Lounge for 19 Nov 2011 by HT Media

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Saturday, November 19, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 47

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

ARJUN RAMPAL

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH KRAFT’S SANJAY KHOSLA >Page 9

What turned the supermodel into a Lady Gagatoting, Ecclestoneflaunting, hatebaiting man of the hour? >Pages 1011 THE BOOKKEEPERS Circles, squares, triangles—add geometry to your bookshelves >Page 8

ON SHUKLAJI STREET

An exclusive look into Jeet Thayil’s debut novel, which plunges into the fever dreams of 1970s’ Bombay >Page 14

INDIE CINEMA’S HOPE After two decades of being a stodgy staterun unit, the NFDC goes through a revival >Page 16

Arjun Rampal at the 2011 International Indian Film Academy event in Toronto, Canada.

PUBLIC EYE

THE GOOD LIFE

SUNIL KHILNANI

PIECE OF CAKE

SHOBA NARAYAN

PAMELA TIMMS

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

BRIBES & SCAMS ARE HAVE YOU EVER SMALL COMFORT, NOT THE REAL CRISIS MOURNED A PET? FROM SCOTLAND

he night before my dog, Inji, died, she and I lay beside each other on the orange couch in our living room. She didn’t shut her dilated golden eyes the whole night and neither did I. Too weak to move after a month of not eating, my beautiful beige Labrador with her still-silky coat suffered spasms all through the night as I kept watch. The E. coli infection that had eaten through her kidneys had finally lodged inside her brain. >Page 5

PHOTO ESSAY

SCRAPS OF HISTORY

HOME PAGE L3

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

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE LOVES | BOOKAROO, DELHI

LOUNGE PREVIEW | SOCCER IN CINEMA, IFFI, GOA

A lit fest for little ones A common goal B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN arun.j@livemint.com

MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

··························· he International Film Festival of India (Iffi) this year will have a special section of films based on football, which is probably not surprising considering the venue for the annual Iffi—Goa. Taking into account the local passion for the sport, the organizers of Iffi, which starts 23 November, will bring together seven films made over the last five years from different parts of the world. They were chosen to take a look at how different ethnicities and sensibilities handle the sport and how effectively they have integrated the spirit of the sport into the medium. Iffi director Shankar Mohan hopes this integration of football films into the festival will provide an emotional connect for Sportsworld: The film is set in East Timor. the audiences in Goa. Similarly, the 2010 documentary The Soccer in Cinema package, a mix of feature films and documentaries, so Argentina Futbol Club showcases the far includes A Barefoot Dream (South legendary rivalry between Boca Juniors Korea), directed by Kim Tae-gyun, Mario and River Plate, often considered by F i l h o , C r e a t o r s o f C r o w d ( B r a z i l ) , non-Europeans as the greatest rivalry in directed by Oscar Maron Filho, Foot of the sport. “We wanted to showcase what football God (Italy), directed by Louis Sardiello, Argentina Futbol Club (Argentina), means to the world and avoided films directed by Juan Pablo Rubio, The Best which merely glorified it and did not do Women in the World (Germany), directed much justice to the game,” says Mohan. These documentaries will try to coexist by Britta Becker, More Than Just a Game ( S o u t h A f r i c a ) , d i r e c t e d b y J u n a i d seamlessly with feature films like More Ahmed, and Zidane: A 21st Century Por- Than Just a Game (2007), a drama about trait (France), directed by Douglas Gor- political prisoners playing football at the don and Philippe Parrenodsax. Robben Island prison in South Africa The documentary on 1998 World Cup where Nelson Mandela was held, and A winner Zidane was shot during a 2005 Barefoot Dream (released this June), game between Real Madrid and Villar- about a retired pro player who aims to real, in which the temperamental Zidane exploit a business opportunity in East was sent off in the dying minutes of the Timor but ends up coaching a ragged game, just like in the 2006 World Cup team of 10-year-olds. final between Italy and France. The documentary is shot from the perspective of The International Film Festival of the French former midfielder and covers India will be held in Goa from 23 almost the full Madrid-Villarreal match. November-3 December.

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

Kashmir with the festival in May and Roy says the response was great. Pinto will organise a quiz session, “Talk of the Town”, for 8- to 10-year-olds which is supposed to be a journey through 12 Indian cities, and will also conduct a storytelling session, “Ragged Petticoats” (for 10- to 13-year-olds). For parents of football-mad and cricketcrazy children, there is Shamini Flint’s book reading of Diary of a Soccer Star and Cricket God. Workshops that any budding tween/teen writer (12-16 years) must attend are “From Apps, Picture Books to a Musical” by Christopher Cheng, which aims to explore how a writer actually goes about the process of writing, and one on “Historical Fiction”—to find out how much is fact, and how much fiction, in a book. Also, Chatura Rao and Loveleen Mishra will be conducting workshops, among them “What Are Stories Made Of” and “Where Do Stories Take Place”, for six- to eight-year-olds. “The idea is to make children understand how a story takes shape on paper and then, when it is performed, how it changes somewhat,” explains Rao, a Mumbaibased author, who is participating for the first time at Bookaroo and has previously conducted sessions for children at Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai. Rao will also conduct storytelling sessions with her sister Adithi on their book Growing Up in Pandupur. “In the Pandupur workshops, we will talk about oldfashioned values and try to make children understand more about them through related activities,” says Rao.

In its fourth year, this popular literature festival that’s only for children gets bigger and better B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

························· f you live in Delhi and want your child to love books, then don’t miss out on the fourth edition of Bookaroo, the only literature festival in the country that is meant especially for tots, tweens and teens. To be held at Sanskriti Kendra from 26-27 November, the festival again promises a mix of book readings, art and illustration workshops and quizzes. The festival aims to cater to the 4-16 age group. Swati Roy, one of the founders of Bookaroo and co-owner of the children’s-only book store Eureka in Greater Kailash-II, New Delhi, says she is expecting large crowds this year because the festival has become well-known around the National Capital Region (NCR). “I am looking forward to children’s responses to the readings by Steve Barlow and Steve Skidmore. They are both from the UK and participating for the first time. They have a unique style of narrating stories. It’s more like a performance and will be an interactive session, which will touch upon pirates, dragons and mythical creatures. Tough stuff to resist for any child.” Another event one should watch out for, according to Roy, is Jerry Pinto’s quiz session. Pinto worked earlier this year with the organizers of Bookaroo when they went to

inbox

Roy says she is also excited about the Bookart exhibition which will showcase the work of 12 Indian artists. “Last year, this exhibition was low-profile because it was a bit far out, but this time it is in the centre of the venue. We hope children will get to see the work of the artists who make their books look so good. There will also be art workshops conducted by Atanu Roy and Tapas Guha and, of course, the Bookaroo doodle wall will be up too,” says Roy. There will be a few limitedentry workshops (entry on first-come, first-served basis) by French writer and illustrator Malika Doray and designer Anand Prakash, who makes handcrafted merchandise from recycled and woodfree paper. Doray’s workshop, “My Never Ending Book”, for four- to six-year-olds, will just involve a sheet of paper, a few folds and cuts, and a story that never ends as a result. Prakash will help 10- to 12-year-olds discover why there are no rules when working with paper. Aviva Bookaroo: Festival of Children’s Literature will be held from 26-27 November at the Sanskriti Kendra, Anandgram, Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road, Delhi. The events will start at 10.30am. For details on workshops and book readings, visit www.bookaroo.in www.livemint.com To find out if your child is ready for a hostel, read our story on boarding schools at www.livemint.com/boardingschool.htm

THE SAME PLACE Reading about the Someplace Else bar in Shoba Narayan’s “The (rock) music is someplace else”, 12 November, rekindled memories of the mid1990s when it was a discotheque and the management hit upon the idea of staying open from 26pm on weekends. Most college students in the Kolkata of that time wouldn’t have got permission to go out at night, you see. As for the no eveteasing thing, that’s just smart wordplay typical of us. KALYAN KARMAKAR

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com LOST WORLD Apropos Supriya Nair’s cover story on ‘Quest’, “Revolutionary road”, 12 November, is it possible there is less space in today’s India for radical thoughts and freewheeling writing and ideas? When you witness the overwhelming herd mentality and the regressive mentality to celebrate moribund conceptions of our cultural heritage, one tends to despair. Perhaps there are people in this nation of 1.2 billion who place ideas above infantile nationalistic or religious pride. But they probably number less than 1%. How do such people get together and perhaps provide one another a sense of comfort? SACHI MOHANTY

Read it right: Children enjoying a bookreading session at a previous Bookaroo instalment.

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

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 46

LOUNGE

BRIDGING THE GAP

Work on those delectable Christmas plum cakes begins months ahead and involves lots of alcohol >Page 6

I cried as I translated Natasha Badhwar’s “Build a bridge”, 12 November, into French for my boyfriend. It was so moving. It’s my own story somehow. Such a different culture, yet the same story in a way. EDEN MILLER

SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE

TICKING ON

THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Nissim Ezekiel, the first editor of Quest, Quest, was one of India’s finest Englishlanguage poets, and a legendary critic and mentor.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH VODAFONE INDIA MD AND CEO MARTEN PIETERS >Page 9

CAKE RUSH

A new anthology recalls the heady legacy of a small literary magazine that published great writers and thinkers. We revisit the ‘Quest’ story and its importance to Indian modernity >Pages 1012

Our roundup of what to watch out for at the second “laidback” Bacardi NH7 Weekender music festival in Pune >Page 16

REVOLUTIONARY

ROAD GAME THEORY

NANDAN’S LITMUS TEST The thinking man’s “multiplex” is 25 years old, but debates continue on the kind of films it should screen >Page 18

THE GOOD LIFE

ROHIT BRIJNATH

REPLY TO ALL

SHOBA NARAYAN

AAKAR PATEL

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

THE MADNESS OF ROCK MUSIC IS IN THE SHADOWS COMEBACK ATHLETES SOMEPLACE ELSE OF THE ARC LIGHTS

ove,” says swimmer Ian Thorpe in the midst of our conversation on comebacks. Love, huh! Sounds a bit trite. But, really, who am I to argue? Anyway, I like him. He’s not your average jock inflated with machismo. He’s built like a lumberjack but designs jewellery. He speaks so articulately he lulls you into feeling he’s unburdening a part of his soul. I like him, this boy probably born in a bathtub, also because of how he swims, an elegant leviathan who moved so smoothly it seemed the waters... >Page 4

am doing something I haven’t done in a long time: asking a perfect stranger out to a nightclub in a strange city. Now that I have your attention, let me tell you that this piece is about music, not blind dates. His name is Prasanna Singh, and I found him online. He writes a blog called Musings of A Manic Manipuri Metalhead, in which he discusses the music scene of Kolkata with headers such as “The PIT v.5—Rising Fists”. >Page 4

fter John Lennon died, Paul McCartney re-released Beatles songs. Without notice or explanation, he changed the credits from “Lennon/ McCartney” to “McCartney/Lennon”. Such pettiness was unexpected from an entertainer already a legend, but this is how desperate people are to claim the status of frontman. To be seen as THE person responsible for the band, not grouped with those in the back. One person cannot be a band... >Page 5

FILM REVIEW

ROCKSTAR

Sidin Vadukut’s “Hunting down an HMT”, 12 November, was a nice writeup but I don’t expect to see humble HMTs at Connaught Place stores. Hit Chandni Chowk and you will see them. I still have to find a person who didn’t fall for HMTs at first sight. AKSHAY

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “Tintinology”, 5 November, the Hindi translator of ‘Tintin’ comics is Puneet Gupta.

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

THE ECONOMY OF

INFLUENCE

s dirt is said to be matter that is in the wrong place, so corruption is money lodged where it shouldn’t be: displaced from the world of commerce, where it rightfully belongs, and into democratic politics. The type of corruption we in India tend to concentrate on is straightforward bribery: the taking of money for special treatment, or for providing services that should not normally be paid for. This form of corruption can reach the level of high scandal. The media has in recent years come to feed off the spectacle of such corruption—centred often on individuals who appear as greedy, evil, criminal, weak. But corruption also has a humble and routine existence—in the transactional malfeasance of everyday Indian life, the buying and selling of access to resources, whether to a hospital bed, police protection, a school placement, or a square of pavement on which to sell used books or hot snacks, which citizens are supposed to have for free. The media shows much less interest in investigating or addressing this endemic form (the analogy is with the media’s contrasting attention to famine as opposed to chronic malnutrition: the former is news, the latter is just life—or death). There is nothing conceptually complicated about this type of quid pro quo corruption, or about the legal remedies needed to address it. Indeed, we already possess in some abundance the legal instruments and agencies needed to clip such bribery. Somehow, though, they don’t seem to function: Whether executive, judicial or police agencies, they lack—as the

saying goes—political will. This suggests that what we are actually facing is a more deep-set type of corruption. This corruption doesn’t just divert public individuals into the pursuit of private gain. It prevents institutions and professions from fulfilling the functions for which they were designed. This second type of corruption—systematic rather than merely venal—is the subject of a passionately felt new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress— And a Plan to Stop It, about the fate and future of the US. The book is by one of the US’ maverick legal theorists, Lawrence Lessig. Lessig’s earlier, iconoclastic work on Internet copyright gave him a cult status among internauts who embraced his libertarian arguments for freer copyright regimes within the “creative commons” of the World Wide Web. For the last several years, though, he has turned his attention to understanding how and why America’s democracy has undermined the independence of its central institutions to the point where the republic—the idea of a public good which leaders are committed to fostering and defending—has been lost. Lessig tells very much an American story, but his argument—which draws on

an older, classical republican understanding of corruption and independence—holds many lessons for our own situation. The really pernicious type of corruption, Lessig insists, is not so much that involving crass monetary purchase: transactional bribery. Goodness knows, we in India have enough of this—and the outright purchase of privileges or services is certainly more regular and troubling here than in the US. But reading Lessig is still a useful and illuminating exercise, as it pushes us to think harder about a more fundamental type of corruption. The corruption that most interests Lessig is generated by what he calls an “economy of influence”. Such an economy operates not by direct transaction, but through the creation of fields of influence which act upon holders of public office or professionals to weaken their independence of judgement and action—to sway them in ways that may be hard to measure or quantify, but which are not difficult to discern and perceive. Think of the civil servants, police officers, or judges, who might trim and tailor their actions and decisions so as not to offend those who may determine their future careers; politicians who dine with the rich and their lobby-

ists, or who depend on powerful patrons for the tenure of their office; doctors who accept invitations from pharmaceutical firms and free trials of medicines; journalists who mingle over cocktails with politicians and corporate leaders; military generals and officers who are entertained by weapons manufacturers. None of these would be recognizable as instances of bribery—and in few of these cases would it be at all easy to show a direct causal connection between illicit actions and such background facts. Each of these examples concern professionals and public officers who are supposed to manifest objectivity and impartiality in their thought and action—that is the basis of our trust in them, and that indeed is the definition of their social roles. What we do suspect, in all of these cases, is that somehow they have been compromised, their independence of judgement clouded. They have become entrapped in the “economy of influence”. Just like all of us in every walk of life, those who act within institutions of government or professional guilds are susceptible to a range of influences. Many of these influences are simply unavoidable, some cannot be controlled or regulated; but some create dependencies, which are hard HINDUSTAN TIMES

Flawed system: (clockwise from right) Street vendors are often victimized by corrupt policemen; Lawrence Lessig; and the media kept the spotlight on allegations of financial irregularities by the Suresh Kalmadiled Commonwealth Games Organising Committee. HINDUSTAN TIMES

What we are actually facing is a deepset type of corruption. This corruption doesn’t just divert public individuals into the pursuit of private gain. It prevents institutions and professions from fulfilling the functions for which they were designed to break precisely because they are like addictions. And these dependencies then systematically distract or divert those elected to govern or to perform professional roles from what they are supposed to be doing—which is working in the public interest. It is this second type of corruption—the slow, insidious creation of a web of dependencies—that in the long run is most fatal to democracies. The effect of those dependencies is to corrupt institutions, not in a directly financial sense, but in ways that undermine the trust in and credibility of a system as a whole. The appearance of impartiality is vital to sustaining the legitimacy of institutions of democratic government. If people cease to believe in the impartiality of institutions and those who inhabit them, then the purpose and point of government itself becomes hard to discern. Democracy has since its Athenian invention been suspected for its tendency to create dependencies. A democratic government is of course dependent on the people—but beyond that, other types of dependencies (on foreign powers, on rich patrons, on persuasive advocates of particular interests) are seen as liable to corrupt political freedom. In that sense, the real threat of cor-

ruption for a democracy is not so much individual venality but the failure of institutions to fulfil their intended aims—which is to defend liberty. For classical republicans, even if a nation succeeded in eliminating individual corruption (and that is by no means an impossible task, even within the existing legal frame), it would still be confronted by the corrupting effects of dependence. For that is not simply the aggregate of myriad corrupt individuals. It is a more systematic failure: a failure of our government and leadership—whose function is not so much to protect the public purse (important as that is), but to maintain trust in the institutions of government. In the long run, India may be able to survive a culture of bribery. It’s the subtler corruption—of the political intentions and purposes embodied in its institutions—that may do it in. Sunil Khilnani is director of the King’s India Institute at King’s College London. Write to Sunil at publiceye@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Sunil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/sunilkhilnani RICCARDO S SAVI/GETTY IMAGES

COLUMNS L5

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Have you ever mourned a pet?

eating, my beautiful beige Labrador with her still-silky coat suffered spasms all through the night as I kept watch. The E. coli infection that had eaten through her kidneys had finally lodged inside her brain. The shivering that had started six weeks earlier turned into violent paroxysms. Let go, child, I whispered, as she drooled bile and saliva; as her body rattled so hard I could hear the emptiness inside. I wanted her to die; I wanted the decision not to be mine. Her eyes never left me, even as I went to get her some water from the kitchen—water that spilled off the sides of her mouth. Was she scared? I don’t know. I was. You want to know about grief. Let me tell you about grief—not the spousal grief so beautifully captured by Joan Didion in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking. This grief is the kind that is felt by a whole family that watches a beloved pet lose life’s last battle. Grief is the sound of drips, the coldness of a metal stretcher, and the smell of antiseptic mixed with urine. It is about monitoring intravenous fluids and a cocktail of drugs. Grief isn’t one emotion. It is shock, rage, bitterness and incessant questions. Why me? What’s a good way to die? Inji was just three years old. The word means ginger in Tamil. I wanted an Indian name; my children wanted to call her Laika after the first dog in space. She ended up being Inji Laika Narayan. She was a healthy, happy Labrador who liked to eat—not the sort of dog to contract a life-threatening illness. But then isn’t that what all parents (and that’s really what I was to my dog) say when their child succumbs to the “lethal march” of an illness that never stops? The entire span of her illness was six weeks. Was that too short a time; or too long a time to watch her suffer? Was it good that her illness gave our family time to adjust? Or would it have been better if she had suffered a stroke and died the next day without suffering? I can tell you that there were days during that long month when I woke up in the morning, dreading the sight of her tired, prone body and feebly wagging tail. Although I am ashamed to admit it now, I occasionally wished that Inji would die in her sleep, relieving me of decisions about drugs that didn’t seem to work; freeing me from days and nights at the clinic. After several weeks of this bleak routine, I just wanted the whole thing to be over. Not my husband. People react in different ways to health crises. You learn new things

about your spouse and children. I learnt that my husband, who didn’t even like Inji as much as I did, would never give up on her. He was like a maniac—going on the Internet to discover new medication; consulting four vets (one in the US) about urine cultures and blood reports. We argued over medical protocols and rising creatinine count. I wanted to let Inji finish her life at home, without needles, in peace. He accused me of pulling the plug; copping out. He never gave up. Till one day he did and the next day, our dog died. He is still grieving. I seem to be over it; or so I tell myself during those moments when I feel Inji behind me as I boil milk in the kitchen. I say this when I insert the key into my front door and feel my body tighten with pleasure in anticipation of the overjoyed welcome my dog gave me—tail wagging, body shaking from side to side. I still smile when I open the door. And then I stop. That last evening, Inji started frothing at the mouth. She had stopped drinking. It was over, said the vet. The infection had affected her brain. That evening, we returned home from the clinic and followed the usual routine of calling four vets before deciding that the illness had won. My husband conceded defeat and called my sister-in-law, Priya. Every family has a go-to person for various crises. You call your Mom for certain things; your Dad for others; your siblings for something. Priya loves all animals; and babies. She was the first person we called that evening. She and my brother came over; and didn’t leave till we buried Inji. Who are you? Are you the kind that grieves intensely and quickly; or does your grief take time to reveal itself and leave? Does it ever leave? In the days that followed Inji’s death, I told myself and everyone else that I was over it. As I watched the palpable grief in the people I love, I told myself that I was different; somehow stronger. Not true. Dr Morton came over on Inji’s last morning. We asked if Inji had a chance to recover. He said “No”. He said: “If I don’t anaesthetize her now, she’ll be dead by tonight. But she’ll be in pain the whole day.” We debated whether to pull the children out of school, and ended up bringing my elder daughter back but leaving the younger one out of the whole thing. At 11.30, my elder daughter put Inji’s head on her lap. My mother poured Ganga jal into her mouth. Inji sipped it. THINKSTOCK

Mixed blessing: Getting a pet will teach your children compassion.

My father looked dazed. Everyone wept. Our friend, Sriram—a dog lover who simply showed up as friends do in times of crisis—said: “Watch her eyes. It helps you gain some closure.” So I stared into my dog’s eyes, watching for signs of pain or hurt. Her eyes remained dilated. Death would occur in a few seconds, said the doctor. I saw the light go out of Inji’s eyes. With my fingers, I closed them. We drove in a motorcade to Kengeri, an hour outside Bangalore, where a wonderful organization called People for Animals (www.peopleforanimalsbangalore.org) rescues wildlife and rehabilitates it. They also have a pet cemetery in a woody knoll. We buried Inji there with full honours and rites: four pall-bearers, sprinkled rice, her favourite foods—milk, bananas—and a jasmine garland. To those of you who are considering getting a pet, let me tell you my experience. Having a dog in the house forced my husband and I to walk together twice a day. It was the best 20 minutes of our relationship. Sans interruptions, we enjoyed the morning sunshine, the relative quiet, and talked about news and world affairs; about trees and philosophy. We met other dog owners and learnt the rhythms of our

street. Having a dog had an impact on our children but not always in pleasant, predictable ways. There were many days when I said nasty, awful things to them in an attempt to goad them to do more doggy chores. “We should have never got this bloody dog,” I would scream as they watched MasterChef Australia, when they ought to have been walking Inji. Having a pet is a lot of work. The benefits are hard to measure. Children curled into a ball with Inji; feeling good every morning because the silly dog wags its tail so hard—how to measure this? If you are considering a pet “for the children’s sake”, realize that it will not be idyllic. But it will teach your children compassion. Your child will suddenly notice other animals, birds, stray dogs, insects and trees and view them as an extension of your family. Your child might refuse to burst Diwali crackers because she is worried that the rockets flying to the sky will scare the birds. We want to get another dog, but not from a breeder. Rather, from shelters such as CUPA or Compassion Unlimited Plus Action. At the clinic, I watched French expats bring in beautiful crossbreeds with limpid eyes. Most were strays that had been

transformed by love into sleek pets. Every Indian city has organizations that place orphaned animals into loving homes. The Hindu carries photographs of puppies that need placement every week. If you are considering a pet, please consider adopting a robust stray—mongrels are healthier. If you define a well-lived life as having a variety of experiences, then get a pet. I have stared at death in my dog’s face and it isn’t pretty. It haunts me to this day. But it has also prepared me for other kinds of death. I have also experienced the kind of love that even my mother or children cannot give me. People who want to experience unconditional love should get a dog; but also be prepared to take it out to pee four times a day. It’s been six months. I miss Inji every day. Shoba Narayan’s family is debating when to get another dog. Two are ready to adopt one right now and two are not. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shobanarayan

L6 COLUMNS

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

Small comfort The one thing we learnt from ‘MasterChef Australia’: sometimes the simplest combina tions are the best

o MasterChef Australia is drawing to a close and the long winter evenings stretch out before us without Gary, George and Matt to keep us warm. How will we cope? For the past few months, millions of us have been glued to every moment of the 24 hopefuls’ journey from enthusiastic home cooks to sous-vide ninjas. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve howled at the injustice of Hayden being voted out. Our social lives have taken a hit, but at least we’ve started “plating up” the children’s tea, and every meal has become an invention test. Some of us are even talking in bad Australian accents (okay, that might just be me). I attended a dinner the other night in honour of one of the show’s chefs, Christine Manfield, and the guests (a fairly A-list Delhi crowd) were positively fawning. One local celebrity was seen begging to have his photo taken with her. Why has India gone Oz crazy? Why is Matt Preston popping up in our Star World ad breaks saying “namaste”? What does MasterChef Australia have that the Indian, British and American versions don’t? My theory is that apart from the fact that the producers wisely decided not to

hire Gordon Ramsay, it all comes down to the utter niceness, the Down Under good-blokeishness of the contestants, the judges and the chefs. There may be some clever editing involved, but we never see any backbiting or meanness, and the battles are always fought in the best possible spirit—the contestants even help each other, for goodness’ sake! The only downside is that 60 minutes of staring at all that food can make you a bit peckish. Some may see it as a cue to get in the kitchen and experiment with some molecular gastronomy. Personally, I reach for the biscuit tin, but this is one situation where a pack of Parle-G just won’t do. These lemon shortbread biscuits are the answer. This is a simple recipe, but as Gary, George and Matt frequently tell us, sometimes the simplest combinations are the best. Because there are so few ingredients, though, it’s important to use the finest. I used imported creamy French butter and large lemons from Thailand which are more mellow than the Indian nimbus. The shortbreads are perfectly buttery, crumbly and lemony, and they just might help console us through the dark days ahead.

Lemon Shortbread Makes about 24 Ingredients 250g flour (maida) 40g icing sugar 25g rice flour A pinch of salt 250g unsalted butter 1 tsp lemon zest, finely grated (it is important to only grate the zest and

Bitesized: (clockwise from left) The buttery, lemony short breads are a perfect antidote to winter gloom; use good quality butter; bake for 3040 minutes; cut out the cookies while still warm; and let them cool before icing. not the bitter white pith. For best results, use a Microplane) For the icing 125g icing sugar, sifted 1 tsp lemon zest, finely grated 60ml lemon juice Method Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Line a baking tin, approximately 30x20cm, with non-stick parchment paper. Sift the flour, icing sugar, rice flour, lemon zest and salt into a large bowl. Add butter and rub into the dry ingredients until it is evenly distributed. Because there is so much butter, you will end up with a soft, slightly sticky mixture.

Gently knead the mixture into a smooth ball on a lightly floured surface, then place on the parchment paper. With a rolling pin, or even fingertips, press the mixture to fit the baking tin. Make sure the shortbread is evenly spread and smooth on top. Bake for about 30-40 minutes, until the shortbread is cooked but still pale. To make the icing, mix the icing sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice until smooth. When the shortbread is baked, remove from the oven, and while it is still warm, cut into shapes using metal cutters or simply cut into bars with a knife. Lift the biscuits out of the tin and leave to cool on a wire rack before glazing the tops with icing.

* Shortbread is a great biscuit to give as a present because it stays for a couple of weeks. At home in Scotland, it is a traditional New Year, or “Hogmanay” gift. Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at Eatanddust.com Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com www.livemint.com For a video on how to bake shortbreads, visit www.livemint.com/shortbread.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011

Play

LOUNGE

The smart city New apps for smartphones could make civic agencies more efficient and transparent B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· an smartphones make our cities better? Earlier this month, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) launched an Android app developed indigenously to track potholes and show real-time progress on fixing them. The app is currently available only for Android phones with GPRS connections, so it’s limited in reach. BMC additional municipal commissioner Aseem Gupta says: “This will make it easy to lodge complaints. It is narrow right now,

but we have just begun; in time we will bring all kinds of issues and devices into the system to make it truly for the people.” Once you download the app, you take a picture of a pothole, and location data from the phone sends a map location along with the photo to BMC officials, so they know how severe the problem is. This also updates the Voiceofcitizen.com website, where users can track progress on potholes being fixed. You have to download the app from the website, since it isn’t on the Android Market yet. Whether someone will make the effort to take a photo is a separate

Mapped: A pothole marked by a user with the BMC’s Android app. issue, but this isn’t the first time a civic body has gone digital. In May 2010, the Delhi Police opened a Facebook account to help improve communication with residents of the Capital, and sought suggestions on traffic management. The page has 87,932 followers, and many people use it to post pictures

of traffic violations. Satyendra Garg, joint commissioner of police (traffic), says: “The Facebook page has been a very useful tool to communicate directly with the public. The force is not just the 5,000 officers, but every citizen on Facebook. People have been reporting a huge num-

ber of violations and everyone, even VIPs or policemen, have been reported by the public, and action has been taken quickly, efficiently and with transparency.” There are also several apps available now that weren’t created by the government but are of great use for people living in or visiting the cities they cover. Cheater Meter on iOS or Android (www.cheatermeter.in) is an app that converts meter readings into fares, for both rickshaws and taxis, and also tracks night charges. The app even spells out the rate phonetically in Hindi, so even if you don’t know the language, you can give the correct figure to the driver. Meter Down, Mumbai Taxi and Rickshaw Card are apps that offer similar functions with different interfaces. The Bestbus Route Finder app uses location information from your handset to help you use the Mumbai bus service. It tracks your movement, alerts you to your stop

and gives you the bus number you need to take. For the local train, there is m-Indicator in Mumbai, and Delhi Metro Navigator in the Capital. They offer timings and routes, and use location data to find the nearest stops. All these apps are free to download and use. In Chennai, volunteers can sign up on www.transparent chennai.com to download an app that tracks location data using phone GPS systems, to report civic issues. Project director Nithya V. Raman says: “Our goal is to create data so that the elected representatives can be held accountable in a concrete fashion. This is a first step in that direction.” Transparent Chennai will present this data to ward representatives and discuss feedback with the people there. The group plans to distribute kits online to make the public part of the civic process.

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011

Insider

LOUNGE t Talking Shelf: At Artitude, HSR Layout, Bangalore, available at www.shopo.in, www.afday.com, www.masalachaionline. blogspot.com, `2,800.

q Boogie Woogie Shelving System: From Magis, Italy, designed by Stefano Giovannoni, at Lista City, Akruti Sky Park Building, Bhulabhai Desai Road, Mumbai, `11,600 each, full system (12 boxes) approx. `1.39 lakh.

PICKS

u Step on Step Book shelf: Designed by Shahid Datawala, at Pallate Design Studio, Badamia Manor, Mahalaxmi, Mumbai, `88,600.

The bookkeepers Circles, squares, triangles—add geometry to your bookshelves B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

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q Pinjra Bookshelf: Inspired by Kashmiri lattice work pinjrakari, by Sandeep Sangaru, at Sangaru Design Studio, www.sangaru.com, `15,000.

q Hillside Bookshelf: By designer Claesson Koivisto Rune, at Zoligns Design Studio, Nizamuddin—West, New Delhi, `3.69 lakh.

q Cloud Bookshelf: From Cappellini, at Poltrona Frau Group Design Center, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai, `44,616. q Wally R: Bookcase on wheels, at IDUS, Kirti Nagar, New Delhi, approx. `60,000.

q Library Sofa Set: At Portside Café, Lado Sarai, New Delhi; and Fusion Access, Monica Bungalow, Old Cuffe Parade, Mumbai, `50,600.

q Zigzag Bookshelf: Tabletop or wall mounted, at L’Orange, Aundh, Pune, www. lorange.in, `2,499.

DIY

Shelf life All you need is imagination and a reliable carpenter B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

·········································· he other day, I walked into an author’s home and right into an overwhelming floorto-ceiling and wall-to-wall bookshelf, with a little ladder sheepishly reclining against the top-most shelf. Now that’s a lifetime of travelling, collecting and curating books. For those of us who share this love of books, making your own shelf might be an area of interest. Three people who’ve designed their own tell us how:

VINEETA NAIR

‘Tangram’ puzzles

Mobile boxes

Neha Shah, founder of graphics company Karigari Design Inc., Mumbai, decided to use the ancient Chinese puzzle art, tangram, to make a bookcase. A set of seven geometric shapes, including triangles, squares, parallelograms, can be rearranged in several ways to create characters and shapes. “Our tangram shelf looks like a man walking. It’s a statement, a subtle reminder to keep walking,” says Shah. She created the sketch of the puzzle on paper and then sat over it with the carpenter. “The most important thing is the proportion. When you’re recreating it as a bookshelf, you have to keep in mind how much space you have, and how big or small each block should be,” she says.

For those who like to keep changing things around the home, boxes and old crates are your best bet. Ashwiny Iyer, creative director at Leo Burnett, Mumbai, has a home which is a riot of colours. Iyer’s study has three different-sized, front-open, multicoloured boxes that make for mobile bookcases. “I didn’t want anything static. So I took old dabbas, fruit petis, or even drawers, refurbished them, painted and polished them, made them stand up and they worked as perfect bookcases that I can move around the house whenever I like,” says Iyer. ASHWINY IYER

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Gang plank Simplicity and accessibility were top-most in his mind when Zaheer Mirza, founder of advertising agency Doosra, Mumbai, designed the bookshelves in his home. “When I was looking for shelves, everything was too tedious; with doors, glass, feng shui and what not! So I decided to make my own. Two unfinished, un-sandpapered, wooden planks were painted black and polished, and then wallmounted with old fashioned bed clamps, giving a rustic look to the shelf. “I’m the sort of person who reads four books at a time, and I mostly have reference, coffeetables, non-fiction type of books. So an open, easily accessible rack, where you can just grab a book and plonk it back again, is the type of thing I wanted,” says Mirza.

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Business Lounge

LOUNGE SANJAY KHOSLA

Khosla and the chocolate factory BY S E E M A C H O W D H R Y seema.c@livemint.com

This crafty salesman has a simple threepoint plan to make you buy more chocolates, biscuits and powdered beverages

···························· anjay Khosla’s job may be that of a key thinker and strategist for Kraft Foods’ developing markets business, but ask this once-upon-a-time fast moving consumer goods sales guy what he loves best about his job and pat comes the reply: “Walking around markets across the world and seeing how they have changed and still remained the same.” We meet at the Polo Lounge, Hyatt Regency Delhi, a few days before Diwali. He’s on a two-day halt in the Capital, on his way to Singapore. It is a busy time for the Cadbury Kraft Foods India team (Kraft Foods bought over Cadbury in February 2010), with Diwali shopping and “kuch meetha ho jaaye” fervour all around. After ordering nimbu-pani, Khosla, 59, settles down to tell me that he has spent the better part of the morning visiting local markets in Hauz Khas and Green Park in south Delhi. He is full of tales of how even the local vendors were impressed with Cadbury Kraft’s focus on a core product—in this case, Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate. As it happens, the president, developing markets, of Kraft Foods—and one of the three key players in the company after the chairman—spent his youth traversing these areas, as a student of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. On a previous visit, he says, he even went hunting for the sardar ki jhuggi, which used to serve parathas outside IIT. It is easy to mistake Khosla for a professor of marketing science—he does after all conduct talks based on a paper (Growth through Focus: A Blueprint for Driving Profitable Expansion) he published with Mohanbir Sawhney, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management, in the Strategy + Business magazine—at US universities such as Northwestern and Georgetown, etc. He wears no necktie, his top shirt button is undone, he does not look at his iPhone even once during the interview, slips in and out of Hindi with a Punjabi twang as we chat, and is keen to ask questions while deftly deflecting any personal queries thrown at him. When he really gets down to talking, it is to hold forth on the virtual cycle of growth, the 5-10-10 formula and the winning-through-focus strategy. However, it would be a mistake to categorize him as a “pure” academic executive. Chicago-based Khosla, who worked with Fonterra Co-operative Group in New Zealand before he joined Kraft in 2007, is a mover and shaker who

IN PARENTHESIS Sanjay Khosla is an avid golfer and tennis player. Yet one sport that he misses out on, he says, is cricket. “One of the big problems of moving to the US is that cricket is not a wellknown sport here. I love cricket. I follow it all the time. I have tried all sorts of things to keep up, but the time difference is really hell.”

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

The power of nada: Khosla believes one way of stay ing focused is learning how to say no to many exciting brand extension plans.

has led the Kraft developing markets unit to show more than 34% growth in four years. The real reason for this success lies in just three simple rules, he says. “When I joined Kraft five years ago we were all over the place, planting flags all over the world, and had more than 100 brands. For the emerging markets section, we decided to focus on the 5-10-10 formula (five product categories—chocolate, biscuits, powdered beverages and coffee; 10 power brands within Kraft, such as Tang, Oreo and Cadbury; and 10 markets, including India, China).” For example, since chocolate was a key category and India a key market, it made sense for Kraft to buy Cadbury so that the company, which did not have much of a presence in countries like India, could gain a foothold here. “I have been experimenting with this concept for a while, and I have realized that the difference is only in implementation from country to country, not in the concept as a whole,” says Khosla, responding to a question on how he adapts this 5-10-10 formula to each country. He disapproves of a large number of innovations in one brand. “People do a large number of small things and they get very busy. Activities get confused with output, and that’s why I prefer a model where things are kept simple and focus is clear.” According to him, in the first half of this year, Cadbury has posted 40% growth in India. “Cadbury has been around for 50 years, so why is there a sudden spurt of growth?” asks Khosla, and then quickly gives the answer himself: “We focused on the core brand—Dairy Milk chocolate. Within that, we have small innovations like the Dairy Milk chocolate shots and that’s why you can see the numbers jump.” The second part of Khosla’s strategy is to get the balance right between the global and the local, or “Go Glocal”, as he calls it. “Earlier, everything at Kraft was centralized in Chicago, now it is all localized for this unit. Chicago is not the repository of superior knowledge all the time.” He uses the example of Oreo cookies and their dismal performance in China four years ago to illustrate how important it is to listen to what the locals are saying. “We were going to pull the brand out of China when I decided to do some market visits. Kraft had gone completely wrong there with ‘what’s good for America is good for all’. Shopkeepers were telling us that this American Oreo was ‘too big, too expensive and too sweet’. So we made it smaller, introduced small packages and made it less sweet and even introduced green tea Oreo,” he says. Today, China is the second largest consumer of Oreo after the US. The third and most important part, he says, is to unleash the

potential of people. “I believe in giving teams and their leaders a blank cheque and the freedom to use it within a framework. The idea is to encourage their entrepreneurial spirit and let them function as a small company within a big company, but as independently as possible.” The whole philosophy of transformation is that they don’t need to go back to Khosla or anyone in Chicago for decisions and can make their own choices. Khosla does sound like a dream boss. Yet he is quick to point out that this is exactly what his boss did for him. “I love this about her (Irene Rosenfeld). She gives me space to operate. I had complete freedom to pursue a strategy which was so different from what Kraft International was doing, so why would I not give this to my leaders?” He has specific ideas on what he looks for in the leaders he chooses to translate his vision: “I ask only two questions to myself: Can he or she transform and adapt to our focus areas and is he or she likely to be a team player? I don’t care much for superstars who are individual brats. I prefer people who can collaborate.” Khosla also makes it clear that while every leader has the freedom to try something new “within the framework”, he prefers it if the team abandons a particular strategy when it realizes that it is not working—and moves on. “The point is to take risks, but when you see it is not going well, have the courage to stop quickly as well. You cannot be emotionally involved because then you will keep saying let’s have one more try, and no, that does not work.” After graduating from IIT Delhi, Khosla joined Hindustan Lever (now Hindustan Unilever) and stayed with the group for 27 years, selling soaps, detergents and AXE deodorant. He worked in the group’s Indian and European markets, including London. He was part of the team that launched Wheel detergent in India, and even today he feels that this brand had a special learning for him. One of the most important lessons learnt at his Wheel tenure: “When you realize that you really have to go after a specific target, there’s no way you can win unless you focus resources which help you achieve just that and nothing else.” Looking back, perhaps this was the foundation of the winningthrough-focus strategy. Maybe, Khosla says, when he retires he will take up teaching full-time. For now, this big daddy of brands and strategy spends more than 15 days a month on the road and is focused on making sure that you and I consume more Tang Orange, Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolates, Bournvita and Oreo.

L10 COVER

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PROFILE

ARJUN RAMPAL:

HOW TO

WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE

What turned the supermodel into the Lady Gagatoting, Ecclestoneflaunting, hatebaiting man of the hour?

SHIVANGI KULKARNI/MINT

COURTESY ARJUN RAMPAL

Kaleidoscope: (clockwise from left) Rampal and wife Mehr Jesia; at the shoot of his TV show Love2HateU; playing showstopper for mentor Rohit Bal; and deejaying at the F1 afterparty in Delhi.

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

···························· or six years I had no money, and when I did make some money, Mehr and I would take the money and fly first class to Paris to chill. We took one day at a time. Because we knew better days would come. I still live like that,” drawls Arjun Rampal as he leans back on a plastic chair in his vanity van. He’s parked on location at Phoenix Mills, Mumbai, for his forthcoming television show Love2HateU, in which the actor brings together his celebrity friends—Chetan Bhagat, Madhur Bhandarkar and Farah Khan so far—and the people who love to hate them. The show will air on Star World

from Sunday, six days before he turns 39. He’s just met his own hater—stand-up comedian Farhan, who mocks Rampal for a living. Rampal is the kind of guy who likes to confront and clear the air. He asks Farhan why he hates him so much, asks if he should “slap him about a bit”. Rampal mocks him, his jokes rile Farhan, yet Farhan is a convert. The show itself is a metaphor for the man. Rampal shrugs off the labels: Gudda’s (designer Rohit Bal’s) blue-eyed boy, Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) camper, industry nice guy, pushover. His elder daughter’s name, Mahika, is tattooed prominently on his right bicep. Two packs of Marlboros lie next to his iPad and his MAC foundation. His face is

pinched with exhaustion. It has been a week since Ra.One released, he hosted the party to put parties on the map, the Formula One (F1) finale, and followed it with his TV show debut shoot—not what he had foreseen as a supermodel at the age of 21. No sooner had Lady Gaga brought Rampal’s painstakingly carved stone marigolds on the piano alive, than socialites began to write columns on how long, and how well, they had known this success in the making. Yet Rampal, in many flops till he turned SRK-sponsored villain in Om Shanti Om (2007), could easily have been an also-ran. He pulls out his iPad and takes us through the minute details of his planning for the F1 party: the

inspirations for the floral walk-in, laser lights, the timing of each trapeze artiste, the projection walls, profiles of every Sports Illustrated model selected to play hostess, security, music—six months of sheer aesthetic orchestration. It is a reflection of the attention and energy he’s invested in his Delhi hot spot: the members-only club Lap, run in partnership with restaurateur A.D. Singh, done up by designer Sandeep Khosla; where six DJs—one for each night of the week—play a progressive House sound and where Bollywood music is banned; where an eightmember secret committee selects an A-list crowd; and where Rampal occasionally deejays too. Rampal has emerged a shrewd

businessman, quite unlike the pretty-face reputation of his modelling years. “The tag ‘beautiful face’ had nothing to do with me,” he says. His work now, says Rampal, is but an extension of his philosophy of partying: “The whole experience of partying is more than just standing around holding a drink, dancing to a DJ and having a stupid conversation. It has to be a visual treat. It can easily become a circus with these trapeze artistes flying around. You should think you’ve seen something and do a double take and be mesmerized by it. It should be magical. If you can transport the customer from one space into a whole different one, you can spin it,” he says. Over the years, Rampal has

PRODIP GUHA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

quietly created a circle of influence that spans fashion, high society, film, industry and politics. His connections are not dependent on each other; he weaves them deftly and on a one-toone basis. His friendship with former IPL chairman Lalit Modi stems from Modi’s wife Minal, once designer Tarun Tahiliani’s muse, who was a friend of Rampal’s wife Mehr Jesia, rather than through SRK. One misstep will not bring the structure down. That is social insurance. Rampal is currently in talks with New York-based hotelier Vikram Chatwal to expand Lap internationally. He is also relaunching his own production house, Chasing Ganesha Films, dormant since his embarrassing 2006 remake of Just Like Heaven—I See You. Rampal has survived the scandal of Jessica Lal murder-accused Manu Sharma caught partying at Lap while on bail in 2009. Lap remains a rare nightclub with an enviable 24-hour permit in a city with a midnight deadline. His friendship with SRK continues despite his relationship with other camps like the Bachchans’. Rampal survives all this because of sheer goodwill. Both friends and rivals jump to the defence of how “above board” he is. “It is remarkable that Sameer

Gaur, owner of the Jaypee Group and a member at Lap, called on me. He could easily have given the F1 party to international planners like all F1s do,” Rampal points out. Why do powerful people love him? Undeniable good looks apart, Rampal is credited with the “X factor”. His mentor Bal explains what drew him to discover Rampal 18 years ago at the once-hip Ghungroo nightclub in Delhi: “Even as a student at Hindu College, he was a star. He is one of the most beautiful faces in the world today—he has an intensity to him. But then, aren’t there many beautiful people in the world? “Arjun is well-rounded. He is genuine in an industry of fakes. He has a great upbringing, he reads, he’s a sporty guy’s guy, he’s a cricket buff, he is the kind of friend who is one phone call away.” Rampal, who offers his chair to our photographer and waits till someone fetches him another, stands out in an industry of egomaniacs. The high EQ has helped him navigate an industry potholed with camps. Rangita Pritish Nandy, creative director of PNC, claims ignorance when reminded that PNC had signed on Rampal in 2009 when the company was reportedly on SRK’s “black list”. The media had debated if Rampal would be “forgiven”. “It’s not an issue any of us were aware of,” Nandy says. “Arjun is the kind of guy with blinkers on. He is so focused that when you work with him, only the task at hand is of importance. He is not about camps. Arjun is not a pushover. He states his opinion, and yet he has this amazing quality which

sets people at ease.” Her brother Kushan will make his as yet untitled directorial debut with Rampal and Amitabh Bachchan. Rampal owns a practical nice guy-ness—stepping into We Are Family for film-maker Karan Johar when John Abraham walked out, being a last-minute show-stopper for Bal, delivering first-aid to an injured Ranbir Kapoor at Bandra’s Gold’s Gym, pushing the launch of Lap till SRK could make it back after his shoot for My Name Is Khan in the US. “I never believed in camps. I have a few friends who are closer than others, but I’ve been lucky to have a work relationship with actors where your chemistry is good. It’s important to create that because that is what is going to be seen on screen. If you can’t create it and there is friction, or it’s too superficial, it won’t work,” Rampal says. His pushing the comfort zone for friends and rivals makes them stand by him. Rampal uses his acute awareness of his own weak spots to disarm you: “The first time I saw the rushes of Moksha, I instantly knew I was really, really bad. I

“

was taken aback. I was really good at maybe riding that horse, but when I had to stand, I would stand like a model. For so many years, I had trained my brain to react in a certain way to the camera. I swore on that day that I would never model again,” he says. At the time of making this decision, Rampal had no clue it would take six years for his first film to be screened in 2001. “Even though my phone would ring and I’d be asked to model, and even though I was running out of money, I had made that decision, so I stuck with it.” As he watched film after film flop, Rampal kept asking himself why he wasn’t able to get it right. Rampal’s career has been repeatedly resuscitated from near-death experiences by his consistent ability to beat himself up with self-doubt. “Mehr and I would eat veg food and watch the dog eat the only non-veg we could afford. My luck just didn’t improve. One film tanked after another. For those six years, I had no money. I realized I was just listening to too many people. I had to cut that off.” Rampal withdrew, changed his friends’ circle and slowly began to “get it right”. Realizing that his greatest quality lay not so much in acting, but in forging bonds, Rampal began to invest in people, instead of in films. “In the beginning, I would stay a lot to myself because I didn’t know the industry at all. Then slowly, I started meeting likeminded people: Farhan (Akhtar), Shah Rukh. I had met Mr Bachchan, who is extremely fond of me and whom I am extremely fond of. The first time I worked with Farhan was the first time I felt I was working with a person in a like-minded space. That triggered off a good friendship. We call each other Adi and Jo still. With Shah Rukh, it’s similar. We became friends. I am fond of Gauri and the children, and it became more than a work relationship. These things happen coincidentally. I just believe that whoever you work with, you need to extend a lot more than just the work relationship, especially when you are doing creative work,” Rampal says. Suddenly, Om Shanti Om earned him acclaim and Rock On!! earned him a National Award and a Filmfare Award a year later in 2008. Farah Khan, director of Om Shanti Om, explains why she offered the film to Rampal, who did not have a commendable filmography to his credit at the time: “At first, Rampal refused the film. He was quite worried because it was an outright black character with no shades of grey. On my part, I needed a face that the audience would believe Deepika’s character would leave an SRK for! I find Rampal immensely watchable, and unlike a lot of actors who sign B-grade films out of desperation, Rampal, even when he was down, was not overexposed. Even now, he is a niche actor and he maintains that selectivity. Arjun may have got awards for Rock On!! but I would like to take credit for freeing the actor inside him.” Rampal’s contact base is not restricted to the high and mighty alone. It is an army enlisted across industries and time zones. Thus, Shashank Dive, who did

The first time I saw the rushes of ‘Moksha’, I instantly knew I was really, really bad. I was taken aback. I was really good at riding that horse, but when I had to stand, I would stand like a model.

the sets for Rock On!!, worked on Lady Gaga’s sets. Atul Jagpal, who did the laser lighting for Rampal’s first stage show overseas, Heart Throbs, did his laser lights. Award-winning space designer Sumant Jaikishan, who once created catwalks for many designers, did the interiors at the F1 do. Bal explains this is a quality that has taken Rampal far. “Arjun gets it right. Few people do. How much to party, how hard to work. He gets people. He gets circumstances. He carries people with him.” Rampal always pulls back just in time. It is a philosophy that prevents him from going over the cliff when reports of being overshadowed by SRK in Ra.One surface. Rampal’s acting career began to revive as his choices began to be dictated by the friendships he forged. “‘I think true talent lies in the choices you make’. (Robert) De Niro said that and it makes a lot of sense to me now,” Rampal says. When he realized his own marked inability to fake an emotion on screen, he turned it to his advantage by befriending the problem. When Rampal played Ranbir’s brother in Raajneeti, the two had met only a few times. “Both of us were a bit nervous to be working in a multi-starrer. We were in Bhopal. I took him inside a room and I said, ‘Okay now, sit down. Tell me all your secrets and I will tell you the same: whatever you want to know, and it will stay with me. But we need to be on that level with each other to be able to play brothers, otherwise how the hell are we going to play brothers? It’s going to be so fake’.” In two days, they had developed a genuine camaraderie. Raajneeti won Rampal a Filmfare award in 2010. Rampal’s friends rely on him for his sense of “balance”. Rampal insists: “I can walk away from anything any time. It’s scary sometimes. It comes from the spiritual side of me. The only thing I can never walk away from is my children.” Keeping his family as motivation, Rampal explains, is key to his professional ambitions: “Having kids changed me professionally. Your children are the nicest motivation to have—it keeps you honest in what you do. Children just open your perception of life so drastically.” His wife Mehr, who fiercely keeps the media out, plays a huge role too. “We all survive on confidence. It’s what gets you up in the morning and allows you to face the world. The kind of confidence Mehr has in me, and the level of honesty, defines me.” Rampal says a secure man is simply a man who doesn’t have a goal. And his constant struggle is to find new goals. He has walked away from success before; as a supermodel by the age of 21, when he headed to Dharamsala to spend six months with monks. “I’m glad I was part of that revolutionary period in fashion. But I wanted to go to a place where people didn’t know me and see if I would still get work.” In London, he found no work. In New York, he had no tear sheets and Fashion Week largely ignored him. “I said, ‘Ok, just give me a shot. If I get some shows great, if not, I accept defeat and go’; because I could not survive there any more. Luckily, I landed Donna Karen, Hugo Boss, Thierry Mugler, and made something like $40,000-50,000 (around `19.6-24.5 lakh now).” Instead of building on it and realizing his dream of going to New York University’s film school, he returned to India and took up director Ashok Mehta’s offer of a debut in Moksha. Circles, even circles of success, are meant to be broken, Rampal insists. Evolution is breaking a pattern. “Success,” he says, “is a perspective.” For some, that means hero, for others, villain. For some, it’s faking brotherhood, for others, acquiring it.

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PROFILE

ARJUN RAMPAL:

HOW TO

WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE

What turned the supermodel into the Lady Gagatoting, Ecclestoneflaunting, hatebaiting man of the hour?

SHIVANGI KULKARNI/MINT

COURTESY ARJUN RAMPAL

Kaleidoscope: (clockwise from left) Rampal and wife Mehr Jesia; at the shoot of his TV show Love2HateU; playing showstopper for mentor Rohit Bal; and deejaying at the F1 afterparty in Delhi.

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

PRODIP GUHA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

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Travel

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

RAMKI SREENIVASAN

NAGALAND

In the name of the bird

Driven to the point of extinction in Nagaland, the Hornbill now lends its identity to a great cultural revival B Y R AMKI S REENIVASAN ························· agaland” and “Naga” invoke stereotypical images of smiling tribal warriors in full battle gear—a stereotype that holds true at the Hornbill Festival, to be held from 1-7 December. In 2000, the state government started the festival to enable the different tribes of Nagaland to understand each other’s customs and culture better. The result is a festival in which all the 16 tribes of the state congregate in traditional dress and perform their folk music and dances at a single location—the Naga Heritage Village, Kisama, 12km from Kohima—over a week. The festival was named after a bird widely respected and depicted in folklore, after many unsuccessful attempts to find a name acceptable to everyone. Ironically, the bird is almost extinct in Nagaland, thanks to a hunting culture that is deeply ingrained. The government has been trying to persuade the tribes—not always successfully—to use fake tail feathers in headgear instead of killing hornbills. When it started, the festival only used to feature traditional games such as the greased bamboo pole-climbing contest and folk songs, most of them about farming or war—the Naga tribes have traditionally fought each other, though they united against the invading Japanese, who were trying to break out of Myanmar and into India, during World War II. The Battle of the Tennis Court, 1944, in

Kohima marked the limit of the—and the last attempt at a—the Japanese advance into India. British and Indian troops jointly pushed the Japanese back in a battle Lord Louis Mountbatten later described as “probably one of the greatest battles in history...in effect the Battle of Burma”. Along with traditional songs, games, food and dances, the festival now includes the Hornbill Literature Festival (on 5 December this year) that focuses on the state’s writers and poets. Another aspect of the festival, the Hornbill National Rock Contest is a rock show that is gaining prestige, with bands from across the country vying for cash prizes. It is quite possibly Nagaland’s first indigenous stage musical. Spanning seven days, it is also the longest rock festival in the country. Applications for it involve sending a recorded demo to hornbillmusic@gmail.com, before 10 November each year (keep it in mind for next year’s show) and selected bands can apply for free dormitory accommodation. If rock is not your thing, try the hugely popular Hornbill Motor Rally or the Designer’s Contest, which puts designers and models from across the North-East on a single platform. And you thought Nagaland was going to be just about the birds. Ramki Sreenivasan is a Bangalore-based nature photographer and wildlife conservationist. Write to lounge@livemint.com

TRIP PLANNER/NAGALAND Air India and Jet Airways Konnect have direct flights to Dimapur from Kolkata. You can then travel to the state capital, Kohima (around 70km from there), by road. If you prefer travelling by train, the Dibrugarh Rajdhani Express and the Brahmaputra Mail run from New Delhi to Dimapur. The Dibrugarh Express and the Kamrup Express run from Kolkata to Dimapur. To Guwahati

New Delhi Kolkata INDIA

Mokokchung

NAGALAND Dimapur

Kohima

Permits

Domestic tourists need an Inner Line Permit. It can be issued by the deputy resident commissioner, Nagaland House, New Delhi; deputy resident commissioner, Nagaland House, Kolkata; assistant resident commissioners in Guwahati and Shillong; and the deputy commissioner of Dimapur, Kohima and Mokokchung. Applications for permits can be downloaded from www.hornbillfestival.com/index.php?option =com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=38 As of 1 January, most foreign tourists do not require a Restricted Area Permit (RAP)/Protected Area Permit (PAP) to enter Nagaland. Previously, tourists had to travel in groups of at least four and were allowed to visit all 11 district headquarters and specified places with this permit, valid for 10 days, with the option of extending it for up to a month. The new rules require foreigners to register themselves at the foreigners registration office of the district they visit within 24 hours of arrival, though Pakistani and Chinese nationals still require the RAP/PAP permits. The change in rules is temporary, and will remain in effect only till January.

Stay

Most people prefer to stay around Dimapur, which has better hang-outs, nightlife and hotel options. But in Kohima, closer to the venue of the Hornbill Festival, you could stay at The Heritage, which is the old district commissioner’s bungalow. You could also try the Orchid Boutique Hotel or Razhu Pru, which is a pre-independence heritage homestead converted into a hotel by owner Jesmina Zeliang. Visit a Kohima village known as Barra Basti, the cemetery for World War II British and Japanese troops, the Catholic cathedral at Aradura Hill and the Naga State Museum. The Japfu Peak, 15km away, is the second highest peak in Nagaland. Accessibility Kohima is essentially a hilly area, so be prepared to walk uphill a lot. Alcohol is not freely available in Nagaland, but you can try the local rice beer. English is the state language, and a few Nagas speak Hindi too, so language should not be a problem. For festival details, dates and hotel options in the vicinity, visit www.hornbillfestival.com GRAPHIC

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

In form: (clockwise from above) Women from the Zeliang tribe have some of the most exquisite headgear at the festival; an Ao warrior sips rice beer from a wine vessel made the traditional way, out of a gourd; this warrior’s ornaments are fashioned out of bird feathers and beads; and Yimchunger warriors from Tuensang district entering the arena to perform traditional dances and songs.

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NOSTALGIA

Memories etched in gold PHOTOGRAPHS

A family member of the British firm that ran the Kolar Gold Fields returns to the town where he spent his early childhood

New coat: The Kolar Gold Fields Club’s façade may have been painted recently but its interiors bring the past alive.

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

···························· ou’ve kept these for all these years?” Patrick Taylor, 63, asks the secretary of the Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) Club as he walks by a wall of framed photographs of all the partners and officers of John Taylor and Sons, the British firm that ran the gold mines in KGF for 72 years from 1884. London-based Taylor is the great grandson of John Taylor, who started the systematic mining of gold in the area, and the son of Arthur Taylor, who was in charge of the mines when they were handed over to the government of India in 1956. “That’s my uncle,” he mumbles over his shoulder to his wife Heather, who has joined him on this trip to KGF, 100km from Bangalore. That era is a beautiful blur in Taylor’s mind—the family left the town when he was 8. The town is today dotted with colonial bungalows and canopy trees. Ever so often, one may chance upon mineshafts that were its bread and butter for more than a century. Joseph Susainathan, 87, who served as caretaker and bartender at the KGF Club for 40 years, volunteers nuggets of information from “those times” as Taylor identifies the men on the wall. “If you ever decide to sell these, you know whom to call,” Taylor tells Nathan S., the current secretary of the club. It all began when Taylor’s elder sister Anthea visited India five years ago. “She gave me this book on KGF. I read it and my itch to come to India intensified,” says

Taylor, referring to the book written by a former KGF resident, Bridget White Kumar, titled Kolar Gold Fields—Down Memory Lane. The book, published in 2009, talks about the history of KGF and then goes on to Kumar’s personal account of her life in the town, the culture and the people who made KGF. “I have many happy memories of my early life in India, and for me this will definitely be a trip down memory lane. It will be greatly enhanced if I can have the benefit of learning from your knowledge of the place that was the foundation of my life,” Taylor wrote in a letter to Kumar, asking if she would join him on a tour of KGF. She obliged. “He always talked about it, but life just never allowed us to visit,” says Heather. Treading away from the family trade of mining, Patrick studied to be a chartered accountant and worked as one for several years before moving to radio and publishing mid-career. Driving through KGF, Patrick has the occasional flash of recognition. “You’ll have to pardon me for not remembering too much,” he says, almost apologetic about the immense attention he is getting. Once called “Little England”, KGF is now a ghost of its former self, its prosperity a distant memory. After the government took over the mines in 1956, it tried to run them for the next 45 years—it even formed the Bharat Gold Mines Ltd (BGML), a public sector unit, in 1972 for this. But recurring losses forced closure in 2001. Today,

ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

Black and white era: (clockwise from above) Patrick Taylor at the Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) Club; looking at photographs of his family and officers who worked at the KGF with Joseph Susain athan (in pink shirt); and the KGF Club was set up 1885. employment is scarce in this area: Over 10,000 men and women travel every day to Bangalore in the jam-packed Swarna Express, the world’s longest passenger train, for work. Repeated talk of reviving the mines brings hope to the residents. “My father was proud of what the family had done here in India. While I firmly believe that every country should run itself, on coming back here, I do feel a certain amount of sadness on seeing this town fading away,” says Taylor, driving by mineshafts that are now locked and closed to the public. KGF was the first in the country to get electricity almost 110 years ago; it is said to have been one of the first towns to get cemented roads. Several colonial bungalows remain, as do the skeletons of the mineshafts. Susainathan, or Susai as his British bosses called him, is at home in the club. “I used to make the best cocktails, I still can,” says Susainathan, his eyes gleaming at the thought of evenings of cocktails and dances. He remembers Taylor. “I went over to his

house when his parents hosted evening parties, and once had fallen sick from eating too many cherries,” Susainathan tells a surprised Taylor. Dressed for the occasion in formal pants and a shirt with a tie and tiepin, Susainathan is adhering to the dress code that was in force when the “dorais” (superiors in Tamil) spent evenings there. Nathan butts in, “When we were young he used to shoo us away if we tried to come into the club.” “Children were not allowed,” Susainathan clarifies. The club’s façade may have been painted recently but its interiors, with the wooden flooring and trophies of wild animals from game hunts lining the wall, bring the past alive. Visitors may walk through, but the facilities at the club, which has a 12-hole golf course, can be used only by members.

Taylor’s first home in KGF is today a convent. He points out his bedroom, the mango tree outside and the road where he waited for a school bus. “I recall a few incidents, like the time I ran my hand through a glass window and cut it,” he says, holding his arm out to show us the scar. His family moved to a new bungalow in 1952. Today, it is in bad shape, home to a barely functioning BGML office. “I have several photographs of the house that is now the convent, but none from this house,” says Taylor after a brief walk-through. “There is so much more to see, which means I have to come back soon,” he says before leaving.

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Books

LOUNGE NIK WHEELER/SYGMA/CORBIS

EXCERPT | NARCOPOLIS

On Shuklaji Street

DIVYA BABU/MINT

An exclusive look into Jeet Thayil’s debut novel, which plunges into the fever dreams of 1970s’ Bombay

Jeet Thayil was born in Kerala, India, in 1959 and educated in Hong Kong, New York and Bombay. He is a performance poet, songwriter and guitarist, and has published four collections of poetry. He is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008). He currently lives in New Delhi.

efore Dimple came to be called Zeenat, she worked part-time for Rashid and disappeared every evening to the hijra’s brothel. I smoked at her station even if other pipes were free, and we talked the way smokers talk, horizontally, with long pauses, our words so soft they sounded like the incomprehensible phrases spoken by small children. I asked the usual foolish questions. Is it better to be a man or a woman? Dimple said: For conversation, better to be a woman, for everything else, for sex, better to be a man. Then I asked if she was a man or a woman and she nodded as if it was the first time she’d been asked. She was about twenty-five then and she had a habit in those days of shaking the hair into her eyes and smiling for no reason at all, a sweet smile as I remember, with no hint there of the changes that would overtake her. She said: Woman and man are words other people use, not me. I’m not sure what I am. Some days I’m neither, or I’m nothing. On other days I feel I’m both. But men and women are so different, how can one person be both? Isn’t that what you’re thinking? Well I’m both and I’ve learned some things, to my cost, the kind of thing you’re better off not knowing if you mean to live in the world. For example I know something about love and how lovers want to consume and be consumed and disappear into each other. I know how they yearn to make two equal one and I know it can never be. What else? Women are more evolved biologically and emotionally, that’s well known and it’s obvious. But they confuse sex and the

spirit; they don’t separate. Men, as you know, always separate: they separate their human and dog natures. And then she said, I’d like to tell you more about it, about the family resemblance between men and dogs, because I have plenty to say, as you may have guessed, but what would b e t h e p o i n t ? T here’s little chance you’d understand, after all you’re a man. She’d learned English by conversing with customers and she was teaching herself to read. She knew enough of the alphabet to recognize some of the words in the newspapers and film magazines that came her way, or the paperback novels forgotten by customers at the khana, or the print on detergent packets and toothpaste tubes. Bengali gave her books sometimes, usually history, but also philosophy, geography, and illustrated biographies with titles like Great Thinkers of the Twentieth Century and One Hundred Great Men of the World. He found the books in the raddi shops around Shuklaji Street, which was a centre of the trade in used paper, rags, toys, junk of all kinds. He gave her books and she read in secret, because she didn’t like to be seen reading. She read the way an illiterate person reads. She liked to look at the covers and trace the title with a finger, and if she was able to make sense of a line or a word, it gave her a thrill. I was stretched out, the khana empty in the dead hour of the afternoon, when Dimple asked what kind of book I was reading. It’s not a book, I said, it’s a magazine and this is a story about an Indian painter who lives in London. ‘Time. What a big name for a small book. Is your painter famous?’ ‘Here, no, in England, yes. He’s a school dropout. No, I have it wrong: he was expelled for making pornographic murals in the boys’ toilet. He put himself through art school and won a scholarship to Oxford. The genteel British expected him to be some kind of Hindu scholar mystic. Instead, it says here, he paints Christ with more authority than

‘Narcopolis cultivates for us a glamorous world which is simultaneously fantastical yet highly realistic. Jeet Thayil has written a work we can place on our shelves next to Roberto Bolaño, next to G. V. Desani and Hubert Selby . . . Completely fascinating and told with a feverish and furious necessity.’ Alan Warner

‘Jeet Thayil’s Bombay is a city dreaming troubled dreams, and Narcopolis will change the way you imagine it.’ Hari Kunzru

Watching, writing: At a brothel in Mumbai in 1974; and (left) Jeet Thayil, the author of Narcopolis.

Wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my . . . Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid’s opium room the air is thick with voices and ghosts: Hindu, Muslim, Christian. A young woman holds a longstemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. Here, they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. In the broken city, there are too many to count.

Design by Faber Illustration by Jimmy Zombie

Narcopolis is a rich, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. Stretching across three decades, with an interlude in Mao’s China, it portrays a city in collision with itself. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.

www.faber.co.uk

499

British painters.’ ‘Read.’ ‘“Newton Pinter Xavier’s art is Catholic guilt exploded to devastating effect. He doesn’t paint as much as eviscerate and disembowel. His altered Christs are more powerful than Bacon’s because they come at us with no frame of reference, or none that we are able to recognize in a terrestrial context. They are adrift of history. As for geography, they remain firmly outside the purview of the British isles, and, I suspect, that of the Indian subcontinent. They drip sex, heresy and indiscriminate readings from the psychopathology of everyday life, they.”’ ‘Enough, stop, it’s too much. Let me see the pictures.’ The editors had thought to include several reproductions of Xavier’s paintings. There was a gory Christ figure wrapped in thorns the size of railroad ties, the figure appearing puny and abused against a backdrop of blood splatter. There was a selfportrait. And there were two pitiless nudes, soft white bodies spreadeagled on stainless steel, dead skin puckered in the harsh fluorescent light. Dimple was silent as she looked at the pictures. Then she handed the magazine back, squinting at me as if she couldn’t see. She said, He’s too angry to think. He’s so angry he’s homicidal. He wants to make everything ugly. He wants to kill the world. She said, How can you trust a man like that?

How can you agree with him when he says that people are sick and deserve to die? After a while, she asked if I would read something else and she reached under her pallet and produced a textbook wrapped with brown paper in the schoolboy way, The New Combined Textbook for NonChristians: History & Moral Science Examination Syllabus. Under the title was the author’s name: S.T. Pande, Professor of History, University of Baroda. She held the book out to me and turned to a page she’d marked and I read a few lines. ‘“The founder of Christianity was the eponymous Christ, Jesus, whose personality, manic and magnetic in equal proportions, served a radical agenda that sought to overthrow the world’s hierarchical social orders. His radicalism, which manifested itself most prominently in the guise of mystic uttering, can best

be encapsulated by the following indirect quote: ‘Be not content with this state of things.’ He was possessed of a sharp tongue that aimed its barbs at priests, the rich, politicians, usurers, Jews, Gentiles, foes and friends. Some say his special gift was indiscriminate truth telling. Others say it was his curse. He was born of Mary, virgin wife and mother, who was blessed with a lovely pear-shaped face and whose devotees address her in the following manner: Hail Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen! ‘“Jesus was, among other things, an unlicensed medical practitioner who could cure the sick with nothing more than a single touch of his right index finger. Whether this ability was of divine provenance or simply a matter of being adept in the use of herbs and plants is open to conjecture. What cannot be disputed is the miraculous effect he

had on the sick and the dying. This is why diseased people became Christians, and the poor too; in other words, the lowest of the low converted to Christianity because they found in it a balm to counteract the casteridden ways of the world.”’ Was this Professor Pande’s style, I wondered, to write as if he’d spent days and nights with Jesus and Mary, taking notes, accumulating the privileged information he was now sharing with us, his lucky readers? I told Dimple that the Professor, if that is what he was, seemed to me an unreliable source, though he was entertaining enough. I said there was nothing wrong with being unreliable. Who wasn’t? What, in any case, was the point in being reliable, like a dog or automobile or armchair? I said it was fine with me, as long as he didn’t call himself a historian and moral scientist. Dimple wasn’t interested. She was a story addict, the kind of reader—if she had been able to read—who hated to get to the end of a book. So I held Professor Pande’s book open on my chest and I continued. ‘“Jesus was crucified in a very cruel way, but he died smilingly. His happy face had a great effect on his disciples and so did the miracles he performed. In fact, he was a consummate performer: no matter what the circumstances he managed several performances a week. He once fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish only.”’ Dimple said, ‘Five loaves of bread and two fish, which means with half a dozen fish he could have fed all the poor of Bombay, no, no, of course not, just the poor of Shuklaji Street. Even so, he should have been born in India.’ Excerpted from Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil, published by Faber and Faber, exclusively represented by Penguin India, 304 pages, `499. Narcopolis will be released on 5 December. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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REVIEW | THE LETTERS OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY

THE READING ROOM

Ernest before Papa ERNEST HEMINGWAY PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION/JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY LIBRARY

The first volume of Hemingway’s letters reveals the impetuous young man before his glorious Paris years

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

···························· nterest in Ernest Hemingway—the first literary love of so many readers—never seems to recede. On the heels of a cameo in Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s Paris-inthe-1920s nostalgia trip, and Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961, Paul Hendrickson’s warts-and-all biography, comes The Letters of Ernest Hemingway—1907-1922, the first of 12 volumes—12!—of Hemingway’s complete letters, 85% of which have never been published. The first edition finds the author during his apprenticeship, before In Our Time, his first published book. This was also before he met F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the lost generation luminaries he’s most commonly associated with, and before he adopted the pompous nickname “Papa”. Much of the material contained was made possible by the 2009 opening of the archive at Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s Cuba redoubt, and by the efforts of the editors, Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, in tracking down these letters from libraries and collectors. The letters in the first volume informed much of In Our Time and A Farewell to Arms, making them of interest to fans, scholars and completists. The early letters only hint at the brawny, modern writing that would make Hemingway’s name. They reveal his love of fishing, hunting and the outdoors—contained here is a graphic description of the thrashing of a porcupine with a woodsman’s axe by 11-yearold Ernie that would find its way into what could be his first short story, self-published months later in a home-made volume. Curiosities like this aside, the earliest letters feel like the palate-wetter before the entrée that is World War I, when, at 19,

Recovering from war: Hemingway as a young man in Europe, where he fought briefly in World War I. the author served as an ambulance driver on the Italian front. From his account, Hemingway had a blast during the war. To a colleague at The Kansas City Star, where he had been a cub reporter, Hemingway wrote: “Having a wonderful time!!! Had my baptism of fire my first day here when an entire munition plant exploded… I go to the front tomorrow. Oh boy!!!” Hemingway’s time at the front would last only six days; he was hit 227 times in the legs by shrapnel from a trench mortar round. “My pants looked like somebody had made currant jelly in them and then punched holes to let the pulp out,” he reported to his family, in one of the finest and longest letters in the collection. “I’ll have to learn to walk again,” he said And walk he did, but not before what sounds like a splendid vacation. “They’re going to send me down to the Riviera to convalesce after I get well so I can walk, so I’ll get some sea fishing and boating and swimming…” Indeed, war is hell. (To be fair, Hemingway was decorated for wartime valour.) It was also during this period that Hemingway entered into a doomed romance with Agnes von Kurowsky, the nurse on whom he based Catherine Barkley, the heroine of A Farewell to Arms. After the war, Hemingway rededicated himself to state-

side journalism and fishing, but quickly set his sights on Europe, where the low cost of living would allow him to write fiction. What’s “the use of trying to live in such a goddamn place as America when there is Paris and Switzerland and Italy,” he wrote persuasively to a friend. Before commencing one of the most storied literary expat lives, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, notorious now for allowing a suitcase full of the near entirety of Hemingway’s writing to date to be stolen at Paris’ Gare de Lyon station in 1922. Hemingway’s letters to Richardson are the most conspicuous absence here, Richardson having burned them after discovering her husband’s extramarital dalliances and the couple’s subsequent divorce in 1927. Hemingway arrived in Paris with letters of introduction to the likes of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Beach, proprietress of Shakespeare and Company, the book store that served as a focal point for the literary set. It’s here that the Hemingway of the popular imagination begins to take shape. In one gem, Hemingway recounts his sparring sessions with the comparatively meek Pound, who “has developed a terrific wallop, I can usually cross myself though before he lands them and when he gets too tough I dump him on the floor.”

TABISH KHAIR

PRIZING LOCAL TALENT Nordic Nobel The Nobel Prize for literature is probably the only major “literary” prize that sometimes turns the spotlight on poetry. Otherwise, barring one or two poetry prizes that get occasional media attention in delimited and largely national contexts—such as the TS Eliot Prize—most of the so-called international “literary” prizes basically focus on prose fiction, and even there almost always on novels. As such, one has to commend the Nobel committee for choosing to bestow this year’s laurel on the great Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer. Bloodaxe Books, which had published an excellent selection of Tranströmer’s verse—carefully translated into English by Robin Fulton—about a decade ago, has brought out a New Collected Poems to mark the occasion. This includes some recent poems that had appeared in translation in the US but were not included in the previous Bloodaxe edition, and a short prose autobiography. Reading the collection, one is struck by how Scandinavian a poet Tranströmer is: This is another thing in favour of this year’s Nobel Prize. Tranströmer, like most good poets, is locally situated to an extent that few successful novelists tend to be today: it is not just where he lives (mostly Stockholm) but how he writes and what he writes about. His nature poems, for instance, can be appreciated by all of us, but they do assume a special depth if one has experienced “nature” in Scandinavia. For instance, take even a simple stanza like this one: “Further north you can see from a summit the blue endless carpet of pine forest/ where the cloud shadows/ are standing still./ No, are flying.” But that realization, in a non-European like me, also results in the gnawing of a doubt. Would any non-European writer—poet or not—be awarded a Nobel Prize for his or her specificity? Would it, for instance, even go to Mahasweta Devi, whose fiction is far more specifically located than most novels today? I doubt it: Ranging from Rabindranath Tagore (Gitanjali, as W.B. Yeats and others championed it) to Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee (each of them a great writer in his own way), the Nobel has tended to go to non-European writers only if they are seen as “universal” enough.

Wild West

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway—19071922: Cambridge University Press, 550 pages, $40 (around `2,000). These Paris letters are what most readers will be anticipating, but unfortunately there are too few of them here and too much time is spent getting to them. At the close of the volume Hemingway is just embarking on his most celebrated decade, the one that would gain him fame and make his letters collectors’ items by its close. Because of that, readers waiting for a companion to Hemingway’s Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, might do better waiting for the second instalment. IN SIX WORDS The youthful importance of being Ernest

We had a rather good Booker shortlist this year, with one exception to my mind. It was a mix of known names that did not disappoint and lesser-known names that were a pleasure to discover. Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers fell into the latter category, at least for me. I had never read deWitt before, but will look forward to his novels from now on. The Sisters Brothers is a funny, action-packed, touching and, at times, thoughtful story of two brothers, hired killers both, in the Gold Rush of the “Wild West”. DeWitt has been hailed as “rejuvenating the Western”, but actually The Sisters Brothers is not a ‘Fantasy’ Western: The straight Western. While it plays on and story of two hired killers. with readerly expectations, it does not set out to evoke the Wild West in the detailed, hyperrealist manner of Cormac McCarthy’s Western novels. Instead, it has a sparer, strangely selective narrative style which resembles a kind of fantasy Western—fantasy, not in the sense of simply the fantastic, but in the sense of a highly selective narration of a different time.

Short stories Love across the Salt Desert: Selected Short Stories by Keki N. Daruwalla is a good introduction to the short fiction of one of India’s leading English-language poets. The stories are thematically wide-ranging and beautifully crafted. The poet in Daruwalla comes through at times, but never interferes needlessly in the job of the storyteller. Tabish Khair is the author of the poetry collection Man of Glass and the novel The Thing about Thugs. Write to Tabish at readingroom@livemint.com

Q&A | ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

Of mystics and sceptics The poet talks about her new anthology of India’s vast body of writing on religious travel B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· iterature and pilgrimage have a lengthy historical relationship: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is a popular candidate for the first novel in English. The idea of an inner journey that helps us know ourselves better is common to the physical act of religious travel as well as the intellectual exercise of writing or composing. Pilgrim’s India, a new anthology edited by poet Arundhathi Subramaniam, shows us the extent to which this is true of Indian literature. From the early

utterances of the Katha Upanishad to essays by modern voyagers such as Anjum Hasan in Ajmer and Bachi Karkaria in Udvada, it demonstrates how far and wide the faithful—and doubters—have roamed. Subramaniam, who says she is inspired by the idea of the “questor who is willing to stake his life on a question mark”, spoke to Lounge about the book. Edited excerpts: The pieces in ‘Pilgrim’s India’ tell us that pilgrimage and religious faith have a tricky relationship. If you are a conscious seeker, it’s a journey that compels you to travel

light. It forces you to examine all sorts of subtle self-serving notions of personal identity, of conceptual idolatry. Even if you are an unconscious seeker, travelling to sacred places can unsettle you, derail you. The Indian pilgrimage is a particularly overwhelming one. But then, there are moments of surprise as well. Moments of clarity and insight happen when you least expect them. For me Arun Kolatkar’s An Old Woman poem from Jejuri is a reminder of that. Has literary practice in India become more reticent about religion over the last few years? This has been an area of unease, and not without reason. And that’s primarily because it’s difficult to disengage religious fundamentalism from the quest for the sacred. That’s made many think-

ing people wary of talking about the religious experience. Then there’s the avalanche of trite, new agey, spiritual pulp literature. But if we allow a cozy, blinkered rationality to stifle our real questions about life and death, we run the risk of chopping off some vital part of ourselves. A habitual brittle suspicion about everything “spiritual” may make your life more convenient, more manageable, but it insulates you from deeper possibilities of self-understanding that may never be “dreamt of in your philosophy”. Are we a more irreligious reading public than our ancestors, or is that a fallacy? At least the content of some doubts has changed. Some anxieties about being exploited or manipulated in the name of religion are historically specific, and entirely pardonable. At the same time, if you read poems by Basavanna, Kabir and Akho in the book, you realize that an attitude of irreverence towards oppressive

Pilgrim’s India: Penguin Ananda, 285 pages, `399. forms of organized faith, punditry and crass ritual is not a new phenomenon at all. What are the challenges to anthologizing a category of literature so vast? The challenge is not knowing where to begin and where to end. I told myself I could never be as comprehensive as I wanted. But I did want a variety

of tone and approach. I think the end result tries to strike a certain balance between the voices of mystics and sceptics; between intrepid spiritual backpackers and cautious observers; between the voices of then and now; between the familiar and the new; between prose and poetry. What was the most troublesome piece in this anthology? Initially, there was a subconscious block about allowing myself the “too mystical” account. I thought this might be too fantastic. Later, I had the reverse concern—I wondered if it was all turning too measured and rational. But then I realized that this didn’t have to be an either-or situation. Why was I inflicting this kind of wilful violence on the book? This is an anthology about seeking and travelling. Seekers and travellers come in all shapes and sizes. I don’t think scepticism is incompatible with faith.

L16

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011

Culture

LOUNGE ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

FILM

Indie cinema’s new old hope

Take two: Nina Lath Gupta (right) and Raj Chhinal at the NFDC office in Mumbai.

After two decades of being a stodgy staterun unit, the National Film Development Corporation goes through a revival

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

···························· ntil a year ago, the office of the National Film Development Corporation of India (NFDC) at Worli’s Nehru Centre, Mumbai, was a cavernous space. Steel cabinets crowded its rooms and tables balanced heaps of files, just as they do in a regular government of India office. The dank, clerical air was symptomatic of what the

public sector undertaking, established in 1975 to produce and promote good Indian cinema and facilitate the development of a film industry, had become over more than a decade. After its golden age—NFDC acted as one of the cradles for the parallel cinema movement in the late 1970s and 1980s—it was drained of dynamism. The organization continued to produce some films, regional and Hindi, but nobody heard about them because nobody promoted them. A former NFDC official (name withheld on request) says government funds were scarce and there was nobody in the organization who cared about change. NFDC now is a different story, under the aegis of its year-old managing director Nina Lath Gupta. A former bureaucrat with the Indian Revenue Service— she quit the service after a stint with the information and broadcasting ministry’s film policy

What to expect Four NFDC films we’re looking forward to

he subjects and scope of four forthcoming films being produced by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) are testimonies to one of the organization’s man dates: to make and promote cinema from different parts of the country, on subjects ignored by mainstream commercial cinema. Here are the syn opses and the people behind them:

Gangoobai Directed by Priya Krishnaswamy and written in Marathi, Hindi and English, ‘Gangoobai’ is the story of an elderly widow who has lived her whole life

in the tiny colonial hill station of Matheran, set against the Sahyadri range. She works as domestic help in a few homes, among them that of the wealthy Hodiwala family which has a weekend retreat in Matheran. Gangoobai’s quiet life is disrupted when, one day, she sees the Hodi walas’ teenage daughter wearing a magnificent designer Parsi sari of white Chinese motifs embroidered on a background of purple silk. The old woman falls in love with this exotic piece of clothing and and longs to own one herself. Against all odds, she saves the

department—Gupta has ensured India’s state-run promoter of cinema gets a second life. Staff strength is down from more than 230 to around 115 skilled employees. The offices have transformed into open, interactive, happy places. The organization now has two plush, well-equipped, preview theatres available on hire for film-makers and producers for screenings at `10,000 per screening, the standard industry rate for screening venues. NFDC recently co-produced writer-director Anurag Kashyap’s That Girl in Yellow Boots and is also co-producing Dibakar Bannerjee’s forthcoming film, Shanghai. (see “In the cans”). “We are not competition to the private sector. We will never be, because the mandate is different. It is to promote cinema from different parts of India, the kind of cinema which does not make the cut for commercial producers,” Gupta says. The most recognized pres-

ence of NFDC in the world festivals and co-production market is the Film Bazaar. The bazaar selects projects by film-makers from South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, or Saarc, countries and facilitates meetings with buyers and producers from the world over. In this, its fifth year, the bazaar will be held from 24-27 November, as part of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), in Goa. Buyers and distributors from more than 40 countries in Europe and Asia will participate. Gupta says, “Our role will change according to the gaps in the industry. Right now, there is no platform on which international producers and distributors can meet Indian film-makers.” A former film critic of The Guardian Derek Malcolm, a mentor at the film lab organized by NFDC at this year’s Film Bazaar (the film lab takes up projects in progress for mentoring by experts and established

film-makers), says: “I think the bazaar is a very useful adjunct to the festival, despite the fact that the festival authorities and Nina do not often see eye to eye. It is principally a way for international guests to meet and talk to Indian writers, directors and producers and its events have proved to be extremely useful to both. The problem with the Indian industry is that it survives in a little world of its own, and particularly the independent sector has very little contact with the international world which might well be able to help them.” At the Cannes International Film Festival in May this time, the NFDC, says Kashyap, was “the India pavilion we have been waiting for”. Malcolm says: “The stall within the market was not so very different, but the Indian pavilion was 100% better. It can be improved still further if Nina is given full support. It was dreadful before.” Raja Chhinal, manager,

NFDC, who has been with the organization for 16 years, is spearheading an initiative to open small, 80- to 100-seater, theatres across India with state-of-the-art projection and audio facilities at various cultural venues which will be meant for non-mainstream, regional cinema, the equivalent of independent film theatres in metros around the world. “The biggest challenge for a filmmaker who has a great film at hand but no star or the usual ingredients for commercial success, is killed almost always at the exhibition stage. So we are creating models like that of New York’s Landmark theatres and Australia’s Cinémathèque in India,” says Chhinal. Gurvinder Singh, whose debut film Anhey Ghore da Daan (Alms for a Blind Horse) was produced by NFDC and mentored by the late film-maker Mani Kaul, and premiered at the Venice International Film Festival this year, says he had complete freedom to work the way he wanted. The film unfurls an insignificant day in the life of a Punjabi family. The narrative’s focus, articulated hauntingly through silences, are those who are silent witnesses to the power equations around them. It’s a film that has found takers around the world, and is the kind of cinema, says Gupta, which fits into NFDC’s aesthetic mandate. A committee of filmmakers, writers and artists is responsible for choosing scripts, independent of the managerial team led by Gupta. Kashyap voices immense optimism about NFDC’s potential to change the way films are made and distributed in India. “NFDC revival is the best thing that’s happened to indie cinema in a long time. (It) all started with Film Bazaar. That Girl in Yellow Boots was at last year’s Film Bazaar, and there we met a lot of prospective buyers and producers/funders. We got a lot of encouragement there after the entire mainstream industry had disheartened us. Everyone told me, ‘Don’t make this film. It’s career suicide.’ Film Bazaar gave me strength to make it. And then it helped me release it by co-producing it.” The Film Bazaar takes place at the International Film Festival of India in Goa from 24-27 November.

money over four years of hard work and finally finds herself in Mumbai.

He... A Bhojpuri film directed by Mangesh Joshi, ‘He...’ is about Hari, a 13yearold runaway ragpicker living with his uncle Krishna in a Mumbai slum. One day he is selected to act in a short

film named ‘Mirror’ as a lead actor. His friends start calling him “Hero”, fuelling his dreams. For two months, “Hero” waits for the shooting of his film to begin. While waiting to fulfil his dreams, Hari confronts society’s ills and finds himself helpless.

tral character, wins over nature, finds water, marries for love and yet is engulfed by Kutch’s cruel sands.

Jal

The Good Road

Girish Malik’s ‘Jal’ is set against the surrealistic and eerily romantic back drop of the Rann of Kutch. It is about hope for its inhabitants—humans and flamingos. Kim has come, just like the migratory flamingos, from a faraway land and stirs up lust and greed in the community, challenging its innocence. Against this backdrop, Bakka, the cen

Gyan Correa’s ‘The Good Road’ depicts a confluence of different lives. Pappu is a truck driver who can’t sup port his family. After an attack on the road, he surrenders his vehicle and stages an accident. Pappu will “die”, the truck will go down a treacherous ‘ghat’ in flames. Pappu is to under take his last journey as a truck driver.

David and Kiran, a married couple from Mumbai, are opposites, with dif ferent personalities. Poonam is the 11yearold child of a prostitute from Mumbai. Her mother is dead and she has turned to her grandmother, the only person she knows outside the redlight district. The disappointments and unful filled promises of these characters emerge as the film unfolds and they meet accidentally. Sanjukta Sharma

CULTURE L17

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SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

THEATRE

A second act of passion CHANDAN GOMES/MINT

Prithvi Theatre’s mainstay on leaving her post as director, her new company Junoon, and striking out for new cultural spaces

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

···························· n 28 February, Prithvi Theatre’s current director, Sanjna Kapoor, will present her last official event at the Mumbai institution, the annual memorial concert on mother Jennifer Kendal’s birth anniversary. Late last week, theatre watchers in Mumbai were taken aback by news that Kapoor was leaving her post to form a new venture called Junoon. With this company, which will begin work in 2012, Kapoor and the current festival director at Prithvi, Sameera Iyengar, will work with travelling groups to take theatre to smaller venues across India which have less access to the performing arts than traditional hot spots in big cities. The announcement prompted much speculation about what Prithvi would look like without one of its guiding forces and best-known representatives. But “there’s no masala”, as Kapoor said to newspapers when the news broke, and with it, questions about what prompted the move. She sees Junoon as the next step of her work at Prithvi, and not a departure from the traditions of the 33-year-old entity. She is clear about the separation of powers. “We needed to make it (the company) known now, as there must be no confusion in people’s minds about the two entities.” But it also seems that Junoon is a development in keeping with Prithvi’s own philosophies, and remains connected with the theatre in important ways. Prithvi was built as a place where professional theatre in

Time to travel: Sanjna Kapoor’s new project takes theatre on the road. Indian languages, especially H i n d i , w o u l d f l ourish, and where aspiring artistes and technicians could find a voice. The year-round bustle in its compact, tree-lined space is proof of its success, but even an avowedly democratic venue has its limitations, especially in a city where theatre groups are in constant search of spaces to work and put on shows. “Junoon will not have a theatre company producing its own plays,” Kapoor says. “We will present plays by other groups in our tour circuits— we will create the infrastructure to enable a superb experience for the group as well as the audience.” Junoon will be a public charitable trust, looking for support from partners and allied organizations, and will start off with a small team of five or

Her life in ‘thumri’ A singer recounts the life of her guru, the legendary Naina Devi B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

···························· n stage, Delhi-based thumri singer Vidya Rao turns into a free spirit. She closes her eyes, sways her head, moves her arms; her face dissolving into expressions of longing and grief, or into a naughty smile as if she is teasing a lover. These could be the tactics of a tawaif, a courtesan. In her first book on life with her late guru, Heart to Heart: Remembering Naina Devi (HarperCollins India), Rao writes: “‘The tawaifs sang thumri the way they did because of their experience of life,’ Nainaji tells me. ‘Only someone who knows that love is doomed can sing that way, can bring to her singing the knowledge of such pain…’ Then, looking at me, her eyes grave, Nainaji tells me: ‘Never be ashamed that you sing a form

that was once sung by these great women. Always bring to your singing the memory of those women and their pain. Be proud that you are heir to that extraordinary, though much misunderstood, tradition.’” Unlike other strands of Hindustani classical music that stress the correct interpretation of ragas, thumri manipulates these melodies to intensify the emotional impact of poetry. Many compositions were created for the Kathak dance in 19th century Oudh by tawaifs, who employed both expression and movement while singing. Rao’s memoir has many themes: evolving tradition, social changes, and the progress of a music form. These are interlaced with the story of a restless aristocratic woman and how she influenced the author’s life. Born in a bhadralok family of Bengal and married into the royal

seven workers and professionals who will lend it their time and effort pro bono. Many of its plans are still in the making. “It would be fabulous if in the process of setting this up we also connect to schools and colleges that my grandparents toured to— bringing back to life the ritual of an annual play by professionals in an educational institute,” Kapoor says (her grandfather Prithviraj Kapoor, as well as maternal grandparents Laura Liddell and Geoffrey Kendal, travelled through India with their respective theatre companies). Evidently, Junoon intends to pay serious attention to young people, but Prithvi is also a young person’s space. What sort of divide is the new company trying to address? Kapoor explains: “The summertime programme (an

annual schedule of workshops and theatre programming for children) that has been running at Prithvi over the past 21 years will now be run by Junoon,” she says. “It will spread across the city, and through the year, with deeper engagements with schools, bringing professional theatre to their neighbourhood.” So what of Prithvi? Kapoor’s role will be taken over by her brother Kunal, currently trustee at the Shri Prithviraj Kapoor Memorial Trust, of which the theatre is a subsidiary. “(Kunal) has always been involved, as has my father, in the big ideas and new plans at the Prithvi,” she says. “He will now need to engage more on day-to-day details, as he did do after my mother passed away in 1984.” Kunal Kapoor, who ran the theatre from 1984-90, says his new role means taking the time to build a new team, and to improve on the current quality of performances and audience experience. “The first and most important (thing) is the repair and renovation of the theatre and its compound, in several phases.” says Kunal. Sanjna Kapoor herself lives in Delhi and shuttles between work and home. On the travel schedule, she says, Junoon’s performers will hit “some of the big cities, but more focus will be given to tier II cities or big towns”. But Junoon’s base will continue to be Mumbai. “Bombay has the spaces and the software,” she says. “It has innumerable theatre groups longing to perform. All it needs is the connect—and the sensibility to think through the finances to make it a viable proposition for the theatre groups, the auditoria management and the audience.” In an ideal world, she says, the government would ensure “a cultural centre for every ward in the city. But that’s asking for the moon”. As she goes about trying to bring the moon home, “Prithvi will continue doing what it’s meant to, and does”, says Kunal Kapoor. “No changes because Sanjna is working on Junoon,” he adds drily. “Except maybe a little less of the loud laughs and screams. She’s a noisy woman.”

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

INTELLIGENT ADULTS ONLY

he Central Board of Film Certification has been vexed beyond limit in recent months. Despite its most strenuous efforts, Bollywood refuses to behave. The Hindi film industry keeps rolling out one dirty picture after another. In Ra.One, Shah Rukh Khan’s G.One clutches the nether regions of the eponymously named villain. Perhaps the unforgettable moment passed muster because the two Ones are robots rather than humans. In Desi Boyz, John Abraham and Akshay Kumar set up a male escort service after they get fired from their jobs. The title track shows the two hunks performing their best imitation of Chippendale employees. Then there is the real article, The Dirty Picture, which you didn’t even have to see trailers of. Not that the Board hasn’t tried to stop the flow of carnal thoughts and images. It encourages adult-content films to accept adults-only certificates. The Board has started bleeping out offensive dialogue, especially in trailers created by dastardly producers and promo editors who want to seduce audiences into buying tickets for their ultimately forgettable films. It even closely scrutinizes movies that have been released purely for the purpose of home entertainment. Children can operate even rocket launchers these days, so who’s to tell if they start watching their dad’s DVD copy of Bridesmaids, a work so offensive that it has to be edited down? However, some filmmakers manage to get away. Ra.One had a Universal rating. David Dhawan, whose son Rohit is responsible for Desi Boyz, got a U/A certificate for Rascals, in which Ajay Devgn and Sanjay Dutt, as dirty old men, lech at and paw the voluptuous Kangna Ranaut. The idea of a U/A: Abraham and Kumar in Desi Boyz. hero making his “entry” into a plot is a big deal, which is why the Salman Khan starrer never opens with him but grandly presents him a few scenes later. Ranaut’s entry was in a silver-coloured bikini. It’s not only the expression of sexual desire that the censor board wants to police. It’s okay to have Dutt’s eyeballs hanging down to the floor at the sight of Ranaut, but it’s simply not okay for a sign demanding a free Tibet to exist in a movie. Now a close examination of the meaning of Saadda Haq in a Rockstar song doesn’t yield any easy answers. Is Jordan, the film’s angsty hero, complaining about the violation of his personal freedom? Does he support the idea of Khalistan, since there are some Sikh gentlemen in blue raising their fists at the camera? Does he stand for the Kashmiri self-determination struggle, since there are a few Kashmiris mouthing the lyrics? The censors needn’t have bothered. Audiences were so confused about director Imtiaz Ali’s motives in Rockstar that he could have declared his support for “Free Ilich Ramírez Sánchez” and it wouldn’t have made a difference. The censor board can’t stop the proliferation of images downloaded from the Internet, which, thanks to technological advances, are now available even on your mobile handset. They can’t stop the desire for political freedom, with or without the support of Ali. They could, perhaps, be a bit consistent in the manner in which they rate films. Better still, they could play critic rather than moral policeman. What if the Board came up with a system that rated films on grounds of aesthetics rather than moral offensiveness? Instead of adults-only certificates, you could have such ratings as “Intelligent Adults Only”, “Strictly for Men Who Refuse to Grow Up” and “Political Dilettantes, This Way Please”. Nandini Ramnath is the film critic of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net). Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com COURTESY HARPERCOLLINS INDIA

family of Kapurthala (now in Punjab), Naina Devi found her calling in the music of tawaifs. Singing was part of daily life in her childhood home; her aunts knew the popular thumris and bandishes. But music was banned at her husband’s house; the only ragas heard were at the mujras held on weddings and births, when tawaifs were invited. Once, hiding behind a screen, Naina Devi witnessed the famous Benazir Bai perform a dadra. “Now Benazir stops. The tabliya takes up the laggi, and the sarangiya plays the mukhra to this faster-paced sequence that comes at the end of the dadra. Benazir Bai begins to dance, not just bhav, not just with eyes and hands, but the scintillating, swift footwork—the laris and chakkars of Kathak. The men in the audience exclaim ‘Wah! Wah!’ and shower Benazir with coins and jewellery.” Another day, Naina Devi told Rao of a tawaif who caused a scandal by marrying into her husband’s family: “Zohra Begum was shunned and ostracized, never allowed to forget who she was. I felt sorry for her, alone amid hostile in-laws. And I felt sorry for her especially because she had given

‘Jugalbandi’: Vidya Rao (centre) with Naina Devi and shehnai player Bismillah Khan in Delhi in 1986. up the life of an artiste—the absorption in riyaz (practice sessions), the performances, singing, dancing, basking in the admiration and the gifts that men laid at her feet. She had given up all that, exchanging it for the stolid security of marriage.” Rao tells us that Naina Devi herself blossomed into a singer only after her husband’s death, when she settled down in Delhi in the 1950s. This was a time of cultural shift in Hindustani music. The era of courtesans was ending; old avenues of patronage had disappeared with the

nawabs and rajas. All India Radio (AIR) was the new sponsor. Music schools were opening up and artistes were starting to perform in concerts. Classical music was reaching the middle class. It had its impact on thumri too. The courtesan tradition jarred with the new notions of Indian womanhood; music had to be rescued from the nautch girls. Only legally married women could sing for AIR. B.V. Keskar, the minister for information and broadcasting, is quoted in the book as saying, “No one whose private life was

a public scandal would be patronized.” Thumri linked the singer to kothas (brothels) and tawaifs. Naina Devi never used her real name, Nilina Ripjit Singh, in her new avatar. Besides administering a music school in the Capital and planning music programmes for AIR, Naina Devi went on to hone her skills as a disciple of Ustad Mushtaq Hussain Khan of the RampurSahaswan gharana. She performed in concerts across the country and was awarded the Padma Shri in 1974. Her disciples included Shubha Mudgal, Madhumita Ray and the author. One of the first dadras (Sudh aai re balam pardesiya ki…) that Rao learnt from Naina Devi was taught to the latter by Begum Akhtar, who learnt it from Lachhu Maharaj, who had in turn learnt it from Kathak maestro Kalka Prasad. Knowledge was passed from one to the other through seenaba-seena, a tradition where a disciple absorbs not just the music’s technicalities but its whole inner world from her guru, and in turn passes on that wisdom to her disciples. Translate the phrase into English and it becomes the book’s title, Heart to Heart.

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DELHI’S BELLY | MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI

The poet’s ghetto

A hidden ‘basti’ in the Capital’s heart is on the threshold of transformation

hwaja Mir Dard Basti, or Shakur ki Dandi, is crude and poorly constructed. Yet it has poetry, music and handmade art. It is sandwiched between the city’s tallest high-rise and a college that traces its origins to the 17th century. The basti is a 5-minute drive from Connaught Place, but feels miles away from Delhi’s bustle. Beggars sing, girls play kikli, and cats prowl for food. The sun never enters the narrow alleys. In summer, they stay cool. In winter, they keep the cold winds at bay. Will the basti survive? Some residents are fearful of change. Those who don’t live here may simply not care; that is, if they are aware of its existence. In 1947, this was a graveyard. Now, according to locals, there are 9,000 people here. The 2.5-acre land is like a Petri dish containing the unresolved issues of land and resettlement, high art and low culture, industry and labour, migration to the city, and within the city. The basti flanks Zakir Husain College. Its shabbiness is made starker by the Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Civic Centre, a 112m skyscraper of grey concrete and glass, the new headquarters of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). Opened last year, it looms over Khwaja Mir Dard Basti as commandingly as Jama Masjid does over Shahjahanabad, the Walled City, across the adjacent Ramlila Ground. If the two visions there are in harmony, the ongoing court case tells us that here they clash. In 2008, while the building was being completed, the MCD proposed a road through the basti for “effective movement of the traffic from the upcoming high-rise office buildings”. It planned a survey of the basti to allot land in a far-flung area to rehabilitate the residents. “But why rehabilitate a settled people?” asks lawyer Ubaidul Aleem, legal adviser to the basti’s residents welfare society, which went to the Delhi high court. Once the MCD realized the land

Another world: (clock wise from left) Children play at the shrine of poet Khwaja Mir Dard; the sun seldom enters the lanes of Khwaja Mir Dard Basti; and the MCD headquarters. was owned by the Wakf Board, a religious endowment made for the benefit of the needy in the Muslim community, it filed an affidavit, saying the survey was fixed “on the assumption that the land belongs to MCD”. That assumption could have destroyed a place as old as India’s independence. MCD called it a “cluster”. It is home to the Mirasis, a community of Muslim musicians who perform at Sufi shrines and in red-light districts. Its handicraft workshops produce “export-quality” earrings and pendants. Its dingy hovels are hostelries of multi-speciality cooks who conjure up seekh kebabs, spring rolls and spaghetti Bolognese for farmhouse parties. The basti’s great landmark—the tomb of 18th century poet-saint Khwaja Mir Dard—is rarely visited by Delhiites. “And still, the man who has found his final resting place in this modest tomb was, in his time, one of the great mystical leaders of Delhi and was, at the same time, the first to write mystical verses in Urdu,” wrote Sufism scholar Annemarie Schimmel in her book, Pain and Grace: A Study of Two Mystical Writers of Eighteenth Century

Muslim India, published in 1976. During the day, goats graze inside Mir Dard’s circular mausoleum, hopping across the tombs. Outside is a butcher’s stall with chunks of meat on display. The mausoleum is hemmed in by residential blocks. Until a few years ago it had no roof and the tombs—all done in ceramic tile—were exposed to the elements. Now, a tin roof makes it as claustrophobic as the chai (tea) shack of Naved Jamal, whose grandfather, a wealthy trader, had a mansion in Old Delhi. The basti was established in the 1950s at a time when the Wakf Board was leasing out space to Muslims. Like Jamal, many settlers were from the Walled City. “When grandfather’s family grew,” he says, “the haveli was partitioned, then broken to build smaller rooms to fit in married sons. Finally, we were too many, we had to look for a new place.” The same factors are currently causing another migration. “Most Mirasis are moving to Laxmi Nagar,” says Rameez Ahmed, referring to the locality in east Delhi. Across the river Yamuna, it is close to the area where Mirasis work and is more spacious.

A Mirasi, Ahmed’s grandfather performed with Chawri Bazaar’s courtesans. The grandson plays the tabla every night for the dancing women on GB Road, Chawri Bazaar’s successor as the city’s red-light area. The brothels are a mile away from the basti. The relocation runs parallel with a disintegrating way of life. “My dada saab made his living in Chawri Bazaar when kothas (brothels) were patronized by nobles wanting to educate themselves in tehzeeb (etiquette) and tameez (decorum),” says Javed Khan, another Mirasi working on GB Road. “Twenty years ago, customers requested for classical music styles such as thumri or dadra. Today, it’s only the latest film songs. It’s rare when somebody requests a mujra (courtesan dance) from Mughal-e-Azam.” Cook Muhammed Salman, 21, is listening to this season’s hit number “Aaya re Aaya Bodyguard” on his cellphone. He and nine others live in a small room with no furniture. The tandoors and kebab skewers are stacked on a shelf. The bulb’s glow is dim. “Do you want pasta?” asks Salman, adding quickly, “in white sauce or red?” Most cooks living in the basti

are from Amroha, in Uttar Pradesh. Not traditional kitchen hands, they learn on the job. Depending on contractors to put their “parties” (a group of cooks who operate together) on a daily-wage basis in the banquet kitchens of luxury hotels and grand south Delhi parties, busy weeks are followed by days where there is no work. There are few holidays for the basti’s Bihari handicraft workers. Tramp up the steep stairs to rooms that are workplaces during the day, dormitories at night. Sitting amid seven men, Muhammed Mujib, 30, says, “We are both labourers and artistes.” The men use beads to make handmade necklaces, which are sent through middlemen to foreign markets such as Dubai. Mujib, from Katihar, Bihar, runs the business from this room. Workers in a unit are often from the owner’s village. A large sum is given to a young man’s parents, and he is brought to Delhi as a salaried employee. He cannot leave the unit till he repays the loan given to his family. Some owners might be seen as exploitative but since the turnover is insignificant, there is little distinction between an owner and his staff. They all live in the same room, sleep on the same floor, eat the same food, and watch the same Bhojpuri films on TV. Occasionally, newspapers report police raids in which child labourers are rescued from such sweatshops. Otherwise the rhythm of life in the streets is hypnotic. Tombs criss-cross the lanes. A few alleys

open into cubicle-like intersections that look to the sky. Goats are tethered to almost every door, passers-by pat them lovingly. Most women only ever come out in a burqa. Sterner than men, they stop anyone new to the neighbourhood, asking if he is up to some trick to evict people so that the basti can be razed and redeveloped as a park. Could that really happen? “That’s unlikely,” says lawyer Aleem. “We have a stay order from the court. People fear that this basti might be demolished because of rumour-mongering by local politicians and also due to ignorance and illiteracy.” Meanwhile, Ahmed the musician is making plans: “We’re moving to Laxmi Nagar next week.” Unlike other poets, musicians and scholars who fled to towns like Lucknow in search of a new livelihood when Delhi was ravaged by invaders, the basti’s patron saint, Mir Dard, never left his city. He wrote: Delhi which has now been devastated, tears are flowing now instead of its rivers; This town has been like the face of the lovely, And its suburbs like the town of the beloved ones. Today, there are invasions of a different kind. Instead of writing sad verses, the people are trying to get on as best they can; finding jobs and opportunities, moving into the neighbourhood and leaving it forever, in search of a better life. Khwaja Mir Dard Basti may survive, but in a different form. mayank.s@livemint.com