate. In The Devil’s Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee, a 2003 book that was translated into six languages, American author Stewart Lee Allen calls the instant coffee available in most parts of India a sickeningly sweet, piping-hot milkshake. He is particularly peeved by the addition of milk and calls Indian coffee “the world’s most consistently vile cup of joe!” Allen possibly never had a cup of Monsooned Malabar—India’s top-notch speciality coffee—during his travels. The heavy-bodied

coffee has a musty, chocolatey aroma and notes of spices and nuts. It is called “monsooned” because it is exposed to monsoon winds, which make the beans swell and the coffee less acidic. The story of its genesis is the stuff of legend. The Dutch, and then the English, were exporting coffee from the Malabar Coast to the Norwegian coast of Europe from as early as the 17th century. The humidity of the wooden shipping boats and the sea winds combined to cause the coffee beans to turn from green to a golden yellow and lose their original acidity, resulting in a sweet and syrupy brew. When transportation was modernized in the early 20th century, the beans were much better protected from the elements. In 1972, after repeated com-

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

India is now the third largest exporter of coffee in the world. So why can’t you find a good cup to drink? PRASHANTH VISHWANATHAN/BLOOMBERG

plaints of a quality drop, the Coffee Board of India, which is run by the Union ministry of commerce and industry, developed a process to replicate these natural “monsooning” conditions. Coffee beans were exposed to the monsoon winds in season—from June through September—in the port city of Mangalore. Sunalini Menon, founder and CEO of Coffeelabs Pvt. Ltd, a Bangalore-based coffee consulting firm, calls this move a pioneering effort for the Coffee Board. “When they went for this ‘branding’, the world was yet to discover speciality coffees. It was far before gourmet varieties such as Colombian Supremo were coined,” says Menon. Today, Monsooned Malabar has something in common with champagne. In 2008, it acquired a Geographical Indication (GI) tag, which is awarded to products that have characteristics traceable to a particular region. Less than 160 products have this distinction in India, some others being Darjeeling Tea and Banarasi brocade. But as a coffee drinker in India, rarely does one get a taste of the best. Almost all of what a premium estate such as the Athikan Estate in BR Hills in Karnataka produces, is exported. Coffee beans from the 130-year-old estate won the “Best Arabica” award in Flavour of India—Cupping Competition 2011, an annual event conducted by the Coffee Board to boost planter quality. S. Appadurai, who owns Athikan, sells his green coffee beans via weekly auctions to coffeeroasting companies around the world. Prices average `260 a kilogram. This year’s harvest, for instance, went to the US, Australia and Korea. While around

80% of the coffee produced in India is exported, almost all of its prized Monsooned Malabar goes out of the country. “There is no taste or demand for it here,” says Menon. Meanwhile, India’s coffee trade is growing at a phenomenal pace. From being the sixth largest exporter of coffee between August 2009 and July 2010, India became the third largest in July this year, trumped only by Brazil and Vietnam. Most of India’s coffee is grown in Karnataka (which accounts for 53% of the production), followed by Kerala and Tamil Nadu. It was in Chikmagalur in Karnataka—where apart from familyrun businesses like Appadurai’s, India’s largest café chain Café Coffee Day owns plantations—that coffee was planted for the first time in India. The story goes that it was introduced in 1670 AD by a Sufi saint on his return from Mecca. The Arabs, who had started cultivating coffee in the 15th century, had imposed a ban on the export of fertile coffee beans, but the Sufi saint had been able to carry seven seeds back. Due to its early development of plantations, Chikmagulur continues to take the top spot as India’s coffee centre. It even hosts the laboratories of the Central Coffee Research Institute and a coffee museum. India does have a strangely wrought relationship with coffee. The International Coffee Organization, a London-based inter-governmental body, acknowledges that India was the first place that coffee was cultivated outside the

Arab peninsula (well before tea was introduced in the 1820s). Still, general awareness about coffee is low—only a few outside of trade circles would even know of the Monsooned Malabar. Menon lists other premium coffees branded by the Coffee Board: Mysore Nuggets Extra Bold, Robusta Kaapi Royale. She should know; she named them. Before setting up her own lab in 1996, she served as the director of quality control on the Coffee Board for 20 years. She set the quality standards for Mysore Nuggets—the highest grade of Indian Arabica coffee, which she describes as sweet with a complex aroma and a hint of spice. Menon believes Indian coffee is especially flavourful because it is shade-grown, unlike other parts of the world. In Kodagu in Karnataka, plantation owners grow intercrops such as guava, jackfruit, cardamom and pepper. The fruits and spices planted alongside coffee bushes lend an incomparable flavour to the coffee bean. Wine drinkers would be better equipped to discern these nuances. The description of flavour notes—terms like fruit finish, bouquet, spice notes—borrows from the vocabulary of wine. Indian coffee growers are only now capitalizing on these nuances. With the Union government managing the coffee trade till the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s, there were no incentives for farmers to improve quality or individually brand coffees. A majority of what was produced was exported as low-quality “filler” coffee, while the better coffees were being used in blends by com-

panies such as the Italian gourmet coffee brand Illy—without ever being branded as “Indian”.

New grounds Initiatives such as the Araku Valley Coffee Project of the Naandi Foundation, an autonomous public trust with interests in fair trade and development, are striving to change this status quo. Manoj Kumar, CEO, Naandi Foundation, says their project started out with 1,000 tribal farmers in 2001 and has empowered 15,000 farmers today to grow and market organic coffee in Andhra Pradesh’s Araku Valley. In 2009, David Hogg, the biodynamic expert who directs Naandi’s coffee operations, started an annual coffee award called Gems of Araku, in collaboration with Menon, to incentivize farmers to grow better coffee. By inviting buyers from around the world on the award panel, the event also encourages a wider sampling of these coffees. Hogg explains that India’s regional differences—soils, climatic conditions and the variety of shade trees—have the potential to produce a range of nuanced speciality coffees. “Indian coffee has huge advantages in its favour if it is grown the right way. It won’t be long before we have GI tags for many. Let Vietnam mass-produce filler coffees...for India, the future lies in quality,” says Hogg. Jennifer Murray, an international cupping expert who was a jury member for the June edition of Gems of Araku, believes Indians coffees will be making a strong statement in years to come.

Murray herself purchased a sizeable amount of Araku’s 2010-11 crop for Five Senses, an Australian roastery. “I think we have only seen the tip of the iceberg of what India has to offer,” she says. “The real challenge,” according to Murray, “is to overcome the years of low-quality coffees that have been exported and made available internationally. It’s tainted the reputation of Indian coffee in the speciality market.” A robust marketing campaign has to be an integral part of India’s ascent to the gourmet coffee league. In the 1980s, the Brazilian government invested close to $25 million (around `117.5 crore now) to publicize Brazilian coffee both domestically and internationally. “Brazil is a world leader but 40% of its coffee is consumed domestically,” explains Hogg. “India needs to develop its domestic demand. Quality will follow.” There are reasons to believe that domestic demand is on the rise. Though far behind tea in terms of absolute consumption, the Coffee Board estimates an increase of 5-6% in coffee consumption annually, especially in north India, which is traditionally a non-coffee-drinking region. The demand for coffee is growing such that new areas for developing coffees are being tried out, like the Eastern Ghats and the NorthEastern states. New varieties are also being researched, and a new Arabica variety called Chandragiri was released for commercial use in India in 2007. Overall coffee awareness is on the boil as well. Bru, the largest brand in the conventional coffee

The perfect brew: (clockwise from above) Keshav Dev with his coffee roaster; Sunalini Menon; and plan tation workers in Kodagu drying coffee. market in India, entered the premium segment with the Exotica range this August. Bru Exotica offers three international coffee varieties: Brazil, Colombia and Kilimanjaro. Priced as high as `590 (100g), its entry signals significant consumer insights. Arun Srinivas, general manager, beverages, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, which owns Bru, says the endeavour is to offer the world’s finest coffee experiences “best suited for Indian taste buds”. At Devan’s too, Dev will soon introduce Brazilian, Colombian and decaffeinated coffee because customers have been making inquiries. At least three more international coffee chains are set to enter the Indian market by 2015: London’s Coffee Republic, Australia’s The Coffee Club and France’s Alto Coffee. Last month, the North Eastern Tea Association urged the Union government to declare tea the country’s national drink. Now more than ever before, coffee needs to stand its ground. www.livemint.com To know your Arabica from your Robusta, read Coffee FAQs at www.livemint.com/coffeestory.htm

SEE RELATED STORY >Read our travel story on plantation getaways, Page 17

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PRASHANTH VISHWANATHAN/BLOOMBERG

From bean to cup: (from far left) Coffee varieties on display at Devan’s; green beans being washed; and coffee berries being plucked at a plantation in Kodagu.

Caffeine kickstart

COFFEE

On a bitter trail

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

mats, apart from hotels and restaurant chains. “Now, there are more locals...the curious ones.”

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

India is now the third largest exporter of coffee in the world. So why can’t you find a good cup to drink? PRASHANTH VISHWANATHAN/BLOOMBERG

panies such as the Italian gourmet coffee brand Illy—without ever being branded as “Indian”.

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Books

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REBOOT

The algebra of infinite crises TASCHEN/BLOOMBERG

Why has DC Comics restarted its story lines? A comics nerd explains why ‘The Man of Steel’ is getting a suit of armour

B Y A BHIMANYU D AS ···························· or the last three months, Internet users everywhere had their newsfeeds bombarded with articles which read like The Onion mated awkwardly with MAD magazine, producing a baby obsessed with superhero fashion. Normals among these readers wondered incredulously about the sudden flood of worldwide interest in whether Wonder Woman needs pants or Superman rocks his briefs. But nerds knew what was coming. Boy, did we know. You see, it’s happened three times in the last 25 years. Only this time, they’re serious. DC Comics has destroyed the universe. Again. This May, the venerable publisher announced the rebooting of the DC Universe (DCU) in September. Coming on the heels of the recent Flashpoint crossover event (see column, Flashpoint Batman, facing page), this involves restarting most mainstream DCU titles from Issue 1, a few cancellations and the launch of some new titles, bringing the total to 52 ongoing series per month. Spearheaded by DC’s chief creative officer Geoff Johns and copublishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio, the reboot also alters parts of the fictional universe; new outfits (pants or no pants?), character histories and the changing (or erasing) of previous continuity. The DCU superheroes will, essentially, start over. This imaginatively named “New 52” is geared towards attracting new readers by being more modern, accessible and tuned in to the potential 21st century audience. It will emphasize diversity, interpersonal relationships and realworld issues, possibly overestimating said audience. Another rebootylicious development to entice fresh readership will be on the distribution front—digital copies of

each title will be available on the same day as the print release, via the comiXology digital-comic platform. The hope is that the convenience of one-click purchase on a mobile device will prove alluring to potential new readers, similar to the business models of the iTunes store or Netflix. Fan response to news of the reboot has tended towards the negative. Much venom has been spewed and heated words exchanged on various forums, social networks, and websites. Dissension even spilled into meatspace, with a well-publicized protest at Comic-Con International 2011 in San Diego, US. Potshots at easy targets aside, the reboot is genuinely important, worthy of serious discussion. The past 75 years of DCU superhero stories represent a significant creative achievement. Much has been made of superheroes being

the mythology of the 20th century. But if this is true, recent years have witnessed a shift to decidedly new gods or, at least, new methods of worship. Print sales have dropped massively as fans get older, budgets get tighter and young people (who should be taking up the slack) prefer to get their ubermensch fix from movies rather than print. A reboot may be a desperate attempt to inject new life into the desiccated corpse of the superhero book, but there are many reasons why it could be a good idea. But the more we learn about

DC’s reboot, the less advisable it appears. First, they have tried this before with Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985), Zero Hour (1994) and Infinite Crisis (2005); all of which share the theme of “everything starts again (OK, except maybe some things)” on different scales. The increase in sales and readership was either short term or negligible in all cases. Why keep trying? Superhero comics have a mandate to keep tossing out charactershifting and earth-shattering events, but they still have to leave character and earth intact enough to sustain a monthly title. The result is that most creative teams accumulate plot holes and mistakes over time and future teams revise or work around them. Seventy-five years of this has built agonizingly convoluted continuity, as older versions of characters fight younger versions from other dimensions created by middleaged versions in yet other dimensions who are actually also supervillains, and so on, in infinite regression. This makes it impossible for a new reader to jump in on a long-running superhero title. The experience is akin to trying to start watching Lost from the last season—even those who started from the beginning have no clue what’s going on. This makes the reboot a golden opportunity. Execution, though, is everything, and DC might be botching it from the get go. Business considerations are

important, but the changes need to be creative decisions. Unfortunately, DC editorial has taken a marketing-driven, corporate approach with top-down, umbrella changes being shoehorned on to titles that neither require nor benefit from them. Instead of doing what’s best for each character, they impose one idea on all of them. Everything must link up to everything else. World-building is the word of the day, because we need that Marvel/Avengers-style multiple-film franchise to get the ledgers back into the black. Wonder Woman is turned into a Flash storyline spinoff which is, in turn, founded upon a Batman story and so on, ad infinitum. Whether Flash or Wonder Woman’s character arcs benefit from being connected to Batman’s (and writer Grant Morrison’s) trippy adventures remains unclear. All this would be somewhat mitigated if the creative teams behind the reboot were given the freedom to make truly revolutionary changes. Again, this does not seem to be the case. The more iconic and financially reliable characters like Batman and Superman remain mostly unaltered, suffering relatively minor tweaks to continuity and superficial costume changes. If it’s a case of not fixing what ain’t broke, why Kindly revert: (clock wise from left) Bat man, Joker and Flash are part of DC Comics’ full scale reinvention; and (above) DC’s classic American hero Superman.

include them in the reboot at all? Why does the Man of Steel need a suit of armour anyway? The attempt to promote hitherto marginal characters into new and prominent directions is an interesting one. The AfricanAmerican Cyborg is set to be an important part of the new Justice League and the lesbian Batwoman is getting an editorial push with the assignment of the talented J.H. Williams III. However, it is difficult to take these changes as anything more than token. The only female writer on the New 52 is Gail Simone on Batgirl and The Fury of Firestorm, even as meme-inspiringly awful artist Rob Liefeld is retained in Hawk and Dove. As for appealing to young readers, the average age of the writers on the reboot titles seems to teeter in the mid-40s. DC is already taking criticism for restoring Barbara Gordon to her feet 23 years after she was attacked by the Joker and became wheelchair-bound. As a former Batgirl-turned-Batman’s intelligence analyst Oracle, Gordon’s character is one of the best-written women in the DCU; she has become a valued symbol of empowerment in the disabled community, and a cultural icon for her representation. Making her yet another face in Gotham City’s roster of butt-kickers reverses (or at least ends) two decades of progress for the DCU’s heroines. I would love to eat crow on this. For all I know, this month will give us 52 of the greatest ongoing superhero stories ever told (or 51, unless they replace Liefeld with a clone with talent). But DC does not have a history of learning from past mistakes and, judging from advance glimpses and descriptions, this reboot looks like another instance of the publishers trying to have their Batcake and eat it too. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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AATISH TASEER | NOON

CULT FICTION

R. SUKUMAR

Elegant but limited

FLASHPOINT BATMAN PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

The viewpoint of the very rich fails to illuminate South Asia’s wider realities B Y O MAIR A HMAD ···························· atish Taseer’s latest novel, Noon, despite being a slim and incredibly easy book to read, is not an easy one to describe. It is composed of four unequal parts, each longer than the last, with a prologue and epilogue. All the sections are bound together by the presence of Rehan Tabassum, the child of an Indian Sikh woman and a Pakistani Muslim father (similar to Taseer’s own life), although some sections are from his first-person perspective, and others from a third-person perspective. Through the four stories of Noon, a reader follows Rehan from his early childhood all the way to the present day. A reader is walked through an evolving, triangular relationship between Rehan, his mother and his grandmother; the changing social dynamics between India’s new business elite and the decay of its old, compromised feudal lords; an investigation into a robbery; and finally the power play within a politically and economically powerful family in Pakistan. Closely observed, and finely told, the stories have atmosphere and resonance. All the stories are about an elite group of people. That may make sense while describing the whiny Rehan Tabassum alone, but it doesn’t do all that much to illume what is happening in the societies

of India and Pakistan, where the stories are set. Bulgari, Cartier and a host of other brand names litter the pages of Noon. The only desi cultural reference is to the late artist M.F. Husain, who is not even recognized properly by the characters populating an upper-crust dinner party. Noon presents a reader with flats in Golf Links and a farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi. There are dinner parties for ambassadors and royalty, spas at five-star hotels, but few insights. It comes as no surprise that rich people have little idea of what their servants are up to. Nor is it a

Noon: Fourth Estate/ HarperCollins India, 239 pages, `499.

shocking revelation that the police use all sorts of coercive measures to interrogate the poor. All the events in Pakistan happen within the air-conditioned interiors of posh restaurants or the houses of the rich. A political demonstration outside is described, not experienced. The gay brotherin-law to Rehan’s father is portrayed as a scheming, cowardly nobody—his homosexuality apparently what makes him “a court eunuch”, for which we are even supplied an appropriate Greek word from history. Rehan’s half-brother is a damaged, petulant child, needing and resenting his father’s attention, and letting it all come out in deviant sexual behaviour. Taseer’s latest novel does a great job showing the lives of a tiny, giltedged minority, the crorepatis and their catamites, whose problems seem to have little in connection with the places they live. Their connection to the rest of the world is through their servants, the people who open their doors, wipe their shoes and who are the brutalized weapons in the petty games of rivalry and jealousy. Unfortunately, Taseer also tries to portray and comment on the wider societies through the mouths of his characters. Their descriptions of that wider society are all similarly condescending—consisting of secondrate Naipaul-isms. When Rehan goes to the servants’ quarter, he observes that it has the “stale, sweet servant smell (he) has known all (his) life”. The police who come to investigate are caste caricatures, with the Jat as the

Farmville: The characters in Noon are most com fortable in Delhi’s sump tuous farmhouses. bumbling, aggressive fool at the bottom, “sly and cruel, his humour bawdy”. His superior officer is of an undefined higher caste, and it shows in his clothes, language and competence. A yet more senior officer is a Brahmin, of course. Why the police have this strict caste hierarchy is never explained or remarked upon. Why the elite are above caste is not even considered. In Pakistan, Rehan’s halfbrother expounds on visions of purity, and how the cause of all of Pakistan’s misplaced anger stems from “that same vision of purity on which (it) was founded”. The epilogue is a series of blog comments on events in Pakistan. These descriptions and expositions on the larger South Asian political scene are the weakest part of the book. The sheltered nature of the elite lives that Taseer describes so well makes these commentators completely unbelievable when they comment on the rest of society. This adds little to the book, none of it good, and could have been left out entirely. Omair Ahmad is the author, most recently, of Jimmy the Terrorist, winner of the 2011 Vodafone Crossword Book Award for fiction. Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Where the rich secede from reality

Batman by any other name... I didn’t particularly enjoy Flashpoint, the crossover story arc DC Comics introduced in May ahead of the reboot of the entire DC Universe, beginning, as it were, from scratch. I will not get into the subject of the reboot except to say that the first issue of JLA was a disappointment, the first issue of Swamp Thing rocked, and the first issue of Superman was very, very intriguing. What I do want to get into, however, is Flashpoint itself, a sort of parallel and changed DC Universe which was significantly different from the one we are all familiar with. Suffice it to say that this happened because of some time travel by one of the characters, Barry Allen aka Flash. Much like one would expect from an altered reality arc, Flashpoint is complex, convoluted, and, at times, laboured. I found much of the series average, except for a miniseries, Batman: Knight of Vengeance, by two of my favourite people in the comics business: writer Brian Azzarello and illustrator Eduardo Risso (yes, the same team that gave us 100 Bullets). If this sentence is enough motivation for you to go out and buy or download the comic, I suggest you stop reading here. For after this point, beware, there will be spoilers. Bruce Wayne is dead in this version of Batman, murdered by mugger Joe Chill as he is walking home with his parents. His parents react to the tragedy differently. Thomas Wayne gives up his medical practice and runs Wayne Casinos, approaching crime-fighting more from the perspective of organizing and controlling crime than the one preferred by Bruce Wayne in the unaltered reality. Oswald Chester Cobblepot (the Penguin in the unaltered reality) is Thomas Wayne’s assistant. James Gordon heads his security detail. And, lest I forget, Wayne has an alter ego: Batman. Martha Wayne channels her grief differently. She withdraws into a shell, loses her mind, and around the same time her husband extracts bloody vengeance on Chill, she flips and becomes the Joker. Whoa, there! WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Flashpoint: Bruce Wayne’s parents become superhero—and supervillain. The story, told over three issues, is perhaps the finest Batman comic series I have seen in a long time and comes not long after I bemoaned the fact that I hadn’t encountered good Batman writing in some time. Azzarello and Risso are at their gritty best; the characters are as well fleshed out as they could have been in a miniseries; the book has a surfeit of the darkness that is an essential ingredient of all Batman classics; and both the writing and the drawings have a jagged edge to them. As much as I didn’t like Flashpoint, by the time I finished the three Batman comics, I wanted more. Thomas Wayne makes a dashed good Batman. R. Sukumar is editor, Mint. Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

QUICK LIT | THE BAD BOY’S GUIDE TO THE GOOD INDIAN GIRL

Likeable in some ways A slight but interesting look at subversive Indian womanhood

B Y A ISHWARYA S UBRAMANIAN ···························· he goodness of the good Indian girl is a badge of sorts. Or, as the cover of Annie Zaidi and Smriti Ravindra’s The Bad Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl suggests, a tacky sparkly medallion. As the authors emphasize in their introduction, “good” here “does not mean the opposite of bad”; merely the set of behaviour considered desirable in an Indian girl. What Zaidi and Ravindra explore in this collection of loosely connected (several characters and names appear in more than one) stories is not the oppressive nature of this set of desirable qualities, but the ways in which women can

transgress them and still retain the Good Indian Girl (or GIG) tag. The result is a book of surprisingly subversive tales in which girls interact with men, climb down rope ladders (“BIG Girls”), flirt and draw back (“Strangers”), cut themselves (“Out of Here”), are nervous and afraid around men but simultaneously willing to play along (“Finger Play”) and manipulate their perceived goodness for their own ends (“Daddy’s Girls”). They are less about emphasizing the restrictions placed on Indian women than they are about how women use and test them. The “GIGs” in these stories have agency and they use it. The stories are interspersed with short segments addressed

The Bad Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl: Zubaan Books, 224 pages, `295. directly to the reader. These are something of a weak point—they are arch in tone, and often attempt to “explain” the previous story or to draw a connection with the next one. It’s unnecessary and intrusive.

We don’t need to be told that Gaurangini (“Panty Lines”) suffered, but lightly, or that the next story will require us to think about what happens when we confront a girl with her own lust. Sometimes these sections are merely trying too hard: “Seems far out? Can’t believe it? Think we’re exaggerating? Trust us: it happened!” Thankfully, as the book progresses, these sections become less self-conscious and more like chatty asides. The interconnectedness of the stories ties the book together. When done well, the related chapters are delightful read against one another, with the same situation reflected in many perspectives. Occasionally, it is done clumsily (as with the paired stories “Tiger Balm” and “Stop Press”). Sometimes it is brilliant, as with the lovely “Rain” and its sequel-of-sorts,

“Words”. However, a consequence of these recurring characters is also to highlight the fact that these characters are a specific subset of Indian girls. It’s possible that Good Indian Girl-hood is so universal as to make no difference, but the authors themselves admit towards the end that “(g)eneration to generation, state to state, notions of GIGdom vary”. Yet besides this one acknowledgement, there’s no exploration of this idea at all. The title of the book is a mystery—what “bad boys” have to do with anything is beyond me. But though The Bad Boy’s Guide to the Good Indian Girl feels rather less than the sum of its parts (the excellence of some individual stories is rather let down by their sameness), it manages to be a likeable, if one-note collection. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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Culture

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PROFILE

The great assembler ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

No artist engages with disparate strands of contem porary India like Atul Dodiya does. Is that why instant international atten tion eluded him?

B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com

···························· rtist Atul Dodiya’s 10,000 sq. ft studio in Ghatkopar, Mumbai, overlooking the Eastern Express Highway and the Thane Creek, is like a museum of his inspirations. Satyajit Ray, Jasper Johns, Bhupen Khakhar, Francois Truffaut, Mahatma Gandhi, his father, Bollywood villains, Joseph Beuys—the breadth of imagery, carefully juxtaposed, is staggering. Dodiya’s new show, Bako exists. Imagine, is a crystallization of this idea of assemblage and meaning-making. With these works—12 paintings in oil, acrylic and marble dust and an installation of nine wooden cabinets containing artworks and found objects—Dodiya returns to his childhood and teen years, when his influences were raw and unrealized. “This show is a celebration of my heroes and my growing up.” My visit to his sprawling studio, the penthouse of an industrial complex in Ghatkopar, coincides with the day the works are being wrapped for transfer to the Chemould art gallery, which is hosting the exhibition. Dodiya used to work at his father’s home in the same neighbourhood until a few years ago; there, he said in an earlier interview to Lounge, neighbours constantly dropped by to give him their feedback—“some valuable and some not”. From the old studio in a chawl, he envisioned and created works

that looked outward to the city, to the history of Indian art, to artists he admired and later, very deeply, at Gandhi and at ideas of nationalism after the Gujarat riots, and chiselled the idiom for his hyperreferential art. Dodiya’s rootedness defines his relationship with the city and in fact, much of his art. In Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City, the narrator explains that

unlike other writers whose exiles and mongrel existence have fed their imagination, he has thrived on his city and neighbourhood. “Mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate: I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am….” This passage by Pamuk could explain Dodiya’s inspired

rootedness and the celebration of the universal in the local in his art. “People who ask me how a person from another part of the world will understand all the references in my art, I say look at Satyajit Ray’s films. He always said he was a Bengali film-maker; his Bengaliness informed his thoughts, but he spoke to the world.” Ray comes up in most interviews with Dodiya. Like Ray’s films, Dodiya’s art has a layered simplicity infused with playfulness and humour. Ghatkopar, where Dodiya works, and has lived all his life, is a tumultuous suburb. Heavy goods trucks, autorickshaws, buses and private vehicles negotiate its narrow arteries, full of craters. It is home to small businesses and middle-class housing societies. Like many other suburbs in Mumbai, Ghatkopar is an India in the making—the city’s malaise juxtaposed with its will to live. Dodiya finds that it still inspires him. “It’s an India that Class act: Thump Thump, a interests me, it encomwork from Atul Dodiya’s new passes some of my show; and (top) the artist at quintessentially the Chemould gallery. Indian concerns—the changing city, for example, the contrasts and the conflicts that exist in

the city,” Dodiya says. In the new show, ideas of nationalism and Mumbai’s transformation, which have engaged him ever since the late 1990s, are conspicuously absent. Words scribbled in white on a black canvas, some of which are mounted on wooden frames, resemble blackboards. The words could be written in chalk, except they are oil on canvas, rubbed on the edges to create an effect that looks like chalk smudged by a duster. On each canvas, occupying a secondary, corner position, are figures made with oil and marble dust. The words are English translations by Arundhathi Subramaniam and Naushil Mehta of a work of absurd fantasy, Bako Chhe Kalpo, by Gujarati author Labhshankar Thaker. “It is a work that has been with me for many years. The idea of a 10-year-old boy having a conversation with Gandhi, not about big ideas of nationhood or patriotism but of ordinary things, reminds me, personally, of a lost time,” says Dodiya. All the 12 paintings are priced under `40 lakh, according to Chemould’s Shireen Gandhy. All of them are, observes Dodiya’s wife, artist Anju Dodiya, “a strange mix of the deeply personal and a literary fantasy with a humour that has always saved him from becoming obscure.” The complexity that arises out of Dodiya’s referential breadth has often altered his readability for an international audience. He has

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Flashback: (clockwise from left) Father, a work from 2002; Dodiya (extreme left) with his father Bachubhai Dodiya and brother Ajay; and part of Mediation with Open Eyes, an installation of nine cabi nets at the new show.

chosen to remain rooted to India, Mumbai, even Gujarat. He keeps returning to the two-dimensional canvas. Dodiya has often reiterated that even his cabinets and shutters are against the backdrop of a wall, and that his vision is essentially that of a painter. Could that be why fame and attention in the global art market have seemingly eluded him? A Dodiya painting is not as directly and spectacularly about the idea of India as, say, the sculptures of Subodh Gupta or some of the politically charged and shockinducing video installations of Shilpa Gupta. For an Indian viewer, Dodiya’s intellectual rigour is discreet and playful. In this sense, he is an Indian artist primarily for Indians. Leading collector Anupam Poddar, who owns three works by Dodiya—Destination 1 (1984), acquired in the early 1990s, Petals (2000), acquired in 2000, and B for Bapu (2001), acquired in 2002—says: “Contrary to this perception, I think that Atul has done well for himself on the international scene. The question for me is how one views international success.” Indian contemporary is not yet hot on the global art scene. In auctions, collectors still largely bet on the Progressives. But there are some names in exclusive catalogues and collections: Subodh Gupta, Ravinder Reddy, the Raqs Media Collective, A. Balasubramaniam and Shilpa Gupta. In contrast to the prices fetched by these artists (above `2 crore on an average in the past two years), the most expensive work by Dodiya sold at an auction was at a Sotheby’s auction in 2007—Father, a work in oil and acrylic, which sold for $601,000 (around `2.8 crore now). In May, at Saffronart’s summer online auction, Sabari Shaking Mondrian (2005) sold for `3.16 lakh. Between December 2009 and May this year, the highest price a work by Dodiya has fetched

in any Saffronart auction, arguably the most important auction held within India, is `24.5 lakh for the 2005 work Stammer in the Shade, sold in February. Going just by numbers, Dodiya’s marketability worldwide is limited. But he has loyal, discerning collectors such as Mumbai-based Harsh Goenka and Delhi-based Nitin Bhayana. His works are in some important international collections, including that of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Australia. Parisbased gallerist and collector of Indian art Hervé Perdriolle says: “The multifaceted aspect of the work of Atul Dodiya is rich and dense. Where many contemporary artists simply develop just one facet of their research to a form of conspicuous repetition, Atul Dodiya does not hesitate to expand his research and themes… The extreme speed at which works are done, for runs at bienniales, exhibitions and fairs, leaves little time for analysis. But that takes time, the work of Atul Dodiya fascinates as much as he himself seems fascinated by his peers, from Mondrian to Khakhar through Beuys.” Added to this dogged and lifelong involvement with his roots and Indian art history is his antiquated, almost Gandhian attitude to the forces of the market. The art market is never a comfortable topic with Dodiya. “I don’t think it’s possible to create art if you have a certain audience or perimeter for international success in mind. It is a huge constraint to creativity. I am never aware of this aspect of working,” he says, slightly flustered, and eager to justify his position. In a recent article on Dodiya in Time Out magazine, curator and critic Girish Shahane writes how, eight years ago, Dodiya was on the cusp of gaining international attention by experimenting with assemblage and installation. Sha-

hane writes, “Well-regarded displays in London, Yokohama and Madrid placed him on the brink of a serious breakthrough. However, he remained true to his love of painting, and kept going back to oils and watercolours. He took on the patently unfashionable subjects of marriage in a solo titled Saptapadi.” Dodiya was born in 1959 to a Kathiawadi family living in Ghatkopar. His father was a civil contractor. The family watched films of Guru Dutt and listened to the music of Kumar Gandharva and other greats. “There is no doubt that we were all interested in the arts and that I was interested in painting since I was in school,” says Dodiya. When he was in his early teens, his father bought him a firstclass train pass to travel to south Mumbai, where art exhibitions were held. “In the early 1970s,

through Doordarshan, I was educated in the cinema of Ray and Ritwik Ghatak, two big influences in my life, especially Ray. A few years later, I also saw films by Truffaut and other European masters. Bollywood was always there,” says Dodiya, adding that cinema is a big part of his life and a way to understanding deeply human concerns. He says he wants to work on a video-based work because of this lifelong interest in film-making. Dodiya joined Mumbai’s Sir JJ School of Art in the mid-1980s. He met his wife-to-be Anju there and had his first solo show of oil paintings in 1989 at the Chemould gallery. Shireen Gandhy, for whom it was the first exhibition as a gallerist, says: “Atul has transformed from an artist to someone akin to a teacher since then. That was not a fertile time as far as art was concerned. There was no market as such for

artists. But he made a mark.” Two years after his first solo, Dodiya received a French government fellowship to spend a year in Paris. It was a time of anxiety and questioning, says Anju. “We would visit the Picasso Museum often; it was just a street away from where we were staying. Atul thought it was already a dead end for him because whatever was left to be done in art has been done, what else could he do? When we returned, his work changed.” He began thinking bigger. He stayed with a strictly two-dimensional canvas; his themes became multidimensional. She says the Gujarat riots in 2002 were the other turning point, when Dodiya’s engagement with Gandhi and ideas about national identity became more urgent. Dodiya says, “I was brought up reading Gujarati literature and being a Gujarati has shaped who I am. So that event hit

me hard. I was ashamed and hurt.” Anju is a critic of his works, but they both say their artistic paths are different. “I shut myself up in a room to paint,” says Anju, known for her stark and introspective self-portraits rich in textural details. “I think he continuously works at his art. While watching a debate on news television or watching an obscure Hema Malini film on his iPad. He is distracted and absorbed at the same time,” Anju says. Their teenage daughter has recently joined an art school in Chicago. Young artists say the freedom inherent in Dodiya’s artistic process, the way art history, the concerns of his city, Indian society, politics, film and nationalism converge in his work, is an inspiration. It is a sign of a free mind more important than the free use of space. “I am a great admirer of Atul’s ability to bring in so many disparate things in his works and make the final product look meaningful,” says 35-year-old Shilpa Gupta, who was a student at the Sir JJ School of Art when Dodiya presented his first solo. It is a spirit that also makes him the artist who captures Mumbai best, says Gyan Prakash, author of Mumbai Fables (the US edition of the book has Dodiya’s The Bombay Buccaneer as its cover). “He will take works of Magritte, Tyeb Mehta, and Bhupen Khakhar and incorporate them in his own art, giving them a different meaning. This aspect of assemblage and quotation allows Dodiya to constantly explore new materials and spaces, and gives his work a restless, open spirit. I find this aspect of his work in tune with Mumbai’s own history and character as a made-up, patched-together city. Not arising at the site of on old shrine or trade route, Mumbai, like Dodiya’s art, is not bound or weighed down.” Kaleidoscopic representation of Indian art is almost always simplistic and naïve. It usually requires crutches of kitsch and overused exotica. Only in Dodiya’s oeuvre does a rigorous chronicle of India’s politics, icons, art history and pop culture emerge as one seamless narrative. He is the artist of an India we are constantly peeling. Bako exists. Imagine is on display at the Chemould Prescott Road gallery, Mumbai, till 20 October.

L16 CULTURE

LOUNGE

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

POP STAR

Shraddha rocks the Internet charts PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Behind India’s top subscribed YouTube channel is a schoolgirl from Dehradun

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

···························· little before midnight on 30 April, Shraddha Sharma uploaded a YouTube video of her singing, with a guitar accompaniment, a teary song of separation dedicated to “a special friend who was leaving her forever”. It was recorded on her parents’ living room sofa. She sang Rahat Fateh Ali Khan’s Mein Tenu Samjhawan from the Punjabi movie Virsa. Five videos and 16 weeks later, in the third week of August, Shraddha’s YouTube channel, Shraddharockin, became the highest subscribed channel in India. Her videos have had more than two million views in all. At the time this went to press, her month-old Facebook page had 44,301 fans. Three fake pages had about 10,000 each. Shraddha, savvy songstress, YouTube phenomenon and Facebook celebrity, is a schoolgirl from Dehradun. She is 15 years old, and has never travelled beyond New Delhi. She has just returned from school when we meet her. After a 6-hour drive from Delhi, we didn’t have trouble finding the free-standing house: The Sharma residence has a board at the gate advertising classes in Hindustani classical music. Shraddha’s mother, Kusum, is a music teacher who has trained her daughter since she was 9. Born after two sons, both of whom have now moved away from home, she is the centre of her parents’ lives. Their house is named “Shraddha”. Her parents moved from Meerut to Dehradun, and bought the house around the time their daughter was born. The class XI student before us—hair pulled back in a ponytail, socks up to her knees—is far removed from her alias online. Neighbours describe her as a shy child, known to carry her guitar around since she got one 10 months ago.

In the clouds: Shraddha on a neighbour’s terrace in Dehradun.

But Shraddha’s appeal isn’t limited to her melodious renditions of movie songs, as the comments under her videos—like “You r reallllyyyy ROCKSTAR” and “You are too cute and like my first love”—suggest. Her selftaught guitar skills are fledgling. But with her waiflike frame embracing a guitar, and the sincere dedications that precede each song, she’s a one-girl performing package. The songs she picks for her “special someone”—a friend who lives in New Delhi—are all love songs. It was with her fourth video, an upload on 16 August, that her videos went viral. Haal-e-Dil, a song from Murder 2, has had more than 700,000 views. A Web trends blog, Articoblog.com, that picked up on her Internet statistics, reasoned why: “...after watching these videos everyone is so mesmerized by her voice that every listener prays that (the pain of) her long-distance relationship ends soon.” Naveen Kumar, a final-year student of bachelor of technology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Hyderabad, was one such smitten fan. He got in touch

with her a month ago, and offered to set up and manage her Facebook fan page. He is now working on designing a website for her. The economics of Internet relationships are such that he hasn’t met her, and has no plans to either. “I’m her online fan,” he says over the phone from Hyderabad. “I want to do everything to get her talent out there.” Shraddha has been shortlisted for television talent shows in the past, including Sa Re Ga Ma Pa and India’s Got Talent. But she didn’t make the final cut. Now, she is decidedly against television. “We never understand how the selections work, and I don’t want to put her through that,” says her mother, who is doubling up as her agent these days, speaking with event managers from as far and wide as Toronto, Canada, and Pakistan who’re requesting live gigs through Facebook. Shraddha has her goals somewhat set. She wants to perform and eventually, compose her own music. “I don’t like playback,” she says, “Everyone does playback.” Shraddha is wearing her newfound popularity well. Her signoffs on Twitter are now eminently

TUBE TALK

YouTube statistics are an indicator of Shraddha’s popularity. We pit her against a popular Bollywood actor Shraddharockin Six videos, four months,

17,598 subscribers JohnAbrahamOfficial 26 videos, 14 months,

9,282 subscribers Bollywood-worthy: She is sometimes “sorry to disappoint fans”, and at other times “thanking them for their support”. Because of the demographics of her Twitter followers, her Twitter handle @shraddhasharma6 now shows actors Priyanka Chopra and Deepika Padukone as “related”. The makeshift ethic of her first video has metamorphosed into better-composed frames. The sound quality is clearer. So far, Shraddha has been recording everything on an iPhone, a gift from her elder brother. She takes us to her parents’ bedroom, where the family’s PC lies

neatly covered with a bedsheet. “It’s old-fashioned,” she says, blushing. “I want to buy a laptop and an HD camera with my first earnings.” How much would those cost? And how much would she be paid? Shraddha doesn’t know, but she’s researching—on the Internet. Shraddharockin has hit the low notes too. Earlier this week, she was broken down by a slew of hateful comments by online viewers who didn’t believe she played the guitar. While her first few songs were recorded in one or two takes, her most recent took six. She got nervous. YouTube has helped teen aspirants in the past. Seventeenyear-old Canadian pop star Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube when he was 13. But when it comes to young online celebrities, one cannot forget the terrible case of the 11-year-old American Jessi Slaughter, who was tracked down and harassed

by trolls from the seedy underbelly of the Internet. Shraddha’s family is unconditionally supportive of her efforts. So is her “special someone” who, as it turns out, didn’t leave her forever. She is scheduled to perform at IIT Delhi’s annual festival, Rendezvous, next month (21-24 October). Her “About Me” on YouTube says “music is mah soul”. And like her father, Anil Kumar, an employee with the telecom company BSNL, says, they’re not the sort of parents to take their children away from the things they love. “She’s always been a good student and we’re trying to make sure that it stays that way. Balance...is everything.” Shraddha’s mother has a story that at six months old, Shraddha would move her feet to radio music. “We’ve always had her singing around the house, so this isn’t as new to me as it is to you,” she explains. At home, they call her Bulbul, after the songbird.

www.livemint.com Shraddha Sharma does a retake of her first Internet upload for us. To watch the video, visit www.livemint.com/shraddha.htm

ARIF HAFIZ

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

TRAVELLING FOR MUSIC

inger-songwriter-composer Moushumi Bhowmik’s splendid online archive of music can be accessed at www.thetravellingarchive.org, a remarkable virtual archive of the folk music of Bengal. The neat, minimal site design and simple interface reflects meticulous planning with an eye for detail, and provides access to music that has been painstakingly researched and collected by Bhowmik and recording engineer Sukanta Majumdar. This is work that could not have been achieved in a flash, so it isn’t surprising to find that Bhowmik and Majumdar have been collecting and recording from 2003, and are now set to share a collection of almost 180 hours of music and interviews recorded over 97 sessions.

There are, of course, considerably larger and varied collections of music in the country, but what makes the Travelling Archive so unique is the generosity and openness of spirit with which the collection has been made accessible to the public, and its wonderful use of technology to achieve its objectives. The smart search capabilities offered by the website permit visitors to browse the collections under three fields, namely: Artiste or Composer; Form, for example, Bangla qawwali, kirtan, etc.; Region, for example, Dhaka, Goalpara, Sylhet, Kolkata, etc. Once a track has been selected for listening in audio format or viewing in video format, information about the

track can be accessed easily. Other than providing track details (like duration, form, region), lyrics and notations can also be accessed, as can notes on the recording session during which the selected track was recorded. Location maps and photographs taken during the session add value to the details. This is in such strikingly pleasant contrast to the many important archives and music collections in the country that are often chained to decaying and lethargic state-controlled organizations, or to individual collectors whose sole purpose in life is to ensure that no one gets to hear even a squeak, leave alone a full track. Alas, there are many collectors in the country who have still not found the time or the inclination to catalogue their collections and make the catalogues available online. How then can they hope to attract visitors, students and researchers? Bhowmik and Majumdar also provide a special section

Sharing notes: Moushumi Bhowmik’s music archives are accessible to all.

on their site dedicated to related research work. There is some fascinating material in this section, including film footage and audio recordings from Bengal made by the Dutch ethnomusicologist Arnold Bake (Music Matters, 18 September 2010, at www.livemint.com/ westmusic.htm) as far back as 1932 and 1933. A discussion forum provides an interactive space for members to discuss, argue and debate if need be. Although there is enough information and music on the site already for the dedicated visitor to spend many happy hours browsing, reading and listening, the Travelling Archive is an ongoing project, and will, therefore, constantly enrich itself and add to its resources. Meanwhile, the website offers so much that music teachers and students can put to good use, provided they have the will to discover the many delights it offers. Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

L17

Travel

LOUNGE FOOT NOTES | AADISHT KHANNA

Peripatetic planter notes Plantations, with their notes of coffee and spices, are languid getaways

LUKAS KURTZ/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

he stories behind what we eat and drink are often exciting, even violent. The spread of sugar was the impetus for African slavery, as West Africans were captured to work on sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The banana, usually associated with nothing more negative than bad innuendo and banana skin pratfalls, was at one point so important to American consumers that fruit corporations sponsored revolutions in Latin American countries to secure their supply chains—giving rise to the phrase banana republic. Even tea and coffee have their origins in botanical espionage: The Chinese and the Yemenis held on to the secret of growing these plants jealously, and a Scottish gardener and an

Indian Sufi mystic eventually smuggled them to India. It’s a peculiarity of the modern world that it’s able to bring good out of evil. Coffee plantations, born in an act of espionage, are today laboratories for sustainable agriculture and have turned the imperialist planter’s lifestyle into a tourist experience. All over the world, coffee plantations are replanting indigenous trees to provide shade to their coffee bushes, multi-cropping coffee and spices, and turning the planter’s mansion into a homestay resort. For anyone who wants a lazy holiday under trees and birds, a coffee vacation has lots to offer. We look at some of the best destinations. Write to lounge@livemint.com

PRASHANTH VISHWANATHAN/BLOOMBERG

Coorg and Chikmagalur, India This is where the Arab monopoly on coffee was first broken. According to legend, Baba Budan, a Sufi saint, stole coffee beans on the way back from Haj, hid them in his langot, and planted them in Chikmagalur when he returned. Today, the hills there are known as the Baba Budan Giri range. In the last few years, lots of plantations here have opened up to tourists. The options range from budget homestays to very posh resorts. If you’re a dedicated coffee connoisseur, try to head to one of the established plantations that will have had the time to perfect its coffee plants.

BRENT STIRTON/GETTY IMAGES

Kenya Kenyan tourism is associated with safaris in the Masai Mara; the highlands aren’t marketed with the same vigour. But for adventurous travellers willing to hunt for heritage hotels on their own, there are lots of coffee estates which have been converted into heritage hotels. Coffee mills don’t conduct guided tours, but if you ask, they’re happy to let you in, show you how the process works, and even let you join the coffee tasters. If you’re still insistent on wildlife, don’t worry. The highlands are home to the endangered white rhinoceros, elephants and leopards.

Travel highs A travel dotcom focuses on discounted packages for its Travelers Club B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

························· n November, two ex-students of the Indian Institute of Technology, Powai, self-confessed travel aficionados, set up a website to sell holidays which they felt would appeal to their kind of traveller. “Essentially people who want to experiment, get a flavour of local life, go to places which are not necessarily touristy,” says Mumbai-based Chirag Bhandari, founder and CEO of High On Travel (HoT). A chemical engineer, Bhandari now works on building partners, sourcing content and marketing the dotcom, while his partner Rakesh Verma, an aerospace engineer, is the chief information architect of HoT. “Our website is not just about booking packages. We also try to give our prospective clients complete audio-visual content which can help them to know

more about the holiday they are about to undertake,” says Bhandari. It took the duo almost eight months to perfect their model and it was only in July that they rolled out a newer, more finite version of the business, with the latest addition being Travelers Club (launched on 29 August). Currently, HoT’s website (www.highontravel.com) has three sections—Local Experi-

ences, Special Stays and Special Interest Tours. Under Local Experiences they have a photography and tea-tasting package in Munnar and a Jaipur crafts bazaar and cuisine walk; under Special Stays they offer packages at Aranyakam Homestay in Wayanad, Kerala, and Yangsum Heritage Farm, Rinchenpong, Sikkim; under Special Interest Tours they offer a Beyond the Batalik tour which includes a visit to Darchik, the hometown of the Brokpa tribe, believed to be direct descendants of Alexander the Great, and a trip to Meghalaya to explore caves. Some of the packages on offer don’t really sound cutting-edge experiential travel and the site needs to work on

Experimental holiday: Acres Wild offers a cheesemaking course.

that aspect fast. The Travelers Club, explains Bhandari, is an invitation-only one. The site sends out invitations to people; members can then avail of discounts on packages. They have 850 members right now. The first offer under this, which concluded on 14 September, was a five-day, fournight stay in Coonoor. The trip included a two-night stay each at Acres Wild and Tenerife Hill and a basic workshop in cheese making and tea-tasting, respectively. The total trip, minus the travel expenses to the location, costs `14,400 (taxes included), almost 25% less than what it would have been normally. Outside the package, a one-day stay at Acres Wild costs `2,700-4,500 per night, taxes extra, and at Tenerife Hill, `4,000 per night, including breakfast and evening tea (taxes extra). Other optional activities, such as a heritage train ride, a visit to Kotagiri, etc., were charged separately. Next on offer for Travelers Club members is the Alaknanda Encounter, a 70km rafting expedition spread over three days from Chamoli to Rudraprayag. Payment details and discounts are being worked out.

Kona, Hawaii According to popular culture, Hawaii has beaches, guitar players and beautiful, scantily clad girls. Popular culture completely misses out on Hawaii’s long coffee-growing tradition. The islands of Hawaii are actually volcanic mountains rising from the seabed, so steep that a single island will have beaches rising into hills, all in the space of a few kilometres. That sort of steep incline means that rainfall drains away quickly—which is just what coffee needs. It’s not surprising then that Kona coffee is prized and expensive—to ensure exclusivity, the Hawaii state government has come up with regulations that specify a minimum percentage of Kona coffee to allow the coffee to be labelled Kona. Coffee farms in Hawaii are small, and don’t usually have hotels on the premises, but will happily offer guided tours. Once you’re done, you can head downhill to the beaches, or uphill for a tour of Mauna Loa, the world’s largest volcano. If you prefer the hills to the beaches, try to book a hillside cottage. WOLMADRIAN/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Blue Mountains, Jamaica Jamaican Blue Mountain is the most expensive coffee in the world, thanks to a combination of quality, scarcity and demand. The rain in Jamaica is ideal for coffee, but there’s only so much of Jamaican highland to turn over to coffee plantation. The result is a potent and delicious coffee that is extremely difficult to get—more than 80% of all production is exported directly to Japan. The Blue Mountains themselves are a lovely travel destination. They’re rich in biodiversity, with more than 200 species of birds nesting there, as well as some of the world’s largest—and most beautiful—butterflies. Plantation resorts in the Blue Mountains offer coffee-roasting tours, hikes up mountain trails and bird-spotting tours. But it’s Jamaica, so if all you want to do is lie back with a book and a cocktail with a base of Tia Marie (coffee liqueur) between meals and siestas, nobody will be able to find fault. Prices start at $700 (around `32,900) for a cottage for a weekend, but it’s worth it.

A TRAVELMASTI BESTSELLER

`17,999/ person for 2N/3D 3rd Night Complimentary

Includes: Return Airfare (ex Delhi) • Welcome Drink (Non-Alcholic) • 2 Nights/ 3 Days Luxury stay • Daily breakfast & one major meal • Complimentary usage of gym & swimming pool • Heritage walk of the Palace followed by a glass of wine at the Bar • Camel Ride through the village & into the Aravali Hills (once during the stay) • All Taxes. Meerut: 0 9997555566 • Faridabad (Charmwood): 0 9871749475 • Naraina: 011 45033225 • North Delhi: 011 47801133 • Noida Sec 27: 0120 6490579 • Noida Sec 51: 0120 4275099

L18 FLAVOURS

LOUNGE

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

PHOTOGRAPHS

MS GOPAL

MUMBAI MULTIPLEX | SUPRIYA NAIR

Photosynthesis Quiet, verdant Pali Hill, home to India’s greatest movie stars, becomes its own little security state

umbai is not a city where people, by and large, object to being photographed. The culture of the image is varied and well-entrenched here. On a regular day on a street, confronted with a camera, some Mumbaikars will pose, some will continue to do what they do. Some will stop to talk to the photographer. A few, of course, will send their bodyguards around to initiate friendly enquiries and bring back the film roll. There are not many neighbourhoods in Mumbai where this happens, but Pali Hill in Bandra is one of them. In this quiet, leafy residential area, movie stars once came to build their havens, away from the occupational hazards of the city. Actors Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand live here, as does the Dutt family, including member of Parliament, Mumbai North Central, Priya Dutt. “What are you doing here?” two policemen on a motorbike ask us as we walk up Nargis Dutt Road, looking for interesting elements of the local architecture. “Why do you want to photograph this street?” They look at the images on the digital camera’s tiny screen to ensure that security—already bolstered by an exceptional number of walls, fences, guards, dogs and notices about dogs—is not threatened (this is not to ignore the occasional armoured jeep oozing through the bylanes, possibly for the protection of the area’s political residents, who include Union minister Sushilkumar Shinde and state

Shoot to hill: (clockwise from above) A tea seller on Nargis Dutt Road; new construction overshadows Pali Hill’s older buildings; the security is ubiquitous; and Zig Zag Road.

minister Narayan Rane). “Life here is like life everywhere else,” one of the policemen tells us kindly. “There’s no need to photograph it.” But this is exactly what the Pali Hill Residents Association (PHRA) is planning to do to secure their neighbourhood further: photograph it. Late last month, local newspapers reported that residents were planning to install high-definition security cameras at strategic public locations along Pali Hill to “monitor incidents opposed to public policy” (Mumbai Mirror, 24 August). PHRA secretary Madhu Poplai explains that these incidents include traffic and parking violations and petty theft. “The police is installing high-definition cameras on main roads between Bandra and Santacruz to monitor crime,” she explains. “But the

highest incident of theft is on Pali Hill. The guards can’t police every corner of it, after all.” Poplai also worries about public safety. Traffic and itinerant mischief-makers could pose problems, especially for senior citizens and women. But Pali Hill also attracts more than its fair share of young people late in the night who park their cars—no doubt unlawfully—and hold impromptu parties. “No more of this ‘booze on the bonnet’,” Poplai says. “All that will end now.” There will be 12 security cameras, some outside apartment buildings, some on chowks, a couple near busy shops and one outside actor Rishi Kapoor’s bungalow. In an area visibly obsessed with privacy, it appears that the cameras are seen to secure that private life, rather than threaten it.

“Every single person has appreciated the effort,” Poplai says. The PHRA, which could not request MP area development funds for the cameras, put out a notice asking for donations to the project. Their `4 lakh budget, Poplai says, was covered within half an hour of the announcement. On Pali Hill, the film stars’ residences stand amid a few small old bungalows, the last signs of Bandra’s past as a collection of rural settlements fanned out over swamp and shaded grove. These are overshadowed by a great many stolid apartment buildings, built in the latter half of the 20th century, populated by quietly affluent families. In the rains, green still threatens to overwhelm the urban encrustations of assiduously built tower blocks and paved streets. Moss springs up on stone walls, and grass grows, in spite of the residents’ best efforts, between the paver blocks on the footpaths. Through the tall boards fencing off property under construction—inevitably, houses making way for more houses—minor afforestations of weeds peek out. These construction sites were the focus of another PHRA public initiative last year, when the association put out a

10-point charter to minimize inconvenience to the neighbourhood in the eternal stand-off between the requirements of builders and those of citizens. The guidelines strongly advised against construction workers being allowed to “loiter” outside the site during breaks, and recommended that security guards be posted on every such site. During the day, the most visible population of Pali Hill consists of those who run its security apparatus. The policemen are outnumbered by the private security guards, both those assigned to buildings as well as those guarding chowks (a look inside one building gate, at random, also revealed members of the rifle-caressing contingents who accompany important people everywhere in the country). Fewer in number are the neighbourhood’s employees: drivers waiting for instructions, nannies on their way to nearby schools, the odd shop assistant. “We did let go of an initial idea where we planned to have banners at certain parts of the area that said YOU ARE BEING WATCHED,” Poplai says. “That met with some criticism. Now, the security cameras will have a little flash every 30 seconds or so, as they do in some countries abroad, as a reminder.” The footage from the cameras will be monitored by the Khar police station, as well as from a private resource that PHRA is setting up in tandem with the security company hired for the task. “My building has no locus

standi to interfere with the association; we haven’t paid our dues for a while,” says Vickram Crishna, Pali Hill resident. “But I think they’re somewhere south of having lost their minds as far as this is concerned. Look, Pali Hill is not a bad place. It’s not like there are gangs of thieves roving the area on bikes, as we had in the 1980s. If there’s a problem, it’s an insider problem, and I’m against putting up any plan that someone else—in this case, the Khar police station—is going to have to implement.” Poplai says the security plan, currently undergoing last-minute tweaks, will be implemented by the first day of Navratri (starting on 28 September). This year’s exceptionally generous monsoon may have let up by then, and construction on the towers of tomorrow will be more enthusiastic than ever. One of those buildings will be industrialist Anil Ambani’s future home, already talked of in the papers as a rival to brother Mukesh Ambani’s Antilia, which casts a long shadow over Altamount Road in south Mumbai. On Nargis Dutt Road, a lone tea seller sells mid-morning “cuttings” to labourers on their break. It is unclear how the PHRA guidelines apply to this situation. “Go ahead,” they offer, as we stop for tea, “take our picture.” They put down their tea glasses and pose on the side of the street, smiling. The tea, at the usual `4 rate, is made with real lemon grass. supriya.n@livemint.com