Lounge for 21 April 2012

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Saturday, April 21, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 16

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

At Shivaji Park, cricketers line up for net practice not far from a football training session.

A WALK IN THE WOODS >Page 8

PARALLEL PARK For years, Mumbai’s historic Shivaji Park has been the crucible of the city’s cricket. So what happens when a clutch of academies and informal clubs start playing football there? >Pages 10­11

THE REAL ROMANTIC

After 25 years, Suneet Varma is set to move from being a designer to a true fashion house >Page 9

THE UNSINKABLE LEGACY

Belfast’s official ‘Titanic Trail’ or a tour of SeaCity Museum in Southampton?

It will depend on how you want to remember the ‘Titanic’ >Pages 12­13

‘OTHERWISE, WHAT’S FICTION?’ Two children listen to the beginnings of a love story. An exclusive extract from Jerry Pinto’s debut novel, ‘Em And the Big Hoom’ >Page 14

PUBLIC EYE

REPLY TO ALL

SUNIL KHILNANI

AAKAR PATEL

WHAT WE LEAVE FOR THE FUTURE

DYNASTY IS NOT PROBLEMATIC

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ow do societies remember? What resources and materials are we, in the here and now, prepared to leave to those who come after to enable them to make sense of our own helter-skelter age—to allow them to separate fact from our own self-loving self-mythologizations? These seem untimely questions in a society such as ours, bustling hungrily towards the future. As the pace of change accelerates daily in contemporary India, as Indians turn away from the past and fix their... >Page 4

THE GOOD LIFE

oes India have a dynasty problem?

Writer Patrick French researched this for a chapter in his last book (India: A Portrait). He found that 37.5% of Congress MPs had a previous family connection to politics. In all, 28.6% of the current Lok Sabha comprises such people. A total of 156 MPs across parties.

Attacking this phenomenon, writer Sadanand Dhume (“India Still Privileges Princelings”, The Wall Street Journal, 15 March) felt that the assembly election results... >Page 5

SHOBA NARAYAN

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

RTE: DISTANT FROM REALITY

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ven the most hard-bitten school administrator will have no quarrel with the principles behind the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act. Education is, at the end of the day, as much an act of idealism as it is a business proposition.

Educators may pore over curriculum; combat staff attrition; mull over real estate and infrastructure; but they dream of catalysing change, inspiring young minds and changing the future. >Page 6

PHOTO ESSAY

FRAMING THE QUIET

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

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pace is an aberration in a cramped city and Mumbai tries to fill every little inch it finds with something—a roadside stall, a double-parked car or just people standing on the streets with arms outstretched.

The new F Bar Lounge Diner on the third floor of One Indiabulls Centre, on the other hand, revels in its space, using 10,000 sq. ft—split in two levels—for a mix of entertainment options.

Wood dominates all the structures, from the floors to the high ceilings. The lower level is a vast expanse of what will constitute the lounge/bar or post-work watering hole, with an open terrace section that’s surrounded by water bodies and greenery.

The staircase leading to the upper level is designed by architect Sameep Padora in such a way that it seems to merge with the ceiling. This level is designed as the dining area, with seating for about 80. A section each is cordoned off on both levels—on the ground for a private dining area for 8-10 people and on the upper floor, as a Dom Pérignon lounge, where it might be mandatory to be invited and then to open a bottle of the bubbly.

F Bar and Lounge in Delhi is

more of a night club, explains its director, Puneet Nath, but in Mumbai the focus will be on food because the closing time, at around 1.30am, is earlier than in the Capital. There are two kinds of cuisines—an innovative Indian one by Chef Vineet Bhatia and a continental one by Rakesh Talwar.

Emiliano Collazo, the general manager of F Bar Lounge Diner, says they have been careful in separating the two sections so that diners can converse without interruptions from the music, while those in for a more casual visit don’t have to deal with the formality of dining tables. Collazo and Kris Correya, the music programmer, say the music in F Bar will be predominantly lounge, moving to more thumping House late in the evenings.

Open for both lunch and dinner, F Bar aims to attract young professionals who work in the Lower Parel area besides the estimated 9,000 people in Indiabulls Centre’s two towers.

F Bar Lounge Diner opens on 27 April at One Indiabulls Centre, 1C, Third floor, SB Marg, Elphinstone Road, Mumbai (66505820).

Arun Janardhan

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: GOPAL MS/MINT CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “I see the medal, and I want it”, 14 April, the video interview with Saina Nehwal can be seen at www.livemint.com/nehwal.htm

L4 COLUMNS

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SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

WHAT WE LEAVE

FOR THE FUTURE Archiving is important in a democracy. An understanding of the past can act as a guide for what it should do next

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ow do societies remember? What resources and materials are we, in the here and now, prepared to leave to those who come after to enable them to make sense of our own helter-skelter age—to allow them to separate fact from our own self-loving self-mythologizations?

These seem untimely questions in a society such as ours, bustling hungrily towards the future. As the pace of change accelerates daily in contemporary India, as Indians turn away from the past and fix their gaze on the future, there seems little advantage in devoting time to past-oriented matters. Let the future manage for itself— we have enough to worry about now.

So, we neglect and suppress questions to do with the material sources—the archive, in the most expansive sense—out of which the coming future can hope to understand our breakneck present. At its most basic, those questions wind down to one: Who will create, conserve and make available the archive upon which the future can hope to understand our present?

Today, our own understanding of India’s modern past rests pretty heavily upon the colonial archive (reposed largely in the India Office Records in London, and in part at the National Archives of India in Delhi), to an important extent on the documentary trail of the national movement (amassed at places like the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi), and to a lesser extent on the documents of the independent Indian state, grudgingly bequeathed to researchers (the current director general of the National Archives, Mushirul Hasan, has shown remarkable determination and skill in extracting from the government and making available to scholars more of these resources).

When it comes to the study of contemporary—that’s to say, post-1947—India, what limited energy there is for such work usually dissipates in venting about accessibility, classification and secrecy.

Certainly these are important issues. The Right to Information is a critical democratic right, fundamental to any open society, and it applies as much to current as to historical documents.

Democratic societies have secrets too, and these can be quite legitimate ones (public authorities too may rightfully claim a realm of privacy for themselves), but the principles that define such secrets must be more stringent in conception and need to be spelt out more clearly, as must the procedures to protect such principles. That’s something

COURTESY DAYANITA SINGH

our own congenitally self-important public officials are rarely willing to do.

But at least equally important as lowering the secrecy barriers to access already archived materials, is the responsibility to create and conserve new archival holdings that contain the materials that will illuminate today’s public world, that are necessary to comprehend the figures and institutions of contemporary history.

Here, things look pretty bad.

Where exactly are the private and official papers of recent political leaders—of our last several prime ministers from, say, Chandra Shekhar to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, let alone of regional political figures—being collected? Are they being systematically deposited somewhere, catalogued and conserved?

How in the future can we hope to write the history of Indian film and cricket, of music and architecture? Of the media, of business corporations and the public sector industries, of banks and NGOs? Unless the material sources of these activities and institutions are built up in archival form, we cannot hope accurately to understand them—or ourselves.

In part, that involves creating safe houses where the documents of architectural practices and film companies, of publishing houses and businessmen, of politicians and writers, can be safely deposited—in the knowledge that they will be safely preserved and responsibly accessed. I am not necessarily suggesting the creation of some mega-institution with its accompanying mega-bureaucracy. The important point, rather, is to inject into our public imagination and discussion an expectation that we do need to establish such collections and to install policies such as tax incentives for those who gift such papers that encourage this to happen. It needs to happen quickly, because such materials disappear before one realizes it.

We think of the Right to Information as a right that belongs to today’s citizenry —as something that applies across our current generation.

But what about future generations’ right to information, their right to know about their past, our present?

Future generations, of course, have no power over us, whether it concerns the use of natural resources, the conservation of cultural heritage, or of the records of current activities and lives: We can, if we wish, decide to leave nothing at all for their use.

Let us be clear. Building such document collections (and I realize that increasingly, these will have to capture digital formats), creating

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

museums that are not merely shop windows for display but which are genuine arenas for research and the creation of new knowledge, investing in the disciplines of historical research and intellectual understanding—none of these are a luxury available only to rich societies. On the contrary, for a poor but great democracy such as our own, making sense of our past is not a discretionary, subsidiary item on our national to-do list.

Democracy as a political form depends profoundly on its capacities to understand its own history—to explicate the intricate causal chains that reveal responsibility and human agency, and which show that it is human decisions that result in better or worse outcomes. It’s through this process of self-analysis—and only through this process—that democracies learn how to do better in the future. History is,

in that sense, the school of democracy—democracy’s method of self-improvement.

Self-education is always an interminable process (it was Sigmund Freud who identified the unending quality of three activities: psychoanalysis, education and politics).

Totalitarian or theocratic societies do not need history; in fact, they work actively to scrub out its inconveniences.

In the more simplified cosmos of such closed societies, it is either ideology (a belief in the great socialist future; or on striving to create a sanctuary for the racially pure), or divine will and dispensation that guides the society infallibly—and blamelessly, for its rulers—from one rock to another.

But all that a democracy has is its understanding of its own past as a guide to what to do next—it cannot invoke religious injunctions, or turn to an ideology (whether of perfect equality or perfect competition, communism or the market) to judge how it should act. Thus, in failing to harbour our past, we are doing a disservice to the

Documenting the past: (above) A photograph from Monuments of Knowledge, a show on archives and museums at King’s College London; and British­era manuscripts in the Maharashtra state archives department. republic, and our own democratic future.

So, even as the settled landscape changes daily all around us, as we anticipate and worry about the future, we need to keep an eye fixed not just on how we got here, but on how those who come after can hope to understand how they got to where they did.

We, and all the documentary debris of our times, are a crucial link in that chain.

Sunil Khilnani, Avantha professor and director, King’s India Institute, is the author of The Idea of India, now published in a new edition. He is taking a break from writing this column. Write to him at publiceye@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Sunil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/sunil­khilnani

COLUMNS L5

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SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Our system of dynasty is not problematic

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MONTY FRESCO/TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES

oes India have a dynasty problem?

Writer Patrick French researched this for a chapter in his last book (India: A Portrait). He found that 37.5% of Congress MPs had a previous family connection to

politics. In all, 28.6% of the current Lok Sabha comprises such people. A total of 156 MPs across parties.

Attacking this phenomenon, writer Sadanand Dhume (“India Still Privileges Princelings”, The Wall Street Journal, 15 March) felt that the assembly election results from Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and elsewhere showed that “...what triumphed last week was India’s culture of dynastic politics. Two new chief ministers and a re-elected deputy chief minister showcase the hold powerful families still exert over public life in the world’s largest democracy.”

Dhume referred to French’s book, which says that “seven out of 10 women in India’s parliament owe their entry into politics to family. Two-thirds of national legislators under the age of 40 are so-called ‘hereditary MPs’ from political families.”

French makes the claim that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) relatively low tally of hereditary MPs (19%) makes the party appealing to the Hindu middle class. “They knew that more than four-fifths of the party’s MPs had ascended by other means, than descending from on high, which made them seem more representative and regular.”

This idea that the middle class prefers merit to dynasty is echoed by Dhume. He offers a solution to the problem of dynasties. “As a fix, the middle class needs to shed its traditional apathy toward politics, and either form new parties or join existing ones. More importantly, parties should respond by starting to treat ideas seriously—attracting followers based on what they believe rather than which caste, community or gene pool they claim to represent.”

French and Dhume assume there is such a thing as middle-class India that behaviourally stands apart from the rest.

I have not seen any evidence of this.

The middle class has no shield against the culture it is part of and wallows in.

Nor indeed does it intend to be insulated from it.

It is the middle-class audience that has created dynasties in Bollywood.

The dynastic principle is a fundamental aspect of our middle-class culture. “Good family (achche ghar ka)” is a middle-class formulation. It demotes the individual and invests genes with merit.

This is the root of dynastic principle.

The understanding is that there is continuance of virtue in a family. This family virtue is received through birth.

It should not surprise that this phenomenon exists in a society that divides itself socially and culturally also by birth. But the idea of dynasty disturbs some of us because it separates us from European democracies.

I would say our problem is the opposite. We do not have enough dynasty in India.

This is because we don’t have an aristocracy, the basis for dynasty.

The duchy of Cornwall has been held by the British sovereign’s eldest son since 1337.

The dukes of Braganza in Portugal have been around since 1442. The dukes of Normandy since 911 in France. Apulia and Calabria have had counts since 1042 in Italy. The Wittelsbachs have been dukes in Bavaria since 1044.

This stability from landowning gentry has produced European civilization. The aristocracy can be discarded now, and has been,

because its contributions, economic and cultural, have all been made and absorbed.

In India, we don’t have landed aristocrats because the Mughal emperor owned all land. He permitted people to till it and officials to tax it.

But when a person appointed died, or was removed from office, the land returned to the emperor to give away to another.

Neither title nor property, and not even wealth, could be passed on to one’s sons. What income was unspent before death was confiscated, along with all savings. In author Sir Thomas Roe’s words, “Every man’s heir is the emperor”.

The Mughal system was anti-aristocracy, anti-dynasty and merit-based. Merit was determined by the emperor, without any test.

The books that document Akbar’s administration, A’in e Akbari and Akbarnama, reveal a second problem.

It was that 70% of Akbar’s courtiers were foreigners. Of the Indian 30%, more than half were Muslims. There were 21 Hindu nobles of note. But of these 17 were Rajputs who had submitted to Akbar.

Actually, in 40 years, only four Hindus—the Brahmin Birbal, Todar Mal and his son, and another unnamed Khatri—served because of ability (W.H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar). None could pass on an inheritance. Every family, no matter how talented, had to start from zero or almost zero with each generation.

Compare this instability to Europe’s ageless tradition.

This absence of landed dynasts continued till the collapse of Mughal power, when short-lived dynastic states sprang up (French counts seven MPs from royal families). The foundation for civil society was missing till education came with Thomas Macaulay in the 19th century, producing the urban middle class. I said earlier that the middle class was the same as other Indians and didn’t behave in an intellectually independent manner. Why is this so?

My estimate is that the number of middle-class families with four generations of literacy (not numeracy) is in the low thousands. And without question it is limited to a couple of castes. This is an insufficient base. It cannot sustain an intellectual

All in the family: Jawaharlal Nehru (left) and Indira Gandhi were the first two of three generations of Indian prime ministers. movement away from the national culture of seeing merit in birth. The explanation to French’s observation about fewer BJP MPs having a family connection is rooted not in middle-class discernment but the fact that it is a young party. It had only two MPs 25 years ago.

So is our dynastic culture all bad?

Dhume thinks Manmohan Singh is a weak prime minister because of this system which doesn’t recognize merit. He writes: “In another country, he may have been attracted early to politics, mentored by like-minded seniors and toughened by electoral combat before claiming the prime ministership.”

This is a puzzling thing to say because if Manmohan Singh has any

instinct for popular politics, any enthusiasm for it, or any real talent for it, it is hidden.

He has no ability to bend public opinion. He’s an awful public speaker unless one is interested in undiluted substance. He could not be a popular leader anywhere on merit, despite his intellect.

The truth is that Manmohan Singh could become prime minister only in India. And here only by the grace of a dynast. This is an aspect that moderates the dynast’s power.

Because her only asset is the public’s mindless veneration, the dynast is alert to perception.

So I don’t think, given these realities, that there’s something wrong with our system of dynasty. It must be

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seen as part of the evolutionary process aborted or held in abeyance

by Muslim rule.

This must be admitted: Indians are unusually good at picking quality dynasties, whether it is the Kapoors or the Nehru-Gandhis.

This is why our stubborn conflation of merit with birth hasn’t been damaging.

Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist.

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

L6 COLUMNS

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SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Philosophically distant from reality

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PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

ven the most hard-bitten school administrator will have no quarrel with the principles behind the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act. Education is, at the end of the day, as much an act of

idealism as it is a business proposition.

Educators may pore over curriculum; combat staff attrition; mull over real estate and infrastructure; but they dream of catalysing change, inspiring young minds and changing the future.

For people deep in the trenches of teaching and learning, this fundamental right of every child to a decent education ought to seem self-evident.

Knowledge—to paraphrase Rabindranath Tagore—should be free.

Yet, most educators I know are against the Right to Education (RTE) Act—for reasons philosophical and practical.

I am not an educator. I have taught classes, but I approach this debate from the point of view of a parent and citizen.

I have read Parth Shah’s critique of the RTE Act in a blog; as well as newspaper commentaries by Abhijit Banerjee, Raghuram Rajan and Manish Sabharwal. I have asked teachers and school administrators about why this Act’s philosophical aspiration is so far removed from the practical realities they operate in. They talk about their frustrations over mandatory high salaries for teachers without proper accountability; about managing school committees; and about focusing on inputs rather than outcomes.

The human face of the RTE Act and one that stares parents in the face is the 25% quota. Affluent urban Indians—and certainly the readership of this newspaper—send their children to elite private schools. The new reality is that these schools will have to mandatorily admit a 25% quota of underprivileged

children—whether it is a Sanskriti, Bombay Scottish or Vidyashilp. This mingling of social classes is certain to cause discomfort even if few parents will vocalize it. “In principle, I have no problem with this,” we will say, and may even believe it. We will call forth our childhood hardships and tell each other, “I believe that my children ought to socialize with, and learn from, all types of children.” We will feel the halo shining around our heads.

Of course, class has nothing to do with character. Intelligence is marginally correlated with wealth, if that. In many cases, the plumbers, drivers and dairy farmers who work for the urban elite are just as honest, if not more, than their employers. Children do learn from their less-privileged peers. But usually, such learning happens in an organic, semi-structured way—over summer holidays at grandparents’ homes when the driver’s son teaches your son how to play pithoo.

The RTE Act takes this notion and wraps a structure around it. The lady who helps clean my home, Rosie, is an erstwhile government schoolteacher, who discovered that she makes more money cleaning homes than teaching.

She lives in Yelahanka, in the vicinity of a number of Bangalore’s top private schools. In theory, Rosie’s daughter, Jenny, could and should be my daughter’s classmate. Jenny is a tall, bright girl with limpid eyes and a quick wit. She smiles often and asks questions.

She is polite and curious. She is of the same age as my younger daughter; and

Logic in funding: It might be a better idea to support NGOs such as the Bharti Foundation that work in the field of education. they could learn from each other.

In theory.

Children are cliquish. I don’t like this fact, but cannot escape it. I can invite any number of outsiders—from hovels or gated communities—to my daughter’s birthday party, command her to “be nice”, and after the initial “hello”, she will return to giggling with her school friends. Lectures about egalitarianism carry as much weight as all those lectures about “starving children while you waste food” and “I studied under the street lights while you forget to switch off the lights”. In that sense, the RTE Act is noble in its aspirations. It is designed for parents who want to break free from the shackles of class and caste. If properly implemented, it may even work. But implementation is key.

As a layperson, a better approach would be to tax the schools—as Rajan and Banerjee have said in The Indian Express. The financial aspect would be

easy to accomplish, particularly from the richer private schools. I would be willing to pay an RTE fee in addition to what my children’s schools charge me, particularly if I know that it will help a child get an education. Educating underprivileged children is a pet cause among affluent parents—and I say this without rancour. But what of parents who send their children to the poorer private schools that author James Tooley writes about? Taxing them when they are already stretched is unfeasible.

Funnelling this money towards private schools that are already performing well seems to be one solution. Building the capacity of a middle layer of schools would be a way to transition bright students from those schools into top-tier schools.

Schools are as much about socialization as they are about curriculum.

Assimilating children of different backgrounds into elite schools will not be easy to do. This isn’t a jigsaw puzzle

where the pieces will fit in.

The RTE Act, as it stands now, seems to me to be a massive government cop-out. What the government seems to be saying is that they have failed the 90% of children who go to government schools and, therefore, want the private schools to step in and do their work. It is a punitive solution to what is essentially a noble intent. As a parent, I laud the intent. I am willing to help make it work. But as a student of psychology, I don’t think plonking underprivileged children in elite schools is the solution.

Shoba Narayan is the product of a convent-school education, but learned just as much on the street. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

SAMAR HALARNKAR

4 cardamoms 5 cloves 2 tbsp bourbon 2 tbsp soy sauce 2 tsp red chilli powder 1-2 tsp garam masala 1 sprig rosemary 1 tomato, finely chopped 7-8 large garlic pieces, smashed Salt to taste 1 tbsp olive oil

OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

MINIMUM KITCHEN, MAXIMUM IMPACT

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ack home in Bangalore, my sprawling kitchen and its ranks of cabinets are a refuge for a variety of odd and wondrous spices and things from all over the world. I have pink peppers from Sichuan, chillies from Peru and Hungarian chilli strands from Vancouver’s Granville Island in Canada. I have every Indian condiment you can think of—from Kashmiri ginger powder to Konkan fish masala to Naga chilli. I have a paella pan from Spain, a heavy, non-stick grill pan from Italy and a bamboo steamer from Seattle.

Does it sound like I boast?

I do not mean to.

Unfortunately, the 15-20 cabinets and shelves that hold these culinary stores and stories live in a kitchen that is given to immodesty. The counters are long enough to be used as beds for the entire family. The cabinets are white, as are the floor and the walls (a nightmare, really, when I use spices that stain, such as turmeric). There is a dining table and an attached toilet. When there is a party, I have counted at least 10 people hanging around without irritating me. This is major because I hate anyone around me when I cook. It is the biggest kitchen I’ve ever had. If it were in Mumbai, my kitchen would have been partitioned into two flats and sold for a small fortune.

Does this still sound like

I boast?

Really, I do not mean to.

After four months in Berkeley, where I am on a teaching stint of five months, I have realized my kitchen in Bangalore is an unproductive extravagance.

Physically, my Berkeley kitchen is the size of a handkerchief. Well, perhaps a little larger. I get snappy if the wife or the daughter drift in while I am cooking. If the fridge door opens, someone has to leave. There is only one counter, and it is barely enough to accommodate a cutting board.

There is just one cabinet.

As for spices and stories, there are barely any—red chilli, turmeric and garam masala from a box. Apart from this, I have two little boxes of spices from, astonishingly, the neighbourhood butcher (but then this is Berkeley, where you can learn yoga above the petrol station), a generic north African spice called sumac and Cajun spice powder from the southern US. I have a bottle of soy sauce, a bottle of olive oil, and, ummm, salt.

There is really nothing here to boast of, yet I cook more often and with far greater verve in Berkeley than I ever have in Bangalore. Of course, one reason is that I have no choice. In Bangalore, a woman comes in to cook the basics every morning.

My parents live nearby, and many meals are at their house. In Berkeley, I cook every meal for the

entire family, and in doing so, I have realized that you really do not need the spices, stores and stories I possess in Bangalore.

“Why don’t we eat such food in Bangalore?” my wife asks every week. I scratch my head and try to find reasons.

One, when someone cooks for you, it is easy to sit back and eat whatever is cooked. If you don’t like it, next time you get something else cooked. You are so focused on getting good food that you really do not monitor the oiliness quotient of something you finally like.

Two, when you open your cabinets and find the range of implements and exotics I have, you tend to be confused and not a little overwhelmed. You tend to put off for next time what you can do today.

Three—and this is most important to me—it is hard to work in a kitchen where someone else is at work. You cannot have two masters to one kitchen. This is why I cook only when the kitchen is vacant, which means infrequently.

Four, I had forgotten an elemental truth. Cooking, as someone once said, is like love.

You must enter into it with abandon or not at all.

Our life in Berkeley allows me no luxuries of cook and cooking aids. So, I experiment with the truth I had forgotten, I cook with an abandon I had forsaken, I cook

Simple roast: Marinate the meat with garam masala, salt and bourbon. with whatever I have, and the results have been more than encouraging.

My cooking in Berkeley has been relentless and, as I did in my single days, I am serving up impromptu meals from my spare kitchen. I cook for the family, for new friends and old. I chop, clean and wash as well, though the wife helps a lot (and, since she is reading this, it is not a good idea to claim otherwise).

I have made two resolutions: 1. I will never again buy exotic spices or kitchen appliances (in any case, I tend to use my oldest knives and indefinitely store gifts).

Exotic spices are hard to duplicate—especially if you, good reader, actually try to follow a recipe I may offer—and since they are in short supply, I tend to store them for a special occasion, by which time they have expired.

2. I will reclaim my grand kitchen and take over daily meals from the cook. She can chop, clean and dish out what she

excels at, such as Dindigul mutton biryani, but it is clearly pointless asking her to make gently cooked spinach and broccoli for the wife.

My biggest triumph in Berkeley is that my daughter, about to turn 2, loves all that I cook, a big change from last year when she refused to touch anything from my grand kitchen. “Na-ice,” she says with a beam, as she wolfs down the stuffed omelette and chicken legs marinated with soy, garam masala, garlic and salt. As for the wife, she generously approves of any vegetable that I roast or stir-fry with the limited selection of spices at my command.

Again, and again, she asks, “So, why don’t we eat such food in Bangalore?”

We will, baby, we will.

Roast Meat Serves 2-3 Ingredients 500g meat (I used beef)

Method Marinate the meat in salt, bourbon and garam masala.

Keep aside for 2 hours. In a non-stick pan, gently heat the olive oil. Drop the cardamom and clove into it until they swell and crackle. Stir-fry the garlic until it starts to brown.

Add tomatoes and sauté for a minute. Add red chilli powder and sauté for a minute. Add the soy sauce and sauté lightly.

Pour the sautéed ingredients over the meat in an oven dish.

Place a sprig of rosemary on the meat. Cover with foil and bake at 300 degrees Fahrenheit (around 148 degrees Celsius) for 90 minutes (depending on how tough your meat is and how soft you want it).

Remove foil and broil for the last 5 minutes.

Serve hot with rice and salad.

Samar Halarnkar is consulting editor, Mint and Hindustan Times. He is presently a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. Write to him at ourdailybread@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Samar’s previous columns at www.livemint.com/ourdailybread

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SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012

L7

Spotlight

LOUNGE RESEARCH

Dishing out pure sciences HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research is breaking boundaries and rearranging what constitutes simple scientific play

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

································· idway up the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) numbered C-6, a 125-tonne radiowave dish receiver appears overhead and 29 other telescopes scanning the sky come into sight. Suresh Sabhapathy, coordinator of the Servo control system that points the dishes towards various celestial bodies, is our guide to the site in Khodad, Maharashtra. Up here, there is deafening silence across the arc of the dishes because “we listen, we only listen, we don’t speak,” says Sabhapathy.

It is not merely the view that is breathtaking, but the realization of what it takes to keep hold of that marginal edge Indian science has achieved here: low-cost, indigenous innovation that must keep pushing new frontiers.

This edge is what the team of 11 men here has its eye on. For the first time since it was set up at a cost of `40 crore in the early 1990s, the GMRT is receiving a fullscale upgrade this year that will cost pretty much the same. The upgrade will “deal with technological obsolescence and continue keeping the competitive edge for Indian science,” says Yashwant Gupta, dean, GMRT. The 30 dishes operate individually as telescopes and collectively, they make the GMRT the largest radio telescope in the 150-1,500 Mhz frequency in the world. In this facility of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR)—which 2011 Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt called “the best in the world” (Asian Scientist magazine, January)—pure research stretches its limited resources.

S. Sureshkumar, senior design engineer for the GMRT’s fibre optic communication systems, says: “Even a satellite only explores the orbit. The opportunity to design instruments capable of mapping galaxies beyond is what challenges us to create.”

The GMRT, one of TIFR’s—and India’s—largest projects to date, represents the fundamentals of an institute dedicated to the sheer joy of scientific play. The scale and localization of its upgrade, with everything being made indigenously, stands for how the TIFR has shaped, and is currently renegotiating, pure sciences in India (see box), even as it seeks The Next Big Thing.

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Defining pure Set up in Colaba, Mumbai, in June 1945 under the guidance of the respected scientist and educationist Homi Bhabha, the TIFR remains one of India’s few bastions of pure sciences. Here, commercial constraints do not cloud projects. Bids for apparatus, even entire labs, receive funding and do not need to be dedicated to a single outcome.

Inter-departmental collaboration is encouraged, to the extent that Bhabha’s famous “Wednesday lectures”—where the faculty attends a common lecture session of other researchers’ ongoing works—continue even today. Almost no hypothesis is too wild a goose to chase.

“In play is the frontier of all scientific discovery,” Prof. Mustansir Barma, director, TIFR, says. Its researchers must achieve a sabbatical at any other research organization once every five years in order to stay competitive. This is the only conditionality imposed.

Prof C. N. R. Rao, national research professor, honorary president and Llinus Pauling research professor, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific

Research, Bangalore, says: “TIFR is a wellendowed institution where scientists need not worry much about funding and support for their ideas and projects. It is unique in this regard. TIFR should be one of the world’s best institutes for research.”

The breadth of perspective it achieves from its collaborative functioning is unique. It is the difference between a single radiowave satellite, and all 30 of them, mapping the same celestial body. With it comes the realization that a change in definitions, silos, approaches, is as necessary as maintaining the purity of the bloodline.

“Pure sciences in the 1940s and 1950s were not what they are today.

While we are careful not to allow applications of science to muddy the water, in that we are dedicated to pure sciences, there is the danger of the other—rejecting something because it may be applied,” Prof. Barma says.

TIFR’s reputation has been boosted by results—the closest temperature to absolute zero was achieved in the basement here, India’s first computers were built here, as were the first micro waves—both (computers and micro waves) were later hived off to commercial corporations.

More importantly, “because of these results, funding and support is easier for us than for most,” Prof. Barma says. As Prof. Gupta of the GMRT explains, “We are trusted.”

New boundaries Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while inaugurating the 99th Indian Science Congress in January, and outlining the 12th Plan objectives, said India’s new goals depend upon achieving improved scientific infrastructure and large key projects such as the India-based Neutrino Observatory (see box). The 12th Plan proposes to increase spending on science from 1% of the gross domestic product to 2%.

At the TIFR, anticipation is high. In previous decades, scientists say, there were few funds for them to even attend international conferences or experiment, among other limitations. With the increased spending, as Prof G. Ravindrakumar, a scientist in the TIFR’s department of atomic and nuclear energy, puts it, “There are no more excuses for not achieving spectacular results in science.”

This is also what Prof. Rao means when he qualifies his praise of TIFR, “Yet it has to strive hard to be on top of scientific institutions in the world.”

Results vs play “We astrophysicists have a saying: All the knowledge uncovered by radio astrophysicists in the world is still not sufficient to light a single electric bulb,” says Divya Oberoi, an astrophysicist who has just returned from the Haystack Observatory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, to work on the GMRT upgrade. In a world of applied science with commercial stakes, where technological advances are as rapid as obsolescence, the fundamental is painstaking. “You see something you did has had an impact many years later,” Prof. Barma says.

Much of TIFR’s willingness to take the risk of wandering through science in this painstaking fashion stems from Bhabha’s theory that the best results in science come from the library and the canteen. Prof. Barma explains: “A biologist and a laser physicist were having tea.

The physicist told his friend about his finding that when you shoot lasers at small metal particles, you get a huge burst of X-rays which are tunable. But he couldn’t prepare particles of exactly the same size. The biologist said: ‘But we have bacteria and they are all the same size.’ And they began to work together.”

Only in TIFR, scientists say, is such random interplay encouraged. The biologist was Krishanu Ray and the physicists, M. Krishnamurthy and Prof.

G. Ravindrakumar, at TIFR’s Ultrashort Pulse High Intensity Laser Laboratory (UPHILL). When using E. coli bacteria, they found the output was 60 times the expected in photon terms. The scientists have applied for a patent and are chasing the possibilities of this opening

New horizons: Scientists involved in the GMRT upgradation project. a whole new field of study.

“I cannot imagine any laser plasma physicist working with a biologist anywhere else,” Krishnamurthy says. Ray is a physicist-turned-biologist and Krishnamurthy a chemist-turned-physicist. They say at TIFR that you don’t become a physicist just because you happened to study physics.

Such perspective is drawing young Indian thinkers in science back home.

Mandar Deshmukh, 37, returned from his studies at Cornell and Harvard Universities in 2006 to set up the first clean room in the nanotechnology lab. He heads the graphene group—experiments with this material, known as the “rock star” of materials science, won two scien-

tists, Russo-British Konstantin Novoselov and Dutch Andre Geim, the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics.

Deshmukh laughs off the hype. “People knew about graphene in theory, but it is only now that they are able to isolate the base atom, not just for graphite but for pretty much the whole class of materials.

Again, the priorities of our country were different,” he says. In 2011, the graphene group at TIFR became the first group to quantify the unusual ability of graphene to contract as it is heated.

“We don’t have the number of scientists the US has and whatever we do will never really have that scale of impact,” Prof. Barma says. “It’s only in the last 10 years that the funding has started picking up. Many things that were unimaginable 10 years ago are possible today. It would be nice if we had a R&D culture nationally. Having said that, it will take some time.”

Nobody knows what doors to the universe the GMRT upgrade will open. As dean Gupta puts it, “Serendipity is an important part of all astronomy.” In the meanwhile, in repeatedly asking the fundamental question rests all scientific progress.

L8

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SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012

Insider

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY ‘C RAFTS

ATLAS

OF I NDIA’

Choktse of Sikkim The Sikkimese­style table or the ‘choktse’ is carved with characteris­ tic Tibetan motifs like masks, dragons, prayer wheels and other mythological symbols and then painted in bright natural dyes.

Lacquered woodcraft of Karnataka

Walnut woodcarving of Kashmir

Channapatnam, a town 56km from Bangalore, is known for its lacquerware. Miniature toys, boxes, spoons and ladles are made from ivory­coloured, close­grained halewood, decorated in ochre, black, deep maroon, gold and white.

The Kashmiri ‘naqqash’ (master craftsman) chips, carves and rounds the edges of soft walnut wood to create a profusion of birds, bees, animals and intertwining leaves and branches. A single tabletop can take as much as six months in the making.

EXTRACT

A walk in the woods From soft walnut wood tabletops to fragrant sandalwood keepsakes—the crafts to bring home B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

················································· book that took 11 years to create says something about the span of traditional crafts in India.

Launched last week, Crafts Atlas of India by Jaya Jaitly, published by Niyogi Books, is a thick tome that documents India’s rich craft heritage. The coffee-table book is illustrated with artwork by the Dastkari Haat Samiti, an association that works to organize, help and market crafts.

Jaitly, founder-president of the Dastkari Haat Samiti, says: “The maps in the book are what anchored us while dealing with the overwhelming amounts of arts and crafts of our country. Each state’s map was done in a style native to that region and it was such joy to work with the artistes and local karigars.”

Leafing through the book, we picked out woodwork that decorates the length and breadth of the country. Intricate carving and lacquer-finished polishes to contrasting Crafts Atlas of India: inlay work—the Indian aesNiyogi Books thetic is lovely, dark and 464 pages, R4,500. deep. Edited excerpts:

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Combs of Uttar Pradesh A small pocket of craftsmen in Nagina of Bijnor district specialize in carving ornamental combs and trinket boxes from ebony wood or ‘shee­ sham’. The combs are mostly made in pairs—male and female.

Carving and Kondapalli toys of Andhra Pradesh The skill of carving elaborate panels for temples and doorways of the famous Shiv temple of Sri Kalahasti is adapted to more handy objects like wall clocks (above). The main centres of woodcarving in Andhra Prad­ esh are at Bhongir and the villages surrounding Visakhapatnam.

Chiselled out of locally available soft Ponki wood are the Kondapalli toys (below). These toys depict themes from daily life or mythological figures from religious books. Figures of soldiers, farmers, artisans at work, more utilitarian objects like napkin holders, wooden fruits, birds and animals are common themes.

Inlaid woodwork of Punjab Inlaid with white acrylic, instead of the banned ivory, the chessboard­pat­ terned furniture of Hoshiarpur creates a beautiful contrast against the dark ‘sheesham’ wood. Motifs of flowers, animals and trellis patterns are etched on chairs, tables and utilitarian objects like rolling boards and pins.

Jewellery boxes from Kerala Nettur offers a special jewellery box, with elaborate brass hinges and typically a triangular lid. Painted or polished in red, yellow and black, they were used in feudal houses as jewellery boxes, often part of a wedding trousseau.

Woodcarving of Himachal Pradesh In Himachal Pradesh, blessed with forests of pine, deodar, walnut and oak, woodwork is a staple. You will spot artisans busy carving away in the vil­ lages of Bari, Bhaba and Kelti. Intricate carving on doors, windows, panels, floors and ceilings of old homes, furniture, screens, walking sticks, utensils —homes in the hills have some exquisite woodwork.

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SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012

L9

Style

LOUNGE COURTESY SUNEET VARMA

PROFILE

The real romantic After 25 years in business, Suneet Varma is set to move from being a designer to a true fashion house

B Y S UJATA A SSOMULL S IPPY ···························· andmark birthdays are always a time to celebrate, but also a time to reflect and retrospect. Suneet Varma is doing both as his fashion label completes 25 years this month. The merrymaking starts this weekend as he holds his Spring couture show, “The Eternal Lightness of Being: To Love, To Hold, To Kiss”, at Delhi’s DLF Emporio mall, coupled with a photo retrospective of his work. “We have never thrown away one contact sheet or negative,” says the 47-year-old designer who’s known for being meticulous and very, very particular.

‘Always proper’ would be the right way to describe Varma when it comes to his style, and even his personality. In the day, one is likely to see him in denims and a simple shirt or a well-cut kurta and churidar. In the evenings, it’s always a sophisticated suit, normally a pinstripe, with an unusual shirt in a muted colour with a tie. Varma is a complete dandy—you can see it in every detail from his shoes, socks, to his never-out-of-place hair.

By the end of the year, he would have also penned his first coffee-table book, Threadbare, which will not only be about Varma and his work, but also

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about fashion in India.

Varma has seen the industry from many angles—as a designer, stylist, a former brand ambassador for Moët & Chandon, and for the last three years, as a collaborator with American luxury house Judith Leiber. Suneet Varma Judith Leiber bags and minaudières have been India-inspired arm candy for actors Sarah Jessica Parker, Jennifer Lopez, Hilary Swank and singer Mariah Carey.

In 2011, he was appointed creative director to the soon-to-open Dusit Devarana Hotels in Delhi, Jaipur and Rishikesh. By end-June, he is set to open the country’s first Armani Junior at DLF Emporio mall—he is one of the promoters of the company, Unique Eye Luxury, which is bringing the luxury children’s clothing brand to India.

He is also working with German automobile company BMW to design the interiors for its new 7 Series. Added to all this is his own couture line—which has grown into an about `30-crore business (the turnover for 2011-12).

At 25, Suneet Varma is one of India’s “older” fashion labels.

Close friend and fashion insider Harmeet Bajaj says: “He was one of the forerunners, one of the first few people to do regular shows and thematic collections. In that way, he was a pioneer.”

Though Varma’s bag of projects and collaborations are more diverse than those of most other designers, many of his peers have also worked on multiple designrelated projects. Tarun Tahiliani has a tie-up with florists Ferns ‘N’ Petals and Timex Watches, while Manish Arora has worked with numerous other brands, including Reebok, Swatch and Good Earth.

This has been the way to survive and expand in India, where fashion is such a nascent industry.

Pradeep Hirani, the man

behind multi-brand store Kimaya, says: “Suneet has always stuck to his core—couture, and selected projects that work with his design aesthetic. Some designers take any project that comes along. Suneet has chosen wisely.”

Trained at the London College of Fashion, Varma began his career in India in the 1980s in Ahmedabad, working with the Lalbhais (of Arvind Mills) on a denim project when they had tied up with fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt. This sparked his love for textile, and it’s this love he is turning to for his latest couture offering. “I am feeling good,” he says, as he gets the music ready for the show.

That the collection has a romantic feel is not a surprise—this is Varma’s signature—but his other trademark, embellishment, is missing. “This collection is a departure for us; 90% of it has no embroidery. It is all based on textile and style.”

“As a couture designer, you are usually inspired by the past,” but currently Varma is in the mood to look forward. Of course, he is a bit nervous but, “after 25 years, you can take both the bouquets and the brickbats. I know now the main thing is to have a reaction out of people. If there is no reaction, there is a problem.”

Without waiting for the reaction, however, he has already planned a date for his second couture show in late November.

It’s the first time he is planning two couture shows in one year.

One of the few designers who is not fashion-week-friendly, he says, “That is simply because I do not have a ready-to-wear line.”

Though he did launch Le Spice, a ready-to-wear line that had over 30 points of sale, around seven years ago, he did not “have the guts to continue both couture and ready-to-wear” after his

spanking new and investmentheavy 3,000 sq. ft Le Spice readyto-wear store on 2 Mehrauli-Gurgaon (MG) Road had to be shut down because the mall housing it was bulldozed.

Known for his love of femininity, Suneet Varma’s label conjures up images of lace, Swarovski crystals, chiffon, fishtail and corsetry.

While it is a confection too sweet for some, his romantic take has a dedicated fan following.

Delhi-based fashionista and stylist Pernia Qureshi says: “Indian girls typically like to look pretty and girlie. Not many like to go for androgyny and edgier looks. He knows how to make a girl look delicate.” She feels he knows how to use lace better than other designers and this is his USP. “I love the idea of a woman being in love,” says Varma, who is a sucker for love stories. Perhaps this is why he has always been open about his love life. He talks easily about playing godfather to his former partner’s child and recounts an incident when, on a flight, a stylish woman asked him if he was married. “No, I am gay,” he told her. It turned out that the woman’s son was gay, and thanks to his advice, she now has a closer relationship with her son. “If you lie about things, then a relationship will never work.

You have to be honest, so why pretend to be something you are not?” says Varma.

Varma agrees that gay men often make for better fashion designers than their straight coun-

Two decades: Feroze Gujral photographed in 1989 by Prabuddha Dasgupta; and (left) Priscilla photographed by Vibhash Tiwari in 2009. terparts. “There is something to the fact that gay men understand women and their bodies better.”

While Varma acknowledges that there is a lot of not-so-friendly (read bitchy) behaviour in the industry, he has a reputation as the Mr Nice Guy of fashion. “I have witnessed things but I have steered clear of that,” he says. He has walked the ramp for both Rohit Bal and J.J. Valaya, and almost never misses the shows of his former assistant Nandita Basu, Rajesh Pratap Singh and Pankaj and Nidhi. “When I die I don’t want to be known for whom I dressed, but with whom I made relationships,” says the designer.

Perhaps a lot of Varma’s success with collaborations is due to his understanding of bonhomie. As Bajaj says, “I believe he always has had organization, management and public relations skills…. Today it takes a lot more than creative talent to be a success.” Hirani believes one of Varma’s biggest assets is he always stayed away from fashion politics.

Given the profile of his collaborations and the volume of his work, it is not surprising there are

rumours that Varma is in the reckoning for a covetable investment from a private equity fund sponsored by a luxury conglomerate. “There is nothing conclusive,” Varma says, neither confirming nor dismissing the rumour. “I think many designers have been approached.”

Meanwhile, his book has been something of a work-in-progress since he first thought of doing it about 15 years ago. He is happy he waited. “This industry has grown so much in 25 years. Look at Manish Arora, who, with 15 years in the business, heads an international fashion house (Paco Rabanne).”

Varma seems to have his creative hands in many pies but he believes there is still a lot more to come, and 2012 is set to be a landmark year in more ways than one.

If he manages to do all the projects he has lined up successfully, he would have proved that Suneet Varma is not just a designer but a true fashion house.

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

Write to lounge@livemint.com PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Mr Nice Guy: Suneet Varma working on his collection at his factory in Noida.

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COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

GOPAL MS/MINT

SPORTS

Parallel

park For years, Mumbai’s historic Shivaji Park has been the crucible of the city’s cricket. So what happens when a clutch of academies and informal clubs start playing football there?

BY SUPRIYA NAIR supriya.n@livemint.com

······························ y 7.30 in the morning, Shivaji Park has launched into another day of work. All over the maidan’s 28 acres in Mumbai, its surface an uneven patchwork of grass, gravel and sand, hundreds of young people turn up in shining whites to stand around each other in circles. They warm up and form a tight field around a quickly levelled pitch—for an indeterminate value of “levelled”—as the batsmen take their position and the bowlers scuff the run-up with their toes.

A wide patch of bare mud along the north-west corner of the park holds its own on the periphery of the nets. A bunch of school friends has turned up in knee socks and a variety of European club football jerseys, a Ronaldo in Real Madrid colours trying hard not to bodycheck a smaller boy in a Barcelona shirt (improbably printed “10: Messy”). Next to them, behind a shrine of the cross and the BadenPowell statue outside the Bharat Scouts and Guides pavilion, a cluster of under-12s is training with the Kenkre Football Academy, lining up for a chance to dodge a child-sized hot pink ball around a line of training cones.

A boy in a Chelsea jersey kicks a nearing ball upwind, into a neighbouring cricket game. The cricketers ignore it for a beat or two, until it finally bounces up the knee of a bored-looking child in white, who kicks it back without a glance.

The vacations have begun, and all through the hot months and the monsoon, Shivaji Park’s cricketers will have their numbers challenged

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by footballers playing along the north, east and western edges of the park. A decade earlier, casual players might have numbered in double digits in the holiday months. Now, the Kenkre Football Academy trains 500 children in its U-16 programmes. A smaller institution, the Adarsh Football Club run by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) workers, has 70 players, and three teams in the Mumbai District Football Association (MDFA) league.

“It’s difficult to describe how much the number of football players on this park has grown,” says Harish Vaghela, coach, Adarsh Football Club, whose “ground”—an invisibly demarcated line that separates one game from another on the field—lies on a sandy stretch near the eastern entrance. “It’s a good thing. We’ve gone on and on about cricket for a while, anyway.

Time for it to take a back seat.”

Shivaji Park is used to being a lightning rod for conflict. For almost 90 years, it has been Mumbai’s terra prima for local politics as well as for sport. Every political party with influence in Maharashtra has had a watershed moment on these grounds, from the Shiv Sena and its Dussehra rallies to the Nationalist Congress Party, whose formation was announced here.

Eight cricket associations currently have plots here, on lease from the BMC. Each plot will have rolled up to three pitches this summer. The actual number of games played here on busy mornings is uncountable. On its website, the Shivaji Park Gymkhana (SPG) lists no fewer than 20 Test cricketers on its honour roll.

At no point during this brutal summer will it seem like Mumbai cricket’s zero point has been threatened by the little footballers stomping around the north-west corner. Whether this will hold true next summer, or five summers from now, is a matter of some speculation.

“In four or five years’ time,” says Joshua Lewis, the CEO of Kenkre Football Academy, “we think we might see a tussle between those using the ground for football and those using it for cricket.”

Kenkre began a youth programme, training children from age 6 upwards, six seasons ago.

They had noticed the steady rise of interest in their sport for some time, of course—regular television broadcasts of European football had accomplished that nationwide. A TAM Media Research survey found that India’s football audience increased by 60% between 2005 and 2009; a 2010 Nielsen survey found that a surprising 47% of Indians described themselves as football fans.

Inevitably, four or five years ago, the numbers of children playing began, similarly, to rise. “It wasn’t just the young ones who came to train,” Lewis says now. “We noticed older players, even working adults, started to stop by in the evening to play.”

“Around 7pm, the whole park changes,” Vaghela explains. “The cricketers don’t play in the dark, but all the children, all the people who have to work during the day, take over the grounds. That never used to happen before—now they’ll play until 10 o’clock, some of them until 11, when the lights are switched off.”

The floodlights were set up at Shivaji Park a year and a half ago.

Soon after that, the BMC installed sprinklers in the north-east corner to condition the ground for the footballers. The result is a curious mix of dust and mud, uneven and likely to blow in players’ faces whenever a strong breeze comes in from the sea. Watching the children play football is like watching 10 fielders thundering down a pitch, all launching themselves behind a ball, raising a minor dust storm.

“The surface is pretty bare,” Lewis smiles. “But when you love a sport you don’t care about the conditions in which you’re playing. It’s all right for amateurs.”

The beginning Shivaji Park came into formal existence in 1925, in an open plot acquired by the Bombay Municipal Corporation and leased out for development. It was inaugurated as a public playground in 1927.

Like its counterparts in south Mumbai (the Oval and Cross maidans, the Cooperage ground and Azad Maidan, once collectively known as Bombay’s Esplanade), it became, and remains, a meeting point for the metropolis—a ground where rich and poor walked together, weary travellers and workers found a few hours’ rest at no cost, and where politics and play both found a welcoming open forum.

Various Bombay clubs and sporting societies would come to make it a permanent home. The SPG, which began life in 1909 as the New Maharashtra Cricket Club (later to become the Dadar Hindu

Play ball: (clockwise from above) Football at the nets; the Dadar­Matunga skyline at night; young cricketers at catching practice; boys practising mallakhamb; and baseball at the park.

Gymkhana), was allotted a southeastern plot of land early in the park’s existence through the efforts of a club member who also happened to be a corporator.

Across the park from the SPG is the Bengal Club. It migrated from its birthplace in Parel in the 1950s to the western edge of the maidan, parallel to the Arabian Sea and Cadell Road, now called Veer Savarkar Marg. They acquired their own clubhouse and football field—their cricket academy was formed as late as 1997.

“In that north-west corner,” says retired sports journalist and stalwart SPG member G.K. Menon, “the Western India Football Association used to conduct tournaments in an enclosed area for a few years between the mid-1940s and 1950s. After the monsoon, hockey players used to take over.”

“The Dadar XI (a football club) used to be popular in the neighbourhood,” says Theo Braganza, another long-time resident and

owner of a city institution, the Marine Sports bookshop, a stone’s throw from the park. “In the 1950s, that corner had wooden stands for viewers. But somehow, over the years, cricket simply took over everything.”

“I can’t understand,” Menon says now, “how all of that just vanished.”

One for all The park is used relentlessly. Its political events are combated fiercely by environmental activists and residents protesting noise pollution (political parties are opposing a Bombay high court ban on all rallies here). Cricket holds sway at the centre, but a walk around the park reveals how stretchable space is here. The cricketers avoid the footballers, the footballers dodge the baseball team, the badminton players skirt the edge of the openair gym at the Samarth Vyayam

Mandir on the south-western side, where child gymnasts clamber along the parallel bars, and boys and girls practise mallakhamb (a traditional Indian sport). The weightlifters at the Shivaji Park Open Gymkhana sequester themselves in a makeshift gym behind the volleyballers, who take care not to lob their ball into a nearby cricket game—and so it goes.

Football as a point of conflict, then, has some years to go before matters come to a head, if that.

Shivaji Park accommodates such a bizarre range of activities that cricketers are able to ignore a lot of things. As Vaghela says: “We adjust with them, they adjust with us. It’s worked well so far.” No cricketers we spoke to at the park said they look at football as an encroaching sport.

Stretchable does not mean infinite, though. Unlike mallakhamb and the parallel bars, football eats up the ground. When Braganza steps out for his 5.30am walk these days, he often spots a coach or two training footballers at dawn.

“We go to the park at 7.30 on Sunday mornings,” says Neil D’Souza, a member of the Arsenal Mumbai Supporters Club, a group of about 20 who play football in Shivaji Park every weekend. “The earlier you go, the more cricketers you avoid.” Sunday is the day few show up at Shivaji Park in cricket whites—instead, the field grows thick with amateurs in everything from kurta-pyjama and floaters to cycling shorts and flip-flops, who come to play for fun.

“You can play cricket in a narrow space but for football, you need to spread out. That’s a prob-

THE CRICKETERS AVOID THE FOOTBALLERS, THE FOOTBALLERS DODGE THE BASEBALL TEAM, THE BADMINTON PLAYERS SKIRT THE EDGE OF THE OPEN­AIR GYM, WHERE CHILD GYMNASTS CLAMBER ALONG THE PARALLEL BARS, AND BOYS AND GIRLS PRACTISE ‘MALLAKHAMB’

lem,” adds D’Souza.

“The thing about increasing numbers of football players is that cricketers have now begun to play football and be interested in it,” says Makarand Waingankar, a veteran observer of Mumbai cricket.

“Some years ago, no schoolboy cricketer would have thought of anything but his game the night before a match. Now, they’ll stay up to watch Manchester United play a game at midnight and come to the ground the morning after.”

When people call Shivaji Park the cradle of Mumbai cricket, they refer to the traditional network of schools and academies whose students, largely from around central

Mumbai, formed a hothouse that produced a steady stream of players for Mumbai and India over the years. Over the last two decades, redevelopment and demographic shifts have changed the island city, and Shivaji Park cricket has reflected that. Historic cricketing schools like Shardashram Vidyamandir (Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli’s alma mater) have had low-key runs in school cricket in the last few years. Future international prospects like Rohit Sharma and Ajinkya Rahane have learned their trade in suburban grounds to the north, to where middle-class migrants have migrated, and cricket facilities, consequently, have bloomed.

Meanwhile, around Shivaji Park, redevelopment has accelerated in the last five years. Coastal Regulatory Zone (CRZ) norms have left the park and its surrounding blocks intact, but the Dadar-Matunga skyline to the east is strikingly crowded, with concrete and plate-glass towers dwarfing old rain trees and the roofs and terraces of squat, broad, three-storey buildings.

One of those red roofs belongs to Balmohan Vidyamandir, a traditional “cricketing” school which began playing football five years ago. This season, the school’s U-12 football team (from its English-medium section) made its debut in the third division of the Mumbai Schools Sports Association (MSSA) tournament, and won the division, beating out 150 teams.

“We accept that we are renowned for cricket,” says Guruprasad Rege, trustee and director of Balmohan Vidyamandir. “But we’ve also won championships in badminton, karate and boxing in the last few years. The (MSSA tournament) football victory changed the whole atmosphere of the school. We can see that football fever is growing and that more of our children want to play football.”

Shivaji Park is one half of the long-running rivalry known as the battle of Tilak Bridge, the railway bridge that connects eastern Dadar to the west—its opponent, the Dadar Union club, is said to produce dedicated, technically correct cricketers, while the park’s protégés turn out to be aggressive, flamboyant types.

Sunil Gavaskar played for Dadar Union; Kambli and Tendulkar come from Shivaji Park. Cricketers’ fierce loyalty to their clubs and grounds gave maidans their competitiveness and edge.

“Back in the day, Test cricketers from Dadar Union or Shivaji Park returned to play local tournaments whenever they could,” Braganza says. “Crowds surrounded the park, watching Ramakant Desai or Vijay Manjrekar coming back to play.”

“These academies and coaching ‘camps’, that have come up were unheard of in an earlier time,” Menon says. “It’s unfortunate that

you can now coach nets—the correct term—if you have some financial backing, even with zero technical knowledge.”

End of an era?

In spite of—or perhaps because of—their reputation for in-yourface cricket, the mood at Shivaji Park is generally sombre. The relay race of trainee cricketers keeps up through the day, their play is neat and economical, not shrouded in galloping clouds of dust like the football teams. They do not smile, laugh or talk.

The footballers come back around teatime, when the worst of the heat has been drained away by the sea air. The Kenkre teams’ training cones are set up again.

The BMC’s sprinklers wet the ground, leaving on it an interlocking pattern of damp circles.

The contrast between the tall, quiet, white-clad young adults and the brightly kitted small footballers offers an appealing visual tableau about the difference between the present and the future, but it is an incomplete one. Kenkre’s older students train at a separate facility, and football, because it requires relatively less equipment and typically starts training at younger ages than cricket, skews favourably towards including five- and six-year-olds.

“It’s a place everyone knows,” says Vishvan Saran, manager of SPT Sports, who was in Mumbai this week to kick off his Bangalore-based training school’s first football camp in this part of the city. “You do think of Shivaji Park as a place dominated by cricket, but it’s so central.”

SPT started training for fiveto 16-year-olds here on Monday, having signed up over a dozen players from around the neighbourhood. As they began their practice drills on the Adarsh Football Club’s ground, five boys, who were watching, ran up and asked to be included. “We’re good at football,” Ganesh, a skinny 12-yearold, said earnestly. “We’re good at cricket too, but we’re better at football. Especially me.”

“I’ll sign you up if you come every day,” Saran promised.

In the evening, Shivaji Park grows busier than ever. The joggers and walkers return. From nearby workplaces, employees escape to sit on the benches under the trees, watching the games, sometimes getting up to throw a ball back into play. For as long as the light conditions allow, the cricketers play on. Around them, the number of amateur football games gradually rises in volume.

For a moment before the boys in white wind down, it looks like one side is having all the fun. www.livemint.com For a related slide show, visit www.livemint.com/shivajipark.htm

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SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PHOTOGRAPHS

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GOPAL MS/MINT

SPORTS

Parallel

park For years, Mumbai’s historic Shivaji Park has been the crucible of the city’s cricket. So what happens when a clutch of academies and informal clubs start playing football there?

BY SUPRIYA NAIR supriya.n@livemint.com

······························ y 7.30 in the morning, Shivaji Park has launched into another day of work. All over the maidan’s 28 acres in Mumbai, its surface an uneven patchwork of grass, gravel and sand, hundreds of young people turn up in shining whites to stand around each other in circles. They warm up and form a tight field around a quickly levelled pitch—for an indeterminate value of “levelled”—as the batsmen take their position and the bowlers scuff the run-up with their toes.

A wide patch of bare mud along the north-west corner of the park holds its own on the periphery of the nets. A bunch of school friends has turned up in knee socks and a variety of European club football jerseys, a Ronaldo in Real Madrid colours trying hard not to bodycheck a smaller boy in a Barcelona shirt (improbably printed “10: Messy”). Next to them, behind a shrine of the cross and the BadenPowell statue outside the Bharat Scouts and Guides pavilion, a cluster of under-12s is training with the Kenkre Football Academy, lining up for a chance to dodge a child-sized hot pink ball around a line of training cones.

A boy in a Chelsea jersey kicks a nearing ball upwind, into a neighbouring cricket game. The cricketers ignore it for a beat or two, until it finally bounces up the knee of a bored-looking child in white, who kicks it back without a glance.

The vacations have begun, and all through the hot months and the monsoon, Shivaji Park’s cricketers will have their numbers challenged

B

by footballers playing along the north, east and western edges of the park. A decade earlier, casual players might have numbered in double digits in the holiday months. Now, the Kenkre Football Academy trains 500 children in its U-16 programmes. A smaller institution, the Adarsh Football Club run by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) workers, has 70 players, and three teams in the Mumbai District Football Association (MDFA) league.

“It’s difficult to describe how much the number of football players on this park has grown,” says Harish Vaghela, coach, Adarsh Football Club, whose “ground”—an invisibly demarcated line that separates one game from another on the field—lies on a sandy stretch near the eastern entrance. “It’s a good thing. We’ve gone on and on about cricket for a while, anyway.

Time for it to take a back seat.”

Shivaji Park is used to being a lightning rod for conflict. For almost 90 years, it has been Mumbai’s terra prima for local politics as well as for sport. Every political party with influence in Maharashtra has had a watershed moment on these grounds, from the Shiv Sena and its Dussehra rallies to the Nationalist Congress Party, whose formation was announced here.

Eight cricket associations currently have plots here, on lease from the BMC. Each plot will have rolled up to three pitches this summer. The actual number of games played here on busy mornings is uncountable. On its website, the Shivaji Park Gymkhana (SPG) lists no fewer than 20 Test cricketers on its honour roll.

At no point during this brutal summer will it seem like Mumbai cricket’s zero point has been threatened by the little footballers stomping around the north-west corner. Whether this will hold true next summer, or five summers from now, is a matter of some speculation.

“In four or five years’ time,” says Joshua Lewis, the CEO of Kenkre Football Academy, “we think we might see a tussle between those using the ground for football and those using it for cricket.”

Kenkre began a youth programme, training children from age 6 upwards, six seasons ago.

They had noticed the steady rise of interest in their sport for some time, of course—regular television broadcasts of European football had accomplished that nationwide. A TAM Media Research survey found that India’s football audience increased by 60% between 2005 and 2009; a 2010 Nielsen survey found that a surprising 47% of Indians described themselves as football fans.

Inevitably, four or five years ago, the numbers of children playing began, similarly, to rise. “It wasn’t just the young ones who came to train,” Lewis says now. “We noticed older players, even working adults, started to stop by in the evening to play.”

“Around 7pm, the whole park changes,” Vaghela explains. “The cricketers don’t play in the dark, but all the children, all the people who have to work during the day, take over the grounds. That never used to happen before—now they’ll play until 10 o’clock, some of them until 11, when the lights are switched off.”

The floodlights were set up at Shivaji Park a year and a half ago.

Soon after that, the BMC installed sprinklers in the north-east corner to condition the ground for the footballers. The result is a curious mix of dust and mud, uneven and likely to blow in players’ faces whenever a strong breeze comes in from the sea. Watching the children play football is like watching 10 fielders thundering down a pitch, all launching themselves behind a ball, raising a minor dust storm.

“The surface is pretty bare,” Lewis smiles. “But when you love a sport you don’t care about the conditions in which you’re playing. It’s all right for amateurs.”

The beginning Shivaji Park came into formal existence in 1925, in an open plot acquired by the Bombay Municipal Corporation and leased out for development. It was inaugurated as a public playground in 1927.

Like its counterparts in south Mumbai (the Oval and Cross maidans, the Cooperage ground and Azad Maidan, once collectively known as Bombay’s Esplanade), it became, and remains, a meeting point for the metropolis—a ground where rich and poor walked together, weary travellers and workers found a few hours’ rest at no cost, and where politics and play both found a welcoming open forum.

Various Bombay clubs and sporting societies would come to make it a permanent home. The SPG, which began life in 1909 as the New Maharashtra Cricket Club (later to become the Dadar Hindu

Play ball: (clockwise from above) Football at the nets; the Dadar­Matunga skyline at night; young cricketers at catching practice; boys practising mallakhamb; and baseball at the park.

Gymkhana), was allotted a southeastern plot of land early in the park’s existence through the efforts of a club member who also happened to be a corporator.

Across the park from the SPG is the Bengal Club. It migrated from its birthplace in Parel in the 1950s to the western edge of the maidan, parallel to the Arabian Sea and Cadell Road, now called Veer Savarkar Marg. They acquired their own clubhouse and football field—their cricket academy was formed as late as 1997.

“In that north-west corner,” says retired sports journalist and stalwart SPG member G.K. Menon, “the Western India Football Association used to conduct tournaments in an enclosed area for a few years between the mid-1940s and 1950s. After the monsoon, hockey players used to take over.”

“The Dadar XI (a football club) used to be popular in the neighbourhood,” says Theo Braganza, another long-time resident and

owner of a city institution, the Marine Sports bookshop, a stone’s throw from the park. “In the 1950s, that corner had wooden stands for viewers. But somehow, over the years, cricket simply took over everything.”

“I can’t understand,” Menon says now, “how all of that just vanished.”

One for all The park is used relentlessly. Its political events are combated fiercely by environmental activists and residents protesting noise pollution (political parties are opposing a Bombay high court ban on all rallies here). Cricket holds sway at the centre, but a walk around the park reveals how stretchable space is here. The cricketers avoid the footballers, the footballers dodge the baseball team, the badminton players skirt the edge of the openair gym at the Samarth Vyayam

Mandir on the south-western side, where child gymnasts clamber along the parallel bars, and boys and girls practise mallakhamb (a traditional Indian sport). The weightlifters at the Shivaji Park Open Gymkhana sequester themselves in a makeshift gym behind the volleyballers, who take care not to lob their ball into a nearby cricket game—and so it goes.

Football as a point of conflict, then, has some years to go before matters come to a head, if that.

Shivaji Park accommodates such a bizarre range of activities that cricketers are able to ignore a lot of things. As Vaghela says: “We adjust with them, they adjust with us. It’s worked well so far.” No cricketers we spoke to at the park said they look at football as an encroaching sport.

Stretchable does not mean infinite, though. Unlike mallakhamb and the parallel bars, football eats up the ground. When Braganza steps out for his 5.30am walk these days, he often spots a coach or two training footballers at dawn.

“We go to the park at 7.30 on Sunday mornings,” says Neil D’Souza, a member of the Arsenal Mumbai Supporters Club, a group of about 20 who play football in Shivaji Park every weekend. “The earlier you go, the more cricketers you avoid.” Sunday is the day few show up at Shivaji Park in cricket whites—instead, the field grows thick with amateurs in everything from kurta-pyjama and floaters to cycling shorts and flip-flops, who come to play for fun.

“You can play cricket in a narrow space but for football, you need to spread out. That’s a prob-

THE CRICKETERS AVOID THE FOOTBALLERS, THE FOOTBALLERS DODGE THE BASEBALL TEAM, THE BADMINTON PLAYERS SKIRT THE EDGE OF THE OPEN­AIR GYM, WHERE CHILD GYMNASTS CLAMBER ALONG THE PARALLEL BARS, AND BOYS AND GIRLS PRACTISE ‘MALLAKHAMB’

lem,” adds D’Souza.

“The thing about increasing numbers of football players is that cricketers have now begun to play football and be interested in it,” says Makarand Waingankar, a veteran observer of Mumbai cricket.

“Some years ago, no schoolboy cricketer would have thought of anything but his game the night before a match. Now, they’ll stay up to watch Manchester United play a game at midnight and come to the ground the morning after.”

When people call Shivaji Park the cradle of Mumbai cricket, they refer to the traditional network of schools and academies whose students, largely from around central

Mumbai, formed a hothouse that produced a steady stream of players for Mumbai and India over the years. Over the last two decades, redevelopment and demographic shifts have changed the island city, and Shivaji Park cricket has reflected that. Historic cricketing schools like Shardashram Vidyamandir (Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli’s alma mater) have had low-key runs in school cricket in the last few years. Future international prospects like Rohit Sharma and Ajinkya Rahane have learned their trade in suburban grounds to the north, to where middle-class migrants have migrated, and cricket facilities, consequently, have bloomed.

Meanwhile, around Shivaji Park, redevelopment has accelerated in the last five years. Coastal Regulatory Zone (CRZ) norms have left the park and its surrounding blocks intact, but the Dadar-Matunga skyline to the east is strikingly crowded, with concrete and plate-glass towers dwarfing old rain trees and the roofs and terraces of squat, broad, three-storey buildings.

One of those red roofs belongs to Balmohan Vidyamandir, a traditional “cricketing” school which began playing football five years ago. This season, the school’s U-12 football team (from its English-medium section) made its debut in the third division of the Mumbai Schools Sports Association (MSSA) tournament, and won the division, beating out 150 teams.

“We accept that we are renowned for cricket,” says Guruprasad Rege, trustee and director of Balmohan Vidyamandir. “But we’ve also won championships in badminton, karate and boxing in the last few years. The (MSSA tournament) football victory changed the whole atmosphere of the school. We can see that football fever is growing and that more of our children want to play football.”

Shivaji Park is one half of the long-running rivalry known as the battle of Tilak Bridge, the railway bridge that connects eastern Dadar to the west—its opponent, the Dadar Union club, is said to produce dedicated, technically correct cricketers, while the park’s protégés turn out to be aggressive, flamboyant types.

Sunil Gavaskar played for Dadar Union; Kambli and Tendulkar come from Shivaji Park. Cricketers’ fierce loyalty to their clubs and grounds gave maidans their competitiveness and edge.

“Back in the day, Test cricketers from Dadar Union or Shivaji Park returned to play local tournaments whenever they could,” Braganza says. “Crowds surrounded the park, watching Ramakant Desai or Vijay Manjrekar coming back to play.”

“These academies and coaching ‘camps’, that have come up were unheard of in an earlier time,” Menon says. “It’s unfortunate that

you can now coach nets—the correct term—if you have some financial backing, even with zero technical knowledge.”

End of an era?

In spite of—or perhaps because of—their reputation for in-yourface cricket, the mood at Shivaji Park is generally sombre. The relay race of trainee cricketers keeps up through the day, their play is neat and economical, not shrouded in galloping clouds of dust like the football teams. They do not smile, laugh or talk.

The footballers come back around teatime, when the worst of the heat has been drained away by the sea air. The Kenkre teams’ training cones are set up again.

The BMC’s sprinklers wet the ground, leaving on it an interlocking pattern of damp circles.

The contrast between the tall, quiet, white-clad young adults and the brightly kitted small footballers offers an appealing visual tableau about the difference between the present and the future, but it is an incomplete one. Kenkre’s older students train at a separate facility, and football, because it requires relatively less equipment and typically starts training at younger ages than cricket, skews favourably towards including five- and six-year-olds.

“It’s a place everyone knows,” says Vishvan Saran, manager of SPT Sports, who was in Mumbai this week to kick off his Bangalore-based training school’s first football camp in this part of the city. “You do think of Shivaji Park as a place dominated by cricket, but it’s so central.”

SPT started training for fiveto 16-year-olds here on Monday, having signed up over a dozen players from around the neighbourhood. As they began their practice drills on the Adarsh Football Club’s ground, five boys, who were watching, ran up and asked to be included. “We’re good at football,” Ganesh, a skinny 12-yearold, said earnestly. “We’re good at cricket too, but we’re better at football. Especially me.”

“I’ll sign you up if you come every day,” Saran promised.

In the evening, Shivaji Park grows busier than ever. The joggers and walkers return. From nearby workplaces, employees escape to sit on the benches under the trees, watching the games, sometimes getting up to throw a ball back into play. For as long as the light conditions allow, the cricketers play on. Around them, the number of amateur football games gradually rises in volume.

For a moment before the boys in white wind down, it looks like one side is having all the fun. www.livemint.com For a related slide show, visit www.livemint.com/shivajipark.htm

L12

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012

Travel

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TOURS

The unsinkable legacy Whether you opt for Belfast’s official ‘Titanic Trail’ or a tour of SeaCity Museum in Southampton will depend on how you want to remember the ‘Titanic’

B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ···························· he first three or four times the bus drives past me I only feel mild bemusement at the driver’s desperation. It is a miserable day in Belfast, and there is a chilling wind blowing across the city’s Titanic Quarter, wreaking havoc on my dry skin.

The air swirls around, unhindered, over derelict shipyards and abandoned dry docks, the husks of Belfast’s past. I am walking up Queens Road after having spent several hours at the spectacular new Titanic Belfast museumcum-attraction-cum-amusement-centre. It is not a particularly long walk—I can just about spot the old offices of the White Star Line a mile or so away where I am headed to next—or an unattractive one—on my right, two gargantuan gantry cranes, stencilled with the “H&W” of the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding company, loom over the post-industrial skyline.

It is a walking route lovers of engineering, history and pneumonia will savour.

This stretch of road is part of Belfast’s official “Titanic Trail” walking route, marked by lively yellow and green signposts. But this afternoon, I am the only

T

adventurer on it. There is a continuously moving rank of taxis outside Titanic Belfast that rush visitors to and from the newly opened venue. Not even the usually storm-proof Chinese tour groups stray outdoors more than they have to.

The driver of this shabby Titanic hop-on-hop-off tour bus, however, is persistent. The bus is empty except for one miserable rider, shrouded in fabric, perhaps the tour guide, who is sitting on the upper open-topped deck, motionless. Now, the fifth time I spot their circumambulation of Queens Road, I begin to feel pity for the pair.

In the history of shipbuilding this is hallowed ground. At least for a short part in its history this was the Silicon Valley of naval engineering, the Baton Rouge of shipbuilding. Here one of the greatest shipbuilding companies in the world made some of the greatest ships in human history, employing, at one point, 35,000 people. Between 1908 and 1914, Harland and Wolff made three of the world’s largest ocean liners for the White Star Line. Indeed, as guidebooks, films and museums tell us over and over again, they were three of the largest moving man-made objects ever PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY IMAGES

built: the Royal Mail Ships Britannic, Olympic, and, most famous of all, Titanic.

This April it has been 100 years since the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, via the sea, into legend and myth. It went down with more than 1,500 passengers on board. If you don’t count losses at sea from the two world wars, the Titanic is still among the worst maritime disasters on record. But that by itself is insufficient to explain the Titanic’s enduring position in human memory. The horror of death at sea and the scale of the disaster are not exceptional enough to explain the books, films, memorials and cultural curiosities that have sprouted all over this tragedy like countless anemones.

So why are people obsessed with the Titanic?

The people of the city of Southampton have adequate reason to remember. After being built and fitted out splendidly in Belfast, the Titanic would sail to three more destinations before finally leaving for New York:

Southampton, where she picked up crew, Cherbourg in France, and Queenstown, now known as Cobh, in Ireland, where passengers boarded, before finally sailing into the open sea on 11 April 1912. In total, 699 residents of Southampton signed on to work on the Titanic, around half of them natives with family. Other locals boarded as passengers.

By far the best—and most moving—of all the Titanic-related exhibits at the brand new SeaCity Museum in Southampton is also perhaps the simplest. The floor of one of the rooms in the museum is covered with a map of the city, with a red dot marking the home, at the time of the sinking, of every Southampton resident who died on the Titanic.

The city lost a staggering 540 residents in the tragedy, almost a third of all losses. The thick smattering of red dots is heart-breaking. The woman at the visitor information counter inside the Southampton Civic Centre tells me that the Titanic touched everybody’s lives. “We lost an

TRIP PLANNER/LONDON Southampton is easily reached from London by train or bus. A very convenient train connection from London’s Waterloo station will take you there in around 90 minutes. Tickets to Southampton can be found online (http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/) for as little as £1 (around R80). Belfast is extremely well-connected to the UK and Ireland by road, air and rail. A 70-minute easyJet connection from one of London’s airports can start from £45, one way.

LONDON Southampton E ngl ish C h annel

You’ll need a UK visa. Apply for one at www.vfs-uk-in.com. Fly to London and use it as a base from where you can make day trips to hiking spots. And because Northern Ireland is a part of the UK, you don’t need a separate visa. Current airfare to London from Indian metros:

Belfast

Scotland

Ireland

UK

England

Lufthansa/Turkish Airlines (Star Alliance)

Delhi R49,140

Mumbai R64,740

Bangalore R64,040

SriLankan Airlines

R38,210

R39,650

R37,810

Fares may change. Some flights may require transit visas. Consult a travel agent.

Stay

Do

Belfast and Southampton are well served by a number of hotels and B&Bs. In Belfast, a large no-frills, child-friendly Premier Inn is located close to the Titanic Quarter. The very popular Tara Lodge, a 15-minute walk from the city centre, has rooms for about £75 a night for single occupancy.

Southampton is easily visited as a day trip from London. Even better, spend a day in Southampton before taking a ferry from the harbour to the Isle of Wight for a beautiful, relaxing weekend by the sea or on a bicycle. Belfast is a great base to explore Northern Ireland.

The UK allows you to hire cars if you have an Indian driving licence. This is highly recommended.

The drive up to the spectacular Giant’s Causeway is well worth it. And if you have a separate visa for the Republic of Ireland, you can drive south across the invisible border willy-nilly.

Belfast quarter: A tour guide talks to visitors at Thomp­ son Graving Dock, Belfast.

Museum details: SeaCity Museum, Southampton: www.seacitymuseum.co.uk. The website currently does not have an online booking facility. Titanic Belfast: www.titanicbelfast.com. There is tremendous interest in the museum and online bookings are a must. Tickets for adults are £13.50 each, but well worth it.

GRAPHIC BY AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

entire generation of people,” she says, fidgeting with a credit card machine. “These days the schools really drill that story into our children here.” Around her are stacks of brochures and flyers for, literally, dozens upon dozens of Titanic-themed events. Like Belfast, Southampton too is going Titanic-crazy this year. I buy from her a map for a self-guided Titanic walking tour that costs £1 (around `80). It is really the kind of thing they should put up on a website as a free PDF. The SeaCity Museum is a brisk 10-minute walk from Southampton Central railway station and abuts the eastern end of the city hall and civic centre complex. If Titanic Belfast is a triumph, then SeaCity must make do with a pat on the back and a sympathetic hug. Clearly the designers have had to work with less space and much less money. The current temporary special exhibition titled Titanic the Legend, housed in a posh new extension to the pre-existing space, is a somewhat juvenile collection of objects, multimedia and interactive screens.

This is a peculiar problem with many museums in the UK. The tendency to either target children and treat them like adults, or target adults and treat them like children. This is particularly an issue in small museums with limited collections that try too hard.

I walk up to the permanent collections on the first floor preparing for the worst: shallow interactive toys and animatronic dolls spouting bullshit. There are two exhibitions: one on how the Titanic disaster affected the city and another on the history of Southampton and its people.

Both, I am happy to say, are superb, contain no animatronic dolls, and are worth calling ahead to book tickets for.

The Southampton’s Titanic Story exhibition works because of its tight narrative. The designers talk about the city and the ship from the perspective of actual crew members on the ship: their origins, their jobs, their social contexts, and their stories on the ship itself. This riveting narrative, if you will excuse the pun, also begins to shed light on the Titanic’s universal appeal.

PETER MUHLY/AFP

On the seabed: Visitors look down on a projection showing images of the wreck of the Titanic.

Visitor attraction: An image of the Titanic’s wreck at the Titanic Belfast museum­cum­attraction­ cum­amusement­centre.

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Or rather the tragedy’s.

It is easy to see the ship as a microcosm of early 20th century Western society. Many of the crew members and third-class passengers came from bitterly poor backgrounds. Some were on their way to New York in search of a new life. This was still a time of outward emigration from the UK. At the same time, the ship was also packed with wealth, none more so than American millionaire John Jacob Astor, the richest passenger on board. Astor, it is believed, died when one of the ship’s funnels fell on him. He was also one of the few dead whose bodies were recovered.

Third-class passengers paid up to £9 for a ticket, a month’s wage for many of them. Tickets for a luxurious parlour suite in First Class cost an eye-popping £870.

Adjusted for inflation, that’s around $100,000 (around `51 lakh) in today’s money.

This disparity was not uncommon in that age. This was a time when many of the poorest families in Belfast, Southampton, and indeed all over Britain, survived on tea, bread and almost nothing else. When World War I broke out later that decade, the British government was shocked at how many men were unfit for service because of their dirtpoor upbringing.

But what later turned the Titanic into something of a minor beacon for social reform was the stark difference in the mortality rates for passengers in the various classes. Out of 30 children in first and second class, only one died.

Fifty-two of the 79 children in third class were lost.

During the subsequent British inquiry carried out by Lord Mersey, not a single survivor from third class was asked to stand witness to what took place on the ship. The presentation of the Lord Mersey inquiry at SeaCity, in the form of a mock courtroom integrated with video screens, is exceptional.

Throughout SeaCity there is one thing that the museum administrators and designers have tried to do—that is, to not let the scale of the disaster take away from the deep confusion and personal grief of the families left behind.

Later, after a quick lunch at the SeaCity café, I embark on the selfguided Titanic Walking Tour bought at the visitors’ information counter. It is a cleverly put together itinerary, connecting a handful of small and large monuments to the various dead: musicians, engineers, crew, firemen,

TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Southampton experience: (from top) A visitor to SeaCity Museum looks at a board show­ ing the number of crew lost on the Titanic; a picture of the grand staircase at the museum’s exhibition; and relatives waiting on a railway platform as survi­ vors of the Titanic arrive at Southampton on 29 April 1912.

and so on. This being the season of Titanic hysteria, each monument is well-laden with bouquets, wreaths and votive candles. Many of these have been placed by members of Titanic societies all over the world in Southampton for the annual Titanic convention.

One of the last stops of the tour is Canute Chambers, a small,

unexceptional building by the side of a busy road near Southampton harbour. Today, it houses private offices but in 1912, this was the office of the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic. It was here that families of crew and passengers waited day and night for information. As lists of the dead or living were

wired in, White Star staff put them up on boards tied to the metal grill that still surrounds the office. No collection of Titanic photos is complete without at least one picture of the crowds around Canute Chambers.

Standing outside Canute Chambers is inexplicably moving.

There is nothing to see except a

small plaque. A bus stop obscures much of the view of the building’s facade. But still, on a cold Southampton afternoon, you can feel the accumulated sorrow and futility that thronged there once.

There is plenty of Titanic all over Southampton, unlike Belfast.

In fact, as one local Belfast bus driver told me, “There is nothing much in Belfast at all besides all the Troubles and that new Titanic museum.” Most people, he told me, come to Belfast for two or three days and then spend all their time doing day trips, especially to the spectacular Giant’s Causeway up north.

For years, Belfast was at the heart of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Which may have something to do with the fact that the city is still coming to terms with peace and the idea of “business as usual”. The Titanic Quarter, explains the audio tour I bought from iTunes, is now undergoing a £7 billion regeneration programme.

The audio tour makes a valiant

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MATT CARDY/GETTY IMAGES

effort at making Belfast interesting. One of the stops, a stone’s throw from the superb City Hall building on Donegall Square, is the old Grand Central Hotel. During the Irish Troubles, the building became a British military base. By the time peace came about, it had become one of the most bombed buildings in the world. It was hit over 150 times.

But that is the highlight of a tour that quickly loses steam, eventually pointing out an outlet of Debenhams as a local landmark. The Irish accent on the audio is good, but not that good.

The Titanic Belfast, however, is superbly executed. The restaurants and gift shops are all packed as I stand in line to enter a remarkably engaging series of displays, interactive elements and even a short ride that simulates life on a shipyard. While SeaCity focuses on the human aspects of the tragedy, Titanic Belfast approaches it, understandably, from a more industrial and engineering perspective. Which allows them to make the experience substantially more immersive without descending into the morbid.

Yet, when I come out of the superb building 3 hours later, I am conflicted. Titanic Belfast is an exhilarating amusement experience. All around me, visitors are clearly having tremendous fun.

Families line up to buy boat-loads of T-shirts, posters and caps at the gift shop.

It all seems like a bizarre way to celebrate 100 years of a terrible tragedy. But then why am I having so much fun?

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Belfast and Southampton may not be quite the cauldron of activities that London is, but there is still plenty to keep children occupied safely and conveniently.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

Both SeaCity and Titanic Belfast take exceptional care of seniors and wheelchair­bound visitors. Most public spaces also have special rates for seniors.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

While central Belfast has an active gay and lesbian scene, Northern Ireland can get progressively homophobic as you travel away from the city. Things are much better in Southampton.

L14

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SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012

Books

LOUNGE

EXCERPT

‘Otherwise, what’s fiction?’

Two children listen to the beginnings of a love story. An exclusive extract from Jerry Pinto’s debut novel, ‘Em And the Big Hoom’

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here’s nothing in Em’s diaries or scattered notes about the first time she went out with The Big Hoom. She never hesitated to talk about it, so I wonder if this means something.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it—maybe she did write something and sometime over ten years, or twenty or thirty, that piece of paper was lost. Or it’s still in one of her cloth bags and I’ll find it if I look hard enough.

The Big Hoom’s version was that he had come right out and asked her. She looked frightened, he’d said, and I presume the vulnerability had attracted him.

“The Paranjoti Choir is singing Christmas carols at the American Consulate tomorrow. Would you like to go?”

“I would like to,” said Em. She maintained that she’d meant that she’d have liked to go but not that she’d wanted to go with him. But, she said, it was already too late: ‘Before I knew it, he was saying, “We leave the office at seventeen hours, tomorrow.

Dress up.”’

When Em talked about that first date, she seemed to remember her own panic most of all. That single casual instruction—“Dress up”—had thrown her into a flurry. She had four dresses, all cotton, and one Sunday suit, a coat and skirt with a white lace shirt.

“Surely, you had your Sunday best?” Susan said.

I remember that afternoon clearly. There’d been a scene because Susan, in her first year of college, had announced that a young man had asked her out for a coffee and she’d said yes. Em had shouted at her, asking who the boy was and what business she had saying yes. For a while I feared that Susan had triggered something and Em would soon be in one of her terrifying manic rages, but Em pulled back from the edge. By the time Susan had dressed, Em was calm. Susan waited for the right time to leave.

Em sat in the cane chair by the balcony door and lit a beedi. “I was your age,” she said, and began to talk of her first date. The tension eased as she told us of her panic, about having nothing appropriate to wear, and Susan asked about her Sunday best.

“Yes, but it looked okay in church. I hated it but it didn’t matter once you got to the hall because all the other girls were wearing the same kind of stuff.

You fit in. But I knew I couldn’t wear that to the American Consulate.”

“They would laugh?”

“No,” said Em. “The Americans I met were always polite. They would never laugh. But you would know that if they weren’t polite, they would be laughing at you. That’s where you’re embarrassed. Inside you.”

Finally, Em had consulted Gertrude who had shrugged off the whole sartorial nightmare in a single word. “Sa-ari,” she had said, drawing out the two syllables to indicate how obvious the whole thing was.

“Such a relief,” said Em. “Of course, a sari.”

It was a minor matter that she couldn’t tie one.

“I would stand in the middle of the room and stretch my arms out and someone would tie it for me.”

There was another problem.

“I could not go to the bathroom. I never did learn how to take a pee in a sari. I mean, the sari and the ghaghra and the pleats and the panties and the seat. It’s just too much of a mess.”

Her solution? A total fast.

Gertrude liked the idea.

“It’s a good thing to suffer in the beginning,” she said.

“Laugh in the beginning, cry at the end. Cry in the beginning, laugh at the end.”

“He thought I was very bored because I kept sighing. I wasn’t sighing. I was trying not to burp. Fasting always makes me want to burp. And there I was, sitting next to the Office Hunk.”

“The Big Hoom?” Susan sounded doubtful.

“What do you lot know? You don’t even think I’m pretty, I’m sure. But I am, even now, if you would just get that familiarity thing out of your eyes. But I was a looker then, thin waist, big wounded eyes, and the bloom of innocence all over me. And Hizzonner was also quite something in a suit, deep black, and white shirt and glowing sapphire tie to match his eyes.”

“You remember what he wore?”

“He didn’t wear that tie. I gave it to him some time later. That day it was a maroon tie. But when I think of him as the hunk, I think of him in a blue tie.”

At the end of the concert, The Big Hoom suggested dinner. Gertie had assured Imelda that it was her duty to refuse. “He’ll ask. Say no. You must say no to everything on the first date or he’ll think you’re easy. Say no, no, no. But let him take you for coffee and then let him order dinner.”

“I would have done exactly that,” Em said.

“Didn’t you ask Granny?”

Susan sounded a bit forlorn.

“Mae? Mae. She was no use at all,” said Em, a little cryptically. Then she looked at Susan, as if noticing her properly for the first time.

Susan was wearing midnight blue.

“Is that you? You look charming,” said Em and took her beedi out of her mouth.

Susan looked startled.

Compliments were rare at any time. When Em was high, they were oases in the desert.

“Come and sit by me,” Em said.

“Go, go,” I urged Susan in my head but to give her credit, she didn’t even hesitate though Em had refused to bathe for two days and had been smoking incessantly all day. She smelled unbelievably high.

“Only one word of advice,” said Em. “Do what your heart tells you. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. The only things we regret are the things we did not do.”

Susan grinned.

“So you’re saying I should sleep with him?”

Em did not miss a beat.

“If you love him. And if you want to.”

“It’s a first date.” Susan’s insouciance began to crumple slightly around the edges. “How

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

Em And the Big Hoom: Aleph Book Company, 232 pages, `495.

can I know?”

“Then chances are you don’t,” said Em. “But it’s a sneaky thing.

It can grow on you slowly. One day you’re thinking what does his chest look like under the banny and the next day you can’t bear the thought of anyone else wondering about his chest. As if you can ever stop people’s minds.”

All of which seemed to be going extraordinarily well. Then Em said, “But if anything should go wrong…”

“Like what?”

“Oh, if he should try and rape you…”

“Em!” “It has been known to happen,” said Em. “Pretend you’re trying to stroke his cock and then give his balls a twist.

And run.”

Susan got to her feet.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Em retreated too.

“You do that,” she said and lit another beedi.

“Don’t look at me like that,”

she said when Susan had gone. “I have to do my duty as a mother.”

She inflected the word with all the rage and contempt she felt for it. It came out mud-dh-dha.

Em did not have the standard attitude towards motherhood.

She often used the word with a certain venomousness, as if she were working hard to turn it into an insult. On one occasion, when we were chatting about a terrifyingly possessive mother, she suddenly broke into a chant: “Mother most horrible, mother most terrible, mother standing at the door, mouth full of dribble.”

Suddenly, now, she began to chant the line again.

It had the ring of a litany this time, but also something else.

“What exactly is that?”

“It’s how we would choose the den when we were children.

Ugh.” That was it, the sound of a playground.

“Mother at the door, waiting to eat you up. It’s a horrible image but maybe it has an

element of truth in it, like those Greek myths.”

“Was Granny a devouring mother?”

“I don’t know. I’m here, no?”

“Yes.” “But I’m mad. That must count against her too. Maybe she did this to me. Do you think I’m that kind of mother? The kind who’d devour her infants?”

“You could be, but…”

“Have you never heard of the phrase ‘a comforting lie’?”

Living with Em, having survived her into adolescence, we’d earned the right to be her equals. “Will it comfort you?” I said. “I’ll lie if it will.”

“Oh shut up,” she said, waving at me dismissively. “You would have to make it comforting.”

“How?” “How? How? A well-told lie can heal. Otherwise, what’s fiction?”

Em And the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto will release on 25 April.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

BOOKS L15

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

POETRY

THE READING ROOM

Shadows at midnight

TABISH KHAIR

THAT COVERS IT Israeli humour

A new translation introduces the deeply personal work of Oriya poet Bibek Jena to the English reader

The excellent Israeli writer, Etgar Keret, has a new collection of short stories out in English translation, and that can only be good news. Titled Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, it has just been published in the UK and Australia, and described in The Australian as “pithy, zany sketches…meditations on sex, religion, family ties, even terrorism”.

This is a great collection of stories, displaying all the elements of quirky humour and topical pithiness that have made Keret a major world writer. While connecting to a long tradition of dour, YOSSI TZVEKER/BLOOMBERG ironic, compassionate Jewish humour, Keret’s is also a very distinctive contemporary voice. The humour and even the surreal in Keret are rooted in the ordinary and the quotidian, as in his story about a businessman who likes having affairs because he can write off his candle-lit dinners as tax deductions. Or the woman who zips open her boyfriend to discover a different man inside. Or the writer who has to narrate an escapist story to a man who holds a gun to the writer’s head.

Zany: Israeli short story I hope Indian publishers will writer Etgar Keret. make Keret’s stories more widely available here. As he put it in an email to me, “Tell the people of India that my two humble ambitions in life are peace in the Middle East and to get everyone to read my book; and because I’m bound to fail with my first ambition, the least they can do is help me fulfil my second one, just so I won’t feel totally defeated.”

That is by no means the only reason to read Keret. But it gives you a faint idea of the man and his exhilarating fiction!

B Y A NUPAM K ANT V ERMA anupam1.v@livemint.com

···························· particularly poignant sequence in Eternity And a Day, Theodoros Angelopoulos’ Palme d’Or-winning film from 1998, recalls the 19th century poet Dionysios Solomos visiting a Greek island to write a poem. Solomos requests the inhabitants to lend him words from their local dialect in exchange for money. He begins receiving one word from each citizen, and eventually starts to assemble the words into a poem which, he believes, will truly reflect the Greek character.

Oriya lyric poet Bibek Jena’s frequent travels to the villages of Orissa echo Solomos’ quest for poetry that captures the essence of his state. Jena’s work has now been introduced to English readers with Memories, Legends And the Goddess: Selected Poems, a collection of his poems translated by contemporary poet Bibhu Padhi, and released by Rupantar on 18 April.

“Bibek used to visit villages to find the exact colloquial words which he could later use in his poems,” recalls contemporary Oriya poet Amaresh Patnaik.

Writing in the 1970s, Jena advanced the view that the poets of the day employ these old, oftforgotten words in their poems.

Jena likened poets to cultivators, says Patnaik—agri-poets, whose task he envisioned as the cultivation of a poetry imbued with the essence of a people largely dependent on agriculture.

Illumined by a “remarkable surrealistic approach”, as Patnaik calls it, the skeleton of a typical Jena poem meanders through the scents, sounds and fields of Orissa, adopts stray words and phrases, and wafts through many a temple door to latch on to symbols (the goddess Kali in particular), before being rolled into a “short and compact” poem. From Midnight (a poem in the collection): “The trees here/shall break down and

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keep you bound to the blood’s/ numerous flowers, and you will be forced to open up your/long black hair to wash my corpse with your tears.”

Born in 1937, Jena was a precocious child who finished his secondary school education by the time he was 12. He waltzed through graduate studies, picking up a degree in geography from Ravenshaw College, Cuttack, in 1955. But it was only when he landed at St Stephen’s College in Delhi for his postgraduate studies that he stumbled upon poetry. He waded through the works of his beloved modern Greek poets—Giorgos Seferis, Constantine Cavafy, Odysseas Elytis—along with Pablo Neruda, Leopold Senghor and others. Closer home, the Oriya poetry of Sachidananda Routray inspired Jena.

“He was impressed by the deep esotericism of Neruda and other poets he admired,” says Chinmoy Jena, Bibek’s younger brother, a poet himself. “This esotericism informs Bibek’s own poetry as well.”

Chinmoy’s Bibek was a boisterous elder brother who read voraciously, introduced everyone else in the family to the joy of literature, kept wickets really well (Jena represented Orissa in Ranji Trophy cricket between 1961-63), burst into invocations of Captain Haddock’s famed “billions of blue blistering barnacles” while playing cards, and swore by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Cultivator: Bibek Jena thought of poetry as an art imbued with the essence of its language and people.

Memories, Legends and the Goddess— Selected Poems: Rupantar, 64 pages, `130.

Jena was never a full-time poet. Soon after graduating from St Stephen’s, and after a short teaching stint in Cuttack, he joined the Indian Audit and Accounts Service in Bhubaneswar in 1960. He stayed with it till his death in 1985.

From 1983-85, Jena and Patnaik also served on the editorial board of a literary quarterly published from Kolkata called Pratibeshi, a magazine still in existence.

But, says Chinmoy, “Bibek’s work was never received too well during his lifetime.” “It was considered too personal.”

A close reading of Padhi’s translations throws this in sharp relief. The poetic idiom is plainly confessional.

Neatly divided into three sections—Goddess, Memories and

Excellent Ambai

Legends—the collection witnesses the sprouting of Jena’s natural symbols within the first few poems. The moon, rain, vermilion, blood, shadows, lotuses and rivers make frequent appearances. They serve to underscore the poet’s anguished longing for the debi (goddess).

Chinmoy tells of Jena’s midnight sojourns at numerous Kali and Durga temples. “His concept of debi, the goddess mother, which so troubled and possessed him, had its birth in those temple walls,” he says.

In the stillness of moonlit temple courtyards, the solemn atmosphere of a Jena poem was born. Then came the surreal abstractions, never jarring, that Jena adorns his poems with, and the ceaseless rhythm of arrival and departure, a journeying in and out of dreams, unhurried yet wistful.

Jena died of cardiac failure at the age of 48 in Kolkata. Chinmoy complains that the poets of his time were concerned chiefly with Jena’s personal life, which they presumed to be turbulent owing to his idiosyncratic way of living. “When he was alive, people were only interested in his personal life. This sudden interest in his poetry both amuses and annoys me,” he says.

Ambai is the nom de plume of historian and author C.S. Lakshmi, who writes in Tamil. Fish in a Dwindling Lake is her latest collection of short stories available in English, translated carefully by Lakshmi Holmström (reviewed earlier in Lounge on 17 March). All the stories revolve around journeys, but in such varied and nuanced ways that one can read the entire collection in one sitting without feeling any kind of thematic strain.

Ambai has been called a feminist writer, and it is true that she explores aspects of women’s lives with a subtlety and precision that is rare. But that can be said of Ambai’s art in other contexts too: She is a writer of shades and nuances; her narratives come at you from unexpected angles, as in the first story of this collection, which is at the same time a story of conjugal love and of “patriarchal” power, of innocence and of experience, of happiness and of sadness.

Single hair I finally managed to get a copy of the latest book by Roberto Bolaño to be translated into English, The Skating Rink; and guess where? In an airport bookshop! It is a sign of Bolaño’s well-deserved success that translations of his book have penetrated such determinedly non-literary spaces as airport bookshops. This novella, a beautifully modulated literary thriller about love, obsession, ambition and (finally) murder, has been expensively produced by Picador, with a double cover. That too is proof of Bolaño’s well-deserved success: two glossy covers instead of a single niggardly one.

But alas, it looks like Picador’s cover designers and editors had not read the novel. The Skating Rink revolves around an ambitious and beautiful skater, and a diverse group of people whose trajectories cross her ambitions and life. In Bolaño’s novella, this skater (the only skater in the story) is portrayed repeatedly and pointedly as a blonde, but Picador’s expensive double cover features a dark-haired skater.

No big matter, surely, except that it makes me suspect that some spaces are even more resistant to good literature than airport bookshops.

Tabish Khair’s new novel, How to Fight Islamist Terror From the Missionary Position, was launched this month.

Write to Tabish at readingroom@livemint.com

MUMBAI NOIR | EDITED BY ALTAF TYREWALA ASIT MEHTA/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Black town A collection of dark stories re­imagines noir in Mumbai’s idiom B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· hat inoculates the stories in this collection from the hyperbole of “maximum city...,” writes Altaf Tyrewala in the introduction to Mumbai Noir, “are the restraints set by the noir genre, which stipulates, among other things, an unflinching gaze at the underbelly, without recourse to sentimentality or forced denouements”. Since there are few genres of modern literature more self-regarding than noir, with its lone wolf narrators and oneiric “under-

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bellies”, Tyrewala’s definition leaves some room for argument.

His anthology, in spite of his best intentions, is a sentimental one.

But this is a good thing for fans of noir, who are inducted into the pleasures of the genre by its bravado—its rum-drinking, Khachaturian-loving gumshoes, toughtalking bombshells and unforgivable policemen (of whom Raymond Chandler wrote the loveliest line in his oeuvre: “No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them”). Noir has always conducted a theatre of ambiguity, in which solvers of crime present a sceptical face to urban decay and human indifference, only to hide how desperately they want to make things right. In its classic examples, noir exchanges the hyperbole of the shining metropolis for the equally persuasive hyperbole of the mean street.

Light and shadow: Mumbai Noir mines the city’s underbelly for stories.

Many of the stories in Mumbai Noir, while escaping the classic constraints of the genre, do indeed display this romanticism fully, and sometimes in ways that are too familiar to be enjoyable: The Mumbai underbelly is not an under-represented subject. There are many rum drinkers and tough talkers to be found here, as well as ex-gangsters, paedophiles, desperate housewives, ethereal bar dancers and two separate instances of ritual castration.

The “forced denouements”,

which slip through in spite of Tyrewala’s hawk eye, fail both their own narrative and the genre they attempt to operate in. A convicted terrorist’s wife meets a victim, and both commiserate; a grizzled policeman tries simultaneously to avenge and make amends for a corrupt colleague; a seneschal of the old underworld wishes evil would revert to its old habits. Cue the world’s smallest Khachaturianplaying violin.

What marks these tales as noir, rather than stories about nasty

Mumbai Noir: HarperCollins, 274 pages, `350. things that happen to Mumbaikars? Mumbai Noir answers this successfully when its best stories (including Tyrewala’s own little time-bomb of a tale about a watchman waiting for an impending death), expand noir to embrace the fears particular to Mumbai, and the voices and accents in which these fears are expressed.

In this respect, the anthology finds some of the city’s most accomplished English-language writers on sparkling form. The duo Kalpish Ratna create an absolute

wonder in At Leopold Café, their creepy, madcap time-travelling thriller, in which a young visitor to the famous café finds himself embroiled in a century-old medical mystery. Both Annie Zaidi and Paromita Vohra write beautifully pitched first-person narratives that will be read and reread for their characters. Namita Devidayal’s The Egg may or may not be the first instance in which Mumbai’s sectarian and exclusionary practice of designating buildings “vegetarianonly” has been imagined as a real house of horrors, but it is certainly the most trenchant. And Jerry Pinto’s They is the best story set in a gym we are likely to read this year, and possibly ever.

On balance, with more delightful stories than dull ones, Mumbai Noir pulls ahead of several of its siblings in Akashic Books’ urban noir series (of which it is the newest; the series began with Brooklyn Noir in 2004). There’s more typical Mumbai than typical noir here, but enough to entertain even readers sick of reading about both.

L16

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SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012

Culture

LOUNGE

EXHIBITION

The art world’s new grammarian ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Through his parallel universe of fragmented images, Pakistani artist Rashid Rana speaks the language of our times

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

···························· ery few artists can pull off a show without all their works on exhibit.

Rashid Rana is no metaphysicist.

Apart from being born in Pakistan, he had little to do with the fact that a large number of his works didn’t arrive in Mumbai in time for his double-bill art opening on 9 April.

They were held up at customs. But Apposite | Opposite, his first exhibition in Mumbai in five years, still managed to stun, and then silence.

The only one to speak was the artist himself.

One of South Asia’s most celebrated contemporary artists, the 44-year-old Lahore-based Rana’s latest exhibition incorporates both newer and existing works, around 30 in all. On till 26 May and spread across two south Mumbai galleries, Chemould Prescott Road and Chatterjee & Lal, it showcases a number of iconic works produced since he last visited India, among them his new and previously unseen video mosaic works.

From 2002, Rana has produced complex and ambitious works that use the phenomenon of pixelation as their mode and metaphor. “Pixelation is Rana’s mode in that he builds his large prints by amassing thousands of smaller images that become ‘pixels’ in service of a bigger picture,” says art historian Kavita Singh. “And pixelation is Rana’s metaphor, because through the relationship between the larger image and its constituent elements, he leads us to meditations about part and whole, surface and depth, fragment and meaning.”

It was in India, in New Delhi’s Nature Morte gallery, that Rana had his first international solo in 2004. Titled Identical Views, the exhibition flagged his ascent to the poster-boy status in the Indian art gallery circuit that he wears today.

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The most memorable exhibits were from the Veil Series, in which the artist’s subversive intentions manifested as photo mosaics of women dressed in burqas. Upon further inspection, the work appeared to be a collage made up of thousands of pornographic stills of women downloaded from the Internet.

In the artist’s visual universe, competing worlds of pop culture, religion and politics collide and converge in mosaic-like settings to give us a new parallel entity: Rana’s world of fragmented images. Here, distance alters meaning. Here, pictures hold secrets: They lie, they confuse, they reveal.

“We truly live in a world of images. Our consumption of media has come to define us.

Imagine bringing someone here in a time machine from 400 years ago...what sort of a visual overload would that be?” asks Rana, who sees himself working as an “photo-based artist” for several years to come.

Chemould Prescott Road, the larger gallery space, hosts the bulk of Rana’s new work. The pièce de résistance is the imposing stainless steel installation, Desperately Seeking Paradise II (2010-11). Viewed from certain angles, its vertical slats give the illusion of a smooth mirror surface. Viewed from other angles, it gives you something like New York City’s skyline. But come closer, and you’ll see the component parts of this high-rise fantasy: tiny images of apartments in Lahore. The precursor to this work, Desperately Seeking Paradise, was exhibited as part of Home Spun, an exhibition curated by Girish Shahane at art collectors Anupam and Lekha Poddar’s Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon from August-December.

That was a cuboid, suggestive of the Ka’aba, the holiest Islamic site of worship. This is a vortex, emerging from a corner of the gallery like Titanic’s bow. It achieves several things that art ostensibly sets out to do—straddling the broad spectrum between admiration, curiosity, fear and nostalgia.

Elsewhere at Chemould, the “pretty” photo mosaics of the Language Series are composed of photographs of Urdu and English signs from shops in Lahore. And in What Lies Between Flesh And Blood Series (2009), Rana presents serene canvases, reminiscent of the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. Viewed closely, the works reveal close-ups

Poetic licence Popular bands are using ancient literature and poems as lyrics for their songs B Y P AVITRA J AYARAMAN pavitra.j@livemint.com

···························· t begins with a solo riff by bass guitarist Keith Peters. A pause and audience applause (hoots included) later, vocalist M.D. Pallavi Arun sings in Kannada, “Togala maliya haalu, kudidu doddavaraagi… (You’ve grown up drinking milk from the skin, you strut around the land).” She is forceful in her presentation, almost as if chiding the audience for its obsession with the beauty of

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the skin—just as 19th century poet-saint Shishunala Sharif meant it to be.

She sings most of the song, but stops to recite a portion of it for effect.

“You caught it on YouTube, is it?” she asks, unable to contain her excitement that her band, HumDrum, is now popular.

HumDrum was formed when Pallavi, an established playback singer-actor, her drummer husband Arun and four others—Sumith Ramachandran on guitar, Pramath Kiran, who works Latin rhythms on drums, Hemanth Jois on keyboard and Peters, who has worked with A.R. Rahman and L. Subramaniam, on bass guitar—decided to make classical Kannada poetry better known. It wasn’t a new idea for Pallavi, who has been singing Kannada Sugama Sangeetha for 15 years.

COURTESY CHATTERJEE

&

LAL

Sliced reality: (clockwise from top) Rana with Desperately Seeking Paradise II; a close­up; and the photo­sculpture Newspapers (2010­11), UV print on aluminium. of blood and skin.

Rana’s most recent line of work are his video mosaics, which he has been working on for three years but only now made public.

In Anatomy Lessons Series 3, Michiel Jansz van Miereveld’s famous painting Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Willem van der Meer—of a naked body, dissected by a doctor and medical students—flickers on a screen. It is made up of hundreds of moving images culled from CCTV footage, films and documentaries. The seemingly provocative video mosaics of The Anatomy Lessons and The Anatomy Lessons II were made by videographing Punjabi wrestlers in a staged setting in Lahore. At first,

“In Sugama Sangeetha, the words of the state’s great poets are put to melodious but traditional music,” says Pallavi. She explains that the sound needed to change for a younger audience to find it refreshing. The sound that came together was the antithesis of traditional, “and yet we were singing in old classical Kannada,” she says.

Like HumDrum, Yodhakaa from Chennai, Avial from Thiruvananthapuram and The Raghu Dixit Project, too, are increasingly picking up traditional poetry and literature for the lyrics of songs set to more modern, even rock, music.

It’s an experiment that Yodhakaa took a shot at a few years ago. “We had no clue if it would work,” says Darbuka Siva, the band’s founding member and drummer. The band performs to shlokas and verses from traditional texts like the Upanishads, singing in Sanskrit.

“I believe that it’s a language made for music. It worked perfectly for our sound. Shlokas gave us amazing flexibility for making

the component videos appear pornographic. But they’re actually sliced up versions of the same video, rearranged to present the same visual landscape.

Asked what made him move to video mosaics, what made him want to have his pixels dance, Rana says he was prompted by the idea of YouTube and the access to the infinite stream of videos that it provides.

While so far, Rana has been more concerned with the juxtaposition of the micro and macro, where smaller images made up one larger image, he is now equally interested in rearranging pixels from one image to form something entirely new. “This is more chal-

lenging in a sense: I can simply rearrange images to form new meanings and new associations,” he says.

Over at Chatterjee & Lal, this new concern is visualized in Pure Beauty III, where one of Gerhard Richter’s famous colour charts are rearranged to form the terrifying scene of a bomb blast. This can only be deciphered properly from a distance. The other eight works at Chatterjee & Lal all play upon this notion of distance. Here, in his series of “photo-sculptures”, Rana pastes highly pixelated photographs of ubiquitous objects—a television set, a flower vase, a stack of newspapers—on to boxes.

This is what the strength of this

Recast: M.D. Pallavi Arun of the Bangalore­based band HumDrum. music, and they have so much of history and lyrical content,” he says. Yodhakaa, which has sold 3,000 copies of its eponymous first album, is now working with ancient Tamil texts and poetry for its next album.

HumDrum performs to the works of poets like Kuvempu, D.R. Bendre, K.S. Narasimhaswamy, D.V. Gundappa, Sharif and the singing saint Purandara Dasa. “It

was a bold step for us. After we performed to a poem called Rekkeya Hulu by Kambar Chandrashekar, who was in the audience, he came up to me and said our way of presenting the song gave his poem a new dimension,” says Pallavi.

She says they are careful not to “disfigure” the poetry. “If anything, we should make it beautiful,” she says. Pallavi is thankful to Raghu

tightly curated two-gallery exhibition lies in: this is the opposite of what is expected of the viewer in the first gallery. At Chatterjee & Lal, to make sense of the artworks, you have to move away. Come closer, and the imagery pixelates, and then totally abstracts.

As the Pakistani critic and curator, and close friend, Quddus Mirza says of Rana’s works, they exist like photographs of our imagination and videos of our dreams.

“Transcending the notions of nationalism and regionalism, his art is international in its essence and vocabulary,” he writes in the introduction of a monograph published by the two galleries to accompany the exhibition. He says Rana’s photo-based works are a mark of a global language, which is understood worldwide yet spoken with a particular accent.

To reiterate the basis of Rana’s artistic manifesto: we live in an increasingly visual, constantly changing, world. And this is perhaps why he is best suited to be its grammarian.

Apposite | Opposite opened on 9 April and will run till 26 May at Chemould Prescott Road and Chatterjee & Lal in Mumbai. All the works were installed on 12 April.

Dixit, who was the first musician in Karnataka to experiment when he sang another Sharif song, Gudugudiya Sedi Nodo. “In fact, he made the poet so popular that I have been asked by several people if any of the songs I sing are by Shishunala Sharif,” she says, laughing.

While HumDrum is cautious about being labelled a rock band, Avial (named after a dish from Kerala that is a mélange of vegetables in coconut gravy) gladly call themselves an alternative Malayalam rock band. Avial, formed in 2003, shot to fame in 2008 when it released its first album Avial with a video for the song Nada Nada.

Though most of its lyrics are written in Malayalam by local writers in consultation with the band, Avial too fell back on some traditional literature to lend familiarity to its music. Avial is constantly on the lookout for poems and literature it can make its own.

How does it scout for these?

“We just keep our ears open,” says Tony John, lead singer of the band, laughing.

CULTURE L17

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THEATRE

Reinterpreting the bard PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

SHUBHA MUDGAL

THE SOUND OF WAR

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

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Sunil Shanbag adapts William Shakespeare’s ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ in Gujarati, for Globe Theatre

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

···························· e taught her sanskaar (culture), but not sansaar (worldly wisdom),” is the rough translation of a line that Kunti, dowager of the wealthy landowner Jugatram Gandhi, uses for Heli. She is the orphaned daughter of a family friend left to her care in Sunil Shanbag’s theatre company Arpana’s reinterpretation of William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well.

The original lines from which it is derived read: “I have those hopes of her good that her education promises; her dispositions she inherits, which makes fair gifts fairer; for where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities, there commendations go with pity; they are virtues and traitors too; in her they are the better for their simpleness; she derives her honesty and achieves her goodness.”

Such are the challenges of culture and language while trying to reinterpret Shakespeare for audiences at the Globe Theatre in London in May. “You will not recognize it,” Shanbag chuckles.

The play in Gujarati, titled Maro Piyu Gayo Rangoon, is being staged as part of Globe to Globe, a festival within the World Shakespeare Festival 2012. Globe to Globe, which runs from 21 April-21 June as part of London’s Cultural Olympiad, will stage Shakespearean plays from 37 theatre companies across the world, each in a different language. New theatre technologies mean the translated essence of the script will feature as subtitles for culturally diverse audiences.

“It’s not like I had a long-standing ambition to do this particular play,” says Shanbag. “It’s what was convenient, given that some companies already have running productions of Shakespeare and some plays were taken.”

When Tom Bird, festival director, came to India in 2011 and saw Shanbag’s then ongoing play Sto-

MUSIC MATTERS

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All the world’s a stage: (above) Actor Mansi Parekh (centre) during rehearsals; and Sunil Shanbag (left).

ries in a Song, which used the nautanki style, he suggested the troupe stick with it—speaking directly to the audience, with the vibrant use of music and dance. Shanbag says that given this condition, All’s Well... adapted best.

Among noted playwright Mihir Bhuta’s challenges was the duration. “The original is 4 hours and we were given 2. A direct adaptation or translation was impossible.

I also believe you can never edit any great writer, least so Shakespeare,” says Bhuta. So he deconstructed the play in order to rebuild it. This included the enhancement of the regular cadences which Bhuta’s writing is known for, into a strongly literary rhythm in language, and the inclusion of 20 songs. “This, in the one Shakespearean play that has barely one or two sonnets,” says Bhuta.

The music has been composed

by Uday Mazumdar. In another rare feat, every cast member—from Chirag Vora to Minal Patel, Utkarsh Mazumdar, Mansi Parekh and Archan Trivedi—has a singing role.

While the sets remain sparse, as

is the Shanbag norm, there is a flamboyance to the characterization: “If audiences expect the curtains to open to a room with minimal furniture, they will be surprised,” Shanbag says.

What is intact in the grafting is Shakespeare’s tongue-in-cheek style. Thus Bertram becomes Bharatram, Helena, played by Parekh, becomes Heli, Parolles becomes Parbat, and Lafeu becomes Lafabhai, a family friend. But for Shanbag, it has never been about arriving at exactitude. Shakespeare, he points out, isn’t lost in translation. “Shakespeare is not about translating a line. It’s about melting it down. As long as you keep the emotion, all else can change.

“As I studied the play, I realized there were many similarities between the culture of trade within the Europe of the time (the play is set between Roussillon, France, and Florence, Italy) and the movement of merchants that ports like Saurashtra, Bombay and Rangoon would have had,” Shanbag says.

Bhuta opted to set the play in the Bhatia community of the 1900s for cultural comparisons to

the original courtly setting. “It was an era when the Gujaratis began to migrate to the Bombay of its day, and the Bhatias were the most prominent community, even more so than the Parsis.

They were wealthy landowners who lived like kings.”

So new wealth, opportunity, small-town boys with big dreams, migration and the breakdown of the landowning system are all scripted in beautifully. In doing so, Shanbag also manages to counter the problems that the original faced. “All’s Well... was always one of Shakespeare’s problem plays.

Firstly, he lost the opportunity to do a fantastic bedroom switch scene, which we are doing on stage. Secondly, there was little that was plausible in Helena’s winning over of Bertram. It didn’t sit well with audiences. We have managed to build an affinity between the couple.”

Culturally, Indian audiences are also far more attuned to a son being forced to marry for reasons other than love. Both within the plot and in its sheer effort, Maro Piyu... is a cultural marriage that depends on the sheer love of drama to function.

Maro Piyu Gayo Rangoon will be staged on 29 April at Bhavan’s College, 1 May at Tejpal Hall and 13 May at the Tata Theatre, all in Mumbai. On 23-24 May, it will be staged at the Globe Theatre, London.

t the risk of being termed the proverbial party-pooper, I do believe now is the time to point out that despite all the flutter and fuss preceding and following Asif Ali Zardari’s visit to India, artistes and musicians from the two countries share a relationship that is as complex, fractious and potentially explosive as the tenuous ties between the two nations. For many years now, I have publicly declared that despite the often severely strained relations between the two countries, “aal ijj well”, to quote from Aamir Khan-starrer 3 Idiots. I now need to withdraw that statement, as it would be hypocritical and idiotic to not do so.

Because under the thin veneer of bonhomie and mutual admiration lie complex prejudices and biases that have for long either been brushed under the carpet or remained unarticulated.

In the process, solutions are impossible to come by, for you can only repair and restore if you admit that some damage exists in the first place.

While there is a huge fan following for Pakistani artistes in India, and artistes from India are reciprocally admired and feted in Pakistan, a simmering sense of resentment and one-upmanship exists on both sides of the border. Occasional outbursts reported by the media reveal that Indian musicians believe visiting musicians from Pakistan are given a much easier deal in India. Reciprocal treatment is denied to Indian artistes invited to perform in Pakistan. They would like a tit-for-tat policy enforced. If Indian artistes are not permitted to broadcast on Pakistan radio and television, we should not permit Pakistani artistes to be featured in the Indian media. Here is a situation that echoes the sentiments of some who say that Pakistani scientist Khalil Chishti should not have been released from Ajmer prison when mercy petitions for Sarabjit Singh, lodged in a Pakistani jail, have gone unheeded.

Music sans borders: Rahat Fateh Ali Khan (left) and Sonu Nigam.

Between musicians, particularly those practising classical music, the spirit of one-upmanship is unprecedented. Some would say that it is in the nature of performers to be competitive and, therefore, a healthy rivalry between artistes of the two nations should be of no concern. If only this was as simple. The need to lay claim to being the true custodians and torch-bearers of a hoary tradition is echoed on both sides of the border. There are some in Pakistan who would have us believe that there was no classical music in pre-Islamic times, and that they are the fountainheads of the original tradition. Here at home are a matching number who only accept the Vedas as the source of all evolved music. All other influences are believed to be defiling and polluting. In the age of easy access to information, the rabidly sickening claims, the petty peeves, the abusive language, and the hatred can be ignored, but not hidden. It shows up somewhere or the other, often turning shared concert spaces between artistes of the two countries into war zones where decibel levels are used as weapons. If even in the realm of music and art we are unable to transcend borders and boundaries, what hope can we have of peace in a subcontinent where once we shared many traditions?

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

Out of the woods ‘Little Terrorist’ film­maker Ashvin Kumar on his first feature film, an ecological thriller B Y U DITA J HUNJHUNWALA ···························· our years—“if you count the making”—is how long it has taken The Forest to see the light of day, says Ashvin Kumar of his first feature film. But if his time as a film-maker has taught Kumar anything, it’s patience.

Since his short film Little Terrorist received an Oscar nomination (for best live action short film) in 2005, Kumar has made four films, including The Forest (his first film was Road to Ladakh in 2003).

After an initial ban, the censor board issued Inshallah Football an “A” certificate. Ironically, the film won the National Award for best film on social issues earlier this year. Another film, Dazed in Doon, on Kumar’s alma mater The Doon School, was banned by the school before most of the students even got a chance to watch it. Attempting to circumvent censorship and

F

delays, Kumar released his latest documentary Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror for a limited time on the Internet. The first 7 minutes of the film are still available online.The documentary had a remarkable 50,000 views in the first four-five days.

Little Terrorist looked at crossborder paranoia when a young boy accidentally crosses the border between India and Pakistan to retrieve his cricket ball. Political themes were more starkly explored in Inshallah Football, which Kumar describes as “a deeply personal narrative about father and son, the devastating conflict of Kashmir and the state of Indian democracy”, and its sequel Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror, which weaves together stories of brutality and terror by the Armed Forces and militants in Kashmir.

And after four years of sanity-

Nature first: A still from the film; and (left) Ashvin Kumar. testing disappointment, a re-edit of the film, another round of deadend meetings and souring deals with distributors, Kumar has finally partnered with PVR Director’s Rare to release his ecological thriller The Forest on 4 May. With The Forest, Kumar plays on the universal human impulse of fear. “Think of your own childhood when you were told a ghost story,” says 39-year-old Kumar, whose creature feature explores the pressing issue of the man against nature conflict. Starring Jaaved Jaaferi, Nandana Sen and Ankur Vikal, the heroes of the film are the leopards (that play man-eating leopards), the location of Jim Corbett National Park and the diligent filming of ani-

mals in the wild by brothers Naresh and Rajesh Bedi, who are wildlife film-makers.

While making his film, Kumar was adamant that he would use real animals. So a pair of trained leopards was flown from Paris to Thailand, where they were filmed.

“If the leopard was not real, the film would have fallen apart,” says Kumar. “Being in the presence of live animals changes equations—even when actors look at real animals, they react differently.

There is a scene where the animal and an actor are together. He’s alone on the tree with the leopard, and the leopard almost goes for him. We had to capture that scene in three takes. The Bedi brothers did a great job capturing images of

tigers and other wildlife in Bandhavgarh National Park.”

In the four years since filming The Forest, Kumar cut his film down to a tight 86 minutes. “It was painful amputating but it made a huge difference to the quality of the film. The distance gave objectivity...a positive fallout of the waiting period,” says Kumar, adding: “The Forest is a thriller moulded as a Hitchcockian classic—there is jealousy, love, and a force greater than the characters at work. There are elemental, mythological themes. That kind of storytelling withstands the test of time.” The thrills are built on the subtext of ecology and conservation.

This done, Kumar is already working on the script of his next

feature-length film titled Hype.

The film is a female-centric coming-of-age film about Indian youth and their subculture, set in Delhi.

This will be Kumar’s most mainstream and commercial project yet. “Hype is a film about love that looks at a lifestyle of drugs and farm parties; it’s a fashionable, edgy milieu centred around a chick on a bike who lives life on her own terms. It blows up every myth of masculinity, especially in the world of Jats,” says Kumar, who was raised in Delhi but now calls Goa home.

The Forest releases in India on 4 May. Write to lounge@livemint.com

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DELHI’S BELLY | RAJNI GEORGE

We didn’t start the fire PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

SHIV AHUJA

Cash­strapped indie musicians are finding new places to perform in.

Should they worry about identity?

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ropaganda on your TV screen/On the exterior they look so nice and clean/In Emporio I see them pose and preen/Wake up, wake up, things are not what they seem,” warn Delhi-based The Ska Vengers in their song Gunshot. The eightmember band’s sharp suits and pork-pie hats are accompanied by a blend of punk, jazz, rap and ska music, as well as political lyrics full of local references. In waging their “musical war”, the “ruder than rude” group has become cooler than cool, say members of their small but growing Facebook fan club.

While the Delhi indie music lot has always thought it was too cool for school—preciously aware of how small it is—manifestos have never been high on the agenda.

But with their earnest lyrics about home-grown uprisings and “dutty politricks”, The Ska Vengers, founded in 2009, are showing that ideology and show business can be the perfect mix. Not to mention, great public relations.

On Thursday, The Ska Vengers hosted and performed at a muchpublicized benefit concert to supplement funding for the musical training of Tihar Jail inmates, at upmarket live music venue blueFROG in Mehrauli, Delhi. On 26 April, Tihar Jail’s inmates will watch a performance by the band in a concert at the prison.

Owing to the Internet-aided proliferation of bands, groups compete for as little as `5,000-15,000 per gig, barely covering costs. Most groups are just happy to play at a gig—even if they must occupy Jantar Mantar. Outfits like The Ska Vengers, with their media-ready package, can charge more, says Asif Khan, who has written about indie music for publications like Rolling Stone India for a decade and regularly photographs and

School of rock: (clockwise from left) Inder Pal Singh (left) of Menwhopause jams with Tihar Jail inmates; The Ska Vengers mix punk, jazz and political rap with ska music; and New Delhi­based The Vinyl Records. organizes gigs and festivals.

Whether they are performing original music or interpretations of Bollywood tracks, the band is playing at every kind of venue.

The Ska Vengers performed at 11 gigs in Delhi alone in 2011, playing with international artiste Apache Indian in March that year and at Justice on Trial, part of the Free Binayak Sen Campaign, a few weeks later. At the launch of Arundhati Roy’s Walking With the Comrades in May, they covered Bob Marley, changing “Israelites” to “Naxalites”: a pitch-perfect localization of the reggae anthem.

Will others on the financially lean indie music community follow their lead?

“Bands in Delhi might be disillusioned, but they are also typically privileged. They aren’t really involved with identity politics,” says Khan. “Political statements in music are meant to move a mass; we haven’t reached that level yet.”

Of the around 50,000 people who go to concerts, only 5,000 are regulars, Khan estimates.

What Delhi bands now need is new platforms which will help a larger cross-section find new audiences, he explains.

The Ska Vengers are trying; they use an indigenous kind of counter-propaganda, filling your head like a newscast on repeat. “I want people to keep hearing these words and connect them,” says lead vocalist Taru Dalmia, who writes most of the band’s lyrics in

a kind of patois and speaks with a Jamaican accent. He adds: “The sad reality is that three things sell: sex, violence and rebellion. Sales are not my orientation, but we offer something that is commercially exploitable by those who have made this their profession.”

Joseph Pottenkulam, who organized indie gigs in Delhi for a decade, says, “Many of Delhi’s musicians come to the city, and often move on to do other things with their lives; unlike Mumbai’s bands, who are generally natives and stay together for longer.”

This, perhaps, makes Delhi more challenging.

“I wanted to do something useful with the narcissistic quality that comes with being an artiste, to put something back in,” says concert organizer Stefan Kaye, the British founder-member of The Ska Vengers. “We want to help prisoners—many of them unconvicted or untried—who don’t have full access to music and the freedom to walk into pubs and clubs.”

Kaye tutored Tihar’s inmates for a month last year and plans to stage high-profile fund-raisers, with support from media channels and musical equipment retailer Furtados, which will be donating equipment to prison.

Delhi band Menwhopause, founded in 2001, was the first band to do a gig at Tihar. “We held workshops and helped inmates form a band called The Flying Souls last December,” says

guitarist Anup Kutty. “There was an ironic moment when they sang our song Free. Eerily, even though we wrote that song in 2003, it felt like it was tailored for them.”

Playing to form, Menwhopause say they were not concerned with the publicity the gig would engender; they enjoyed watching the inmates perform last year and are currently in post-production for songs they recorded together and plan to release soon. “We are not politically inclined, or seeking to overthrow the establishment,” Kutty explains. “We sing about personal confusions.”

Mithy Tatak, the drummer of Delhi’s all-girl The Vinyl Records, which also took part in the Tihar Jail benefit, says her band too is indifferent to politics. The four members of The Vinyl Records are from Arunachal Pradesh. “We are new wave, have influences like the melodic hard rock of Veruca Salt; our lyrics are about self-expression,” asserts Tatak, talking about the strength of their music.

New bands, however, have short shelf lives. Among the older indie bands, Parikrama, Pentagram and Motherjane—based in Kochi, with a large fan base in Delhi—are the big three who have survived through sheer persistence, canny business formulas and a faithful college-going audience, says Rahul Gandhi, the former manager of Motherjane.

The rock group was the only one to target corruption and politi-

cians in their music: “There’s something wrong with the Constitution/When criminals freely contest.” (from the song Let’s Privatize the Government).

“Using politics to create your identity is a good selling point,” says Gandhi, who now works in ITC’s fast-moving consumer goods division. “The Ska Vengers can carve out a market of their own; it’s what Megadeth did in the US. But they will have to struggle to stay different.”

It’s still sound and performance that matters most, he emphasizes.

“I don’t think lyrics get much attention in the scheme of things.”

Harsh Sahni, 25, who manages the resource centre at a Delhi non-profit, agrees. “I find The Ska Vengers’ lyrics, especially all the Leftist rapping, intellectually shallow, but harmless. Ultimately, they are a delight to watch.”

The indie music audience, like its entertainers, has always been pricey. Bands have always been picky about their causes—more likely to champion an anti-war effort than protest fuel prices, explains Pottenkulam, who left the music industry to consider a return to architecture. “Lyrics will stay in a vacuum, they don’t matter when it comes to success. But international records are now part of the game; the bands that have a unique identity are the ones who will end up making money.” rajni.g@livemint.com

DELHI INDIE MUSIC 101 What to listen to and where FORTHCOMING GIGS u 25 April: Electro­pop duo Sridhar + Thayil will launch their new album ‘STD’.

10pm, blueFROG, 4­A, The Kila, Seven Style Mile, Kalka Dass Marg, Mehrauli (30800300). u 26 April: Local band Soul’d Out will play a tribute to the late guitarist Jimi Hendrix.

9pm, Hard Rock Café, DLF Place, First floor, District Centre, Saket (47158888).

INDIE MUSIC VENUES u Zorba the Buddha: 7, Tropical Drive, Mehrauli­Gurgaon Road, Ghitorni (26804790) u The 567: Grand Sartaj hotel, A­3, Green Park (9990323567) u nU.Delhi Q’BA: 14/48, Malcha Marg Market (47378800) u Florian: MGF Metropolitan Mall, Third floor, Saket (9999986575) u Zook: Shop No. 3, PVR Anupam Complex, Saket (41057482) u TLR Café & Kitchen: 31, Hauz Khas Village (46080533) u Turquoise Cottage: 47, Basant Lok, Priya Cinema Complex, Vasant Vihar (47686868)

T h eMi n t i P a da p p Ne ws , v i e wsa n da n a l y s i sf r o mMi n t ’ sa wa r d wi n n i n gj o u r n a l i s t s .

T h eMi n ta p pf e a t u r e sl i v es t o c kq u o t e s , b r e a k i n gn e ws , v i d e o r e p o r t sa n ds l i d e s h o wsb a c k e du pwi t hc o mme n t a r yt oh e l py o u ma k es e n s eo f t h ewo r l do f b u s i n e s sa n df i n a n c e .

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