Lounge for 19 May 2012

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Saturday, May 19, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 20

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

BANGLAWOOD Tollywood superstars, contemporary Bengali cinema and the city of Kolkata are weaving their way into Mumbai studios and multiplexes

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH BCCI CHIEF N. SRINIVASAN >Page 8

>Pages 10­12

MUCH TO WENLOCK

A charming little town, whose good doctor inspired the modern Olympic Games, will be the centre of attention this summer >Pages 14­16

ANSWERING THE BIG QUESTIONS

Mustansir Dalvi explains the importance of Iqbal in a new translation of his classics >Page 17

Yami Gautam in a wedding scene from Vicky Donor, where she plays a Bengali girl.

THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR

N. RAJADHYAKSHA

HOW TO MAKE YOUR CHARITY COUNT

M

any years ago, our schoolboy gang had mastered a little trick to maximize collections for the neighbourhood Ganpati festival. We used to first approach the families that were most likely to make large donations. A crisp `50 note meant a lot in those days. The initial donations we collected acted as a benchmark. Other families would then decide how much they would contribute in comparison to these large donors. Some would try to match that number while even the stingy would try to stay... >Page 4

THE MERRYMAKER’S SHAHJAHANABAD

REPLY TO ALL

OUR DAILY BREAD

AAKAR PATEL

WHY ONE PARTY GETS IT RIGHT

W

e are a Congress-minded nation.

In saying this, I don’t mean we’re a nation of Congress voters, though that also is not inaccurate. Other than in one election, 1977, Indians have always voted for the Congress more than for any other party. What I mean is that Indian values are best, and I would even say, only represented by the Congress. These values are religious accommodation, comfort with racial and linguistic diversity... >Page 6

SAMAR HALARNKAR

THE POWER OF MINIMALISM

S

o, what Indian food do you miss most?”

That was my American friend from graduate school, visiting me in Berkeley, California, just before we left the organic capital of the US after a five-month teaching stint. “Nothing,” I said. His eyes widened. “Nothing?” “Well, if you insist, home-made dosa, perhaps.” I explained what dosa was, and he said, “Well, that sounds like something I could miss.” Don’t get me wrong.

I love Indian food as much as... >Page 6

An exhibition and book put the spotlight on Old Delhi under the reign of its lesser­known but most colourful Mughal >Page 18

EVERY TIME YOU PICK UP HINDUSTAN TIMES, YOU CONTRIBUTE TOWARDS SENDING A CHILD TO SCHOOL

Every time you buy a Metro copy of the Hindustan Times in Delhi-NCR, you contribute 5 paise towards the education of an underprivileged child.

Over the year, the contribution from lakhs of readers like you will enable over 10,000 children to go to school.

Partners

www.youreadtheylearn.com

HOME PAGE L3

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEWS Dunkin’ Donuts

Connaught Place, New Delhi It was only a matter of time before the US fast food behemoth Dunkin’ Donuts made its way to India. I had no idea that when it did, it would involve me waking up at an ungodly hour to make my way to Connaught Place, the shopping and commercial complex in the centre of New Delhi.

The Indian unit of the US food retail chain, a joint venture between Dunkin’ Brands Inc. and India’s Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd, opened a flagship store here on 8 May (another store had started operations in the Greater Kailash-I M-Block Market in a “soft launch” a few days earlier).

But there I was, staring at the large, shiny orange façade of the store at 7 in the morning, for the heaviest breakfast possible. For, like other US fast food chains in India, Dunkin’ Donuts opens at that hour, and serves breakfast. The spacious shop, with its exposed-brick walls, dark-wood panelling and candy-coloured sofas and high chairs has the look of a fun, if generic, café. Trays of colourful donuts were being stacked inside the display cabinet when I entered, and the kitchen in the otherwise empty shop was buzzing.

It’s branded “Dunkin’ Donuts & More” in India, so the shop menu also features ciabatta sandwiches, bagels, croissants, milkshakes and coffee.

The good stuff The classic donut, dusted with sugar,

was soft and pillowy, and not overpoweringly sweet.

They were perfect, dunked in a cup of drip coffee (black, no sugar), and the coffee was exceptionally good—robust and smooth, with a lovely aroma. As you would Too sweet: expect in a shop that specializes in donuts, there were lots of different flavours on display, and as I drank my coffee, more trays were being brought out. The lady at the counter took the trouble to tell me that the donuts stay fresh for 22 hours if kept in an air-conditioned room, and that refrigeration and reheating spoils them. I tried seven of the 14 different varieties on offer, and all of them had the perfect texture, including the cakey chocolate donut, a moist cake in the shape and size of a donut.

The not­so­good The chicken ham and eggs bagel for breakfast was disappointing. It’s unwieldy to begin with, but the real problem was that the bagel itself was chewy and hard. Which means it probably wasn’t fresh. There was an over-generous lathering of mayo and some kind of Thousand Island-variety dressing which drowned all other tastes. The lettuce was limp and black at the edges.

While donuts are meant to be fun, sugar-high indulgences, the flavours felt a little more artificial than they should. The lemon-glazed donut

CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “The best chutney in the world”, 12 May, a body double, and not Shabana Azmi, enacted the scene between Dr Aadam Aziz and Naseem.

The 12 May Lounge Loves, “The story of Sahibzadi”, published in some centres should have carried the byline of Anindita Ghose.

NOTE TO READERS The Media Marketing Initiative on Page 5 is the equivalent of a paid­for advertisement, and no Mint journalists were involved in creating it. Readers would do well to treat it as an advertisement.

In April, Funskool, a wellknown Indian game maker, announced a turnover of more than `100 crore, up from `80 crore in 2010-11.

Girish Khera, an e-commerce entrepreneur, is betting this is being helped Dunkin’ Donuts has two outlets in Delhi. along by the renewed interest of adults in board games. tasted like candy, all the varieties of He has now created an Indian board chocolate donuts (and there are game for adults. It’s really a board many) have so much sugar that the game of truth or dare. In Pure Mistaste of chocolate is all but drowned chief, each player starts at the Land of out, and the Irish cream donuts share the Driven Snow and races to reach the same fate.

Mischief Island. The game consists of a board with 40 places, 18 counters Talk plastic for as many players, three six-sided Donuts are priced at `45 a piece. dice, three packs of 40 cards each, When you buy six, you are charged and a fourth pack with 80 cards. for five. The sandwiches are priced at The players should decide before`90-110. A cup of drip coffee costs hand how many dice are to be used `90, a cappuccino, `70. on each turn. Each player must roll the dice, move his token accordDunkin’ Donuts, N-6, Connaught ingly, and then take the same colour Place, New Delhi. action card. These cards are divided into Confession, Dare, Rudraneil Sengupta Purity and Trivia.

Confession and The promoters of HT Media Ltd, Dare are truth or which publishes the Hindustan Times and Mint, and Jubilant are closely related. There are no promoter crossholdings.

Pure Mischief With TV and video games omnipresent and aimed at younger children, you might think board games are on their way out—but that’s not the case.

Truth or dare? Pure Mischief is a board game for grown­ups.

dare, while Purity is a yes/no answer to questions such as “Have you ever made out in a car?” Trivia comprises questions that are, rather loosely, about sex.

The good stuff The game uses high-quality material—the action cards and the board are thick and sturdy. The box and compartments are made of the same materials to prevent damage.

The game can be fun, if you’re willing to fiddle with the rules and discard some of the cards before you begin. Trivia is the best part of the game, with unintentionally hilarious questions.

The not­so­good The art looks like a bad collection of clipart. It’s an area Khera definitely needs to look into if his company gets around to making a new version. The execution is awkward and sometimes juvenile. The Confession, Dare and Purity tiles often read as if they were written by a team of teenagers.

Talk plastic The game, only available online on www. puremischiefgame.com, is priced at `2,850, with a limited-time discounted price of `1,999.

Gopal Sathe

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR

How to make your charity count

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SONDEEP SHANKAR/GETTY IMAGES

any years ago, our schoolboy gang had mastered a little trick to maximize collections for the neighbourhood Ganpati festival. We used to first approach the families that were most

likely to make large donations. A crisp `50 note meant a lot in those days. The initial donations we collected acted as a benchmark.

Other families would then decide how much they would contribute in comparison to these large donors.

Some would try to match that number while even the stingy would try to stay as close to the initial donations as possible. Our devious mind game was inevitably successful, with the average contribution higher than what we could normally have collected.

Behavioural economists would now describe this trick as an exercise in anchoring, a tendency of the human mind to focus on one piece of information to make a decision.

Those first handsome donations for the local festival played on the minds of subsequent donors. I remembered the old trick when, in April, I read on the Mostly Economics blog written

by Amol Agrawal about an interesting experiment conducted by two economists on how to encourage small donors to give for a particular cause.

The experiment was conducted by Dean Karlan of Yale University and John List of The University of Chicago. Here’s what they did: They sent letters seeking donations for a charity focused on poverty reduction to two sets of people— those who had previously donated to the charity and those who had not. One set of letters told potential donors that their contribution would be matched by a similar sum by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation while another set of letters made no mention of such a matching grant.

The result from both groups was basically the same. Those who were told about the matching grant from the Gates foundation tended to give more. Charities seeking donations usually reach out to people who do

not have credible information about its activities. I am sure several of us face this problem; we feel strongly about a particular issue but do not know enough about the people who approach us for money. What the promise of a matching grant did in the experiment conducted by Karlan and List is that it gave potential donors a credible signal that even the Gates foundation had confidence in the charity.

I saw a similar process work at Mysore in 2009, during the first TED conference held in India—TED is a global set of conferences that invites well-known names from a variety of fields to talk about new ideas and innovations. Sunitha Krishnan had given a chilling talk on sex slavery in India, one that I would urge readers to watch on the TED website; it not only won her a standing ovation but disturbed people enough for the subject to linger on during the evening party as well. At the end of the talk, a woman stood up and told the audience she would give $10,000 (`5.36 lakh now) for the cause—but only if another 10 people in the audience made matching grants.

More than 10 people put up their hands to join in. The conditional commitment worked like magic.

Let’s shift to the other part of the charity game: What should you fund? Giving to social causes is a deeply personal act. You give to the causes you most intensely believe in. Large donors can definitely follow their passion, because the very size of their philanthropy can make a dent in the problem they are most concerned about. But smaller donors will have to perhaps think a bit harder about what activities to fund. Should it be education or environmental protection or human rights or something else? Where will you get the best bang for your buck?

Science of giving: Donors like Microsoft founder Bill Gates (second from left) bring credibility to any organization seeking funds.

A bit of scientific research could be useful here as well. One guide has been provided by the Copenhagen Consensus Center (CCC), a think tank housed in the Danish capital that seeks to provide well-researched advice on how money should best be spent to help people and the planet. “The idea is simple, yet often neglected; when financial resources are limited, it is necessary to prioritize the effort.

Every day, policymakers and business leaders at all levels prioritize by investing in one project instead of another. However, instead of being based on facts, science and calculations, many vital decisions are based on political motives or even the possibility of media coverage,” says the CCC website.

The advice proffered by the think tank is largely targeted at governments, civil society groups and businesses, but small donors can learn something from their research as well. In 2008, CCC published a report based on two years of careful analysis by 50 economists who were asked to find the most cost-effective solutions to

10 important global problems. Then a group of eight major economists, including five Nobel laureates, vetted the proposals.

The results were surprising. The most effective intervention is a very simple one—vitamin A and zinc micronutrient supplements for children. Giving such help to 80% of the 140 million undernourished children in the world would cost just $60 million but lead to $1 billion of benefits.

Five of the top 10 suggestions attack the malnutrition problem, with solutions ranging from salt iodization to deworming and nutrition promotion in communities. More fashionable concerns such as development of low-carbon technologies to combat global warming or conditional cash transfers feature relatively lower on the list (though their very presence means that they are important interventions as well). At No. 2, new global trade talks are a rare fashionable issue at the top of the list.

So if you want to figure out in what areas your charitable

donations will have the maximum impact, then the Copenhagen research suggests that it would be in simple solutions that deal with malnutrition, the education of girls, clean drinking water and maternal care. I have tried to focus my meagre donations to charities every year on micronutrient support to young girls in poor communities.

The Upanishads define three principal human virtues: damyata, datta and dayadhvam, or restraint, charity and compassion. Indians do not give enough to charity, but the habit is growing among those who have been lucky enough to benefit from a dynamic economy. A little scientific inquiry can ensure that your charity can be effective.

Niranjan Rajadhyaksha is executive editor, Mint.

Write to Niranjan at impartialspectator@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Niranjan’s previous Lounge column at www.livemint.com/impartialspectator

THINKSTOCK

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

NOTES ON HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD

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e are a society that does not give itself permission to love daughters.

We have family and social systems that are dismissive of our feelings, that are designed to break the natural bonds of support between people. They damage and hurt us as individuals; yet we cling to hierarchies and to the status quo, like a frayed security blanket.

In the last column, I wrote about taking on a stranger who had been rude to my children and me (“Do girls make you uncomfortable?”, 28 April). It was a random encounter. A woman we were meeting for the first time saw a family with three daughters and assumed that the only reason we would have crossed the golden threshold of “hum do, hamare do (two children per couple)” is to have a son. Out of the blue, in front of the children, she said to me, “You had three children because you wanted to have a son.”

Our children, all of them under 10 years, were right there listening to her. They watched me react, first with hesitation and then a sureness born out of shock.

My problem with her was not that she had judged me so bluntly. After all, it is a common desperation in India to crave for a son. I could have been in her place and thought the same thing.

What was totally unacceptable to me was how rude and dismissive she had been of the children. Talking about little children in front of them as if they are deaf, daft and worthless is another great tradition of our culture. We behave as if children don’t grasp the world around them, as if their feelings don’t matter.

I stepped away with the woman and confronted her. My own anger had crossed a boundary that made my words come out calm and clear.

Self­sufficient: Teach your children to deal with meanness and cruelty rather than try and protect them from it at all times.

In the scheme of things, it was a small incident. Yet I shared it and something about it resonated with those who read it. Three weeks later, I am still receiving responses in my mailbox.

Much of the email is from parents of daughters. That is where I got the first line of this column. As a society, we deny parents the permission to be in love with their daughters. We

refuse to validate how they feel.

A friend of mine recently became a father of two daughters.

“I am perfectly happy,” he said to me, “yet I have this nagging feeling as if I have failed an important exam.

Others are thrusting disappointment on me.”

People want to stand on rooftops and declare, “I love my children, whatever their gender or abilities may be.” I can tell this

from the resounding applause I receive when I do that. And you know what? I was full of self-doubt too on my way to the roof. I started raising my voice only because it was drowning in the din. I couldn’t hear myself any more.

Mothers of sons have written in. They get to hear that their lives are incomplete without daughters. Apparently sons cannot have emotional bonds with parents the way daughters have. Yet every parent knows differently.

Why do we limit ourselves so radically? Are we scared of the power of love and intimacy? As a society, we seem to have bottled up our natural feelings in jars and left them to pickle in the sun.

Children are not just financial or emotional transactions, yet we constantly define them as such. Who will take care of us later? How will we maximize returns on the investment we are making?

Individually we are all reasonable voices of sanity and yet collectively we pull each other down with our ruthless judgements. We despair about how some things never change, yet the only power each of us has is to change ourselves. We don’t have to be helpless victims. We can be powerful. We are

powerful. We must challenge the language of this discourse.

Among the many responses was one from a daughter.

Anubha Yadav is one of four sisters and she shared stories of how they learnt to laugh, be angry and play games as they dealt with a million silences and unwanted reactions in their growing-up years.

“Children are bright, Natasha,” she writes. “They will learn to make fun of and take on the people who challenge them.

Because they are lucky to be born to you.”

I didn’t know I was looking for it, but this is the reassurance I needed. I don’t have to protect my children from meanness and cruelty. I have to show them how to deal with it. That’s how we will change the world around us.

We are and will always remain our children’s first, most influential, role models.

Let the only luck they will ever need be the luck of having YOU as their parents.

Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker, media trainer and mother of three. Write to her at mydaughtersmum@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Natasha’s previous columns at www.livemint.com/natasha­badhwar

COLUMNS L5

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SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Women who go va­va­vroom

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rvashi Patole, 23, rode her first motorbikes, Bajaj XCD 125cc and the non-gear Kinetic Honda, when she was 14. These belonged to her cousin and the young girl, growing up in Pune, was hooked.

Today, Patole lives in Bangalore, works for Bosch, a global supplier of technology and services, and has founded Bikerni, a Facebook site and portal that connects women motorcyclists across India. Their first expedition together was to Khardung La, part of every biker’s bucket list.

Eleven women aged 21-53 (the eldest was from Rajkot, Gujarat) made it to what is believed (incorrectly by some estimates) to be the highest motorable pass in the world.

I contacted Patole to answer a question: Why don’t women ride motorbikes? Some do. Just a year old, Bikerni has already racked up 80 members. But relative to the thousands of male riders, the number of female riders is “disappointingly low—less than 1-2%”, according to Sunil Gupta, 31, content manager at xBhp, India’s biggest motorcycling portal. Bangalore and Pune have the greatest number of bike enthusiasts, followed by Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai, says Gupta. Delhi has several motorcycle clubs, including the Sikh Motorcycle Club, in which members wearing Hermès orange turbans pose in front of

their bikes. Not many women though.

“Women, at least in India, are not that adventure-loving and there is hardly any incentive for them to break that image,” says Gupta.

As an adventure-loving, adrenalin-junkie skydiver, I disagree with that portrait. But here’s the thing. I may drive my stick shift as if I were on Formula One. I may seek speed and thrills, however elusive, on our national highways. But so far, I haven’t been drawn to buying a motorbike when in fact I would be a perfect target for a motorcycle ad campaign.

Why? I called Siddhartha Lal, managing director and CEO of Eicher Motors, Royal Enfield’s parent company, to explore this chicken and egg question. Why don’t motorcycle companies market to women, I asked.

Is it because women don’t ride bikes?

Or do women not ride bikes because motorcycle companies don’t market to them? “It’s a self-perpetuating stereotype,” said the Delhi-based Lal. “Motorcycle companies don’t market to women because they form such a small percentage of our customer base; less than 1%. And those

women are going to buy our bikes anyway, even if we don’t market to them. But if that 1% rises to 10% women riders, maybe all of us will sit up and take notice, although, frankly, I don’t think the number of women riders is going to go up significantly.”

Patole and her cohorts are trying to break that image. They get inquiries from rural women who want to ride a bike; they are pushing for gender-based customization—shorter bikes for women—although they don’t think that is about to happen. And most of all, they are combating gender stereotypes and the perceived social stigma

THINKSTOCK

One of a kind: Biking is not popular among women in India, yet.

associated with women riding bikes. It has to do with male ego, says Patole; but also social conditioning that prevents women from thinking of the motorcycle as a viable vehicle option.

It isn’t just women. My metrosexual male friends rue ad campaigns for conditioner and body lotion that are marketed just towards women when, in fact, they buy just as many, if not more, skin products than their female friends.

Slowly spas, beauty parlours and cosmetics companies are waking up to the male market with ads customized for men who want to look good. Will the same thing happen to motorcycles, admittedly a very different and more expensive product, but one that could follow the same marketing trajectory?

Why not, says Patole. After all, riding a bike is about body coordination, and when to shift gears. “A lot of our women riders are very ladylike, very pretty. But once they put on their helmets and get on the bike, they ride like demons. But that’s the other thing,” she continues hastily. “People think that we bikers are rash when in fact we are the ones who follow safety disciplines the most.”

So I got on her matt black, 350cc Royal Enfield.

It was 6.30pm when we headed out of Trinity Circle; peak traffic all around. Once I got over the initial exhilaration of riding pillion with a woman on a motorbike—a first for me, once we got over the stop-and-go traffic and on the gurudwara side of Ulsoor Lake, we began cruising. I exhaled and shut my eyes, enjoying the strength and speed of these magnificent machines, for exactly 2 minutes till we came to a traffic

light. You know what? With your eyes closed, a woman rider didn’t feel any different from a male rider, at least from the vantage point of the pillion.

Was it inventor Ben Franklin who said that all cats are grey in the dark?

Similarly, good riders are the same.

Sex doesn’t matter (and I mean gender here). Patole is a fabulous biker; no different from a Sunil Gupta, Malvinder Singh or any of those bikers who are part of India’s male motorcycle clubs.

When I asked for her price-no-object bike, Patole gave me a bike junkie’s answer. “I would buy lots of vintage bikes and work on them,” said this stuntwoman who can do all the Dhoom riding-on-one-wheel tricks. She likes Triumph, Norton and Honda Karizma.

Bikers can talk about their Bullet’s torque and suspension; about the Harley-Davidson Roadster’s performance and attitude. But in the end, and I can say this as a non-rider, it is only a friggin’ bike. Doesn’t matter if a man or woman rides it.

Visionary bike companies should market motorcycles to women. Not only would it be a distinctive, memorable, brand-building exercise; it would also increase the number of female riders in this country. In us, you bike companies have a captive market. What are you going to do about it?

Shoba Narayan would like to buy a Suzuki Hayabusa but “gentlemen”, she will probably start her engine with a TVS Apache because she likes the name and its Indian pedigree. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

MINT MEDIA MARKETING INITIATIVE

L’Oréal Professionnel Homme introduces anti dandruff shampoo Cool Clear Also launches three styling products for men- Clear Fix, Mat and Clay WHAT IF YOUR STYLING GEL COULD HELP YOU FIGHT DANDRUFF? CLEAR FIX is the first anti-dandruff styling gel with extra strong hold that offers dual benefit of styling your hair and leaving it dandruff free simultaneously.

Want to get rid of your Dandruff double fast?

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The Piroctone Olamine combats dandruff very effectively. When the gel is applied or rinsed, the Piroctone Olamine comes in contact with the

Want to get that perfect stylized look this season? L’Oreal Professionnel latest innovation on the offering for the Indian Men is L’Oréal Professionnel HOMME Cool Clear- 1st high-foam anti-dandruff Shampoo with invigorating freshness that leaves the scalp incredibly clean.

Cool Clear by L’Oréal Professionnel Homme contains lime fragrance for freshness and menthol for the cooling effect. So, DON’T GET ASPHYXIATED

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scalp to help eliminate dandruff from the very 1st application. The styling agents sculpt and structure your look, with no residue.

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L’Oreal Professionnel Homme Clear Fix. Clear fix is not the only one making debut this month. While Clear fix is an anti dandruff styling gel, L’Oreal Professionnel new styling products –Mat and Clay will satiate Men’s love for Matt Styling.

CLAY L’Oreal HOMME Clay brings way for intrinsic structuring and control with high definition style and shaping.

It contains strong Kaolin-clay for an instant grab and texturizing beeswax infusing remarkable density. It also has Hold Factor 5 for an extra strong hold and matt effect.Mat and Clay.

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L6 COLUMNS

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SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Why the Congress represents Indian values best

W SUBHAV SHUKLA/PTI

KESHAV SINGH/HINDUSTAN TIMES

e are a Congress-minded nation.

In saying this, I don’t mean we’re a nation of Congress voters, though that also is not inaccurate. Other than in one election, 1977, Indians

have always voted for the Congress more than for any other party.

What I mean is that Indian values are best, and I would even say, only represented by the Congress. These values are religious accommodation, comfort with racial and linguistic diversity, acceptance of caste in politics, comfort in dynasty and a preference for compromise over principle. This flexibility has kept India democratic, and it is a Congress trait. The party also represents the middle-class consensus which views India as a great civilizing force, and seeks a nurturing of India’s cultural aesthetic.

In Pakistan’s The Express Tribune, Khaled Ahmed wrote on 8 April: “The Indian Constitution informs the attitude of the Indian middle class, which is tolerant of secularism.”

This is true, and as an idea it is owned by the Congress.

Unlike the Tories and Labour in the UK or Republicans and Democrats in the US, we don’t have division by ideology in Hindu middle-class society.

Writer Arvind Rajagopal made this point by asking who, if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the Hindu right, was the Hindu left? There’s no such thing, of course.

The BJP thinks it is an ideological party but it doesn’t have any real ideology. The party’s three ideological thrusts are all negative: Muslims shouldn’t keep their family law, Muslims shouldn’t keep Ram Janmabhoomi, Muslims shouldn’t keep separate status through Article 370 in Kashmir.

Ideology is something you stand for, not against. The CPM is an ideological party. The BJP is a party of resentful Hindus (symbolized by the face of a permanently sour Arun Jaitley).

We can observe a demonstration of this in the collapse of the Ayodhya

movement. Its supporters were not in favour of the temple, but against the usurping mosque. Once the mosque disappeared, so did the movement of which we now hear little. This flaw is in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) gene and was passed on.

Muslim concession always deflates the BJP, and this explains the party’s decline, which will continue. The middle-class Hindu’s bigotry against the Muslim is reactive. His hatred is not ideological or dogmatic, such as the Muslim’s for the Jew. His bigotry responds to offences against him real and imagined—Somnath temple or Partition.

Because the bigotry is reactive and not ideological, the Congress has been able to accommodate it where required almost as efficiently as the BJP. An irreligious Congress such as Jawaharlal Nehru’s does not put off Hindus, but it thinks it cannot afford to take the chance. This opportunism also aligns the Congress morally with Indians.

Many hate Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi now but historically, the Congress has never been above using a little slaughter to appease Hindus, like in Ahmedabad in 1969 under Hitendrabhai Desai. During the 1992-93 riots, when Surat burned, Gujarat was ruled not by the BJP but by Chimanbhai Patel. When Delhi’s Hindus turned against Sikhs in 1984, Rajiv Gandhi looked away.

It is only under Sonia Gandhi that the party has again become the standard-bearer for Ashokan secularism.

She will go down in history as the finest Congress leader along with Nehru.

Pakistan’s Ahmed separates Congress voters from BJP voters in this fashion: “Many factors are common between the city-dwelling middle classes of India and Pakistan. The middle class lives in the city and votes rightwing. The Bharatiya Janata Party

Woman power: BSP chief Mayawati is a terrific orator, while Sonia Gandhi (left) is one of the Congress’ finest leaders. gets its vote in the city; the Congress party gets it from the rural areas.”

This is how many people see it.

There are two problems with this formulation. The first is that the Congress, in its various forms, is currently dominant in four out of six metros. The BJP has only Bangalore.

Secondly, the BJP’s appeal for its voters lies in caste rather than ideology.

For example, it is a Lingayat party in Karnataka. Its problems there have come because the RSS does not accept this fact and denies Lingayat champion B.S. Yeddyurappa his due. Ahmed’s observation that the middle class aligns with the BJP is valid only so far as middle class can be conflated with upper castes, seen as BJP voters. Middle-class expansion is today happening in India because of the rapid entry of lower castes. This is actually lethal for the BJP and good for the Congress. Unlike in Pakistan, India’s middle-class expansion will make it more moderate.

There is a reason why the Congress continually attracts young and urbane talent, but the BJP doesn’t. The reason is the alignment of the Congress with the broad Indian sentiment, which makes it naturally attractive and competitive. The open-minded BJP leader like Manohar Parrikar senses this and must often distance himself from the RSS position. In the Congress, Nitin Gadkari would have made even district president with difficulty.

I predict the decline of the BJP and the

fragmentation of its state units into regional parties based on caste. This breaking away will paradoxically make these units more acceptable in coalitions and more coherent. The signs are visible in Rajasthan and Karnataka, where Hindutva has become irrelevant. In Gujarat, the party will collapse after the autocrat exits.

The Congress under the Gandhis, and later the Vadra-Gandhis, will remain our one great national party.

I nailed my colours to the mast in my column of 17 May 2009, but it is appropriate in a piece such as this that I again disclose my allegiance.

I am a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) voter. I was persuaded by a newspaper article. In 1996, writer Meenal Baghel reported a BSP rally in Uttar Pradesh for The Indian Express. She described rain, a large crowd, wet, and the bamboo barricades it was straining.

Mayawati mounted the stage and said: “Chamari hoon, kunwari hoon, tumhari hoon” (I’m low-caste, single, yours). What a terrific line. I was seduced immediately.

The BSP is corrupt, true. But it has not butchered Sikhs or set Muslim children on fire. It has more legitimate grievance with India than any other group (Gandhi said of B.R. Ambedkar: “That he does not break our heads is an act of self-restraint on his part”). But it doesn’t extract justice through collective punishment. It is pragmatic with its social tormentors, a quality I admire.

It doesn’t share the Hindu middle-class fantasy that India will become a world power tomorrow, though most of us are illiterate and hungry and will remain so in our generation, and the next and the next.

I have sometimes wondered if I do right in voting BSP, for I am greatly attracted to Manmohan Singh, and because I have lived in states where BSP candidates usually forfeit their deposits.

But I have never felt guilt.

Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist.

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

SAMAR HALARNKAR

OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

THE POWER OF MINIMALISM S

o, what Indian food do you miss most?”

That was my American friend from graduate school, visiting me in Berkeley, California, just before we left the organic capital of the US after a five-month teaching stint.

“Nothing,” I said.

His eyes widened.

“Nothing?”

“Well, if you insist, home-made dosa, perhaps.”

I explained what dosa was, and he said, “Well, that sounds like something I could miss.”

Don’t get me wrong. I love Indian food as much as any other Indian. But my tolerance for the bastardized, heavy curries that pass off as desi fare in restaurants—Punjabi, Mangalorean or Andhra—is fading. Our home cooking is dramatically lighter, but in general, sometimes, we just do too much with food.

We over-prepare, over-spice and overcook. Too many vegetables are frankly, well, buggered, by ceaseless simmering and tossing, and

meats are too many times drowned in curries and soaked in spices.

As I said in a previous column (“Minimum kitchen, maximum impact”, 21 April), I learnt in Berkeley—as you read this, I am in New York, preparing to fly home to Bangalore—that a handful of spices are all you need to run a kitchen.

So, on a particularly rushed last week, between editing stories, writing columns and cooking for the family, I put all my speed-cooking skills to test.

One of the things I cooked as I started emptying out my freezer was my packet of “bork”. In my last column (“San Francisco, ’tis hard to leave”, 5 May), I wrote how I had bought a little packet of meat that was half-boar, half-pig, but I never got around to cooking it. I finally did, and the minimalist recipe I used really did bring out the flavour of the meat.

The same goes with snacks.

Whenever we had a party in Berkeley, the wife always

insisted I make tzatziki sauce, an old mainstay. You can have it with chips of all kinds, and when the party is over, it works wonderfully as an accompaniment to anything from curries to roasts.

This is how, after the farewell party we threw for ourselves in our Berkeley backyard, I considered the leftover tzatziki, a sauce that is used by the Greeks and Turks (like India and Pakistan, another example of enemies with common culinary traditions).

My old friend was visiting, and we didn’t want to buy more food when our aim was to empty the refrigerator. So, out came the “bork” and the leftover tzatziki.

I spread out the tzatziki and laid the roast “bork” atop. We ate it with leftover bread—of course, this was Berkeley bread, studded with sesame seeds and lovingly crafted in a local bakery.

It was a simple, rough and ready meal. Sometimes, when your mind is full of other things, that is all you want.

Roast ‘bork’ on tzatziki sauce Serves 2 Ingredients 400g “bork” (you can use regular pork, or even lamb) 1 tsp garlic paste 2 tbsp soy sauce 1 tsp chilli powder Juice of K lemon Salt to taste Method Marinate the meat for 3-4 hours with the ingredients listed. Place in ovenproof dish, cover with foil and roast for 90-120 minutes (depending on how tough the meat is) at 275 degrees Celsius. Serve hot on a bed of tzatziki sauce.

Tzatziki sauce Serves 2 Ingredients 200g curd 1 small cucumber, grated and water squeezed out 1 clove garlic, finely minced 3 tbsp mint, washed and finely

Quick fix: Serve bork (or pork) atop tzatziki sauce. chopped Salt to taste 2 tbsp olive oil Method Hang the curd in muslin, until thick. Beat well with a fork until smooth. Add grated cucumber, garlic, salt and mint. Mix well.

Drizzle in the olive oil and mix.

This is a column on easy,

inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar is consulting editor, Mint and Hindustan Times.

Write to Samar at ourdailybread@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Samar’s previous columns at www.livemint.com/ourdailybread

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SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012

Style

LOUNGE TREND

Kudos to the ‘kedia’

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Garments with mirror­work and vegetable dyes, folk­style silhouettes—there is no escaping the charm of Gujarat in the coming season

B Y S UJATA A SSOMULL S IPPY ···························· ften there’s more to a fashion trend than clothes and accessories. A trend can actually reflect a deeper social thought and feeling. Indian fashion’s recent love affair with Gujarat means you will be seeing a lot of mirror-work and folk silhouettes this season and the next.

Traditionally, fashion has always been inspired by the north and east, but it seems the west’s time has come. At the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week (WIFW) Autumn/Winter 2012/13 earlier this year, designer Anupama Dayal’s show, “Surat and Spice”, started with a musician playing a Gujarati folk song on the sarangi. It set the mood for a collection that comprised lots of kedias, ghagra skirts and chintzprinted hoodies.

Dayal later said Gujarat was the only state she had not visited earlier. While researching the subject over two months, she found that a lot of the textile industry had been centred around Gujarat in the colonial period. “I was awed by how in the 18th century the whole world was drawn to the textiles of this area. So much so that it affected the textile business in Europe and (export was) banned

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(eventually),” says the designer.

She discovered too the kedia shape—a cross-over jacket fitted till high waist and then flaring out, the traditional dress of the Kutch shepherd—and fell in love with it.

“It is an absolutely timeless garment. The shape is androgynous, yet has the feel of Mother Earth.”

Dayal did tweak the shape though to add a princess cut and make it more flattering. “I think now you will see some element of Gujarat in all my collections; it has become a part of me.”

She is not alone. James Ferreira, Abraham and Thakore (A&T), Anju Modi, Nachiket Barve and Pia Pauro were among the designers who looked to the region for inspiration at the Lakmé Fashion Week Summer/Resort 2012 or the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week (WIFW) Autumn/Winter 2012/13 in February.

From Pauro’s electric blue mirror-work kaftans to A&T’s Chanelstyle kedia skirt-suits, get ready to go Gujarati this festive season. In

fact, traditionally strong northern silhouettes such as the anarkali may have finally found their match in the kedia.

This traditional dress also inspired Tom Ford a decade ago when he was the creative director of Yves Saint Laurent.

Now the silhouette shows up in jackets fit to wear to the office

by A&T, or a chic evening wrapstyle jacket by Ferreira, or in the fun, easy resort-wear of Pauro and Dayal. According to designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee, the kedia and Gujarat’s ghagra skirt—a panelled anklelength skirt, traditionally with a drawstring at the waist—will be among the most favoured shapes in the coming season.

“They are folksy yet easy, and can be both Western and Eastern,” he says. Mukherjee suggests wearing the cropped kedia with jeans and the ghagra skirt with a simple tee. Both would be investment pieces for, this trend is far from peaking yet.

Westside: (above) Anupama Dayal is using Gujarat as inspiration; and Abraham and Thakore’s kedia­style bandhani jacket with skirt.

There are three good reasons to believe that the Gujarat story is going to remain strong in Indian fashion in the coming season. The amount of money Gujarat Tourism is spending on promoting the state reflects on the ramps too, with Kutch’s mirrorwork, patchwork and mashru fabrics dominating at both WIFW and LFW. “Advertising is making a difference; seeing Amitabh Bachchan (the actor is the state’s brand ambassador) in those beautiful traditional clothes does make you think, there is so much to the state,” says designer Anju Modi, who was in Kutch just last week to do more research for

her forthcoming collection.

It is not just the Kutch district or Surat alone that have caught the fashion designer’s eye. Ahmedabad is home to the National Institute of Design (NID) and today, many of fashion’s brat pack also comes from this school. Barve, Rahul Mishra, A n a n d Bhushan, Paromita Banerjee and Aneeth Arora, who have done well in the last five years, have been profoundly influenced by Gujarat—just as being stud e n t s a t D e l h i ’ s National Institute of Fashion Technology (Nift), often considered to be India’s first school of fashion design, shaped the design philosophy of its alumni J.J. Valaya, Rohit Bal, Manish Arora and Rajesh Pratap Singh.

A&T, who have been in the business for 20 years, are among the few commercially successful designers who come from NID. Says David Abraham: “I had gone back to NID to do an assignment at the beginning of this year and I was wandering about Ahmedabad and that’s where I got the inspirations for this collection.”

The city has such a strong sense of style that he believes it is only natural it will have a long and lasting impact on anyone studying there. Originally from Bangalore, he says: “I grew up in Anglicized surroundings, and Ahmedabad is so unique. As you walk around the city, you see the

women wearing Gujarati fashion.

Some wear it in a modern way, others are traditional.”

A&T’s Autumn/Winter 2012 collection, which will hit stores in September, reflects this influence in dresses and coats, tunics and trousers—basic building blocks for a modern urban Indian woman’s wardrobe, all inspired by the traditional clothing silhouettes of Gujarat.

For A&T, while the kedia was the anchor piece, there was lots of mirror-work and bandhani, and the sari was worn Gujarati-style, with plenty of play with the Parsi soudreh (the Parsis first landed in Gujarat and remain a strong community in the state).

Aneeth, whose label Pero is the current darling of the industry, says: “Gujarat has such a vast heritage. Whether it is prints, textiles, weaves, dyes, or embroidery, they have it all.” Barve adds, “There are a lot of unexposed ideas and hence the state has a fresh feel.

They (the silhouettes and fabrics from Gujarat) are also open to being modernized.” He hopes to see more of the rogan (a hand-dye technique) printing from Kutch being explored.

Modi, who visits the state often, says their printing processes use vegetable dyes and she hopes to see more of this in mainstream fashion. She is looking also at the suf embroidery technique. “It’s done with hand and is a painstaking process, and gives delightful geometric patterns. There are so many tribes, and so many different types of techniques; there is just so much inspiration (in Gujarat),” she says.

Perhaps, most significantly, there has been a move towards producing environmentally friendly clothing in India. Says Ferreira: “This state has always been known for its organic farming. But even its cotton, weaving and dying processes have always been environmentally friendly.”

It seems the north, the traditional bastion of fashion, may have found a challenger!

Sujata Assomull Sippy is the former editor of Harper’s Bazaar India.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012

Business Lounge

LOUNGE

N. SRINIVASAN

Two different ball games The India Cements MD, vice­chairman, and BCCI chief on business, cricket, and missing those golf putts

Non­playing captain: N. Srinivasan’s term as the BCCI president extends till 2014.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

BY A NUPAMA C HANDRASEKARAN anupama.c@livemint.com

···························· uiz Srinivasan Narayanaswami about cricket and the president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI)— cricket world’s wealthiest administrative body—will dish out rote responses with his much-publicized, trademark straight face. But talk golf, and the 67-year-old beams, gushes and even jokes, no longer sounding like a scratched vinyl record.

I’ll save that for later.

A lunch meeting being firmly ruled out due to paucity of time, the venue for this meeting is Srinivasan’s 10th floor office at the Chennai headquarters of India Cements Ltd—south India’s largest maker of

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concrete, co-founded by Srinivasan’s father just a year before India’s independence.

The 4pm appointment on a Monday squished any likelihood of rusticity arising from dining at the company’s second-floor canteen. So I found myself seated in his roughly 2,000 sq. ft office overlooking clear blue skies over the Bay of Bengal instead of digging into a masala dosa—Srinivasan’s choicest meal—to break the ice.

It took months to nail this meeting with the BCCI chief and India Cements managing director and vice-chairman, who also wears the top hat at the Tamil Nadu Golf Federation.

This is in addition to running a cement business through which he is the de facto owner of Chennai Super Kings (CSK), labelled in 2011 by UK-headquartered valuation agency Brand Finance as the most valuable cricket franchise in the five-year-old Indian Premier League (IPL).

With more sports than cement plastered on his résumé, it sounds unconvincing when Srinivasan says, “Cement is not only my heart, it is my job and it is what I do well.”

The disbelief over his response also stems from quarterly profit announcements where Srinivasan frequently glances sideways for prompts from company managers shuffling through financial statements a few feet behind him. Of course, just a fraction of the time is generally spent on

discussing the cement business—`4,203 crore in revenue for April 2011-March 2012. The rest is usually cricket chit-chat.

During one such February meeting, journalists probed for titbits on the tiff between the BCCI and the Sahara group, which had withdrawn its 11-year sponsorship of the Indian cricket team a few days earlier.

Srinivasan’s face was deadpan as he hinted that things would be sorted out.

Two weeks later, BCCI and Sahara buried their differences.

This is why Srinivasan is often stamped with superlatives such as “the most powerful” and “the most influential”. But his stocky build, neatly patted-down salt and pepper mop, suspenders, and the slightly smudged kumkum on his forehead, exude the demeanour of a conservative Tamilian accountant rather than a cricket honcho. The only overt signs of his status are the Swiss luxury watch Rolex on his wrist and his voice, an undertone that reminds one of acclaimed actor Kamal Hassan’s award-winning act as an underworld don in the 1987 Tamil blockbuster Nayakan.

In that gravelly, yet assertive voice, Srinivasan tells me about his serendipitous entry into his father’s cement business.

Srinivasan was the eldest of two boys and two girls born to T.S. Narayanaswami—a mathematics major who jointly set up India Cements with S.N.N. Sankaralinga Iyer. The latter’s family, which divested its entire stake in India Cements by 2007, runs the Chennai-based Sanmar Group, with interests in shipping, metals and speciality chemicals.

As an engineering student in the 1960s at Madras University, Srinivasan played cricket, hockey and tennis.

But he figured he should stick to his books.

“I knew I wasn’t going to become the best sportsperson and would do better concentrating on my studies,” Srinivasan says. He became a chemical engineer and travelled to the US in the early 1960s to get a postgraduate degree in engineering and business from Chicago’s Illinois Institute of Technology.

When Srinivasan was on the cusp of his final semester of management education at

IN PARENTHESIS N. Srinivasan loves reading John Grisham’s legal thrillers. ‘The Brethren’—Grisham’s book on three disgraced judges behind bars—is his favourite. Mario Puzo’s ‘The Godfather’ also ranks on top of his book list.

Every May, Srinivasan escapes to the Tamil Nadu hill station Kodaikanal to unwind through golf. Legendary American golfer Jack Nicklaus remains his favourite and Srinivasan is particularly proud that he’s even had a chance to see Nicklaus play live.

Illinois, he contemplated doing a master’s degree in economics.

However, his 57-year-old father died and the reins of the cumbersome, governmentcontrolled cement business were thrust on the shoulders of the 21-year-old.

It’s been nearly half a century of cement in Srinivasan’s life, with sales growing at an average 10% clip every year for the past 20 years. Yet, his name is glued more to cricket.

“From my father’s time, India Cements has been supporting cricket,” he says. “Many Ranji Trophy players were employed in the company. When there was no money in the sport, we were promoting cricket and cricketers,” he says.

I go down a laundry list of questions on fatigued, ageing cricket players and his contentious ownership of CSK as a BCCI official. He’s heard these questions before and his responses may as well be lip-synched to a recorded tape.

“We’ve had some reverses in England but overall the scorecard is good,” he responds, referring to India’s losses in all versions of cricket played in England just months after winning the 2011 World Cup. The downtrend in audience ratings for cricket’s miniature version (IPL) has been an added thorn for the game’s sponsors.

But if Srinivasan is worried, he’s adept at masking it.

“People expect all three formats of the game to perform at the same level all years,” he says. “That’s not possible.”

“Today, the audience for all three formats (five-day Tests, One Day Internationals and Twenty20) put together is higher than what it was for any one form previously,” pitches in Srinivasan, who hiked from state-level cricket administration to the BCCI top slot in a little over a decade, stoked by his company’s early association with the game.

The sexagenarian’s game face slips only when I query him about two of his adversaries: former BCCI president A.C. Muthiah and IPL founder Lalit Modi.

Four years ago, Muthiah, who last year retired as chairman of the troubled Southern Petrochemical Industries Corp.

Ltd (Spic), lost to Srinivasan in the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association (TNCA) presidential elections. In 2010, he filed two petitions in the Supreme Court, claiming there was a conflict of interest in allowing Srinivasan, who was then treasurer at BCCI, to bid for an IPL team

through his company.

“I didn’t think Mr Muthiah would stoop to this level after he lost an election to me,” says Srinivasan brusquely. “I think he should be concentrating on his business.”

On Modi, currently in London, Srinivasan is even more caustic. “I will say nothing because I don’t respond to him.”

Knowing I’ll have to confront the blistering Chennai heat as I step outside, I shift the focus to golf. It’s the only time during the interview that Srinivasan smiles. Both Srinivasan and daughter Rupa Gurunath, who is likely to succeed the India Cements managing director, are ardent golfers.

At one point, the grandfather of Gurunath’s two daughters had an enviable handicap—a numerical representation of a golfer’s ability, a lower score being better—of 6. But it now stands at 14. “There’s nothing more frustrating than missing a short putt,” Srinivasan says about his passion, for which he has had less and less time. But things aren’t as green as the golf course otherwise.

His cement business posted disappointing fourth-quarter results—the company’s 2011-12 profits came short of analyst expectations as energy and transportation costs weighed.

The company posted a net profit of `293 crore for the year ended 31 March and fourth-quarter profits rose 18% to `65 crore.

The profit numbers were lower than average analysts’ forecast of a net amount of `302.37 crore for the full year and `85.25 crore for the quarter.

And CSK seems to be losing sheen in the IPL—the defending champion team was in fourth position after 15 matches before Thursday’s match.

“Everyone knows there’s an economic slowdown and growth expectations have been belied and are being revised downwards,” says Srinivasan.

“That coupled with high interest has increased uncertainties and so capacity expansion in the cement industry has slowed down. I will hesitate to borrow money to expand.”

On the personal front, recent news of the arrest of his son Ashwin—who Srinivasan says isn’t interested in the cement business—after a brawl in a Mumbai pub is keeping up the heat.

Add to that the controversy of five cricketers being accused of spot-fixing in the ongoing IPL. It might be a while before Srinivasan lowers his golf handicap.

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SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Tollywood superstars, contemporary Bengali cinema and the city of Kolkata are weaving their way into Mumbai studios and multiplexes

FILM

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

···························· he television crews waiting in the lobby of PVR Pictures’ corporate office in Lokhandwala have a common refrain. It’s a sticky, late April day in Mumbai and they’ve been there for close to 2 hours—mollified by a steady supply of tea in paper cups—to meet Prosenjit Chatterjee.

“He doesn’t speak Hindi!”

Gasps, shrieks.

“Yaar, what were his last few Hindi films?”

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None. Nothing in the last 20 years.

“Why is he playing the lead in Shanghai?”

Dibakar Banerjee, the film’s director, wanted someone “very seasoned, yet very fresh”. Next month, Prosenjit, veteran of 327 Bengali films, will make a “comeback” in Hindi cinema. A political thriller based on the Greek novel Z by Vassilis Vassilikos, Shanghai also stars Abhay Deol, Emraan Hashmi and Kalki Koechlin. It is scheduled for an 8 June release.

Prosenjit, 49, could best be

described as the Salman Khan of the commercial Bengali film industry or “Tollywood”. At the start of his career, he’d famously—or foolishly—turned down both Maine Pyar Kiya and Saajan, films that Khan eventually made his bones in, to focus on his Tollywood projects. The estranged son of actor Biswajeet, he’s made a career playing macho, save-the-world roles, which continue to be his mainstay: Next Friday (25 May), he will appear in and as Bikram Singha, the Bengali adaptation of Rowdy Rathore.

Having Prosenjit in Shanghai is a minor casting coup for Banerjee. He plays a pivotal role—a charismatic social activist called Dr Ahmadi who meets with an accident while delivering a speech. This forms the crux of the thriller.

“One of the biggest problems in casting a star is that the character takes a back seat,” says Banerjee. “I wanted someone who’d be new to Hindi film audiences but someone who had star charisma…it comes from facing the camera for so long.”

Getting Prosenjit on board

wasn’t easy. “It took three months for him to finally agree,” says Banerjee. Dr Ahmadi is a man who rouses people with speech. “His strength lies in his oratory prowess. I shoot live with sync sound and Prosenjit was wary of his grip on the language,” he explains.

But there is no trace of a man who could, a year ago, speak only halting Hindi, when we meet in a small room tucked at the back of the PVR Pictures’ office. Prosenjit had months of diction and language workshops before Shanghai’s 45-day shoot

schedule in May-June 2011.

When he swings around a steel pole with a practised smile for the cameras, Tollywood’s superstar shines through, despite the awkward moustache he is sporting for Bikram Singha.

Shanghai will decide what lies in store for him in his second innings outside Bengal (he did a couple of Hindi films in 1990 and 1991). For now, he is still a newcomer here, making do with the room at the back. Interactions with the film’s other stars were scheduled the next day at Sun-n-Sand hotel in Juhu—a site for the more conventional Bollywood bytes.

Prosenjit isn’t Tollywood’s only export this summer. After a month of playing to packed theatres across West Bengal, debutant director Anik Dutta’s film Bhooter Bhobishyot (the future of ghosts), a satirical comedy, released in four scre e n s i n Mumbai multiplexes on 27 April—two more were added last week. Bhooter Bhobishyot has made more money than any other Bengali language film in the past decade. Produced on a `1.5 crore budget, it is expected to gross `5 crore by the end of this month (`2 crore makes for the average Tollywood box-office hit). In June, it will release in multiplexes in Delhi, Bangalore and Pune—the widest distribution for a Bengali film in recent history.

Angling off the predicament of a motley crew of resident ghosts of an abandoned bungalow, Bhooter Bhobishyot attempts to highlight urban displacement.

Parambrata Chatterjee—more

widely known as “Rana”, the infatuated young cop from Kahaani—plays a young filmmaker who’s attempting to film in that bungalow. The movie packs in several clichés: Parambrata is a bespectacled, Leftleaning intellectual who makes stray comments on Russian literature, and the ghosts must make a daily trip to the fish market.

But the treatment is surprisingly frothy, nothing like what Parambrata calls “the slow trolley films”—an image that’s plagued Bengal’s arthouse for decades.

Bhooter Bhobishyot embodies the staggering change that Tollywood has been priming itself for over the last six or seven years, regaining the favour of intelligent audiences back home and in other parts of India.

The other, more far-reaching change is that Bollywood producers, directors and screenwriters are making room for fish markets and characters who will compulsively pronounce “V” as “B”: the Bengali.

This is indicative of a bigger trend that calls for cultural detailing to tell stories. Filmmakers such as Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bhardwaj took viewers to Rajasthan (Gulaal) and the hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh (Omkara; though it was shot in a village in Maharashtra). A clutch of young, adventurous directors in Bollywood, mostly Bengalis themselves, is using this opportunity to introduce Bengali culture and the city of Kolkata to mainstream audiences.

One of this year’s biggest boxoffice hits so far, loved by audiences and critics, Kahaani is set

entirely in Kolkata.

It’s Sujoy Ghosh’s fourth film, and he says it’s long been his “dream project”, surpassing everything he’s done so far. Vicky Donor, another small-budget film that Boxofficeindia.com declared a “super hit”, softened its controversial sperm donation storyline by riding on the cultural clash between its Punjabi and Bengali leads.

The new storytellers Kahaani has finished 50 days and crossed the `100 crore mark—a milestone for a `8 crore film—the day I meet Ghosh, the film’s director, cowriter and co-producer. In his Bandra studio, flanked by a poster of Kahaani and a photograph of Satyajit Ray, Ghosh is a smug man. “The rulebook has ceased to exist,” he says.

A movie with no lip-synched songs, no “heroes”, a pregnant woman as the lead—Kahaani takes big leaps. And when was the last time you saw a Hindi movie entirely set in Kolkata?

There was Mani Ratnam’s Yuva in 2004, but little else in recent film history.

Kahaani’s Kolkata is an antiquated but spectacular place. It’s filled with stodgy, middle-aged men. Here, the protagonist Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan) will always be “Bidya”. Shot in the city during Durga Puja, in the brief window of time when the Howrah TURN TO PAGE L12®

New arrivals: (from top, left) Ayushmann Khurrana in Vicky Donor; Kay Kay Menon and Rituparna Sengupta in a still from Benoy Badal Dennis; Swastika Mukherjee (foreground) plays the ghost of a yesteryear actor in Bhooter Bhobhishyot; Vidya Balan and Parambrata Chatterjee in Kahaani; and Prosenjit Chatterjee.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT IMAGING BY SANDIPAN DAS/MINT

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Tollywood superstars, contemporary Bengali cinema and the city of Kolkata are weaving their way into Mumbai studios and multiplexes

FILM

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

···························· he television crews waiting in the lobby of PVR Pictures’ corporate office in Lokhandwala have a common refrain. It’s a sticky, late April day in Mumbai and they’ve been there for close to 2 hours—mollified by a steady supply of tea in paper cups—to meet Prosenjit Chatterjee.

“He doesn’t speak Hindi!”

Gasps, shrieks.

“Yaar, what were his last few Hindi films?”

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None. Nothing in the last 20 years.

“Why is he playing the lead in Shanghai?”

Dibakar Banerjee, the film’s director, wanted someone “very seasoned, yet very fresh”. Next month, Prosenjit, veteran of 327 Bengali films, will make a “comeback” in Hindi cinema. A political thriller based on the Greek novel Z by Vassilis Vassilikos, Shanghai also stars Abhay Deol, Emraan Hashmi and Kalki Koechlin. It is scheduled for an 8 June release.

Prosenjit, 49, could best be

described as the Salman Khan of the commercial Bengali film industry or “Tollywood”. At the start of his career, he’d famously—or foolishly—turned down both Maine Pyar Kiya and Saajan, films that Khan eventually made his bones in, to focus on his Tollywood projects. The estranged son of actor Biswajeet, he’s made a career playing macho, save-the-world roles, which continue to be his mainstay: Next Friday (25 May), he will appear in and as Bikram Singha, the Bengali adaptation of Rowdy Rathore.

Having Prosenjit in Shanghai is a minor casting coup for Banerjee. He plays a pivotal role—a charismatic social activist called Dr Ahmadi who meets with an accident while delivering a speech. This forms the crux of the thriller.

“One of the biggest problems in casting a star is that the character takes a back seat,” says Banerjee. “I wanted someone who’d be new to Hindi film audiences but someone who had star charisma…it comes from facing the camera for so long.”

Getting Prosenjit on board

wasn’t easy. “It took three months for him to finally agree,” says Banerjee. Dr Ahmadi is a man who rouses people with speech. “His strength lies in his oratory prowess. I shoot live with sync sound and Prosenjit was wary of his grip on the language,” he explains.

But there is no trace of a man who could, a year ago, speak only halting Hindi, when we meet in a small room tucked at the back of the PVR Pictures’ office. Prosenjit had months of diction and language workshops before Shanghai’s 45-day shoot

schedule in May-June 2011.

When he swings around a steel pole with a practised smile for the cameras, Tollywood’s superstar shines through, despite the awkward moustache he is sporting for Bikram Singha.

Shanghai will decide what lies in store for him in his second innings outside Bengal (he did a couple of Hindi films in 1990 and 1991). For now, he is still a newcomer here, making do with the room at the back. Interactions with the film’s other stars were scheduled the next day at Sun-n-Sand hotel in Juhu—a site for the more conventional Bollywood bytes.

Prosenjit isn’t Tollywood’s only export this summer. After a month of playing to packed theatres across West Bengal, debutant director Anik Dutta’s film Bhooter Bhobishyot (the future of ghosts), a satirical comedy, released in four scre e n s i n Mumbai multiplexes on 27 April—two more were added last week. Bhooter Bhobishyot has made more money than any other Bengali language film in the past decade. Produced on a `1.5 crore budget, it is expected to gross `5 crore by the end of this month (`2 crore makes for the average Tollywood box-office hit). In June, it will release in multiplexes in Delhi, Bangalore and Pune—the widest distribution for a Bengali film in recent history.

Angling off the predicament of a motley crew of resident ghosts of an abandoned bungalow, Bhooter Bhobishyot attempts to highlight urban displacement.

Parambrata Chatterjee—more

widely known as “Rana”, the infatuated young cop from Kahaani—plays a young filmmaker who’s attempting to film in that bungalow. The movie packs in several clichés: Parambrata is a bespectacled, Leftleaning intellectual who makes stray comments on Russian literature, and the ghosts must make a daily trip to the fish market.

But the treatment is surprisingly frothy, nothing like what Parambrata calls “the slow trolley films”—an image that’s plagued Bengal’s arthouse for decades.

Bhooter Bhobishyot embodies the staggering change that Tollywood has been priming itself for over the last six or seven years, regaining the favour of intelligent audiences back home and in other parts of India.

The other, more far-reaching change is that Bollywood producers, directors and screenwriters are making room for fish markets and characters who will compulsively pronounce “V” as “B”: the Bengali.

This is indicative of a bigger trend that calls for cultural detailing to tell stories. Filmmakers such as Anurag Kashyap and Vishal Bhardwaj took viewers to Rajasthan (Gulaal) and the hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh (Omkara; though it was shot in a village in Maharashtra). A clutch of young, adventurous directors in Bollywood, mostly Bengalis themselves, is using this opportunity to introduce Bengali culture and the city of Kolkata to mainstream audiences.

One of this year’s biggest boxoffice hits so far, loved by audiences and critics, Kahaani is set

entirely in Kolkata.

It’s Sujoy Ghosh’s fourth film, and he says it’s long been his “dream project”, surpassing everything he’s done so far. Vicky Donor, another small-budget film that Boxofficeindia.com declared a “super hit”, softened its controversial sperm donation storyline by riding on the cultural clash between its Punjabi and Bengali leads.

The new storytellers Kahaani has finished 50 days and crossed the `100 crore mark—a milestone for a `8 crore film—the day I meet Ghosh, the film’s director, cowriter and co-producer. In his Bandra studio, flanked by a poster of Kahaani and a photograph of Satyajit Ray, Ghosh is a smug man. “The rulebook has ceased to exist,” he says.

A movie with no lip-synched songs, no “heroes”, a pregnant woman as the lead—Kahaani takes big leaps. And when was the last time you saw a Hindi movie entirely set in Kolkata?

There was Mani Ratnam’s Yuva in 2004, but little else in recent film history.

Kahaani’s Kolkata is an antiquated but spectacular place. It’s filled with stodgy, middle-aged men. Here, the protagonist Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan) will always be “Bidya”. Shot in the city during Durga Puja, in the brief window of time when the Howrah TURN TO PAGE L12®

New arrivals: (from top, left) Ayushmann Khurrana in Vicky Donor; Kay Kay Menon and Rituparna Sengupta in a still from Benoy Badal Dennis; Swastika Mukherjee (foreground) plays the ghost of a yesteryear actor in Bhooter Bhobhishyot; Vidya Balan and Parambrata Chatterjee in Kahaani; and Prosenjit Chatterjee.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT IMAGING BY SANDIPAN DAS/MINT

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Bridge is lit up, the film presents the city’s best face.

Otherwise based in Mumbai, Ghosh wrote Kahaani in Kolkata, living in the hotel opposite Monalisa Guest House on Sarat Bose Road in south Kolkata, which is where Vidya Bagchi stays in the film. “I wanted to draw people into a convincing world. Whether it’s Woody Allen’s Manhattan or Almodovar’s Spain, it helps to layer the world you’re setting your story in,” says Ghosh. In Kahaani, there was a genuine effort to “get” Kolkata. “Once you create a world that is convincing enough, it is bound to appeal to audiences no matter where they are,” says Ghosh, adding that the film has had successful runs in unconventional centres such as Chennai as well as seven international markets. He has recently sold the rights for a remake in Tamil and Telugu; and to YRF Entertainment for their first English language production.

“Those ‘Neverland’ characters we had through the 1980s and 1990s—the generic ones without any roots—they’ve been booted out,” says Banerjee. “The lifelike portrayal of another culture, another people, is always left to storytellers who’ve come from the outside.”

Like Banerjee, Shoojit Sircar is a Bengali brought up in New Delhi. He comes from a background in ad film-making.

His film Vicky Donor, actor John Abraham’s first home production, has its Punjabi hero Vicky (Ayushmann Khurrana) falling in love with Ashima Roy, a reclusive Bengali girl (Yami Gautam) who lives in Delhi’s Bengali colony, Chittaranjan Park. While stereotypes abound, they’re possibly a change for an audience bored with the Bollywood stock characters of the helpful Sikh taxi driver or the idli-eating “Madrasi”.

Sircar’s Ashima is accomplished and beautiful, she wears muted colours and is prone to breaking into a Tagore song while being driven around in her boyfriend’s car. When Vicky and Ashima decide to get married, their families engage in a hilarious duel to dominate the wedding rituals.

“We wanted a love story with some hurdles to complement the central theme,” says Sircar. “We ended up getting more feedback for the characters we created than the issue of sperm donation,” he adds. Released in April during the Indian Premier League cricket tournament, with little invested in publicity, Vicky Donor’s success has been a box-office windfall.

The film also features an elaborate Bengali wedding sequence complete with the bride veiling her face with betel leaves and the cumbersome white reed headgear for bride and groom.

“That’s one thing I’ve learnt from advertising—detailing. In an ad film, we have to establish characters in under 2 minutes. Clothes, props, geographic cues, they all become important,” says Sircar.

Television actor Gautam says she watched Konkona Sen Sharma’s films to prepare for her character.

“Sir (Sircar) made me watch films starring Konkona and other Bengali actresses to understand their body language,” she says. Apparently, Sircar also told her to behave “a little condescending”.

Borrowing from Bengal “We’re like the French. We’re snooty about our views on culture and cinema,” says 32-yearold Parambrata, a familiar face in the new guard of Bengali cinema by directors such as Anjan Dutta, Srijit Mukherji and Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury.

“Look, I can’t play a brawny Dev or Jeet—it’s not for me,” says Parambrata. “After Kahaani, I’m being offered roles in Hindi films and I realize there’s room here for actors like me.”

In Mumbai to promote Bhooter Bhobishyot, Parambrata had several meetings with talent manage-

SECOND RENAISSANCE

Counterculture: (right) Sujoy Ghosh with a poster of Kahaani; Shoojit Sircar (below); and Dibakar Banerjee.

A decade in films that brought Bengal to the centre stage Devdas (2002) Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s movie ver­ sion of the 1917 Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay novella took audi­ ences to period Bengal. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s puffed sari blouses left a lasting influence on women’s fashion. The film’s cos­ tume designers (Reza Shariffi, Neeta Lulla, Abu Jani, Sandeep Khosla) won a National Award for their work.

Yuva (2004) A film by Mani Ratnam in the “hyperlink” format, ‘Yuva’ had the lives of three young men from different stratas of society connect by one fateful incident on Kolkata’s Howrah Bridge.

Originally titled ‘Howrah Bridge’, the film showed three distinct faces of Kolkata without over­ tones of sentimentality.

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

The Namesake (2006) Mira Nair’s English­language film based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s acclaimed novel follows the life of a second­generation Bengali immigrant in the US. Parts of the film were shot in Kolkata.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

ment agencies and producers lined up.

“I’m considering doing more Hindi films but I won’t shift my base,” he says. “There’s no need to any more. There’s so much give and take.”

Tollywood actor Paoli Dam, with a range that spans from the crass commercial to Goutam Ghose’s critically acclaimed Moner Manush (2010), also made the crossover with her first Hindi film, Hate Story, which released last month. While the movie sold graphic sex and vengeance on its posters and wasn’t the ideal launch vehicle, the important thing is that Dam got her ride.

Bengali actors are finding more work in Bollywood also because the nature of the film industry is changing to accommodate a wider range. There is talk of the stalwart Soumitra Chatterjee, 77, who was recently awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India’s highest honour in cinema, starring in a Hindi film.

Sircar, who produced a Bengali film called Aparajita Tumi (2011), which featured Soumitra, says they’re trying to get him on board for a Hindi project. Sircar is also in the process of signing on “a Tollywood superstar” for his next Hindi film Jaffna, a film on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) set in Sri Lanka. John Abraham will act in and produce this film—scheduled for an early 2014 release.

Parambrata, grandson of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, believes this intermingling of the two film industries comes from an increased confidence back home.

“For a long time, all that Tollywood was doing was copying formulas. These films alienated the Bengali middle class,” he says.

The newly forged success story of the Bengali film industry comes from a middle ground between the auteur-driven tradition of Ghatak, Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, and these action films made for the mofussil market.

“These (new) films might not fill an 800-seat theatre. But they’re thriving with the multiplex culture even outside of Bengal—the market is segmented enough to fill a 300-seater,” says Soumu Ganguly, co-producer, Bhooter Bhobishyot.

With a 25-year reign over the Tollywood box office, Prosenjit has doubled up as a mentor for young directors by slashing his fees for recent films such as Autograph (2010) and Baishe Srabon (2011), allowing him to exercise his acting muscle with challenging roles and simultaneously giv-

Parineeta (2005) Another film based on a novella

by Chattopadhyay, ‘Parineeta’ cast Bengali actors (Sabyasachi Chakraborty played Saif Ali Khan’s father) and alluded to “Calcutta” hot spots such as Flury’s, Trincas and Moulin Rouge.

Kaminey (2009) Vishal Bhardwaj’s heist film fea­ tured three Bengali goon broth­ ers. Chandan Roy Sanyal starred as the youngest brother, Mikhail, who is close friends with one of the film’s protagonists, Charlie (Shahid Kapoor).

ing the films some market credibility. Now, with a host of festival favourites under his belt, the actor is planning a film festival in multiplexes across the country later this year.

After his success with Bhooter Bhobishyot, Ganguly is preparing for the release of Benoy Badal Dennis, a Hindi film directed by Anjan Dutt, in late August. A `9 crore film which will release in 350 screens across India, it stars Kay Kay Menon, Jimmy Shergill, Naseeruddin Shah and Sonali Kulkarni alongside Bengali actors such as Rituparna Sengupta. Shot entirely in Kolkata, Ganguly says

its production and distribution follows “the Kahaani template”.

Even Banerjee, who’s made a signature out of making quintessentially Delhi films so far, is setting his next film, a detective mystery, in Kolkata. But he is quick to assert that being Bengali has nothing to do with it. “I was born and brought up in Delhi and I speak Punjabi and Haryanvi as fluently as I do Bengali,” says Banerjee. “I don’t wear my ‘Bongness’ as a badge. I find that a mundane sort of cultural chauvinism.”

Indeed, the line spanning cultural nuance and chauvinism is a

fine one. In Vicky Donor, Vicky and Ashima initiate an online chat by playfully calling each other names: “Fish” and “Butter Chicken”. Will this new clutch of Bengali film-makers engage in similar parochial battles?

The Bengalis were dominant in the film industry before the Punjabis, points out film scholar Rachel Dwyer, professor of Indian cultures and cinema at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. “Calcutta’s New Theatres made Hindi films—those starring K.L. Saigal and Prithviraj Kapoor. Bombay Talkies had a large number of Bengalis in the 1930s—Himanshu Rai, Devika Rani, Gyan Mukherjee, Ashok Kumar,” says Dwyer.

More Bengalis moved to Bombay after 1947, including Bimal Roy and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, who set many films in Kolkata and drew on the city’s atmosphere. Dwyer evokes Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen, which was set against the backdrop of the Bengal famine. Kolkata was also the setting for Guru Dutt’s (who had lived in Kolkata) Pyaasa.

But when Bengali old-time directors like Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee made their masterpieces in the 1960s and 1970s—Golmaal, Chupke Chupke, Anand, Abhimaan, Rajnigandha, Khoobsurat—the economics of the movie business mandated that they make movies that would appeal to India as a whole.

Mukherjee did frequently evoke the Bengali bhadralok in memorable characters like Amitabh Bachchan’s Bhaskar Banerjee, a doctor whom Anand (Rajesh Khanna) endearingly referred to as “Babumoshai”, a Bengali term for the genteel. In Chupke Chupke (1975), Bachchan played the shy-faced Sukumar Sinha, a professor of English liter-

Kahaani (March 2012) Filmed in Kolkata with the city’s ecosystems ingrained into the storyline, ‘Kahaani’ reintroduced West Bengal’s capital as a viable cinematic backdrop. The film introduced two Tollywood actors—Parambrata Chatterjee (as Rana) and Saswata Chatterjee (as Bob Biswas)—to the Hindi film industry. It also featured a patriotic song by Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Ekla cholo re’ (sung by Amitabh Bachchan).

Vicky Donor (April 2012) Yami Gautam plays a Bengali girl called Ashima Roy, whose family stays in Chittaranjan Park, a Ben­ gali colony in south Delhi. A full­ blown Bengali wedding sequence is part of the film. A Tagore song makes a fleeting appearance.

Shanghai (June 2012) Dibakar Banerjee’s forthcoming film will mark the return of Tolly­ wood superstar Prosenjit Chatter­ jee to Hindi cinema. Chatterjee stars in a pivotal role as the char­ ismatic social activist Dr Ahmadi. ature. Always a foil to the more lively, exuberant protagonist, Mukherjee’s Bengali was a stand-in for sobriety; a surrogate figure. Babumoshai’s cultural identity was coded in his straightlaced manners and white kurtapyjamas. It was never the feature of the film itself.

Film-makers of that era also borrowed from Bengal in more covert ways: S.D Burman often made parallel tracks in Hindi and Bengali. Chupke Chupke was a remake of a hit Bengali film, Chhadmabeshi, starring Uttam Kumar, which released in 1971.

But the Bengali is out of the closet now.

Early trailers for Benoy Badal Dennis show Kay Kay Menon, who plays a policeman in Kolkata, bringing home a big fish on a string for his wife and son. He smiles joyously as he shows it off.

Will the Bollywood banquet make room for shorshe ilish?

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Gay in the mainstream In its third edition, India’s biggest queer film festival will screen movies that integrate LGBT stories with broader narratives

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

···························· he third edition of the Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival that starts on 23 May has a catalogue list designed to seduce not only the gay community, but also the straight.

“The non-LGBT audience is scared of watching queer cinema because it isn’t sure what to expect,” says Sridhar Rangayan, one of the two directors of the festival. “This year, we have chosen films that sensitively integrate queer stories with narratives that have a wider appeal.”

A blockbuster from Punjab, Family Khusreyan Di, is as run-ofthe-mill as any “non-LGBT” comedy. The village braveheart is shot dead and his lookalike is brought in to save villagers from the evil headman. What the villagers don’t know is that the new saviour is a hijra (eunuch). This is one of the four Indian films in the festival which features a transgender as the lead

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Poignant: A still from My Last Round. character. The other three are in Marathi, Hindi and Tamil.

Organized by Solaris Pictures, a film production company that focuses on making gay films, and Bombay Dost, a queer magazine, in association with The Humsafar Trust, a gay community-based organization, the five-day festival will screen 120 feature-length films, short films and documentaries from 30 countries. There will be 23 feature-length films.

“You will see films with queer angles being mere subplots,” says Rangayan, giving the example of Bollywood Beats, an entry from the US in which a homosexual man is one of the many lead characters.

“Many people think that movies with gay themes deal only with sexual encounters or identity crises.

Our selection will tell you that the

concerns of queer lives could be similar to that of those who constitute the mainstream world.”

The special focus of the festival will be on France, with two full feature-length films and six short films from that country. Gigola, a lesbian crime drama set in the underworld of 1960s Paris, is a must-watch. Starring Spanish actor Marisa Paredes and French comedy actor Thierry Lhermitte, the film ran to packed houses at the 25th London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival last year. The Guardian called it “steamy, saucy, racy and suffused with the feeling of wickedness you might get from drinking spirits before lunch or smoking in church”.

The second French film, Le Fil,

by Tunis-born director Mehdi Ben Attia, depicts a gay romance in

FESTIVAL FIX Some of the other films that promise to be interesting viewing

Men to Kiss An award­winning German comedy about two male lovers shows the colourful and wild underbelly of gay Berlin.

August After dumping his boyfriend, Troy returns to him, hoping to revive the relationship. But the ex­boyfriend already has a hunky lover. Director Eldar Rapaport mixes sparse dialogues with rich visuals. The film won the Best Feature at the Iris Prize Festival.

My Last Round A tender love story between a young kitchen hand and a middle­aged local boxing champion.

It is set in Chile.

With their second album, the Pakistani band Laal continue their ‘anti­imperialist struggle’ komal.sharma@livemint.com

···························· hink revolutionary music and you’d expect something angst-ridden. But when the Pakistani band Laal, known for their songs of dissent, performed at Hard Rock Café in New Delhi last month, it was more of a celebration. Spirited melodies in Urdu and Punjabi, guitar riffs intermittent with soulful flute pieces and people dancing—Laal’s gig felt like a party with a cause.

“I feel we need to celebrate life even through the struggle. We want people to be hopeful,” says Taimur Rahman, 36, the lead singer and founder of the band.

On a tour to launch their second album, Utho Meri Duniya

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Queens! Destiny of Dance This movie on the trials and tribulations of a close­knit ‘hijra’ (eunuch) family did not receive great reviews, but watch it for Seema Biswas, who plays a ‘hijra’ guru. It also stars ‘hijra’ activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi.

We the Outsiders A Marathi film on the discrimination faced by transgender people; it’s inspired by a real­life character.

My name is Red B Y K OMAL S HARMA

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(Fire Records), Lahore-based Laal performed at venues in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore between 19 April and 1 May. Aimed at rallying people against religious extremism, their songs borrow liberally from poetry. The title song, Utho Meri Duniya, takes cues from the philosopher-poet Allama Iqbal. The video—available on YouTube—has Rahman wearing a red headband and mobilizing people in villages with words that challenge the tyranny of the rich and the clergy.

Laal consists of Rahman on lead guitar and vocals, Mahvash Waqar on backing vocals, Haider Rahman on flute and Salman Malik on bass. For their India tour, they also roped in Paul Schneiter, a French drummer from New Delhi. With a

Tunisia. In an interview last year to news website Your Middle East, Attia said, “I wanted to show that homosexuality isn’t necessarily a tragedy, it is possible to be either gay or lesbian and happy even in an Arab and Muslim country.”

A jury of four that includes actor Parvin Dabas and critic Mayank Shekhar will judge awards in seven categories. There will also be an art exhibition, panel discussions, and interaction with film-makers.

The festival will open with Beginners, an American romcom that got Christopher Plummer his first Oscar for the supporting role of a widower who comes out of the closet in his 70s. “The lead character is not the gay man,” says Rangayan, “but his son, who is seen grappling with girlfriend issues while coming to terms with his father’s sexuality. In other words, this film meets our aim of mainstreaming queer visibility.”

But mainstream Bollywood has no presence in the festival. “Bollywood is slowly coming out of the closet and is exploiting gay themes for more than just laugh tracks,” says Pallav Patankar, another festival director. “However, it needs to have greater awareness and sensitivity towards queers.”

One criticism against festivals that aim to sensitize people to the concerns of suppressed minorities is that they run the risk of putting off viewers with politically correct but bad art. “I don’t think the films we are going to show are necessarily politically correct,” says Patankar, who claims that 30% of the audience in the last two editions consisted of heterosexuals.

“These movies are meant to push you off the edge and show a reality most of us don’t have to face in our lives. Many of these may be by amateurs. They all might not be good cinema but they have explored queer issues sensitively and have created some poignant portrayals. We are here to give a voice to these films and the individuals behind them.” says Patankar.

If you are not taken in by promises of sensitive treatment of the historically harassed, Rangayan has this to tell you: “At the end of the day, we are offering quality cinema for everyone to enjoy.”

The festival venues are Cinemax at Infiniti mall (Andheri West) and Alliance Française de Bombay on New Marine Lines Road, Mumbai.

Entry is free. For details, visit www.mumbaiqueerfest.com

Reality check For the first time in India, a commercial screening venue for documentaries and shorts

True life: A still from Bilal, which is part of Nandan’s May list.

B Y S HAMIK B AG ····························· ack in the 1980s, a cinema hall experience wouldn’t have been complete without the obligatory screening of socially relevant documentaries before the show. In those years of rationed entertainment, documentaries on population control and polio campaigns were inescapable viewing when all the audience really wanted was to cut to the chase—the song and dance and the inevitable fight sequences.

It seemed apt that the memory of those newsreels was raked up earlier this month at a press conference to announce the return of documentary films to the theatre—this time as a ticketed venture. With Nandan, the government-run multiplex in Kolkata, deciding to commercially screen Indian documentary films, it was apparent that non-fiction films have come a fair distance from the days when they were free and forced.

It’s reportedly the first time such a venture is being tried in India. Nandan’s plans are both ambitious and circumspect. On Saturdays and Sundays, one of the screens of the multiplex is being reserved for short films and documentaries. If the audience response is good, the number of days will increase, says Jadav Mondal, CEO, Nandan.

“There are no viewing platforms available for documentary films in India outside of the film festival circuit. It is about time one was created,” says Mondal.

“This is a dream for documentary film-makers,” adds Mrinmoy Nandi, whose film Khelnabati is part of the May schedule.

Based on a sustained initiative

by Kolkata-based documentary

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film-makers like Ananya Chatterjee, Supriyo Sen and Nandi, the first commercial screening started on 5 May with two widely awarded films, Sen’s 13-minute Wagah and director Sourav Sarangi’s 52-minute Bilal.

Tickets for each day have been priced at `30 (other show tickets at Nandan go for `30, `60 and `70). There is, however, an air of ambiguity on the profit-sharing ratio between Nandan and the copyright holder of the films. Chatterjee says an “honorarium” will be paid to the copyright holder, while Sarangi spoke about a 50-50 revenue-sharing ratio.

There is unanimity, however, in welcoming the move by Nandan.

“It is worth noting that all the films selected for screening have won awards in major international films festivals, and now the general public will get an opportunity to see them,” says Chatterjee. Sen, whose 2-hour film Way Back Home will also be shown, thinks Indian documentaries have moved on from being exclusively political and activist-propaganda-oriented.

The fact that all six films for screening in May are by Kolkata-based film-makers has elicited a word of caution from Sarangi. “Kolkata produces good documentary films but it is not enough to sustain commercial screenings. This effort will be successful only when it is given a national, even international, flavour.”

Sen says that for the following months, documentaries such as War and Peace by Anand Patwardhan and Kamala Bai by Reena Mohan—classics from non-Kolkata film-makers—are being considered for screening.

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PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

volatile mix of Marxist ideology and the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Habib Jalib and Ahmed Faraz, Laal’s agenda is to move the masses through music. “Political speeches move the mind but music touches the heart and soul,” says Taimur Rahman, who’s been a grass-roots activist for labour and farming communities for 15 years. Though he used music to mobilize people, his work as an activist was relatively low key.

Laal’s music has given him visibility over the last three years.

The band first drew attention during the 2007 Lawyers’ Movement in Pakistan, when people took to the streets in protest against military ruler Pervez Musharraf’s unconstitutional sacking of the then chief justice of Pakistan. British-Pakistani filmmaker Taimur Khan filmed a documentary on their work, titled Democracy in Flames. “Khan urged us to record. He took us to a studio where we recorded some songs and put them up on YouTube. We expected a couple of hundred hits but when we got

Loud poetry: (from left) Paul Schneiter, Salman Malik, Taimur Rah­ man, Haider Rahman and Mahvash Waqar during their India tour.

4,000, we were stunned,” recalls Rahman. Laal released their first album, Umeed-e-Sahar, in 2009, protesting against military dictatorship. Since then, singing in villages, at garages and parking lots, and from rooftops, they’ve picked up a reputation for their “guerrilla concerts”. “We would go to villages and announce from the

masjid and ask people to collect in the chowk. We’d set up our portable systems and next thing you knew, people were cheering in agreement,” says Rahman.

Their day jobs are different.

Rahman is a professor of political science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences; Waqar, a news anchor; Haider, a banker;

and Malik, a sessions player. “We get two reactions—one is that you’ve done something fantastic.

Second, you’re foolhardy, you should have been more subtle.

Sometimes we get threatening emails,” Rahman says.

But subtlety means little to Laal.

In a manic song, they chant Amreeka ke pitthu saare/kabse ban gaye dost hamare? (Since when have the pawns of America become our friends?) The video starts with a clip of Hillary Clinton speech in which she says, “Who we’re fighting today is who we created 20 years ago.” Rahman explains that their struggle is not anti-American, it’s anti-imperialist. “Fundamentalists are strong but they are small in numbers. The vast majorities hate extremists. My band’s name is Urdu for red, I sport a Che Guevara guitar sling, I’m cutting my second album—someone must be supporting me too. Pakistan is a complex society with a lot of progressive people who love art and music. It is not a monolith. I hope to break that stereotype,” says Rahman.

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SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012

Travel

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OLYMPICS

Much to Wenlock

PHOTOGRAPHS

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B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ···························· uch Wenlock is quite possibly the most becoming little town in all of Great Britain. In fact, I don’t think I’ve been to a more charming place in the whole world. It is the kind of instantly likeable little place—like Amsterdam, Aix-en-Provence, St Andrews or Braemar up in the Scottish Highlands—where, by the end of your first walk about town, you’re already wondering, whimsically, how much a two-bedroom, semi-detached by the canal or the river or the ruined abbey is going to cost.

However, these days the residents of Much Wenlock have little time to sit back and enjoy the impossible charm of the place.

Instead, everyone is busy gearing up for the frenzy of London Olympics-themed activities planned for later this year. And I do mean everyone, literally.

Almost all the Much Wenlocki-

A charming little town, whose good doctor inspired the modern Olympic Games, will be the centre of attention this summer

M

TRIP PLANNER/MUCH WENLOCK Indians travelling to the UK will need a visa. Apply for one at www.vfs-uk-in.com. Fly to London and use it as a base from where you can make day trips to hiking spots.

The nearest railway station is Telford.

Take a train from London Euston to UK Wolverhampton or Birmingham New Street and then change to one of several regional connecting London services to Telford. A minicab to Much Wenlock, which your hotel can arrange, costs around £11 (R950). Black cabs outside the station cost around 50% more. Local transport, however, is quite poor. Taxis are cheap, but will need to be booked in advance.

Crosby

Holyhead Wolverhampton Telford

Shrewsbury

MUCH WENLOCK Birmingham

UK Swansea

Cardiff

Current airfare to London from Indian metros: Qatar Airways Finnair (oneworld) Turkish Airlines (Star Alliance) KLM/ Air France (Skyteam)

Delhi R52,610 R60,380 R53,040 R57,210

Mumbai R61,550 R59,770 R51,510 R54,320

Bangalore -R72,400 R51,150* R64,450 *Air India

Fares may change.

Stay

Do

There are approximately 300 beds available for visitors within a 5-mile (8km) radius of Much Wenlock. And prices start from around £30 (around `2,600) per person per night. The two best hotels in Much Wenlock are The Raven and The Gaskell Arms, and both can be booked on www.booking.com. More accommodation information is available from the town council website (www.muchwenlock-tc.gov.uk). Visitors can also base themselves in Wolverhampton or Telford, and easily experience the entire region.

The Shropshire region has plenty of activities for families, young couples and single travellers. There has been a lot of investment recently in walking and trekking paths. For visitors to the UK with time on their hands, the region is an ideal weekend stopover en route to Wales from London. Near Much Wenlock is the Ironbridge Gorge Unesco World Heritage area comprising the world’s first cast-iron bridge and several other attractions. In addition to Wenlock Priory, there are numerous other English Heritage sites within driving distance. In the right weather, the scenery is impossibly beautiful.

Like most of the UK’s smaller tourist destinations, the region has a busy, but ever-changing, events and attractions calendar. Check the Shropshire Tourism website (www.shropshiretourism.co.uk) before leaving home.

GRAPHIC

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

ans I ran into seemed to be shouldering two civic responsibilities in addition to whatever they did for a living. There is the formidable, fleece-hatted, sensibly shoed, handsome old woman who not only volunteers to take visitors on walking tours, but also helps man the Much Wenlock Museum. She is currently upset at the uneven distribution of visitor information leaflets in the local shops and hotels. Then there is the tirelessly enthusiastic woman who attends to tourists at the guildhall, but is also in charge of deciding which parts of the town should be reserved for ecological purposes, and which should be open to development. When I visited the museum on a recent Thursday afternoon, she was bent over a large printed map of Much Wenlock, seemingly absorbed in her eco-friendly deliberations.

I met all of them in the course of a two-and-a-half-hour-long walking tour of the town in the company of Timothy King of the Shropshire Council (the UK has a terribly confusing local government structure. There are councils and towns and town councils and boroughs and counties and whatnot. For the sake of clarity, think of Shropshire as the district, and Much Wenlock as a town within). King is one of the council’s two tourism officers.

King is the most enthusiastic government functionary I’ve met anywhere. Rotund, cheerful, with thinning hair and a taste for The Raven Hotel and Restaurant’s excellent cheesecakes, he patiently took me from location to location all across town. He has rarely been busier. My visit comes shortly after trips by a Canadian journalist and a Chinese TV crew. The day after our tour, I spot him near the town square along with a camera crew from CCTV5, yet another Chinese TV channel. It seems like an awful lot of attention for a small town in rural Shropshire. But it all makes sense when you realize that Much Wenlock is, in an appreciable sense, the home of the modern Olympic Games.

I first met King over a late lunch at The Raven, a hop, skip and reasonable jump from the town museum and guildhall. The walls of the hotel’s dining room are covered with memorabilia, most of them having to do with perhaps the most important event in the history of the town. The same event that this year will draw dozens of journalists, and subse-

quently, the town hopes, busloads of tourists, to Much Wenlock.

In October 1890, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a dapper Frenchman and father of the modern Olympic Games, visited Much Wenlock to meet William Penny Brookes, town doctor and Much Wenlock’s most famous son. By that time, Brookes had already organized an astonishing 40 annual editions of the Wenlock Olympian Games on the Gaskell Recreation Ground, close to where the shiny new school now stands. The games were an annual regional festival of competitions comprising both traditional sports like football and cricket, and country sports like quoits, tilting and, on at least one occasion, “the old woman’s race for a pound of tea”.

Coubertin, steeped in Greek history and deeply impressed by the sporting culture in British schools, had by then spent a few years planning an international revival of the Olympics of ancient Greece. In 1889, he sent out a postal survey all over Britain asking for inputs on physical education. One of his correspondents was Dr Brookes of Much Wenlock, who replied with a copy of a pamphlet about his own Olympic efforts. The two hit it off immediately. The next year Coubertin visited Brookes to witness a special sporting festival held for him in Much Wenlock, and for a series of long discussions at The Raven.

Today, Coubertin is widely remembered, memorialized, and feted for reinstating the Olympiad. Brookes, by comparison, is at best a footnote in the history of

the Games. King told me that this is changing. Over the last decade or so, he reckoned, there has been a growing awareness of the role that Much Wenlock and Dr Brookes have played in the Coubertin legend.

Brookes is to Much Wenlock what Shakespeare is to Stratfordupon-Avon. Wait. Scratch that. He is much more. Except for a few years in London, Paris, and Padua, Italy, spent studying, he spent his entire life in Much Wenlock. First an apprentice to his father, the town doctor, Brookes followed suit and became a doctor himself, before taking over the practice in 1831.

“But he probably spent little time being a doctor,” said King, as we stood outside the town church and looked at Brookes’ home, now a private home undergoing renovation. The scaffolding outside, a modern interruption on an otherwise unspoilt stretch of buildings, caused King much consternation.

Brookes was soon to delegate his medical duties to an assistant and focus all his energies on improving the lives of the poor and working classes. Wenlock at the time was hardly the solid middle-class haven it is now. Many townsfolk worked the farms and toiled at the nearby limestone quarries. Most of them were poorly educated and led unhealthy lives. Brookes’ plan was simple: Get them to read and get them to exercise.

He began by opening the Wenlock Agricultural Reading Society in 1841 in the Corn Exchange

Sporting history: (clockwise from above) Memorabilia from the Wenlock Olympian Society; the Much Wenlock high street; and the town museum. building. The building still stands and still has the town library inside. Nearby are a number of bookshops, including the delightful Much More Books. Inside are stacks upon stacks of second-hand books, DVDs, vinyl records, and sheet music. Among substantial collections of military history and cooking, I find a recent biography of spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and a much older handbook on “the other romance” called Lesbian Love.

After it was established, Brookes’ library soon became a venue for interest groups called “classes”.

One of these was the Olympian Class that liked to exercise. Annual competitions started in 1850, and by 1860, the Olympian Class had transformed into the Wenlock Olympian Society.

The guildhall turned out to be an exceptionally well-maintained building, well worth the £2 (around `170) in entrance charges.

While part of the hall is still used for town council meetings, the other half is an old courtroom which now displays a selection of town records and Brookes memorabilia. The good doctor never ran for office, but he did serve as a justice of the peace—a kind of local judge who worked for no pay. In TURN TO PAGE L16®

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those days, King told me, stealing cattle was the most common crime.

It is hard to think of Much Wenlock today as a place of any crime at all. But I was told that a lawnmower was stolen recently.

Carrying on past the guildhall and the church, we went to the extremely photogenic ruins of Wenlock Priory. Now under the stewardship of English Heritage, a government agency, the property was a place of worship for around a thousand years, until it was shut down during the reign of English king Henry VIII. It was around this piece of land that the town of Much Wenlock established itself around the seventh century.

The ruins are spectacular. The Priory itself must have been a remarkable structure for what was, and still is, a tiny provincial town.

Photojournalists especially, said King, love the ruins. The carvings, stonework, textured surfaces, shadows and lush green ground make for superb pictures. Soon, images of the Priory could be beaming into millions of homes.

A few months ago, King said

with explosive enthusiasm, a video crew from American TV network and official Olympic broadcasters NBC came to Wenlock. The gossip is that images of Wenlock Priory will be used in the opening video sequence before every Olympics 2012 broadcast.

Contrary to my expectations, Much Wenlock was enthusiastic about a boom in tourism. The town now has a new 200-car parking facility, a coach parking area with capacity for five full-sized buses and, King estimated, 300 beds across hotels, B&Bs and cottages in a 5-mile (around 8km) radius. Overall, the town had seen an investment of around a million pounds in the lead-up to the games. Canadian, Japanese and Chinese tourists have already begun to show keen interest, King told me, and Indian ones would be welcome indeed.

We spoke for a while about Indian tourism, and somehow got to the topic of Pune’s famous Shrewsbury biscuits. Shrewsbury is one of the larger towns in the Shropshire region, and roughly marks the northern end of the council region that King oversees.

King had never heard of these

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About town: The guildhall is still used for town council meetings. biscuits, and immediately made a mental note to use it in one of his tourism campaigns.

One of our last stops on the tour was also the most important: the Gaskell Recreation Ground. This is where Much Wenlock’s Olympics took place and where Coubertin witnessed the special games held in his honour. Well-maintained and meticulously manicured, the grounds were an explosion of potential desktop wallpapers. On one side, they were abutted by the

new William Brookes School, a stunning modern construction complete with swimming pool and AstroTurf hockey pitch. The school is regarded highly enough to attract young couples to move into the area. On one end of the ground was the pitch square of the Much Wenlock Cricket Club. A typically English pitch full of grass and bounce, no doubt.

The town is now gearing up for what should be the highlight of the year. On 30 May, the Olympic

Torch will pass through Much Wenlock, to the delight of King and his friends. One of the main events will be a concert, complete with choirs, on the ground of the Priory ruins. In a sense, this will complete a circle started by Dr Brookes in 1850 with the first Much Wenlock Olympics.

Unfortunately for the doctor, he died just four months before the first modern Olympics in Greece in 1896. Still, his exploits will now get the attention they deserve. Not least of all because one of the mascots of London 2012 is called Wenlock, a tribute to the little town and its proud Olympics history.

That night, on tourism officer King’s recommendation, I ordered the Slow Cooked Morville Beef for dinner at The Raven. Far away from London and Oxford and all the other British tourist traps, in one of the most charming towns in the whole world, I sat and ate a gold-medal-winning dinner. As I swallowed every impossibly tender morsel, I even thought of a catchy athletic slogan for this little town and its enthusiastic people. Much Wenlock: Our Personal Best.

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CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Events for children and families are a focus for the council and feature prominently in the events calendar.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

The region is home to many senior citizens and is very safe. However, the lack of public transport can be a problem.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

Rural Britain may not be as open­ minded as the cities, but Shropshire actively tries to be LGBT­friendly.

There is a local LGBT group, and an annual Rainbow Film Festival.

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SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2012

L17

Books

LOUNGE EXCERPT

Answering the big questions PALE BLUE DOT/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

PETALS SHED

Mustansir Dalvi explains the importance of Iqbal in a new translation of his classic ‘Shikwa’ and ‘Jawaab­e­Shikwa’

Iqbal, in Urdu transliteration and Dalvi’s English translation Kumriyaan shaakh-e-sanobar se gurezaan bhi hui Pattiyaan phool ki jhad-jhad ke pareshaan bhi hui Woh puraani ravishein baagh ke veeraan bhi hui Daaliyaan pehran-e-barg se uriyaan bhi hui Qaid-e-mausam se tabiyat rahi aazaad uski Kaash gulshan mein samajhtaa koi fariyaad uski

I

t is a hundred years since Muhammad Iqbal first recited Shikwa (Taking Issue) at a gathering of the Anjuman-eHimayat-e-Islam in Lahore in 1909. Through the tumultuous century that succeeded this event, the poem and its response, Jawaab-e-Shikwa (Allah’s Answer, 1913), have assumed a strange afterlife in the subcontinent.

Although his poetry is appreciated on both sides of the border, in India and in Pakistan, Iqbal is viewed through different lenses. In Pakistan, Iqbal is immortalized as a founding father. In veneration, his titles precede his name.

Iqbal’s legacy is more interesting in India. His poem of 1904, Taraanaa-e-Hindi (Song of India), is an anthem to this day. His early poems still inspire patriotic nationalism and communal amity. However, his subsequent inclination beyond Indian nationhood to a pan-Islamic global identification has been seen as problematic for its divisiveness.

Shikwa marks the shift that reaffirms Iqbal’s Muslim identity and asserts his affiliation to the ummat, or the Islamic community of the world, and for that very reason remains a deeply conflicted text that emphasizes a fraternity through difference. Ever since their first unveiling, Shikwa and Jawaab have been appropriated to forward various agendas through recitation, repetition and selective quotation. Those who claim Iqbal as their own, both in India and in Pakistan, have found different ways of defining their contemporary relevance.

For Indians today, Iqbal is best known as the composer of Saare jahaan se acchha (from Taraanaae-Hindi), which extols wataniyat, or love for the homeland, where all its denizens are bulbulein, or song-

Petals shed, now lie scattered and strewn.

The doves have abandoned the cypresses.

birds, in this garden/country.

His early poems “made him the darling of the Indian people”. Iqbal wrote of freedom from all distinctions and oppressions: religion, caste and class. His words evoked the syncretic impulses that remain at the heart of India’s diversity.

Bacche Ki Dua (A Child’s Prayer) was ubiquitous in classrooms in India even in his time: Ho mere dum se yunhi mere watan ki zeenat Jis tarah phool se hoti hai chaman ke zeenat Let me bring glory to my land

with every breath, like blossoms that are the glory of the meadow Being Indian, and of India, inspired several of Iqbal’s poems.

He wrote of the land and its geography in poems like Himalaya and Taraanaa-e-Hindi; its great seers and deities in ‘Nanak’ and ‘Ram’ (whom he called Imam-e-Hind, or Prophet of India); and its poets in ‘Mirza Ghalib’ and ‘Dagh’. Iqbal even translated the Gayatri mantra from the Sanskrit into Urdu verse as Aaftaab (The Sun). In Nayaa Shivala (New Temple), Iqbal deifies his homeland. Using a vocabulary more Hindi than Persian, his views are syncretic of Hindu and Muslim thought: Patthar ki mooraton mein samjha hai tu Khudaa hai Khaak-e-watan ka mujhko har zarra devataa hai You assume God exists only in icons of stone, every speck of earth that is my land is Divinity itself

Taking Issue & Allah’s Answer: Penguin Books India/ Penguin Modern Classics, 153 pages,`299.

His poems found easy acceptability with their images of reconciliation and mutual respect.

National leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore praised his verse.

Then, in 1905, Iqbal left for Europe for a three-year sojourn.

Between 1905 and 1908, Iqbal travelled extensively and studied phi-

Once trod, garden paths now lie forlorn, branches stripped bare of their vestments.

Visionary: Iqbal’s tomb in Lahore; and (right) his poetry fundamentally changed Muslim philosophy. losophy, law and metaphysics in different parts of Europe. His years outside India brought about a profound change in his perception of territorial nationalism. He was closer to the world-changing events of his time; he observed the rising influence of Western materialism and the corrosion of Islamic power bases. He visited the former sites of Islamic dominance in Europe and felt a great nostalgia for this loss.

Iqbal’s writings changed: His gaze stretched beyond nationhood to a larger universe of the fraternal Islam of the ummat and the millat (the community of the faithful).

This internationalism was quite removed from the earlier intensity, fervour and patriotism of being an Indian. Iqbal now assumed the mantle of an alienated Muslim for whom, in the words of Mohammed Ali, Muslims for ‘the past thirteen centuries had been “a nation without a country”’.

Upon returning to India, Iqbal wrote Shikwa and, later, Jawaab-eShikwa. In the rift between Iqbal’s years as a poet of India and his later Islamist leanings, lie these poems. For Indians, then, Iqbal is a poet with a past.

In Pakistan, Shikwa is the

Only the bulbul is free of the shackles of seasons, if only someone in the garden could comprehend his prayer.

avant-garde to a brave new world of Muslim self-determination. It is a blueprint on which the future state—not even articulated when these poems were written—could base both its actions and abstractions. Muhammad Iqbal himself is invoked variously, the most common being the appellation of Allama, or scholar. He is also Sir Muhammad Iqbal—he received a knighthood from the British government in 1922 in recognition of his poetry. He is Shayar-eMashriq (Poet of the Orient), Hakeem-ul-Ummat (Doctor of the Community) and Mufakhir-ePakistan, or Philosopher of Pakistan, on the basis of his writings and speeches from 1909 onward until his death in 1938.

Iqbal is regarded as a pillar of the new state of Pakistan that came into being in 1947. His life and work have been analysed and scrutinized constantly by literary critics and religious ideologues alike, in print, in talk shows, on Internet forums and on blogs, where determined attempts are made to cull certainties and universalities from his writings. Shikwa and Jawaab are no longer mere poems but manifestos, and the abstractions inherent in his poetic turn of phrase are heightened to the point of dogma. For Pakistan, Muhammad Iqbal is the voice of the future—his poems its harbinger: Astr-e-nau raat hai, dhundlaa sa sitaaraa tu hai Tomorrow is still in darkness, and you are the faint new star —Jawaab-e-Shikwa Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books India from Taking Issue & Allah’s Answer by Iqbal, translated by Mustansir Dalvi.

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HINDUSTAN TIMES

THE READING ROOM

TABISH KHAIR

NO ONE’S MONKEYS Ismat Chughtai It has remained a source of personal pain to me that I still find highly literate and very open European, African or American scholars of literature who have never read or even heard of Ismat Chughtai. I always photocopy one or two stories by her—usually Lihaaf, which has appeared as The Quilt in English—and give it to them. As a rule, I receive a raving email in a few days, asking me for greater details, followed by another raving email in a few months, thanking me for introducing the scholar to, as one such email put it, “one of the greatest short story writers of the 20th century”.

Yes, that is what Chughtai was. But she was also a woman who walked her own path. The thing about a writer like Chughtai is that any “label” does not really do her full justice.

Take, for instance, a story like The Quilt: How does one read it?

Is it a feminist narrative, a lesbian love story, psychological drama, the portrait of a semi-feudal family structure, the story of an alternative modernity? It is all of these and something else at the same time.

Chughtai’s celebrated Urdu memoir Kaghazi Hai Pairahan, a title aptly lifted from one of Mirza Ghalib’s more obscure shers (couplets), is now available in lucid English

translation by M. Asaduddin as A Life in Words: Memoirs (reviewed in Lounge, “A woman for all seasons”, 31 March). It is a must-read for anyone interested in literature, or for that matter, life.

Plucky publisher It is one of those little remarked aspects of publishing today: Most translation takes place from English to other languages, and not from other languages to English. Some rich countries, like north European ones, have a bit of money invested in translating their own writers into English, but still the ratio is grossly uneven. What is even more uneven is the ratio of non-Western texts entering the English-reading market in places like India. It is an aspect of our colonial experience that we use largely colonial cultural bridges, ignoring all others.

One such bridge, which has also existed between India and the “world”, is that of Arab

Memoirs: Writer Ismat Chughtai.

literature. It remains grossly ignored. In this context, the Indian imprint, Women Unlimited, an associate of Kali for Women, is doing a brave and necessary favour to all of us by bringing out contemporary Arab literature in English.

The one that I read this week is Hoda Barakat’s The Tiller of Waters, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.

Translated by Marilyn Booth, this is a major work by an acclaimed Lebanese novelist.

Born in Beirut in 1952, Barakat graduated from Beirut University in 1975, and moved to Paris later on, where she continues to reside.

Barakat’s The Tiller of Waters is a complex meditation on science, craft, tradition, modernity, Arabs, Greeks, Kurds, history, myth, etc., presented as the many-layered recollections of a hallucinating man in war-devastated Beirut.

This is literature that is no one’s performing monkey.

Comparative literature Why is it that in India when we do “comparative literature” what we mean is comparison over the colonial bridge? That is, the comparative study of texts from Germany, France, the US or UK, mostly.

There seems to be almost no real “comparative literature” within India and between Indian literatures. Surely, a lot can be done between Bangla, Urdu and Tamil literatures, as well as, say, when it comes to the study of Tagore not as a Bengali writer (or as an Indian writer) but as a writer in Hindi or Telugu translation? It is time Indian universities invested much more in regional comparative literature programmes.

Tabish Khair is the author of How to Fight Islamist Terror From the Missionary Position. He is taking a break from writing this column.

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DELHI’S BELLY | MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI

The merrymaker’s Shahjahanabad An exhibition and book put the spotlight on Old Delhi under the reign of its lesser­known but most colourful Mughal

N

ew York’s Park Avenue was briefly home to the gilded age of Muhammad Shah and 12 other Mughal emperors, most of them largely forgotten. “The later Mughal period after Aurangzeb is a blank to most people, including scholars,” says William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal. But the Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi) of that time was a world of princes and courtesans, invaders and colonizers; a place where power struggles and political intrigue ran parallel to poetry and painting.

The Asia Society Museum in New York recently hosted Princes And Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707-1857, a three-month (7 February-6 May) exhibition of 100 artworks from the later Mughal period acquired from museums and private collectors across the world.

Jointly curated by Dalrymple and art historian Yuthika Sharma, the show was accompanied with a lavishly illustrated book of the same title. Penguin India will publish a domestic edition, with essays by six scholars, in September.

The delicately drawn portraits and landscapes in the book highlight the vanity of the successors of Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughals, who died in 1707. Their stately profiles in courts, palaces and gardens hide the reality of an unstable reign: One emperor had his head severed, another was blinded with needles. But the book also illustrates the revival of Delhi’s cultural life, which was dimmed during the reign of an austere Aurangzeb who banned music, wine, hashish and dancing girls.

If the drawings of Shahjahanabad’s court painters in the years following his death are anything to go by, the period marked an upsurge in decadence.

Consider a few samples from the book: the

emperor riding a horse in his private garden; the emperor celebrating Holi; the emperor and his harem watching an elephant fight in a royal courtyard.

The emperor in these drawings is Raushan Akhtar Muhammad Shah. For 29 years, from 1719-48, he barely took the trouble to make war, watched partridge fights in the morning, and was entertained by mime artistes in the evening.

Frequently dressed in a woman’s tunic and pearl-embroidered shoes, he was bestowed the moniker of Rangila, the colourful one. Though no letters or any other writings of Rangila have survived, second-hand accounts suggest a man of gentle passions.

In the exhibition book, Malini Roy, a specialist in late Mughal painting and a British Library curator (visual arts), writes: “Through the synergy of Emperor Muhammad Shah and the artists of the imperial studio, the Mughal painting tradition preserved, and a distinctively new style emerged that was reflective of the emperor’s joie de vivre.”

Although Rangila’s hedonistic impulses did not stem Delhi’s political decline, it also did not impede the flowering of the city’s cultural renaissance. Under the patronage of his court, which succeeded the short and indifferent reigns of seven rulers in 12 years, Shahjahanabad witnessed an explosion of extremely sensual and colourful cultural resurgence.

The introduction in the book tells us that during his reign, Shahjahanabad benefited from the services of at least 22 scholars, including great theologians and mystics such as Khwaja Mir Dard, Shah Waliullah and Mir Taqi Mir, and a vast number of Urdu poets, musicians and painters. The city also had a reputation for attracting the best dancing girls.

As emboldened Mughal governors of Bengal, Awadh, Gujarat and Hyderabad were establishing their own dynasties and Marathas were defeating the Mughals in the south, Rangila’s capital was obsessed with the finer things in life. The poets composed new verses in the qahwa khanas (tea houses) of Chandni Chowk, the courtesans performed Kathak in the establishments of Chawri Bazar and Meena Bazaar, the qawwals performed in the dargahs of Mehrauli, and Rangila worked overtime to live up to his title. One painting that could not be included in the exhibition because of logistical difficulties is of Rangila making love to a woman.

There was a brief interruption in Rangila’s revelry in 1739, when the Persian invader Nadir Shah massacred thousands in Chandni Chowk and took away the Koh-i-Noor diamond, now in the hands of the British.

In spite of the loot and the murders, Rangila’s capital did not lose its artistic allure. The book Muraqqa-i-Delhi: The Mughal Capital in Muhammad Shah’s Time is indicative of this.

Written between 1738 and 1741, Rangila’s revelry: (left) Two elephants fighting in a courtyard before Muhammad Shah, attributed to Nainsukh, c. 1730­40; and Rangila with his female attendants, attributed to Nainsukh, c. 1735­40.

PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

ASIA SOCIETY MUSEUM

Princes And Painters in Mughal Delhi, 1707­1857: Asia Society Museum, 212 pages, $60 (around `3,180). the Urdu-language travelogue by Dargah Quli Khan acts as a guidebook to the sacred pursuits and wicked pleasures in Shahjahanabad. If one part has respectful sketches of Sufi saints, another reads like an encyclopaedia of the city’s tawaifs.

Connoisseur Khan tells that Zeenat’s “well-shaped figure and coquetry helps increase the lust of the people”. Kali Ganga’s “dark complexion is like the black eyes of a doe”. Nur Bai, who

travels only on an elephant, is known for “bringing ruin to many houses”. Behnai has mace bearers as servants. Chamani, who “enhances the eloquence of her conversations with the use of appropriate idioms”, has “crossed the threshold of her youth” but still has access to badshah Rangila.

The impressions of Hyderabad’s Dargah Quli Khan serve as an unofficial accompaniment to the pictorial exhibition guide of Dalrymple and Sharma. However, their investigation of Shahjahanabad through its artistic aspects does not end with Rangila. He is merely a starting point to the story of a capital that would see more emperors, more massacres and more devastation.

There would be a second cultural revival under Akbar Shah II (1806-37), but that world would crumble in 1857, with the British bringing down Babur’s dynasty by exiling Bahadur Shah Zafar—the last Mughal—to distant Rangoon (Yangon).

Many of us are familiar with the events that led to the collapse of Shahjahanbad following the uprising. The poetry of Mirza Ghalib and Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was himself an accomplished poet, is still recited in the select gatherings of Pahari Imli and Chitli Qabar in Shahjahanabad.

But Rangila remains one of the few Mughal emperors to suffer the ignominy of having no road in Delhi named after him. “He is not perhaps considered among the Great

Mughals,” says Dalrymple, “because Nadir Shah destroyed Delhi under his watch.”

The Asia Society Museum exhibits that were displayed at a cost of $1.5 million (around `8 crore) will never come to Delhi, Dalrymple says, because no such institution in India has that kind of money and it would be impossible to surmount the logistical challenges.

But at least we have tombs.

The most eminent Dilliwallas of Rangila’s Shahjahanbad are buried in rarely visited corners of the city. Mir Dard’s tomb lies in a slum near Minto Bridge.

Shah Waliullah’s grave is in the cemetery enclosed within the campus of Maulana Azad Medical College. Muhammad Shah Rangila was buried in the dargah of Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. A marble screen separates the tomb from the shrine’s courtyard. The chamber used to be filled with excitable pilgrims claiming to be possessed by djinns. This year, the dargah administration has begun locking the tomb. Rangila is left alone.

In November, the Mughals will be in the spotlight again when the British Library in London opens a major exhibition titled Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire. “It will include Rangila,” says Dalrymple, who will deliver a lecture during the exhibition, “and you will see the painting in which he is making out.” mayank.s@livemint.com

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