Lounge for 21 Jan 2012

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

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 3

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

A free practice session organized by the Bengal Women Football­ ers Welfare Association at Maidan, Kolkata.

SHOES ON YOUR BROWSER? >Page 7

THE MULTITASKING QUILT

The Jaipuri ‘razai’ can brighten up the gloomiest of winters. We shopped to pick the best from the market >Page 6

A DIFFERENT

BALL

CAN’T TAKE BOMBAY OUT OF THE BOY

What’s India in the Rushdie universe?

We look back at his love for the country of his birth, and how he has altered Indian writing >Page 12

GAME India’s two big football clubs now have women with executive powers. But on ground is a different reality. Few women footballers feel empowered by the game; the rest still toil in complete anonymity

ART HOUSE BLUES

Grant Road went from being Mumbai’s Times Square to the seat of decrepit theatres. We revisited to find the survivors >Pages 17­18

>Pages 9­11

PUBLIC EYE

THE GOOD LIFE

SUNIL KHILNANI

SHOBA NARAYAN

THE GLASSY SUCCESS THE POETRY OF A GALLOPING HORSE OF AIRPORTS

F

or decades, Indians endured airports, circles of purgatory to be traversed before they could be ejected into the paradise of abroad—or just get themselves to a different city. Now, we have become airport connoisseurs—savouring the drive along six-lane highways past well-manicured botanical insta-gardens (have we already left India?), comparing India’s newest with its peers, and with the world’s finest. Which has the biggest Croma, the smartest, sweetest-smelling toilets, the best dosas?

These glassy structures... >Page 4

DETOURS

P

appu is nuzzling my neck. He smells of hay and heaven. His hot breath fills my nape as he nudges my tussar silk dupatta aside. The material must tickle his nose because he does something I’ve rarely seen horses do: He grins. “Hrrummph,” he neighs and takes a playful bite of my shoulder. “Ouch,” I reply and step away. Pappu stomps his feet and bangs on the aluminium gate. He wants out of the paddock. He wants to run in the afternoon sun and feel his mane fly up joyously. >Page 5

SALIL TRIPATHI

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

THE LAMP­MAN OF PARIS

B

y early afternoon, the sky had turned pale, and Notre Dame was visible in full glory, its beauty no longer hidden by the ugly scaffoldings that I remembered from my last time here, when the church was covered as though there was something embarrassing about its appearance. The trees had discarded their leaves, and their delicate branches curved like the curlicues of an intricate window. I sat looking at the river, in front of a bookshop where I had... >Page 16

FILM REVIEW

J EDGAR

MINT MEDIA MARKETING INITIATIVE

e

e en presents

No matter where technology takes us, this

Toast Theof T time i

is one instrument that will always stay.

Little surprise from quills to roller balls, they’ve changed form but been a constant part of lives.

1822

1822 John Mitchell of Birmingham starts the mass production of pens with metal nibs.

1827

1827 1830 The idea of making scratch marks in through metal nibs to record information was popularised.

Romanian Petrache Poenaru invented the fountain pen, which were patented by the French Government.

1850 The usage of Quill pen starts fading and the quality of steel nibs improves by tipping them with hard alloys of iridium, rhodium and osmium.

Patents were taken by John Loud. Waterman Ink was replaced by air-steady ink flow, no blots. His pens consisted of a metal nib (steel, gold, iridium etc).

It was first hand made, later he opened a factory in Montreal.

a constant in the life of connoisseurs. The Glenlivet-the single malt that started it all, is a legend that lives on.

The same year King George IV makes a state visit to Scotland in a gesture of reconciliations between the two countries. At the welcoming ceremony the king requests for The Glenlivet single malt.

1827 Just a year back in 1826, Glenlivet started production.

Also Corgarff Castle used as a base for troops sent to suppress illicit distilling and smuggling.

1884 1850 1830 1884

1888

legend has evolved and changed but been

1822

1830

The Lewis Edson waterman launched 1st proper fountain pen.

The same holds true for The Glenlivet. The

1953 First inexpensive ball point pens become available as the French Baron, Bich, developed the industrial process for manufacturing ball point pens that lowered the unit cost dramatically.

1888

1953

1980 Roller Ball Pens are introduced.

Unlike the thick ink used in a conventional ball point, roller ball pens employ a mobile ball and liquid ink to produce a smoother line. Technological advances achieved during the late 1980s.

2004 Fountain pen in Magnum size - the barrel is made by the Amber Room´s restorers in St Petersburg, Russia- plunger mechanism- platinum-plated metal inlays.

Glenlivet becomes synonymous with quality, leading competitors to brand it on their casks. Some are so far afield that Glenlivet becomes known as ‘The Longest Glen in Scotland’. Finally a trademark case is settled out of court which decrees that only one company can legally call itself ‘The Glenlivet’.

1997 1997

2004

The same year George Smith rents Deinabo Estate and opens Cairngorm Distillery. Also Usher & Co introduces Old Glenlivet.

1884

1980

Ring Pens’ were produced in huge numbers

by GRANDEE Corporation.

These pens were designed to write without gripping the pens with three fingers.

1850

A year later in 1831, soldiers leave Corgarff Castle due to decline in production of the Glenlivet.

1953 1888 Just a year back in 1887, the Glenlivet capacity reaches such a high volume that four excise officers start living in the factory premises.

“Coronation The Glenlivet’ filled on Coronation Day, 5 March 1953 Glenlivet production goes up.

1980

1997 New visitor centre opens.

A year later in 1981,The Glenlivet filled in 1956 are bottled as Royal wedding Reserve.

2004 Introduction of Nàdurra.

HOME PAGE L3

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

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

LOUNGE PREVIEW | CAFÉ AT THE NCPA, MUMBAI ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

T

he Café at the NCPA opens at a time when Mumbai is in the midst of rare, reasonable weather.

The alfresco bistro on the premises of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) at Nariman Point could have, therefore, not timed its arrival better.

Additionally, the narrow, over 50m-long café forms a sort of corridor for a constant breeze from the nearby Arabian Sea, which perhaps might make it worth visiting even after the good weather has passed in a few weeks.

Cocooned by concrete on three sides, which filters out some of the noise that makes outdoor places in Mumbai so unbearable, the café fills a long-standing gap in the city’s business district—of a place to just sit and chat in the outdoors. That’s precisely what Khushroo N. Suntook, chairman of the NCPA, hopes the café will become—a meeting place for visitors to art exhibitions and theatre, like the Café Mozart in the Austrian capital Vienna.

“People need a place to wait before the shows begin and a place to discuss what they have experienced after the show, which is what this café is designed to be,” says Suntook, hoping that the venue will become a regular haunt for artists and musicians.

One entrance to the café is from Amadeus, the Mediterranean restaurant that opened last year next to the Tata Theatre, one of five theatre spaces at the NCPA. Farrokh Khambata, chef at Amadeus and the café, says the menu has been designed to comprise predominantly snacks and

finger food—sandwiches, burgers, salads, dim sums and kebabs, among others. For Tata Theatre regulars who look forward to the ubiquitous buttery, white-bread sandwich and delectable cold coffee at the refreshment counter, there’s some good news—the café has a slightly more refined version of the cold coffee (with cinnamon, at `190).

Three open-air counters will serve an eclectic mix of Indian, Thai and American cuisines, along with coffees, teas and mocktails (no alcohol is being served at the moment, though Khambata is considering getting a

wine licence). So an open roast beef sandwich (`315) coexists with a spicy pahadi murg tikka (`165).

Khambata was keen to get a “real burger” on his menu; he says that it’s something that’s missing in the city (prime grilled beef tenderloin with pickles and greens, `325).

The menu includes a grilled bambaya chutney and vegetable sandwich with Cheddar cheese (`155), melting Gruyère with jalapenos and onions sandwich (`240), a smoked salmon bagel with philli cheese and capers (`460), chicken khao suey (`350) and mixed-greens dim sums (`180). Mini meals served with noodles or fried rice cost `230-465, while desserts include a Philadelphia cheesecake with strawberries (`250).

“The prices have been kept low so as to encourage artists and young people to come here,” says Khambata.

Scheduled to open on Monday, the all-day café (noon-10pm) can seat 70-100 people in a predominantly single file of tables.

The high walls of the Tata Theatre block one side, while a low wall on the other separates the entrance to the basement parking. Artificial grass on the floor and a row of palm fronds and potted plants give a sense of tranquillity to the 4,000 sq. ft space.

Additional perks—you can maybe ask the budding musician on the next table to play you a note to accompany the sound of waves in the distance.

Arun Janardhan

inbox

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com STUMP SOUNDS I enjoyed reading Rohit Brijnath’s “Be quiet, I can see the ball cut to square”, 14 January. Though I have the TV commentary on mute most of the time, I had never thought of the idea of commentary on mute and stump mikes on the track. I hope technology will make that possible sometime soon.

PRABHU www.livemint.com

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

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 2

LOUNGE

MIDDLE­CLASS APATHY

THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

I thank Aakar Patel for his column, “The shallow middle­class contempt for Singh”, 14 January. Thanks particularly for the headline.

It is always easy to find fault with THE LAST GREAT MODERNS others. But there are many people who took the trouble of dirtying their hands to bring about some change.

The insensitive middle class wants to compare today’s leaders with Gandhi and Nehru. But they forget about the masses who assembled behind them. Before T H A independence it was almost a single­point agenda, and the leaders came from the masses. The followers were great men in their own right.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and we have hundreds of forces against which we should be vigilant. Historian Ramachandra Guha admits that Manmohan Singh has not tried to benefit personally from his post. In fact, there are crores of Indians who do not wish to hold any public post. They are only interested in living their lives and finding joy in the small things of life. Singh could have opted for martyrdom, as suggested by you—but it would have been an easy way out.

JOHN VARGHESE BHAICHUNG BHUTIA TAKES A BOW >Page 8

THE INEFFICIENCY OF ‘ECONOMY’

Hands­on time with the world’s cheapest tablet is more depressing than disappointing >Page 9

Syed Haider Raza and Akbar Padamsee, legendary torchbearers of the Indian Modern sensibility, tell us what it took to create art without a market and hasty experimentation

‘WISH TREES ARE MY ONE HIT SONG’

In India for her first exhibition in the country, Yoko Ono talks to us about her art, performance, criticism, and her first patron >Page 13

>Pages 10­12

Artists Akbar Padamsee, 83, and (top) Syed Haider Raza, 89.

GAME THEORY

REPLY TO ALL

THE GOOD LIFE

BE QUIET, I CAN SEE THE BALL

THE CONTEMPT FOR MANMOHAN

THE LOSER’S GUIDE TO COMIC RELIEF

hanks, God, I will say in homage to Wasimbhai if someone can invent a device which can stop me hurling the kitchen sink at my television. No, not a clichémeter to go with snickometer, wherein commentators receive a low-voltage shock every time they intone “run in hard”, but something far simpler. In this age of Hot Spot, super slo-mo, ball trackers, why isn’t there a button on my remote which allows me to watch television with the sound on but the commentary off? I want the percussion of wood on... >Page 4

istorian Ramachandra Guha has sent down his pronouncement on Manmohan Singh. Writing in The Telegraph, he dismisses Khushwant Singh’s view that Singh is the best prime minister we’ve ever had. Khushwant Singh, Guha observes, is not the best judge of leaders. He thought Sanjay Gandhi would save India. For Guha, Manmohan Singh has been a disappointment and even, this is in the headline and may not be Guha’s view, a failure. Singh has never been a... >Page 5

s 2012 kicks in, it is time to think of resolutions to make and keep.

Philosopher Robert Nozick called it “The Examined Life”. After examining mine, I came up with three goals: to be more disciplined; to remember not to forget; and to become funny.

The last one is somewhat pathetic because I have resolved to become funny for the last five years.

Clearly, I haven’t made much progress. You readers may know me as a writer, but what I really am is a comic trapped in a... >Page 6

ROHIT BRIJNATH

AAKAR PATEL

SHOBA NARAYAN

CHUGGING INTO THE NEW YEAR

Popping champagne, dancing to the DJ’s rhythm, and an unscheduled midnight view of Dudhsagar Falls—on the Golden Chariot train >Page 14

Take a holiday where your kids stay free

LEADING BY EXAMPLE A leader like Manmohan Singh defines all that is required to run a diverse and poverty­stricken country like ours (“The shallow middle­class contempt for Singh”, 14 January). His survival amid the turmoil of corruption scandals is exemplary. Let us support rather than find fault.

RAKESH KAPOOR

FOOTBALL HERO “Bhaichung takes a bow”, 14 January, is a wonderful article. When I started reading it, I felt bad that Bhutia was retiring, but in the end felt optimistic about his future plans.

DEVALINA ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

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

PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

AERODYNAMICS F

The understory to the glassy success of our new airports is not in itself surprising, but the high visibility of these projects, and their claim to be embraced as success stories, invite attention

or decades, Indians endured airports, circles of purgatory to be traversed before they could be ejected into the paradise of abroad—or just get themselves to a different city.

Now, we have become airport connoisseurs—savouring the drive along six-lane highways past well-manicured botanical insta-gardens (have we already left India?), comparing India’s newest with its peers, and with the world’s finest. Which has the biggest Croma, the smartest, sweetest-smelling toilets, the best dosas? These glassy structures, abstracted from their landscapes, seem to become even more impressive to us when rendered into the lexicon of new India’s statistical architecture: “With 78 gates, 97 automated walkways, 95 immigration counters, 20,000 sq. m of retail space, and parking for 4,300 cars,” the press announced when Delhi’s T3 opened in 2010, “the building is comparable to the aviation hubs of Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore.”

We are champions in the emerging airports stakes (yes, there is an Emerging Markets Airport Award—step forward, Bangalore). Like GDP growth figures, airport statistics mark our global rise.

As yet, we don’t have our own

home-grown Tyler Brûlé, self-appointed scourge of the global airport industry, perhaps the only person in the world who can tell you whether the luggage conveyor at Helsinki Airport is slower than Hobart’s, whether the flooring at Narita is better than JFK for roll-on Rimowas—but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we have our very own exponent of the arcane art of airport criticism.

There is a great deal to celebrate in this renaissance age of the Indian airport—much was promised, much has been delivered and on time, and I, along with many others, benefit from the ease and comfort these new terminals provide. It’s also the case that the new airports, and the private companies that run them—GVK in Mumbai and Bangalore, and GMR in Delhi and Hyderabad—are fostering a new type of culture of public usage. In many respects, India’s new airports have created a certain kind of level space: A regularity of standards is achieved, in the sense that all passengers appear to be treated alike, queues and lane discipline are observed, there is none of the haggling over excess baggage or porter’s fees, or the special fawning over sharp-elbowed “VIPs” that one

often saw in earlier incarnations of Indian airport culture. The impersonality of market norms brings a calm focus to all who enter India’s new global portals.

But there is also something troubling about these special, duty-free zones. Given that we are only at the beginning of what is going to be a continuing expansion of such infrastructure (GMR’s plans for Delhi airport extend forward to 2026), it’s important not to let the short-term relief at having gained such facilities lead us to set aside some larger questions. The questions turn in particular on the nature of the new nexus being established between the need for public services and infrastructure and the willingness of private capital to supply this. What are the costs, initial and enduring, of such supply? For, how such costs are determined, and who bears them, may well shape to what extent Indians will in coming years trust capital driven by private interests to provide public services.

As Mint reported last year, the GMR-led consortium that built T3 in record time also overspent by more than double—with those additional costs now to be recouped from airport development taxes paid by users over the next several years, and BHARATH SAI/MINT

Cost­benefit analysis: (right) The Rajiv Gandhi International Airport, Hyderabad; and the T3 terminal at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport.

AJAY AGGARWAL/HINDUSTAN TIMES

also from public grants approved by the Airports Economic Regulatory Authority—taxpayers’ money, yours and mine. Cost overruns were not reported to the public stakeholders; decisions to expand built space were taken without consultation. Further, the companies that built these airports now also run them—and so have something of a captive hold over how operational and running costs are determined.

We can expect tens of thousands of crores to be spent on such projects in the next decade and more, projects that are described in GVK’s publicity material as “the visible evidence of the country’s rapid progress”. Yet the scrutiny and auditing mechanisms that are available for monitoring such projects are astonishingly feeble. Progress rarely happens on auto-pilot: It must be a self-reflexive and self-correcting process.

Big questions turn also on how we dispense land and arrange space in our cities, on what kinds of public provision we are able to make for those firmly grounded in the slums that are so often inextricably mixed in with the “airport cities” that accrete around runways and terminals. As the race to build accelerates, how are the lives of those who live in the penumbra of these structures affected? They exist in a kind of limbo state, a perpetual state of unknowingness as to who will or won’t be eligible for rehabilitation, if and when their homes might be razed. Rumour displaces fact, helping to create a world of volatility and mistrust—one of the many conditions documented

by Katherine Boo in her new book about citizens living in a slum beside Mumbai airport, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (full disclosure: I am married to the author).

The fact is that India’s new airports are in tension—sometimes even at war—with their social environments. Either they take pains to remove themselves from the city—or to remove the city from their own ambit (an effort

underway in Mumbai). It’s not surprising that the private companies building India’s airports spend a good deal of time buffing up their own image: glossy magazines distributed free (Touchdown), much-advertised CSR programmes, generally every effort to portray themselves as benign public providers.

Even as we need such projects, and more of them, we need also to be more quizzing of them: of how costs are determined, of the levies, tolls and taxes which are applied to keep these places profitable, of how benefits stack up against costs. We can’t afford to let such public-private partnerships become accountability-free zones, like sovereign airport city states with their own security, their own financial parameters, and their own definition of the country’s changing needs.

That there is an understory to the glassy success of our new airports is not in itself surprising: After all, which successful recent Indian project doesn’t involve land grabs or deals, and unaccountability? But it’s exactly the high visibility of these projects, their own claim to be embraced as success stories, that invites attention. One clear lesson of the recent financial and bank crises is that the instruments of private capital need to play by transparent rules, to make themselves accountable—if nothing else, for purely selfish and self-preserving reasons. We may be in an age of cosmetic engineering—and but we cannot afford to be in one of cosmetic accounting.

Sunil Khilnani is Avantha professor and director of the King’s India Institute at King’s College London. A new edition of his book, The Idea of India, has just been published as a Popular Penguin.

Write to him at publiceye@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Sunil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/sunil­khilnani

COLUMNS L5

LOUNGE

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

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

The poetry of a horse on the move

P

appu is nuzzling my neck. He smells of hay and heaven. His hot breath fills my nape as he nudges my tussar silk dupatta aside. The

material must tickle his nose because he does something I’ve rarely seen horses do: He grins.

“Hrrummph,” he neighs and takes a playful bite of my shoulder.

“Ouch,” I reply and step away.

Pappu stomps his feet and bangs on the aluminium gate. He wants out of the paddock. He wants to run in the afternoon sun and feel his mane fly up joyously. Like in the movies.

Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster adaption of Michael Morpurgo’s children’s book War Horse opened last month with great fanfare in the US (it releases in India on 11 February). Kate Middleton apparently wept while watching the premiere, as did Spielberg when he watched the stunning theatrical adaptation, still playing in London’s West End. If you happen to go to London, be sure to see the show which features magnificent life-size puppets that eerily resemble horses. Chronicling the love between boy and horse, War Horse is the latest in a long line of love stories between man and beast.

Horses—Equus ferus caballus. Why do these animals command such devotion? Ever since they were first domesticated in Central Asia (Ukraine and Kazakhstan) around 4,000-3,500 BC, horses have inspired painters and sculptors, most recently Deborah Butterfield, Marcia Spivak and Andy Scott. A horse painting by George Stubbs fetched $35.9 million (around `186.6 crore) in July in a Christie’s auction. My favourites are Chinese watercolours, which capture the energy of horses. If you want to give a horse rider a fabulous gift and have a big budget, I recommend Sayaka Ganz’s stunning sculptures of horses, made of reclaimed materials, including spatulas and other kitchen utensils. Google “Sayaka Ganz Emergence” and you’ll see what I mean.

Why do humans feel affinity towards certain species and not towards others?

Why do we view elephants with awe and hippos with dispassion, if not distaste? Does it have to do with how an animal looks; or its usefulness to us?

What are the parameters that humans use to connect with another species?

Pappu lives at the Equestrian Centre for Excellence (ECE) in Bangalore. He has almond-shaped limpid brown eyes.

Every now and then, he swats flies with

his tail, munches grass and whinnies softly. They all have the same eyes, these animals: dogs, cows and horses. They vary in size but look dark, sombre, beguiling. You see your reflection in them. You could swim in them if you were a pixie. They offer you a glimpse of history—not the near-sighted mortal history as we know it; or even from the Indus Valley, or Egyptian civilizations.

This history is from a long time ago, when humans were Neanderthals and wild beasts roamed the world.

Have you seen a wild horse run?

Have you seen a black stallion shake its mane, buck, rear, canter and neigh? Have you had the privilege of watching a wild animal’s eyes whiten as it encounters human attempts to break it down? Have you watched a horse froth at the mouth as it tries to break free from the rope? Have you, I ask, had that privilege? I have. It was unforgettable.

ECE is managed by Nitin Gupta, 37, an award-winning rider and coach. A Delhi boy, Gupta now lives and works in Bangalore. He talks about the world of riding with both passion and despair. Riders may love their animals but they also have to answer uncomfortable questions: What do you do if your horse is sick the day before a big game? An easy option is to pump the animal with steroids or painkillers to get it through the event. Horses keep secrets—till they fall sick.

Gupta coaches young riders now, many of whom have gone on to win national and international awards—Fouad and Aliaskar Mirza; Maryk and Anantya Sahney; and Aliya Dasgupta. For the young children who come to ECE, riding offers a thrill that is hard for a non-rider to understand. It is like driving a Formula One car, except one with a mind of its own—like the movie Herbie Goes Bananas.

I used to ride horses at Agram, a military campus in Bangalore. Our coaches were Rajasthani men who, Gupta says, have a natural instinct for horses and riding. At Manvar Resort, Jaisalmer, a desert camp owned by a friend, I watched a turbaned Rajasthani

COURTESY ACT4.CO

rider literally tie a six-year-old boy to him and gallop through the sand dunes, inculcating, perhaps, a lifetime of love for these superb speedy beasts.

Great riders find that balance between control and respect.

They know when to rein in a flighty creature which, arguably, is a skill that can be used on high-strung lovers. Horses are capricious animals that don’t know their own strength. Again, the same can be applied to spouses.

Put this way, riding a horse is great preparation for working on a relationship. But that’s not the reason most people ride.

You ride to gain a measure of peace; you ride to be at one with nature; you ride to feel the elements on your skin. Mostly, you ride because you are a privileged member at the top of the food chain and the animal that you sit on has been generous enough to carry you. With this right comes responsibility and that perhaps is what all horse centres ought to instil in their student riders.

In motion: Night, an installation from sculptor Sayaka Ganz’s Emergence series.

Shoba Narayan gifted her dupatta to Pappu so that he could keep on grinning. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

THINKSTOCK

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

A HAPPY PARENT HAS HER OWN PURSUITS I am well-qualified but stayed home to look after my children.

However, I feel they don’t value this. Now that they are 14 and 16, I have taken up part-time work so they can learn their mother can’t be taken for granted. But this has not worked. I get no cooperation, they leave the house even more untidy now and don’t even eat properly. They have no interest in what I do and never ask me how my day was. The job is not well-paying, which is also something they joke about, telling me to not waste my time.

Their father remains extremely busy and says I should do what pleases me. How do you get children to appreciate that their mother too has a mind and

some personal ambitions, among other things?

You seem to want validation and understanding from your children as a first point of your agenda, and having your own pursuits and interests as the secondary. Perhaps you need to be fully into what you are doing, without worrying about how this will “teach your children” something. Simply taking up something to do to make a point will not work with teenagers. Get involved with something you like to do, be engrossed and contented, and this may get you genuine respect from your children.

Frankly, teaching children to respect and appreciate a parent’s “me time” starts much earlier

Early lesson: Teaching children to respect a parent’s ‘me time’ will help them value their own interests. than 14 and 16. It is one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself as well as your children.

Once you’re sure they are safe, looked after and occupied during the time you are away (or even if you work on something out of home), going after your own pursuits is a great thing.

A self-actualized parent who

is not constantly waiting on her children or worrying for them, or worse, feeling saintly about the career sacrifices she has made, is a happier person.

Having work or interests that are yours alone is also a safety valve from the constant pressure of responsible parenting.

On their part, growing

children, after some initial resistance, if any, learn to respect and appreciate that you are happy and occupied with something you love to do. It also teaches them the value of having one’s own pursuits and allowing each other time and space.

After all, a parent who is there full-time but feels simmering

frustration and resentment at the absence of any adult time for herself/himself is not a great person to be around. The so-called sacrifice that parents make (by not pursuing any of their own interests), whether spelt out or implicit in their attitude, is something that weighs heavily on children—whatever their age. When younger, they don’t quite know how to deal with the parents’ hurt and anger about the child being ungrateful or unappreciative of what they “sacrificed” for them. When older, they are bound to find the “shrug” mechanism to deal with this litany.

You need to find something you like to do genuinely and do it unapologetically. Perhaps one small chat with them about their attitude, by both you and your husband, instead of constant pleas to be appreciated, may help.

Gouri Dange is the author of ABCs of Parenting.

Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

L6

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 2012

Insider

LOUNGE

PICKS

The multitasking quilt The Jaipuri ‘razai’ can brighten up the gloomiest of winters

Top row (from left)

Second row from top

Third row from top

Bottom row (from left)

u Mysore chatri quilt in muslin

by Goodearth, `4,400. u Printed quilt by Soma, `1,680. u Geometric pattern quilt by Fabindia, `1,730.

(from left) u Printed quilt by Soma, `1,680. u Jardin cotton voile quilt in coral by Sarita Handa, `13,000. u Cotton quilt by Anokhi, `1,950. u Kalamkari­printed quilt by Fabindia, `2,280.

(from left) u Silver Poppy quilt by Rasa, `4,000. u Seringapatam cotton quilt

by Goodearth, `4,400. u Buti­printed quilt by Anokhi, `1,850. u Floral quilt by Fabindia, `1,730. u Patchwork quilt by Ratan Textiles, `2,760.

u Shaded Mukesh quilt by Rasa, `4,600. u Floral quilt by Ratan Textiles, `1,790. u Chanderi quilt by Fabindia, `2,990. u Silk and brocade quilt by Soma, `4,620. u Printed cotton voile quilt by Shyam Ahuja, `6,750.

B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

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SHOPPING GUIDE • Anokhi, N­Block Market, Greater Kailash­1, New Delhi; Sargam Marg, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad; and The Leela Galleria, 23, Airport Road, Kodihalli, Bangalore • Fabindia, N­Block Market, Greater Kailash­1, New Delhi; Jeroo Building, Kala Ghoda, Colaba, Mumbai; 152, Commercial Street, Bangalore; and 11A, Allenby Road, Kolkata • Goodearth, Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; Juhu Tara Road, Mumbai; and UB City Mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore • Rasa, S­55, Ashok Marg, C­Scheme, Jaipur • Ratan Textiles, N­Block Market, Greater Kailash­1, New Delhi • Sarita Handa, Khan Market, New Delhi • Shyam Ahuja, Lajpat Nagar­II, New Delhi; and Dr Annie Besant Road, Worli, Mumbai • Soma, Mehar Chand Market, Lodhi Road, New Delhi; Indiranagar, 100 Feet Road, Bangalore; and High Street Phoenix, Senapati Bapat Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Q&A | KRYSTYNA HELLSTRÖM

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Culture wrap A Polish historian on the aesthetic and utilitarian merits of the Jaipuri quilt

Jaipur Quilts: Niyogi Books, 203 pages,`495.

B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

···························· hether it’s block-printed floral motifs, the iconic poppy, zig-zag lehariya, concentric geometry or Mughal motifs, Jaipuri quilts perfectly express the vivacity of Rajasthan. Inspired by that burst of colour and pattern, Krystyna Hellström, who was born in Poland and now lives in Stockholm, Sweden, wrote her first book, Jaipur Quilts, which was launched earlier this month.

Hellström, who has a degree in history of art from Lund University, Sweden, and did a thesis on Jaipuri and Provençal quilts, spent the last three years meeting designers and craftsmen in India to find out more about the quilting and printing of these razais. Edited excerpts from an interview:

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This is one of the first books written exclusively on the subject of Jaipuri quilts. What led you to it?

I remember I was walking home on a cold, dark day in Sweden when I decided to look

Precision art: (above) A craftsman meticulously block­prints a fabric at Jaipur­based designer Gitto’s studio; and Hellström.

through a book store. I picked up a copy of the German magazine, Architektur & Wohnen. They had done a special issue on India and profiled some trendsetters. I came across the French-born designer Brigitte Singh’s work in Jaipuri textiles. Looking at the exquisite Jaipuri quilts, I

spontaneously made up my mind to visit India and see these beautiful crafts myself.

I must admit I was hesitant to write a book in the beginning, but when I came to India and spoke to my mentor, Chandramani Singh, a textile expert, she kindly offered to help me do the book. I did some research and realized there wasn’t much documented material on Jaipuri quilts. So I got in touch with Brigitte, who was sour in the beginning (laughs), but eventually helped me immensely.

But why Jaipuri quilts? What fascinated you about them?

To start with, these quilts are

so light. I think it’s because historically, people of Rajasthan lived in caravans that were always on the move, so these must have been easy to transport.

The sheer variety in these quilts is exciting. Also, the quilting in Jaipuri razais is neat.

In the morning you can just roll up or spread them. When I’m in Stockholm, I use them when I go to the beach or for a picnic.

Also, they’re breathable because they’re made of cotton.

You met various designers and craftsmen in Jaipur while writing this book. Tell us about the experience.

I honestly couldn’t imagine how people can produce so many designs, colours and motifs. Whichever quilt you pull out, it’s different. Every

season there are new designs. I was touched by how modestly these people were doing their work, without even knowing how good they were. I fondly remember Ezo, an 80-year-old craftsman who worked with Kitty Rae, the owner of Kin Fabrics (Jaipur) and one of the first few designers to take up Jaipuri quilts. He had been working with her for the last 60 years, making blocks.

Unfortunately, he died before the book came out.

How do you take care of a Jaipuri ‘razai’?

I myself have quite a collection of Jaipuri quilts. I suggest you wash them in the wool programme of your washing machines because it’s gentler.

Don’t soak them or put on a vigorous cycle. Also, never dry them in direct sunlight because the natural colours fade.

Instead of hanging them on a clothesline, spread them on a flatter surface so there is no crease. I’ve had some of my quilts for almost 10 years now, so their lifespan is pretty good.

Madhurima Patni (a Jaipur-based designer), better known in Jaipur as Gitto, told me that historically, every season, Rajasthanis would unstitch their quilts, fluff them up again and then use them. It gives the quilts a new life.

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Shoes on your browser?

Fashion portals are proliferating in the `2,000 crore online retail market. We make sense of the boom through four such sites B Y G AYATRI R ANGACHARI S HAH ···························· stealthy but exciting revolution is taking place in online shopping. In the past six months, a number of Internet-based fashion companies have sprung up, offering affordable ready-to-wear clothes while forging brand identities.

Karan Sabharwal, a 26-year-old Visakhapatnam-based businessman, has purchased T-shirts, jeans and shoes from the monthold website Freecultr (www.freecultr.com), and says he was “really impressed by the packaging and quality of the products at those prices”. “I’ve gifted the T-shirts to my friends and they’ve loved it. I was a bit hesitant to buy jeans initially but they’ve given a very good size chart and the jeans fit right.”

Delhi-based venture capitalist Siddharth Talwar, 35, who has bought a number of items from Sher Singh (www.shersingh.com), says his favourite part of the buying experience is receiving the delivery. “The packaging, the box, the way it is presented to you—you feel like a king! I love it,” he says. Talwar says buying on the site is easy, not just in terms of navigating, but also because “you don’t need to leave your couch.”

A

’S YEPMSEELLERS: BEST­ SHIRTS DENIM EANS AND J

FREE BEST­SCULTR’S MEN’SELLERS: AND W JEANS O STRETMEN’S PANTSCH

Menswear at a click Distinct from discounted multibrand aggregators like Fashion and You (www.fashionandyou. com) and Myntra (www.myntra. com), which have so far dominated online apparel shopping, these fashion-focused websites are looking to create quality, branded high-street clothing for both the Indian market as well as overseas. Freecultr, Sher Singh, Yepme (www.yepme.com), Zovi (www.zovi.com) and The Stiff Collar (www.thestiffcollar.com) are among the fashion e-tailing sites that have emerged, and each offers a distinct experience.

India’s online retail market is valued at `2,000 crore and projected to rise to `7,000 crore by 2015, according to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham). The Internet and Mobile Association of India has listed an estimated 110 million Internet users, growing at 13% overall year-on-year. Analysts say that anywhere from 10-20% of these users shop online.

Menswear in India has been the biggest segment of the apparel market, so it’s no surprise that The Stiff Collar (read www.livemint.com/loungeloves. htm), Yepme and Zovi launched as men’s-only clothing sites.

“Men have more standardized body types and the quality in supply chain for women’s wear is difficult, so we decided to focus on men,” explains Gurgaon-based Yepme’s CEO Vivek Gaur.

With easy-to-navigate pages and simple layouts, these e-retailers are attempting to bring ease and approachability to fashion.

“Indians are very good at custom shirts and suits but when it comes to inward domestic distribution of ready-to-wear, there is a big gap in quality,” says Sujal Shah,

co-founder and CEO of Freecultr, an online high-street fashion site based out of Gurgaon. Partly because of the inefficacy of distribution in India, and the high costs of organized retail, the Internet offers an attractive alternative. Retailers have the flexibility of trying different pricing options quickly, and consumers benefit from cheaper prices.

Cash on delivery, which Indians are more comfortable with, has been a GH’S game changer for SHER SIN LERS: online retailers. All the BEST­SEPLO OS sites mentioned here EN’S RLVES M offer delivery within AND SCA two-four days, although it can take up to a week depending on the location.

Most sites offer free shipping, or ren’s successful Polo label, using access, the opportunity, the influfor orders costing less than logos as its leitmotif, including ence of branding is getting a wider `1,000, a nominal fee of `60. one inspired by cricket that seems audience across India.” Yet he Most of these sites offer a 30-day, to have defined the brand so far. and some of these other sites have no-questions-asked return policy The Delhi-based co-CEO and co- bigger ambitions. “India has the founder, Sonny Caberwal, says capability to create a global highwith full refund. that while the look is aspirational, street brand,” he explains. “The the pricing is not. “The market- world is our market, and India is The ABC of the new sites YEPME: “We cater to tier II and III place is so new, there are perhaps our starting point.” towns, where high-street brands 25 players in e-commerce right What works: Unlike some of the are not available,” says Gaur. The now, but the market is growing other sites, Freecultr’s focus is on site has close to 700,000 regis- very fast,” he says. The company casual wear basics, so most of its tered users. The typical customer raised $16 million (around `83 T-shirts and pants are in solid colis someone in their early 20s, crore) from Tiger Global Manage- ours. The Shop by Look section on entering the job market for the ment, Accel Partners, Helion Ven- the site is a good idea, although it first time and with a bit of dispos- ture Partners and angel investors. would be helpful if the clothes on able income, looking for some What works: The most appealing the model changed when choosself-confidence. The site is in clothes on the site include the ing between colour options. active discussion with both Ama- Cricket by Sher Singh—polo tees T-shirts, shoes, jeans/pants are its zon and Aesos to sell its products for men. There are no trousers or top sellers. overseas, and has just closed a jeans on offer yet, either for men Pricing: Prices range between second round of funding with or women. The site offers Indian `499-2,299.

Helion Venture Partners. Since women’s wear, which doesn’t ZOVI: Funded by Asia-based Yepme’s launch in early 2011, the quite fit with the rest of private equity firm Saif company has served 580 out of t h e b r a n d p r o f i l e .

Partners, which has had the 640 districts in India, includ- Caberwal says they ZOVI’S considerable success ing places like Kargil, Bijapur, plan to revamp the with Chinese fashion Tawang and Tiruvallur. Gaur s i t e s h o r t l y t o BEST­SELLE R S: site Vancl, the site was claims they handle 10,000-15,000 s t r e a m l i n e s u c h SHIRTS A launched in July. It offerings and orders in a month.

SHOES ND introduced women’s What works: Yepme’s trousers are claims that the site is among its best menswear offering. handling “a few hunapparel last month, but The virtual dressing room tool, dred orders” a day on the selection is limited. replete with a model in his under- average, with 40% of the custom- Headquartered in Bangalore, wear, allows users to “try on” ers from Delhi and Mumbai.

Zovi says its target consumer is in clothes. Yepme has done no Pricing: Prices range between the 18-35 age group, understands advertising till now, but at the `499-1,499. fashion and wants to make a time of writing, had 583,355 statement. The site offers a com“Likes” on Facebook. Best-selling FREECULTR: Like Sher Singh, this bination of office, active and site has a distinctly urban, hipper, casual wear, as well as shoes and items include wallets and belts.

Pricing: The average price of prod- sophisticated appeal. It looks like other accessories. It also features ucts on the site is `1,000, with an overseas high-street website, in a selection of winter wear, which dress shirts going up to `1,999, tune with The Gap or Old Navy, is not available on other sites. and it is the only one offering The management refused to disand trousers to `1,100. lycra-based clothing. In its first close specifics, except to say that SHER SINGH: This site (launched month, Freecultr says it has had they serve 300 “destinations”. in late March at the time of the sales across 25 states. Venture What works: Shirts and shoes are cricket World Cup, with polo tees capital firm Sequoia Capital has their best-sellers. added to their product line in put in about $4 million. “The Pricing: Prices range from `239 for August) is a spin-off of fashion site Indian customer is evolving,” says T-shirts to `1,699 for jackets.

Exclusively.in. It appears to be Shah, who has been associated taking a page out of Ralph Lau- with Lakme Fashion Week. “The Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 2012

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Out of his shell: Vikas Krishan at the National Institute of Sports, Patiala.

BOXING

‘I’m the smartest in the ring’ B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA

How Vikas Krishan, India’s most promising young boxer, plans to protect his brain

Every fortnight we focus on an athlete or a discipline for an inside look at their efforts to secure an Olympic medal in London 2012.

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···························· ikas Krishan is scared of being punched.

It’s a perfectly reasonable fear for most people, but if you are a boxer, that’s a bit like a fish that dislikes water. For 19-year-old Krishan, however, it’s not a weakness, it’s a philosophy. It’s this fear that has propelled him, at warp speed, to the top of the pile of India’s most talented boxers, and earned him a place in the 2012 London Olympics.

“It’s simple,” Krishan says. “I hate the feeling of being hit and I love the feeling of dodging punches. If you keep getting punched in the head, after 35 your brain starts degenerating. I don’t want that to happen to me. Do you want that to happen to you?

“I like my brain, I want it intact.”

Evading danger is a primal thrill, a deep-set response called “flight or fight”, where the body releases the hormones adrenalin, dopamine and cortisol, which in turn increase the heart rate, constrict blood vessels and dilate air passages. The end result, if you’ve successfully avoided the danger, is great exhilaration.

It’s the same perverse thrill you get during a roller-coaster ride, or a bungee jump. Krishan feeds off this buzz.

When he first entered a ring, Krishan was just 11. All his

V

friends were boxing, and the Bhiwani Boxing Club in the small town of Bhiwani in Haryana, where Krishan grew up, was the place to be for any selfrespecting young boy.

“I was stunned by how much a punch hurts and how much it scared me,” Krishan says. “But I couldn’t back out. My friends were doing it, they seemed fine. I could not admit that I was afraid.”

So he did the intelligent thing. He focused all his attention on his defence. He worked tirelessly on his “shell”, the guard you form with your arms and gloves to protect the head and the body. He ran and jumped rope even when he was not practising, to get his feet moving quickly. “The funny thing is, I hardly get hit any more,” Krishan says. “I have the perfect guard, I back-pedal and sidestep. This puzzles my opponents. They get frustrated, desperate, and open themselves to my counter-attack.”

Just how well this strategy worked was on full view at the 2011 Boxing World Championships in Baku, Azerbaijan, where Krishan became only the second Indian boxer after Vijender Singh to win a medal. This came despite it being his first World Championship appearance, and his first major tournament in the 69kg category, to which he moved from 60kg after the 2010 Asian Games.

In his pre-quarter-final fight

ceded just four points till the final, and scored 27. He won the final against Chinese boxer Hu Qing, who took out his frustration at Krishan’s unwavering defence by hitting him below the belt, giving away crucial penalty points in the process.

Krishan became the first Indian boxer since Dingko Singh in 1998 to win a gold at the Asian Games. What makes it truly remarkable is that this was his first international tournament at the senior level.

Krishan, though, has a habit of doing this. In 2005, in his first junior national championship appearance, he walked away with the gold. He won it again in 2006, and in 2007, at the World Cadet Championship in Baku, his first international tour, he won yet another gold. In 2009, he moved into the next age group and claimed the gold medal at the annual Indian Youth National Championships. He won the gold again at the 2010 Asian Youth Championships in Tehran, Iran. At his first senior national championship in 2010, the trend continued, and he was rated the best boxer of the tournament.

“I am an open person,” Krishan says. “I like asking questions. I’ll ask seniors, juniors, coaches, trainers—I’ll constantly pester them, I’m not shy. I absorb and analyse all the things that are told to me.

I’m a thinking fighter, my confidence does not come from my

D R E A M C A T C H E R S against Onder Sipal of Turkey, Krishan ran circles around his opponent. Throughout the fight, Krishan back-pedalled, his defensive shell held tight, while Sipal charged at him with swinging punches. The moment Sipal’s tempo flagged, Krishan moved in, scored with quick, hard jabs, and then moved out again to resume the dance. He won the fight 14-7, and qualified for the Olympics.

Krishan won the next fight to claim the bronze medal, before losing in the semi-final.

“I could have won that as well,” Krishan says. “But the entire tournament I fought with a damaged wrist. I took painkiller injections in the wrist before fights and since the main objective was to qualify for the Olympics, which I had done already, I did not want to risk further injury.”

Krishan’s tricky, exasperating style was in even sharper relief in the tournament that put him in the limelight—the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou, China. In his gold medalwinning campaign, he con-

strength or size, it comes from my belief that I can out-think the person I’m fighting. When I’m in the ring, I believe I’m the smartest person there.”

It’s not surprising that when he is not in training, Krishan can be found pestering his teammates to play a game of chess with him. “Chess is as much a part of my training as hitting the punchbag,” he says.

For the Olympics, Krishan knows that he has lost the element of surprise he carried into the Asian Games and the World Championship. He’s figuring out ways to turn that into an advantage too.

“I’m into heavy-weight training right now to increase my strength,” says Krishan who, at No. 2 in the 69kg category, is the only Indian in the top three of the International Boxing Association (Aiba) world rankings for any weight category.

“I’m working on switching between a defensive, counterattacking style to an all-out, aggressive mode. I’ve always been good at luring my opponents, and that’s what I’ll be working on. When you think you’ve got me, BOOM, you won’t see the punch coming.”

How will the Indian boxers fare at the 2012 Olympics?

“Maybe this will be a historic Olympic for us,” Krishan says.

“Maybe this will spark such an interest in the sport that Indian newspapers will start dedicated sections just on boxing, like they do with cricket.”

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SPORT

A DIFFERENT

BALL

GAME India’s two big football clubs now have women with executive powers. But on ground is a different reality. Few women footballers feel empowered by the game; the rest still toil in complete anonymity B Y S HAMIK B AG ···································· t a recent football event, a senior player advised us against giving further publicity to Dolly Adhikary. “She’s been in the news,” was the reason given.

Here, nevertheless, is Adhikary’s story.

Last year, on 13 June, the 22-year-old footballer who represents Bengal was bitten by a poisonous snake outside her home in a district neighbouring Kolkata. The modest means of her mother, who works as domestic help, and bedridden father forced wellwishers to shift Adhikary to a government hospital in Kolkata and the state’s sports minister to chip in with funds. The local television channels followed; among the rare occasions in recent memory when a woman footballer made “news”.

Having recovered, Adhikary feels “disillusioned” by the game—all these years of playing football, and it hasn’t given her enough money to buy a pair of shoes. She got into the game out of love, transitioning from being a ball girl to a promising statelevel player. These days, however, Adhikary’s hunger for a salaried job exceeds her desire for scoring goals.

The same year, Mohun Bagan and East Bengal—India’s premier football clubs, with narratives dating back 122 years and 91 years, respectively—elected a woman each to their highest decision-making executive committees for the first time. When East Bengal elected Molly Ganguly in February and Mohun Bagan, Sohini Mitra in November, the events went largely unnoticed.

Yet both Ganguly and Mitra have overcome century-old club norms that are horribly tilted against women. While the overtly “male chauvinist” character of Indian football is something both had to contend with, in the case of Mohun Bagan there was a “constitutional” ban on inducting women as members till 1995, according to the club’s

A

Bend it: it: Dulali Ghosh, who represented Bengal in the national league, says she is now considering training in physiotherapy to bolster her income.

general secretary, Anjan Mitra.

Some followers of club football in Kolkata have called their induction gimmicky, notional and nepotistic (both Mitra and Ganguly are known to have close relatives in influential club positions). But Arunava Chaudhuri, a blogger, keen observer of women’s football and founder of IndianFootball.com—a website dedicated to building an online database on Indian football—considers it “a significant” signpost for Indian women’s football. “Right now it’s a positive step, but only just. It remains to be seen how it is utilized,” says Chaudhuri.

“For women’s football to come up, administrators of the All India Football Federation (Aiff) should perform a more proactive role,” says Sohini Mitra. “Aiff must make it mandatory for national I-League playing clubs to have a women’s team and also organize more than one national-level tournament. My primary focus at Bagan will be on youth development and on getting women interested. A mother who is keen on football can only mean a newer generation of fans and players.”

Bare facts On the ground, the reality is not negotiated easily.

Over the decades, there has been a general fall in the standards of Indian football, and the women’s game has been neglected.

Aiff’s annual budget for women’s football, for instance, is about `6 crore, less than half of the `14 crore allotted to the men. Initially, it would appear, Aiff wanted to start a clublevel women’s tournament akin to the Federation Cup for men, but found that only two-three states had club-based women’s football. Even today, Bengal, Manipur and Orissa account for more than half of the 1,000 active women footballers in India.

So the 20-25 state women’s teams that TURN TO PAGE L10®

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have been participating in the national championship every year since the early 1990s, when the tournament began, can provide a misleading picture. Just eight-nine states are considered to be regular and serious about football. Though Tamil Nadu, Goa, Maharashtra and Kerala have begun to show better results in recent years, many teams are still put together hastily, some even including members who don’t actually play football.

Across states, women still have to battle the odds to play the game, and earn a living.

Bengal—which has 13 regular women’s football clubs, and over 300 players registered with The Indian Football Association (IFA)—too has suffered setbacks.

Both Mohun Bagan and East Bengal had fielded women’s club teams at the 2001 Calcutta Women’s Football League, but disbanded the sides a few seasons later, citing lack of funds, unavailability of practice fields and women’s dressing rooms as reasons. It created a void for players that India’s first regular women’s football league, started in 1993, has been unable to plug, says an official of the IFA, the league organizer and the game’s state-level governing body.

Anjan Mitra says the club plans to reintroduce the women’s team in the near future—a responsibility Mohun Bagan has, he says, as a national club. Gopal Ghosh, general manager (operations), East Bengal, believes that creating a women’s team “on an impulse” will be unsustainable. “We can attempt to make East Bengal at par with Barcelona FC,” he says caustically, “but it will be self-defeatist. We first need to create the infrastructure backbone.”

Promising stats

Bridging the gap: Former player Kuntala Ghosh Dastidar; and (top) a practice session at the Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) president Sepp Blatter had earlier commented that “the future of football is feminine”—but improving the lot of Indian women’s football will not be a goal that is e a s i l y achieved.

Indian women’s football continues to be mired in ironies that have at opposite ends the promise of global elevation and the plight of players like Adhikary and Shanti Mullick.

The only Arjuna Award-winning Indian woman footballer, Mullick cherishes the day she got a job with Eastern Railways more than the day she received the award from the President in 1983. “Most girls get involved with football out of natural liking. Later, they realize that a job is essential to keep the home fires burning,” she says.

Yet the Indian women’s team is ranked a respectable 53 in Fifa’s global rankings, and 11 in Asia. In comparison, the men’s team is ranked 158 globally and 29 in Asia—of course, the men’s team is in a bigger and more competitive pool.

“The rankings show how close the Indian women’s team is to securing an Olympic or World Cup berth, which are both distant dreams for the men. If the Aiff pays more attention to the women’s game, much can be achieved,” argues Subhransu Roy, who is currently researching a doctoral thesis titled “Sociocultural History of Women’s Soccer in India” at Kolkata’s Rabindra Bharati University.

It has been a hard-fought comeback for the national side, delisted by Fifa in 2009 for not having played a match for more than 18 months. “After the break, when I took charge, it was hard work to motivate the girls,” says Mohammad Shahid Jabbar, current coach of the Indian women’s team. “We have recently won a series against Bahrain, but the gap between the top-ranked Asian teams and India is enormous. A good grass-roots level programme is missing, and we need long-term planning.”

“From being Asia’s No. 2 side, today we find ourselves out in the cold,” says Goa-based former India player Yolanda D’Souza, whose hat-trick of goals against a visiting Swedish side in 1976 remains the only such feat by an Indian. The player-turnedpainter, though, rates a goal scored off a reverse volley (the spectacular bicycle kick) during a Far East tour by the national team among her career highpoints: a colour-and-canvas artist betraying a preference for athletic artistry.

It is interesting to go through D’Souza’s career graph, highlighted as it is by standout performances from the 1970s and 1980s against international sides, unlike the minor state-level achievements many current players showcase. She explains: “The WFFI (Women’s Football Federation of India) organized more tournaments and international friendlies, which improved the game and provided exposure.” This happened before, as D’Souza adds cryptically, “the men took over”. Meaning, the control went out of the hands of the women-run WFFI, which came up in 1979 after a sustained

Eye on the goal: (clockwise from left) Shanti Mullick, the only woman Arjuna Award winner in football, at her Kolkata home; Manipur (in green) playing Haryana at the national under­19 tournament in 2009; and the Delhi University team. initiative by Lucknow-based sports enthusiast, the late S.R. Zaidi. In the early 1990s, the WFFI handed over the reins of Indian women’s football to Aiff.

The risk: The worthy achievements of Indian women’s football may go into the deep freeze of nostalgia rather than act as platforms for take-off.

Where we were The Indian women’s team was twice runner-up at the Asian Women’s Championship (now called AFC Women’s Asian Cup) in 1979 and 1983 and came third in 1981. In 1982, before Fifa took over the reins of global women’s football and it was an underpublicized, less glamorized affair, India even participated in the World Women’s Invitational Tournament in the 1980s held in Taiwan, where the team drew against Holland and Haiti but lost to Germany before ending up in the 12th position. The invitational tournament was then seen as the equivalent of a World Cup, and had all the major teams participating.

Look at it this way: Back in 1982, the Indian women’s football team was the 12th best in the world.

“To put things into perspective, 15 years ago India lost by a slender 0-1 margin to Japan. At the 2011 Fifa Women’s World Cup, it was Japan who became

world champions after defeating the US,” says Chaudhuri. “To me, Indian women’s football is a case of where we were, where we could have been and where we are not.”

Kuntala Ghosh Dastidar was there in the middle, and sometimes at the helm, of the Indian team, when many of the on-field triumphs were being scored in the 1970s-80s. She is a key person in Indian football’s feminine feats—the era Chaudhuri glorifies as the heights.

She is also a bridge to where much of Indian women’s football emerges from: the conservative, rigidly guarded, semi-urban, semi-rural societies steeped in traditional mindsets that discouraged women from playing a physical sport usually dominated by men. Only the rare courageous woman could escape the long-held value system, where superstitions festered and dowry deaths and witch-hunts were not uncommon.

Ghosh Dastidar remembers two instances vividly. In 1975, Ghosh Dastidar, then just a teenager, was travelling in the team bus for an exhibition match to Bolpur in Bengal’s Birbhum district—and not far from the freethinking precincts of Tagore’s Santiniketan—when a mob of young men followed the bus on a particular stretch. The men noisily demanded that the girl foot-

ballers display their legs, bare beyond the football shorts.

She shudders as she recounts a second instance: In 1978, while playing a village match, a section of the crowd felt cheated at the sight of teenage women players with cropped hair and underdeveloped bodies. The mob had angrily surrounded the team’s temporary, thatched hut shelter, demanding proof of the players’ gender—with petrol and matchbox in hand. “We managed to escape around dawn,” she says.

Over three decades later, women’s team-versus-women’s team “exhibition matches” are held all over Bengal with much greater regularity than a travelling circus or a nautch show.

Hundreds of people pay `40-70 a ticket, but individual players earn no more than `400 a game.

Players depend on the game for their living, and the highest earning among them is lucky to get an annual contract for `10,000 from their Calcutta Women’s Football League-playing club.

For reasons ranging from lust to awe, both men and women spectators continue to watch the girls play football in their shorts.

Short­changed If there is any change, contends Dulali Ghosh, a widely respected national league-playing footballer now considering physiotherapy to bolster her

income, it is in the fact that some of the daughters of the spectators might now be playing football in the village fields. It’s the result of initiatives of former players and organizations like the Bengal Women Footballers Welfare Association, which continues to put faith in football as an empowering feminist game changer at the grass roots.

Nevertheless, gaining social acceptance is an off-field struggle that most aspiring women footballers have had to essay in Bengal, where in earlier centuries personalities like Rammohan Roy and Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar were the guiding lights for women’s education, empowerment and emancipation, and where men’s football gained popularity in the 1880s.

In Goalless: The Story of a Unique Footballing Nation (2006), sports scholars Boria Majumdar and Kausik Bandhyopadhyay chronicle the birth of women’s football in India. The book recounts the travails faced

by Purna Ghosh, an early woman footballer and member of Kolkata’s National Youth Association, which was founded by the liberal reformist Brajaranjan Ray in the 1930s. When Purna Ghosh discarded the sari in favour of a costume that allowed easier movement on the field, she was roundly criticized, even though the Bengali news-

paper Anandabazar Patrika showed its support by publishing photographs of her.

In the 1930s, other sari-wearing women footballers in Kolkata were reported to have been injured while playing.

Many years after she quit as a player, 50-year-old Ghosh Dastidar continues to sport a closely cropped hairstyle. She has maintained one since the day Mullick and her entire team walked into a saloon and demanded a “footballer’s cut”, even though she risked a pasting from her father, the patriarch of a conservative home. “I would scale walls and escape from home to play. One day, on seeing my father in a match, I became nervous and accidentally kicked and injured a player,” Ghosh Dastidar laughs.

This was in the mid-1970s, when young athletes responded to an advertisement for forming a women’s team by Arati Banerjee, the football-enthusiast wife of the legendary Indian player P.K. Banerjee. Over a hundred teenaged girls applied; and along with these came warnings from within the male football fraternity: An aggressive sport like football could create hormonal imbalances in women, affect child-bearing capabilities, interfere with menstrual cycles, and so on, remembers Mullick, one of the first applicants.

We met at the Calcutta Referees’ Association tent at Kolkata’s Maidan just days after Mullick returned as the triumphant Bengal side’s coach—the team had participated in an interstate tournament organized by Nalco in Orissa in late December. Bengal’s dominance in women’s football has been emphatically undermined by the Manipur team, which has won 16 of the 19 editions of the India Women’s Football Champion-

ship, with Bengal emerging champion twice and Orissa, a rising force, once.

Mullick’s expected exuberance is tempered by a nagging worry: Her teenaged daughter hasn’t been well. Having been associated with the game for over 35 years, it is not her daughter’s recently discovered interest in football that the mother wants to highlight. It is her daughter that the footballer wants to show off; for Mullick, her successful motherhood breaks yet another myth regarding the vision of physiological misfortune previously held out against women playing football.

Free in Manipur Though there are economic and unemployment problems, no such sociocultural bias or baggage afflicts the women’s game in Manipur. It was introduced as a sporting discipline in 1976, and Manipuri women’s continuous dominance, contends Ranjit Roy, secretary of the All Manipur Football Association, is because of the girls’ and their parents’ enthusiastic approach, “over and above the social support”.

In a state where women have spearheaded efforts ranging from organizing cooperative and individualistic economic models to social and protest activism, it is understandable when Roy says there is no difference between the sexes when it comes to participation, competition, support and organization in football. In a rare interview given to the popular website Kolkatafootball.com, Manipur’s Oinam Bembem Devi, winner of Aiff’s Woman Footballer of the Year for five years and the backbone of the national team, mentions a supportive mother behind her impressive career.

“We have a regular state league, state-level knockout

and inter-district tournaments. In our cultural life, football is an important component,” she says.

It is the kind of social safety net that has benefited Manipuri players like 22-year-old L. Naobi Chanu, who represented her state as a striker but now studies and plays for the Delhi University (DU) team. “As a youngster, I only needed to step out of my home and there would be boys and girls playing football together in the courtyard,” says Chanu.

The DU women’s football team comprises students from colleges like Jesus and Mary, Janki Devi Memorial college, Indira Gandhi Institute of Physical Education and Sports Sciences, Kamala Nehru and Kalindi College. It is led by Uttarakhand native Nancy Gupta, who was inspired to take up football after watching British-Indian director Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 film, Bend It Like Beckham.

It’s not the only time the film is mentioned as an inspiration for a newer generation of girls to take to the field. The feel-good story of a London-based Sikh girl overcoming cultural odds to play football scores much higher in the football pop chart than the bittersweet view in Jafar Panahi’s Offside, of Iranian women fans caught outside a stadium during a scorching men’s game, or the fact that Bollywood actor Esha Deol was once considered to possess footballing potential.

An even spread When Iffat Ara Parveen and Mahima Cholera, students of Kolkata’s Modern High School for Girls, took to football, they were guided by a single motivation. “If boys can play football, why can’t we?” they chirped on the sidelines of the prize distribution ceremony of an interschool girls football tournament organized by the Bengal Women Footballers Welfare Association in December. Modern High, with others like La Martiniere, Mahadevi Birla, Calcutta International and South Point, forms the fulcrum of football’s increasing spread among elite girls’ schools. If football is gaining popularity among the English Premier League (EPL)-watching young urban crowd, so too is support coming from the most underprivileged quarters: India’s tribal population.

“From Orissa, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, many good tribal woman footballers are coming up. They have endurance, stamina and merely need to be moulded,” says Aiff’s director (national teams) Subhankar Mukherjee.

More international matches, including an international tournament later this year, training camps, a proposed academy and

exposure tours are some of Aiff’s plans for women’s football. “We are also stressing on junior teams. The focus is on building a team for the future.”

The example of Orissa— where an individual, Nandkishore Patnaik, has been able to build a football culture from scratch—is often cited as Indian women football’s most recent positive story. It is also a glowing citation to long-term vision; 18 years since the football coach formed the first girls’ team after “contributing from the salary” (primarily his own), the state team won the national championship in 2011. “Initially, I got laughed at. Now, women’s football is played in all districts and there are 300 registered players,” says Patnaik.

“In every sport, you can make a career. It depends on determination and discipline,” says Indrani Ghosh Sarkar, now in her 40s, negotiating the north Kolkata traffic as we talk. The determination and discipline required to drive through the narrow congested by-lanes has also guided her through a 25-year-plus football career. She currently teaches football, among other games, at the Calcutta International School. On her way home, she trains young boys, many from underprivileged backgrounds, as part of the Kolkata Goalz project supported by the EPL through the British Council—Mohun Bagan is one of the six clubs associated with the programme in India.

Sarkar has never been outside the football curve. She is suave, articulate, convent-educated, mother, wife, and drives her own car too—just some of the coordinates that go into forming the image of a conventionally successful careerist.

But Sarkar is just half the story of Indian women’s football. The other half belongs to a lady footballer who did not want to be named. Contacted on the phone, she refused to furnish details of an “exhibition match” in a Bengal village where she was to play without the knowledge of the club she is contracted to for the Calcutta League. Keeping the club out of the loop often means earning an additional `100. If the clubs get to know, it could lead to a showcause notice or suspension.

Having spent weeks researching the article, I was eager for some on-field action. There was nothing happening, underlining a popular claim that Indian women’s football is more talk than play. I requested her for the match information, she baulked. I pleaded, she stonewalled. Eventually she threw reason. I withdrew.

“For you, it’s only an article.

For me, it’s a livelihood.”

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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

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

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have been participating in the national championship every year since the early 1990s, when the tournament began, can provide a misleading picture. Just eight-nine states are considered to be regular and serious about football. Though Tamil Nadu, Goa, Maharashtra and Kerala have begun to show better results in recent years, many teams are still put together hastily, some even including members who don’t actually play football.

Across states, women still have to battle the odds to play the game, and earn a living.

Bengal—which has 13 regular women’s football clubs, and over 300 players registered with The Indian Football Association (IFA)—too has suffered setbacks.

Both Mohun Bagan and East Bengal had fielded women’s club teams at the 2001 Calcutta Women’s Football League, but disbanded the sides a few seasons later, citing lack of funds, unavailability of practice fields and women’s dressing rooms as reasons. It created a void for players that India’s first regular women’s football league, started in 1993, has been unable to plug, says an official of the IFA, the league organizer and the game’s state-level governing body.

Anjan Mitra says the club plans to reintroduce the women’s team in the near future—a responsibility Mohun Bagan has, he says, as a national club. Gopal Ghosh, general manager (operations), East Bengal, believes that creating a women’s team “on an impulse” will be unsustainable. “We can attempt to make East Bengal at par with Barcelona FC,” he says caustically, “but it will be self-defeatist. We first need to create the infrastructure backbone.”

Promising stats

Bridging the gap: Former player Kuntala Ghosh Dastidar; and (top) a practice session at the Modern High School for Girls, Kolkata.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa) president Sepp Blatter had earlier commented that “the future of football is feminine”—but improving the lot of Indian women’s football will not be a goal that is e a s i l y achieved.

Indian women’s football continues to be mired in ironies that have at opposite ends the promise of global elevation and the plight of players like Adhikary and Shanti Mullick.

The only Arjuna Award-winning Indian woman footballer, Mullick cherishes the day she got a job with Eastern Railways more than the day she received the award from the President in 1983. “Most girls get involved with football out of natural liking. Later, they realize that a job is essential to keep the home fires burning,” she says.

Yet the Indian women’s team is ranked a respectable 53 in Fifa’s global rankings, and 11 in Asia. In comparison, the men’s team is ranked 158 globally and 29 in Asia—of course, the men’s team is in a bigger and more competitive pool.

“The rankings show how close the Indian women’s team is to securing an Olympic or World Cup berth, which are both distant dreams for the men. If the Aiff pays more attention to the women’s game, much can be achieved,” argues Subhransu Roy, who is currently researching a doctoral thesis titled “Sociocultural History of Women’s Soccer in India” at Kolkata’s Rabindra Bharati University.

It has been a hard-fought comeback for the national side, delisted by Fifa in 2009 for not having played a match for more than 18 months. “After the break, when I took charge, it was hard work to motivate the girls,” says Mohammad Shahid Jabbar, current coach of the Indian women’s team. “We have recently won a series against Bahrain, but the gap between the top-ranked Asian teams and India is enormous. A good grass-roots level programme is missing, and we need long-term planning.”

“From being Asia’s No. 2 side, today we find ourselves out in the cold,” says Goa-based former India player Yolanda D’Souza, whose hat-trick of goals against a visiting Swedish side in 1976 remains the only such feat by an Indian. The player-turnedpainter, though, rates a goal scored off a reverse volley (the spectacular bicycle kick) during a Far East tour by the national team among her career highpoints: a colour-and-canvas artist betraying a preference for athletic artistry.

It is interesting to go through D’Souza’s career graph, highlighted as it is by standout performances from the 1970s and 1980s against international sides, unlike the minor state-level achievements many current players showcase. She explains: “The WFFI (Women’s Football Federation of India) organized more tournaments and international friendlies, which improved the game and provided exposure.” This happened before, as D’Souza adds cryptically, “the men took over”. Meaning, the control went out of the hands of the women-run WFFI, which came up in 1979 after a sustained

Eye on the goal: (clockwise from left) Shanti Mullick, the only woman Arjuna Award winner in football, at her Kolkata home; Manipur (in green) playing Haryana at the national under­19 tournament in 2009; and the Delhi University team. initiative by Lucknow-based sports enthusiast, the late S.R. Zaidi. In the early 1990s, the WFFI handed over the reins of Indian women’s football to Aiff.

The risk: The worthy achievements of Indian women’s football may go into the deep freeze of nostalgia rather than act as platforms for take-off.

Where we were The Indian women’s team was twice runner-up at the Asian Women’s Championship (now called AFC Women’s Asian Cup) in 1979 and 1983 and came third in 1981. In 1982, before Fifa took over the reins of global women’s football and it was an underpublicized, less glamorized affair, India even participated in the World Women’s Invitational Tournament in the 1980s held in Taiwan, where the team drew against Holland and Haiti but lost to Germany before ending up in the 12th position. The invitational tournament was then seen as the equivalent of a World Cup, and had all the major teams participating.

Look at it this way: Back in 1982, the Indian women’s football team was the 12th best in the world.

“To put things into perspective, 15 years ago India lost by a slender 0-1 margin to Japan. At the 2011 Fifa Women’s World Cup, it was Japan who became

world champions after defeating the US,” says Chaudhuri. “To me, Indian women’s football is a case of where we were, where we could have been and where we are not.”

Kuntala Ghosh Dastidar was there in the middle, and sometimes at the helm, of the Indian team, when many of the on-field triumphs were being scored in the 1970s-80s. She is a key person in Indian football’s feminine feats—the era Chaudhuri glorifies as the heights.

She is also a bridge to where much of Indian women’s football emerges from: the conservative, rigidly guarded, semi-urban, semi-rural societies steeped in traditional mindsets that discouraged women from playing a physical sport usually dominated by men. Only the rare courageous woman could escape the long-held value system, where superstitions festered and dowry deaths and witch-hunts were not uncommon.

Ghosh Dastidar remembers two instances vividly. In 1975, Ghosh Dastidar, then just a teenager, was travelling in the team bus for an exhibition match to Bolpur in Bengal’s Birbhum district—and not far from the freethinking precincts of Tagore’s Santiniketan—when a mob of young men followed the bus on a particular stretch. The men noisily demanded that the girl foot-

ballers display their legs, bare beyond the football shorts.

She shudders as she recounts a second instance: In 1978, while playing a village match, a section of the crowd felt cheated at the sight of teenage women players with cropped hair and underdeveloped bodies. The mob had angrily surrounded the team’s temporary, thatched hut shelter, demanding proof of the players’ gender—with petrol and matchbox in hand. “We managed to escape around dawn,” she says.

Over three decades later, women’s team-versus-women’s team “exhibition matches” are held all over Bengal with much greater regularity than a travelling circus or a nautch show.

Hundreds of people pay `40-70 a ticket, but individual players earn no more than `400 a game.

Players depend on the game for their living, and the highest earning among them is lucky to get an annual contract for `10,000 from their Calcutta Women’s Football League-playing club.

For reasons ranging from lust to awe, both men and women spectators continue to watch the girls play football in their shorts.

Short­changed If there is any change, contends Dulali Ghosh, a widely respected national league-playing footballer now considering physiotherapy to bolster her

income, it is in the fact that some of the daughters of the spectators might now be playing football in the village fields. It’s the result of initiatives of former players and organizations like the Bengal Women Footballers Welfare Association, which continues to put faith in football as an empowering feminist game changer at the grass roots.

Nevertheless, gaining social acceptance is an off-field struggle that most aspiring women footballers have had to essay in Bengal, where in earlier centuries personalities like Rammohan Roy and Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar were the guiding lights for women’s education, empowerment and emancipation, and where men’s football gained popularity in the 1880s.

In Goalless: The Story of a Unique Footballing Nation (2006), sports scholars Boria Majumdar and Kausik Bandhyopadhyay chronicle the birth of women’s football in India. The book recounts the travails faced

by Purna Ghosh, an early woman footballer and member of Kolkata’s National Youth Association, which was founded by the liberal reformist Brajaranjan Ray in the 1930s. When Purna Ghosh discarded the sari in favour of a costume that allowed easier movement on the field, she was roundly criticized, even though the Bengali news-

paper Anandabazar Patrika showed its support by publishing photographs of her.

In the 1930s, other sari-wearing women footballers in Kolkata were reported to have been injured while playing.

Many years after she quit as a player, 50-year-old Ghosh Dastidar continues to sport a closely cropped hairstyle. She has maintained one since the day Mullick and her entire team walked into a saloon and demanded a “footballer’s cut”, even though she risked a pasting from her father, the patriarch of a conservative home. “I would scale walls and escape from home to play. One day, on seeing my father in a match, I became nervous and accidentally kicked and injured a player,” Ghosh Dastidar laughs.

This was in the mid-1970s, when young athletes responded to an advertisement for forming a women’s team by Arati Banerjee, the football-enthusiast wife of the legendary Indian player P.K. Banerjee. Over a hundred teenaged girls applied; and along with these came warnings from within the male football fraternity: An aggressive sport like football could create hormonal imbalances in women, affect child-bearing capabilities, interfere with menstrual cycles, and so on, remembers Mullick, one of the first applicants.

We met at the Calcutta Referees’ Association tent at Kolkata’s Maidan just days after Mullick returned as the triumphant Bengal side’s coach—the team had participated in an interstate tournament organized by Nalco in Orissa in late December. Bengal’s dominance in women’s football has been emphatically undermined by the Manipur team, which has won 16 of the 19 editions of the India Women’s Football Champion-

ship, with Bengal emerging champion twice and Orissa, a rising force, once.

Mullick’s expected exuberance is tempered by a nagging worry: Her teenaged daughter hasn’t been well. Having been associated with the game for over 35 years, it is not her daughter’s recently discovered interest in football that the mother wants to highlight. It is her daughter that the footballer wants to show off; for Mullick, her successful motherhood breaks yet another myth regarding the vision of physiological misfortune previously held out against women playing football.

Free in Manipur Though there are economic and unemployment problems, no such sociocultural bias or baggage afflicts the women’s game in Manipur. It was introduced as a sporting discipline in 1976, and Manipuri women’s continuous dominance, contends Ranjit Roy, secretary of the All Manipur Football Association, is because of the girls’ and their parents’ enthusiastic approach, “over and above the social support”.

In a state where women have spearheaded efforts ranging from organizing cooperative and individualistic economic models to social and protest activism, it is understandable when Roy says there is no difference between the sexes when it comes to participation, competition, support and organization in football. In a rare interview given to the popular website Kolkatafootball.com, Manipur’s Oinam Bembem Devi, winner of Aiff’s Woman Footballer of the Year for five years and the backbone of the national team, mentions a supportive mother behind her impressive career.

“We have a regular state league, state-level knockout

and inter-district tournaments. In our cultural life, football is an important component,” she says.

It is the kind of social safety net that has benefited Manipuri players like 22-year-old L. Naobi Chanu, who represented her state as a striker but now studies and plays for the Delhi University (DU) team. “As a youngster, I only needed to step out of my home and there would be boys and girls playing football together in the courtyard,” says Chanu.

The DU women’s football team comprises students from colleges like Jesus and Mary, Janki Devi Memorial college, Indira Gandhi Institute of Physical Education and Sports Sciences, Kamala Nehru and Kalindi College. It is led by Uttarakhand native Nancy Gupta, who was inspired to take up football after watching British-Indian director Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 film, Bend It Like Beckham.

It’s not the only time the film is mentioned as an inspiration for a newer generation of girls to take to the field. The feel-good story of a London-based Sikh girl overcoming cultural odds to play football scores much higher in the football pop chart than the bittersweet view in Jafar Panahi’s Offside, of Iranian women fans caught outside a stadium during a scorching men’s game, or the fact that Bollywood actor Esha Deol was once considered to possess footballing potential.

An even spread When Iffat Ara Parveen and Mahima Cholera, students of Kolkata’s Modern High School for Girls, took to football, they were guided by a single motivation. “If boys can play football, why can’t we?” they chirped on the sidelines of the prize distribution ceremony of an interschool girls football tournament organized by the Bengal Women Footballers Welfare Association in December. Modern High, with others like La Martiniere, Mahadevi Birla, Calcutta International and South Point, forms the fulcrum of football’s increasing spread among elite girls’ schools. If football is gaining popularity among the English Premier League (EPL)-watching young urban crowd, so too is support coming from the most underprivileged quarters: India’s tribal population.

“From Orissa, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, many good tribal woman footballers are coming up. They have endurance, stamina and merely need to be moulded,” says Aiff’s director (national teams) Subhankar Mukherjee.

More international matches, including an international tournament later this year, training camps, a proposed academy and

exposure tours are some of Aiff’s plans for women’s football. “We are also stressing on junior teams. The focus is on building a team for the future.”

The example of Orissa— where an individual, Nandkishore Patnaik, has been able to build a football culture from scratch—is often cited as Indian women football’s most recent positive story. It is also a glowing citation to long-term vision; 18 years since the football coach formed the first girls’ team after “contributing from the salary” (primarily his own), the state team won the national championship in 2011. “Initially, I got laughed at. Now, women’s football is played in all districts and there are 300 registered players,” says Patnaik.

“In every sport, you can make a career. It depends on determination and discipline,” says Indrani Ghosh Sarkar, now in her 40s, negotiating the north Kolkata traffic as we talk. The determination and discipline required to drive through the narrow congested by-lanes has also guided her through a 25-year-plus football career. She currently teaches football, among other games, at the Calcutta International School. On her way home, she trains young boys, many from underprivileged backgrounds, as part of the Kolkata Goalz project supported by the EPL through the British Council—Mohun Bagan is one of the six clubs associated with the programme in India.

Sarkar has never been outside the football curve. She is suave, articulate, convent-educated, mother, wife, and drives her own car too—just some of the coordinates that go into forming the image of a conventionally successful careerist.

But Sarkar is just half the story of Indian women’s football. The other half belongs to a lady footballer who did not want to be named. Contacted on the phone, she refused to furnish details of an “exhibition match” in a Bengal village where she was to play without the knowledge of the club she is contracted to for the Calcutta League. Keeping the club out of the loop often means earning an additional `100. If the clubs get to know, it could lead to a showcause notice or suspension.

Having spent weeks researching the article, I was eager for some on-field action. There was nothing happening, underlining a popular claim that Indian women’s football is more talk than play. I requested her for the match information, she baulked. I pleaded, she stonewalled. Eventually she threw reason. I withdrew.

“For you, it’s only an article.

For me, it’s a livelihood.”

Write to lounge@livemint.com

L12

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 2012

Books

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Can’t take Bombay out of the boy TERRY SMITH//TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

What’s India in the Rushdie universe?

We look back at his love for the country of his birth, and how he has altered Indian writing

B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ···························· hen the rector of India’s leading Islamic seminary, the Darul Uloom of Deoband, found that Salman Rushdie was visiting the Jaipur Literature Festival, which began on Friday, he asked the Indian government to cancel Rushdie’s visa.

The maulana’s anger dates back to Rushdie’s 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, which many Muslims have found offensive, even though it is extremely unlikely that most of those who have expressed outrage have read it or know what it is really about.

To placate the offended, India became the first country to ban the novel (a ban which still stays), and his visit to Jaipur was not meant to be about that novel.

Born in India, Rushdie does not require a visa to enter India, and the government initially said it could not stop his visit, although in the days leading up to the festival, some Congress politicians joined the bandwagon against Rushdie’s visit, which included Muslim clerics, and opposition parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—some echoing the clerics’ concerns, others arguing that his visit would pose law and order problems.

So what is the fuss about? Yes, there are elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP), but is stopping Rushdie from entering Jaipur the most pressing priority of Muslims in UP, or anywhere else? And even if it is, is such a demand even legal?

Freedom of expression in India has always had caveats, or “reasonable restrictions”, which are loosely defined, giving the state enormous power to restrict the free flow of ideas. Considerable power resides with the Customs Act of 1962, whose section 11 outlines 22 wide-ranging circumstances under which the government can prevent certain goods, including books, from entering India.

In October 1988, the finance ministry used those powers to prohibit the import of The Satanic Verses, because the officials thought the novel’s “dangerous content” could provoke unrest.

The government said the ban “did not detract from the literary and artistic merit of Rushdie’s work”, and that it was being banned as “a pre-emptive measure” because certain passages had been identified as “susceptible to distortion and misuse”, and the ban was to prevent such misuse. Rushdie responded in The New York Times, writing an open letter to then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, saying, “thanks for the good review”.

Reporting on The Satanic Verses controversy, I had some surreal conversations with the mullahs and ulemas in India. They warned me how incendiary and mischievous the book was, and how it hurt the sentiments of millions of people. When I asked them about specific passages from the novel, it was immediately apparent that they hadn’t read it. At that time,

W

Exile and home: Rushdie, soon after the fatwa was announced against him. A painting by artist Arpita Singh hangs on the wall; and (below) Kala Ghoda, the Mumbai precinct which features in his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Feet.

PRODIP GUHA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

the late Pramod Mahajan was a member of Parliament (MP) in the Rajya Sabha for the BJP. He had heard that I had a copy of the novel (which I did) and he wanted to know if I would lend it to him so he could wave it around in Parliament, to protest the ban. He hadn’t read the book either, but he said it should not be banned. In the end, I did not give Mahajan my copy. It wasn’t a tool for Mahajan to score political points (and his own party’s record in defending free speech was hardly exem-

In 2000, Rushdie travelled across the country gratefully, rediscovering his motherland

plary). Wouldn’t it be better, I asked Mahajan, if he were to file a petition in a court and get judges to overturn the ban?

Two months after my conversation with Mahajan, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa on Rushdie, and I saw, stunned, television images of the novel being burned in Bradford and other towns in Britain, even as some British politicians supported the Muslims’ right to take offence.

The world was turning topsyturvy, like in a Rushdie novel.

That moment was the turning point. Over the years, astute observers like Rushdie’s friend, the late Christopher Hitchens (in his many essays), Hanif Kureishi (in his novel The Black Album), Kenan Malik (in his book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy), and Nick Cohen (in his engrossing new book on the struggles of free speech, You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom), have pointed out the significance of that book’s burning: Acquiescence with such intolerance under the guise of multiculturalism ultimately encouraged the monster of fundamentalism that Al Qaeda and Taliban were to unleash within a decade.

Intolerance has grown exponentially in India. Words like “blasphemy” are tossed around as though they were part of Indian culture, tradition and discourse: Most recently, cabinet minister Kapil Sibal called Web pages about his party leader Sonia Gandhi that he found insulting, blasphemous, unconsciously giving her the halo of divinity. India’s greatest painter, Maqbool Fida Husain, had to die in exile, because the state refused to protect his right of free expression when vigilantes threatened him and cases continued to be filed against him even after courts had ruled in his favour, dismissing similar cases. Earlier this month in Delhi, another artist, Balbir Krishan, who happens to be gay, and whose art deals with homosexuality, was attacked. The impulse to take offence runs everywhere.

The Satanic Verses is an imaginative, literary exploration of the meaning and origin of faith, and the eternal conflict between faith and doubt. It is about angels and devils, about migration, and it merges reality with fantasy. The central assumption Rushdie’s critics have made—that it is an attack on Islam—is flawed. That assumption sends the fundamentalists into a tizzy. But as Rushdie has explained, and as anyone who reads the novel will know, those passages are the hallucinations of a character losing his mind; they aren’t history, nor are they Rushdie’s interpretation of history. But this is about politics, not literature; it is about manipulating perceptions, not about accuracy.

Rushdie himself has legally visited India several times since 2000, two years after Iran declared that it would no longer support the fatwa. But all of that is beside the point—more germane is Rushdie’s undeniable love for India, and what he has done for India. As Clark Blaise noted in his 1981 review of Midnight’s Children in The New York Times, that novel “sounds like a continent finding its voice”. That it did: It told India’s story as it had never been told before—to outsiders, but also to Indians. No doubt other Indians like Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Anita Desai had written important novels in English before him; but it was Rushdie who made the world sit up and take notice of Indian writing. He vividly brought to life the land of his birth, allowing the country’s sounds, smells, sights, and swagger to luxuriate, disturbing the genteel tapestry of the English countryside. He grasped the English language, doing things to it which few had done before, twisting it, turning it, spicing it up, and smearing it with colour; he appropriated it. Some Indians who followed him imitated him; some deliberately wrote differently, carving their own niches; others tried to distance themselves from the looming

shadow he cast.

To be sure, there had been other pioneers: James Joyce had done much the same to English decades ago with Ulysses, and G.V. Desani had shown what a skilled writer of Indian origin could do to English, in All About H. Hatterr.

Rushdie’s own novels that followed Midnight’s Children continued the trend: in Shame, Rushdie revealed how much he disliked the idea of, and what became of, Pakistan; in The Moor’s Last Sigh, he wrote an elegy about Bombay, as he insists on calling his city of birth, and what politicians were doing to its cosmopolitanism: “Those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay,” he presciently warned then. The musical beginnings of The Ground Beneath Her Feet were to be found in the shop, Rhythm House, near Kala Ghoda in Bombay; Shalimar the Clown returned his readers to Kashmir; and in The Enchantress of Florence, in the ideas of emperor Akbar, Rushdie articulated a vision of syncretic, liberal India which eludes the current crop of leaders.

India was “a dream we had all agreed to dream”, as he wrote in Midnight’s Children.

You can take the boy out of Bombay, but not Bombay out of the boy.

In a revealing diary (published in his collection of essays, Step Across This Line), Rushdie wrote how, while writing Midnight’s Children, “Living in London, I wanted to get India back; and the delight with which Indian readers clasped the book to themselves, the passion in which they, in turn, claimed me, remains the most precious memory of my writing life…” The “plague years” (as he described the period of the decade of the fatwa) prevented him from returning to India, and Rushdie’s anxiety grew. He further wrote: “Nothing about my plague years…has hurt me more than this rift. I felt like a jilted lover left alone with his unrequited, unbearable love. You can measure love by the size of the hole it leaves behind.”

In 2000, Rushdie travelled across the country gratefully, rediscovering his motherland, revisiting places from his childhood, meeting old friends, and breathing the smells and imbibing the tastes the plague years had denied him. His subsequent visits have been less eventful. He could be seen at Parmeshwar Godrej’s beach house at a party; he would call friends unexpectedly, saying he was in town; and he was in Jaipur, at the festival, in 2007, condemning the abuses in Kashmir and Gujarat.

Delivering the keynote address at the India Today Conclave in 2010, Rushdie noted with alarm the “culture of complaint” that had come to dominate the Indian discourse. He chided India for not defending Husain: “He is even being jeered at for being old. This is the proud face of a philistine India. There is nothing wrong in not liking his art. You can easily opt out. A painting is a finite space of art. If it offends, don’t enter that space. The best way to avoid getting offended is to shut a book…

The worst thing is that artists are soft targets… We do not have armies protecting us.”

Writers should not need armies to protect them in a free society.

That Rushdie might need protection in India reflects poorly—not on him, but on India.

Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

BOOKS L13

LOUNGE

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

MAPMAKING | EDITED BY DEBJANI SENGUPTA

A river runs through it DIPTENDU DUTTA/AFP

Translated stories from the partition of Bengal highlight a history that is often sidelined in mainstream Indian consciousness Mapmaking—Partition Stories from Two Bengals: Amaryllis, 207 pages, R295.

B Y S HAMIK B AG ···························· couple of years ago, an assignment for a French magazine gave me the opportunity to stand in front of the newly constructed barbed wire fence on the Indo-Bangladesh border in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district. Eight feet tall, reinforced by the fear of electrocution, with flashlights and ringing alarms, the border fencing project was the Indian Border Security Force’s brainchild to stop all kinds of illegal movement—even of the bovine sort—across the border. The fencing stopped at the banks of the river Ichhamati, which forms a natural boundary between India and Bangladesh. The river flowed unhindered like a folk song, the steady monsoon breeze creating a disorderly tide.

The fence had an aura of finality; the climactic outcome of a territorial division in 1947 which saw a knife being run through people who had everything in common except religion. The fence felt like the irrevocable end of a romance, and, a little over six decades after 1947’s partition of Bengal, the beginning of a stern, independent practicality. Yet the Ichhamati, which criss-crosses the two countries at multiple points, seemed like a link to an interrelated narrative, and a natural nerve still connecting the two people.

Edited by Debjani Sengupta, Mapmaking: Partition Stories from Two Bengals, featuring English translations of short stories of writers from Bengal and Bangladesh, with a foreword by Ashis Nandy, brings back the

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On the wire: The India­Bangladesh border separates two close­knit cultures. commonalities without whitewashing the crude disparities that unsettled lives back then and forced millions to be displaced from their land, the refugees escaping with stories of their plight and not much else. The communal crisis took lives too, and nearly all of the dozen short stories in Mapmaking have the shadow of murder and death lurking in the bushes.

Mapmaking, however, reaches a critical balance not just through the even-handed spread of six writers from each country, but also with the undercurrent of humaneness and compassion that knits together the stories of shared, cross-border tragedies. It is also worth noting that the Indian and Bangladeshi writers are Hindus and Muslims, respectively—indicative of the religious wedge that led to the partition of Bengals, communal riots in places such as Barisal, Noakhali and Calcutta (now Kolkata), and festering wounds.

Yet, in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Road, two Hindus seek out their Muslim friend in a riot-scalded

Calcutta slum. In Pratibha Basu’s Flotsam and Jetsam, Jamir, the Muslim chief in erstwhile East Pakistan, refers to the Hindu landlady as “Ma” and feels helpless when she asks for his advice on leaving for India. A picture of Gandhi hangs on the wall of the Muslim protagonist in Dibyendu Palit’s Alam’s Own House, while Hashim risks his life to save that of his neighbour Paran’s in Ateen Bandopadhyay’s The Infidel—Paran had earlier carried Hashim’s unconscious and fully pregnant wife home.

Similar strains of empathy run through the stories of the Bangladeshi writers. In Hasan Hafizur Rehman’s Two More Deaths, a Muslim passenger in a train paints a portrait in his mind of the terror-struck Hindu family travelling with him. He can offer the elderly Hindu man seating space but no other consolation, caught as the train is in a “deathly quiet”. Escaping the Hindu-sponsored pogrom in India, Ali Haider, the central male character in Selina Hossain’s An Evening of Prayer, names his newborn

Prateek; his mother’s name is Pushpita—as a reader, there is no escaping the cross-religious linkages of the names. The Muslim encroachers of a deserted and palatial Hindu home in Syed Waliullah’s The Tale of a Tulsi Plant confabulate and decide to let the tulsi (holy basil) plant, with its strong Hindu associations, be.

Even against the bristling polemic where each community holds “the other” responsible for the partition’s horrors, many of the perpetrators and victims of crimes in these stories come from the same community as the other: Hindu women refugees who get picked up for sex work by Hindu pimps, elderly women with low earning potential who are thrown off running cars, and marauding Muslim mobs who butcher their own for sheltering Hindus.

While Mapmaking subtly introduces the dominant players and coordinates which went into 1947’s partition of Bengal, none of the stories ponder the role played by the India-fleeing Bihari Muslim populations to East

Pakistan, reportedly as usurping agents of communalism. Or the rigidly held views of upper-caste Brahmin landowners in the villages of undivided East Bengal, where Muslim communities would often live in fringe ghettos, generally ostracized. These issues, which find resonance in the scholarly non-fiction work of Bengali authors and editors like Mihir Sengupta and Sebanti Ghosh, are said to have widened the chasm between communities.

The stories also end with the exodus of refugees to India in 1971 before and after Bangladesh’s Liberation War, even though Hindu refugees have continued to pour into Bengal until as recently as the 1990s, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in India—a predicament for Hindus in Bangladesh, for whom rampaging Hindu right-wingers had little concern when they went about “reviving” the faith in India.

Even though the English translations by Sengupta and Rani Ray are fluent and engaging, there is a certain standardization

of form that renders the writing of Sunanda Bhattacharya and Akhtaruzzaman Elias or Manik Bandyopadhyay and Syed Waliullah within the same stylistic range. Occasionally, the English language too feels helpless against the wit and intricacies of Bengali dialects spoken in East Bengal (which might explain why historian Tapan Raychaudhuri’s fascinating childhood memoirs from Barisal have been left untranslated).

Mapmaking is not just a riveting read, but a relevant one too.

Four decades after the birth of Bangladesh, the book might trigger further discourse on the eastern partition of India, which has been a subdued affair in Indian mainstream consciousness compared with the careful documentation of the Punjab partition by writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, Khushwant Singh, Bhisham Sahni and Urvashi Butalia. With the passing of the worst-affected generation of refugees, Mapmaking could also guide newer generations to their social lineage, familial moorings, warts and all.

In Mapmaking, the roles are often reversed, the assumed victim is often the perpetrator, and a thin veil separates the real from the imagined. As a line sketching a much-hassled Hindu elderly man in Two More Deaths describes: “A stubble at least a week old; another month and he’ll begin to look like a maulvi.”

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Divided by religion, united by history

Q&A | JOSEPH S ALTER

Shape of the nation The author talks about his new book on Indian masculinity, nationalism and celibacy B Y A NUPAM K ANT V ERMA anupam1.v@livemint.com

···························· oseph S. Alter is professor and department chair at the department of anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US. His scholarly work explores South Asian concepts of the body, masculinity and medicine. In Moral Materialism: Sex and Masculinity in Modern India, Alter investigates the Indian concept of brahmacharya (celibacy).

Looking at yoga, kabaddi and traditional Indian wrestling, he studies the notion of masculinity in historical and nationalist rhetoric. He spoke with Lounge about his book and globalization’s impact on masculinity. Edited excerpts:

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Moral Materialism— Sex and Masculinity In Modern India: Penguin Books, 256 pages,R499.

What drew you to India for your research on the male body?

I was born and raised in India and have lived in Mussoorie for most of my life, so my academic

interest in questions of masculinity, sexuality and health were shaped by early experiences. I started wrestling when I was about 16 or 17. I was never a good wrestler, but the exercise regimen of akhara life took hold of my imagination—and my body—and became an intellectual obsession as well.

In other words, I guess, it is about a feeling of attachment and this draws me back to India through the akhara. This can give rise to a sense of nationalism—Fatherland, Mother India, and all that—but the physical experience of elemental intimacy with place brings one down to earth, and keeps flights of the imagination in check. It is a sense of masculinity that takes shape and is rooted in the soil of India.

In ‘Moral Materialism’, you dwell on the idea of the Indian male’s body in relation to the idea of India as a nation.

The body is an extremely powerful tool of nationalism precisely because it generates a profound sense of attachment to people, places and things. I have

Man overboard: Alter uses yoga and wrestling to examine masculinity. written extensively about Gandhi’s nationalism in relation to the struggle for independence, and his was clearly a kind of intimate nationalism that involved a struggle with the body, with masculinity and with sexuality. What is fascinating is that Gandhi’s embodied sense of being started out as nationalism but then “went global”—so to speak—and many of the seemingly strange things he did—fasting, being celibate, practising nature cure—were ways of connecting an embodied sense of self to all people, all places and all things everywhere.

I don’t think that the significance of this idea has paled in the least.

Do you see any striking differences in attitudes towards the male body in

India and the West?

There are profound differences in essence, but not in structure or form. If you grew up in Montana riding horses and fishing in mountain streams, that experience will form the essence of a sense of self that is deeply embodied. Cormac McCarthy has captured this essence of the fading American frontier in a number of his award-winning novels.

What is happening in India is certainly changing attitudes towards what is happening to a sense of the body in India, but not in any way that is especially unique or different from the sense captured by McCarthy or Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie and—much closer home—Ruskin Bond. Fragmentation of the body

is symptomatic of globalization, although remember what I said about Gandhi.

What sort of new conflicts does globalization bring into play ?

This is a question that provokes as much irony and humour as pathos and tragedy. When images of Lord Ram and Hanuman are cut in the mould of Mr Universe, the terms of masculinity are being twisted in ways that are not too difficult to understand.

Similarly, there are ways in which the figure of the hero in popular cinema is increasingly derivative and two-dimensional. But I think it is equally true to turn things around and look at the impact of “the Indian body” in the world.

Here, yoga is a fabulous case in point; not that it is simple or easy to say that the empire strikes back. Modern yoga came into being inspired by a global movement—loosely termed “Muscular Christianity”, and focused on athleticism, fair play and sportsmanship—in boarding schools throughout the empire.

Bikram Choudhury is the heir to this tradition and, as I point out in Moral Materialism, what Choudury has done in Los Angeles is to reshape yoga into a form of global athleticism that is almost more classical in its articulation of moral gymnastic values than the early Greeks could possibly have imagined.

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 2012

Culture

LOUNGE

PREVIEW

The contemporary hall of fame Navin Thomas

The second edition of The Škoda Prize establishes the awards as exhibition­driven.

We revisit the three shortlisted exhibitions B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· he Škoda Prize for contemporary Indian art, now in its second year, rewards “an Indian artist under the age of 45 for the most outstanding exhibition in India produced in the 12 months preceding the award (this year, works exhibited between May 2010 and May 2011 were considered).”

When Mithu Sen, an emerging artist based in New Delhi, won the award last year for her risque exhibition Black Candy, it generated plenty of buzz. This year, the entries have gone down from 169 to 128, which Girish Shahane, the art adviser for the prize, attributes to galleries shifting focus to art fairs and doing fewer solo exhibitions. “The inclusion of established artists such as Alwar Balasubramaniam in the list last year also possibly threw off many gallerists from participating,” says Shahane.

This year, as an added incentive for younger artists to participate, besides the `10 lakh Škoda Prize, there is a second award: a cash prize of `50,000 for the Breakthrough Artist of the year, which will be given for the best debut solo exhibition. An additional feature is a group exhibition called The Škoda Prize Show, where works by all 20 longlisted artists will be on exhibit.

The composition of the longlist is evidence that the award committee is grading exhibitions, not artists. So while it includes veterans such as Jitish Kallat and Manjunath Kamath, there are young artists such as Manish Nai and Paula Sengupta. The winner will be announced at a collateral event to the India Art Fair (25-29 January) in the Capital on 28 January.

We revisit the shortlisted shows:

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Jitish Kallat Shortlisted for ‘Fieldnotes: Tomorrow Was Here Yesterday’, at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad

Museum, Mumbai, from 23 April-31 October 2011 Fieldnotes was conceived as a residency project by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, the honorary director and managing trustee of the Bhau Daji Lad Museum. The seminal exhibition linked Kallat’s long-standing obsession with the city of Mumbai to the museum’s colonial history and architecture.

“I wanted the artworks to be conduits between the existing pieces in the museum,” says Kallat, commenting on the new and old works which hid among the museum’s permanent exhibits, exploring the cycle of time and the drive for survival in the megapolis.

Kallat’s years in Mumbai, where he was born and raised, informed the exhibition’s theme. Playing both curator and artist, Kallat used the museum as a stage to unpack its histories, using art to travel between tomorrow and yesterday.

One installation, Circa, alluded to Mumbai’s construction boom with 120 resin sculptures that resembled bamboo scaffolding. In another, titled Annexation, a 6fthigh black lead kerosene stove had friezes of fantastical beasts. A closer look showed that the animals were devouring each other in a struggle to survive—inspired by figures adorning the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, which is the nerve centre of Mumbai’s commuter action.

“The intention was to not enter the space with a notion of one own’s art and place in it,” says Kallat, “but see how the collection and one own’s work can be invigorated through a mutual encounter.”

LN Tallur Shortlisted for ‘Chromatophobia: The Fear of Money’, at Nature Morte, New Delhi, from 10 April-4 May 2011 In the wake of the recent global financial crisis, L.N. Tallur’s exhibition cast a satirical eye on the obsession with wealth in India.

Tallur, who lives in Karnataka and South Korea, used “found” classi-

Without borders ‘Foodistan’ is more than Indo­Pak rivalry. There’s enough culinary skill on display B Y A MRITA R OY amrita.r@livemint.com

···························· nlike the widely popular MasterChef, the contestants of Foodistan, the food reality show on NDTV Good Times that will air from Monday, are not amateurs.

Created by NDTV Good Times and produced by Siddharth Basu’s BIG Synergy TV, it is reminiscent of the American reality show Top Chef Masters, where professional chefs vie for the prize.

Foodistan, a 26-part series, will have 16 chefs from some of the best hotels in India and Pakistan competing with each other, in team as well as individual challenges. Don’t go by its gimmicky hoardings, Foodistan has enough healthy competition, judging by its

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first two episodes.

The Indian team includes Manish Mehrotra of Indian Accent, New Delhi, with his signature blend of Indian and world cuisines on the same plate; and Meraj-ul-Haque, a third-generation chef from the Qureshi family of Lucknow and the man behind The Great Kabab Factory’s kebabs. There’s Nimish Bhatia of The Lalit Ashok, Bangalore, who has applied the concept of cold cuts to kebabs to come up with “thande kebab”; and Madhumita Mohanta from The Claridges, Surajkund (Haryana), the sole woman in the Indian line-up.

On the Pakistani side, among others, are chefs with experience of working in Dubai, London, Hong Kong, the US and Pakistan’s premier restaurants. Besides Mohammad Ikram of Dumpukht, PearlContinental Lahore, a specialized dum pukht chef who also loves to cook Chinese, there is Akhtar Rehman of Marriott Islamabad, who specializes in traditional Pakistani dishes. The executive chef at Park Plaza Lahore, Mohammed Naeem,

cal icons to comment on greed in modern society. So there was an installation titled Unicode, where a traditional bronze Nataraja was obscured by an ugly mass of concrete. In another work, titled Deepa Laxmi, Lakshmi—the Hindu goddess of wealth—was seen obliterated with a concrete grinding machine.

In this context, chromatophobia, or the fear of money, is a peculiar predicament, Tallur reasons. “Treating chromatophobia (is) an invasive procedure that involves ‘bringing the rhythm back’ while maintaining the vitals in a stable condition under local anaesthesia.” Visitors to the gallery could opt for a quick fix to their phobia by affixing a coin into Chromatophobia (hammered)’s log of wood, an altar of sacrifice held in place by two sculptures of Lakshmi. As more hopefuls hammered their wishes in, the

wears multiple hats—author, blogger, traveller and racing enthusiast, who specializes in Mughlai dishes and pastas. One of the strongest members of this team is Mehmood Akhtar, who spent his initial years cooking for Mehmood Sayeed Sakhery’s Palace in Saudi Arabia before returning to Pakistan to work with Avari hotel, Lahore.

They are set tasks by a panel of three judges—Merrilees Parker from London, a chef and TV show host; actor Sonya Jehan, granddaughter of the legendary singer Noor Jehan, who helped her French mother set up the Café Flo restaurant in Pakistan, and critic and journalist Vir Sanghvi.

In the first round, the judges kept things fairly straightforward.

Parker, probably because of her experience as a food show host, was the most effervescent and Jehan the most diplomatic, but all three were largely understated, compared with other Indian reality television judges. Sanghvi’s opinion seemed to matter the most, at least to the Indian contestants, judging by the Indian skipper’s reaction to being awarded a point by the critic.

Based as it is on the theme of an Indo-Pakistan conflict—the teams are outfitted in predictable blue

Contenders: (top) Jitish Kallat’s Unti­ tled (1857) includes a museum vitrine at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum titled Regi­ ments; and Deepa Laxmi by L.N. Tallur.

and green, respectively—the first episode is shamelessly dedicated to fake nationalistic fervour: opening shots of mustachioed guards on their routine war dance on the Wagah border, opinion from the streets about which side is likely to win—some of the masala you associate with an India-Pakistan cricket match is unfortunately present. Thankfully, it does not descend to vulgar jingoistic depths.

There’s dollops of food culture served up from both countries.

Food historian Pushpesh Pant holds forth on the impact of refugees on both nations’ cuisines over

sculpture turned into a glittering monument. This work recalled a traditional practice in rural Karnataka— from where Tallur hails—of pinning down the goddess by affixing a coin to one’s door.

“Lakshmi is considered chanchala, the restless one, who does not like to stay in one place. So people do not buy pictures or sculptures of Lakshmi in a standing position—they think she may leave early. Traditionally, she is shown sitting comfortably on a lotus. Some traditions go one step further and nail her: There is a tradition of nailing a coin at the entrance doorstep and the back-door steps of the house. This way, they manage their fear about money,” says Tallur, whose argument is that India has a deeprooted tradition of chromatophobia.

the last half-century. There are cross-border vignettes such as an interview with an Indian gentleman whose sister-in-law in Pakistan requests some mixed vegetable curry every time he visits them.

The live action that followed wasn’t hunky-dory. The challenge set for the two teams was easy enough—a curry, a kebab, a biryani and a dessert. With so many professional reputations on the line, the knives were out and, surprisingly, between teammates.

In the Indian team, the classical techniques of Haque grated on the day’s captain, Mehrotra, and

Chef’s hat: The Indian team at work during one of the episodes.

Shortlisted for ‘From the Town’s End...’, at GallerySKE, Bangalore, from 30 August-9 October 2010 In From the Town’s End…, Bangalore-based artist Navin Thomas explored his continuing interest in the afterlife of salvaged electronic junk. The exhibition had Thomas engendering interaction between electronic objects and the small living creatures, such as birds and insects, that inhabit the environment around them.

Thomas, who says he is interested in “the private life of your discarded electronic appliances”, found each device used in the show in a scrap shop. The artist regularly scours flea markets and other junk havens in search of gadgets with audio capacities. “I am curious to see what a city regurgitates every morning,” he says. “I think you can tell a lot about a culture from what it throws away.”

In an installation titled …, a treelike structure constructed from metal pipes and radio antennas was connected to discarded transistors tuned to blank frequencies.

A flock of birds was introduced to this humming tree. When the birds flew around the antennas, the intensity of sound emitted from the radio sets fluctuated.

Patterns of attraction formed lyrical loops in Don’t Stare At the Light, Too Brightly..., which had a public announcement speaker serenading a flower made from ultraviolet bulbs and an industrial exhaust fan. Another speaker played the calls of nocturnal insects and animals.

Amid the installation, the drama of unrequited love played out: Insects gravitated to the bulbs and died from their devotion; their corpses surrounded the light stand each night. The recorded tracks, including the jazz tune My Funny Valentine, pushed the notion of bittersweet romance. Thomas had you wonder whether sounds from a mechanical device could exercise a hold over real insects as a love song appeals to humans.

The Škoda Prize Show will be on exhibit at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, from 24 January-6 February. The winner will be announced on 28 January.

the four Pakistani contestants worked themselves up into a tizzy.

Matters almost came to a head between captain chef Ikram, and his sole female teammate, the lively Khursheed Amina Agha, or chef Poppy, as she is known. A chef with her own culinary institute and TV show, she failed to earn her skipper’s respect when entrusted with making the shahi tukda dessert. Ikram’s snide remark that a TV chef didn’t have to serve customers, and that made all the difference, added to the tension, but the shahi tukda was one of the dishes that impressed the judges. The other was Haque’s gosht (mutton) biryani.

If there’s one bone to pick in this well-produced show, it’s the hosts. It’s not clear what makes actors Ira Dubey and Aly Khan qualified to anchor this show. In the second episode, Ikram tells Khan that the Irani seafood biryani is not being made with fish like salmon and tuna but ones from the Indian Ocean. Khan sagely quips, “Ah, bhetki!” Bhetki is a freshwater fish, as every discerning Indian foodie knows.

Foodistan will air on NDTV Good Times from 23 January, Monday to Wednesday, at 9.30pm.

CULTURE L15

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

THEATRE

MUSIC MATTERS

The lost son of Lahore

SHUBHA MUDGAL

WAKE UP TO VIRTUAL MUSIC

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Ajoka, Pakistan’s robust theatre group, stages the country’s first play on the life of Bhagat Singh

B Y S HREYA R AY shreya.r@livemint.com

···························· t is an uncanny coincidence that Nawab Muhammad Ahmad Khan Kasuri, the magistrate who signed the death warrant of Bhagat Singh, was killed, more than 40 years later, at the same spot as the 23-year-old freedom fighter. The roundabout in Shadman Colony, Lahore—where the execution chambers of the Lahore Central jail used to be—is where the magistrate was shot in 1974. Not that many Pakistani youngsters know these details about Singh’s death, or even that he was from Lahore; to them he’s the guy Ajay Devgn played in a Bollywood movie.

Resurrecting Singh—and reclaiming him—as a son of Lahore is Pakistan’s Ajoka theatre group, in the first-ever Pakistani production on the freedom fighter, Mera Rang De Basanti Chola. The play, to be staged today at the National School of Drama’s (NSD’s) Bharat Rang Mahotsav, is third in a series of Ajoka’s plays that question the Ara-

I

bised Pakistani identity, and emphasize its roots with the Indian subcontinent. Drawing constant parallels with contemporary society, peppered with traditional folk song and dance (including a Tangewala ki ghodi, a type of Punjabi folk song on the verge of extinction), this is a typical Ajoka play.

Born in 1978, after the overthrow of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government by the military regime of Zia-ulHaq, Ajoka was formed by a group of writers, intellectuals and artists perturbed at the erosion of democratic values in their country. They wrote about religious extremism, repressive government machinery, and other things that made the Pakistani establishment sit up and squirm. Within a year, they had been banned from performing at public venues, and their members, personally attacked. Playwright-director Shahid Nadeem, who has written 40 plays and adaptations, including Mera Rang De... and is, along with his wife Madeeha Gauhar, one of Ajoka’s key founder members, lost his job with PTV twice. The first was in 1979, during Zia-ul-Haq’s regime, when he was forced into exile in London for eight years but kept writing for Ajoka; the second in 1999, during the reign of Nawaz Sharif.

Only after the death of Zia-ulHaq in 1988 did the group gradually get access to venues like the Goethe-Institut, which gave them space to rehearse and perform.

But even during the years of the ban, Ajoka performed at factory premises, community halls, street corners, even private residences.

There have been suicide bombers

and bomb attacks outside venues during their performances. Members have received threat calls, emails and texts, the most virulent after the production of Mujahid, a telefilm produced by Ajoka about the “jihadi mindset and how it is destroying society”, aired in 2005.

“The film was a warning against jihadi violence—which until then hadn’t assumed the scale it has today—and said that if the issue wasn’t addressed it would spiral out of control,” says Nadeem. “The government’s response to that was to say that people like me need to be thrown outside Pakistan; in the parliament they talked about having our group banned, they had conferences accusing us of being enemies of Pakistan.”

The high drama off-stage is wonderfully offset by the entertaining and often uproariously funny plays. Their take on family planning, specifically the issue of vasectomy, Jum Jum Jeeway Jaman Pura (Long Live the Delivery Town) in 1995, addressed the politically explosive subject through song and dance. Burqavaganza, which travelled to India for the NSD festival in 2008, was a laugh-out-loud satire on hypocritical Islamic clerics—and their attitudes to women, sex and sexuality.

The connection with India is not quite incidental; their relationship with India is “a political statement”, says Nadeem. The latest series of plays, which keeps rejecting its Arabised identity, keeps making constant connections with India. “Mera Rang De...,” says Gauhar, who has also directed the play, “is not just about Bhagat

Forgotten hero: Nirvaan Nadeem plays Bhagat Singh.

Singh, it’s about identity. After the creation of Pakistan, there was an effort to reinvent ourselves as Pakistanis, and identify ourselves with our Muslim identity and with the Middle East (West Asia). This was a way to justify the creation of a nation based on religious identity. But in that myopic view, thousands of years of history was wiped out,” she says.

Dara, their previous play, celebrated Mughal prince Dara Shikoh, and held up the peace-loving and Sufi-poet prince as the true face of Islam. “Nobody in Pakistan knows about Dara’s ideology because there has been an effort to erase him from our history books, as happens with anyone who doesn’t fit into the ideology of Pakistan and the two-nation theory. It is these distortions in history that we’re trying to correct,” she says.

Similarly, Singh, despite being a hero of the independence movement and a son of Lahore, has been ignored because he was a non-Muslim and a socialist, says Nadeem. “He is an important role model in present times, when the current generation doesn’t know of the dream of socialism that inspired people in the previous century,” he says. “They need to know that there are other things more inspiring than the insanity of suicide bombers,” he says.

Mera Rang De Basanti Chola will be staged at the Kamani Auditorium, Mandi House, New Delhi, at 7pm today.

f late there has been much ado about going “viral”. Odes and paeans have been scripted in tribute to the Kolaveri phenomenon, which became an online sensation. But even as our television presenters babbled on blithely about the viral track of the year, the online medium crept determinedly towards the finishing line, finally emerging victorious in more ways than one. If diversity is what you are looking for, then online music shows are what you need to be bookmarking.

One of my favourites in terms of concept is Balcony TV (http://balconytv.com/), which basically features performances from balconies around the world. As simple as that! No fancy studio set-up, no elaborate lighting, just bunches of musicians on balconies across the world, shot on video, and offered to the online world for free viewing and listening. It can’t get simpler than that, and yet look what it offers—music from across the world, without some marketing maniac usurping the show with the usual weapons that are employed to fetter, manacle or massacre any attempt to make good music. For example, interrupting the music to bring in stars from the soon-to-be-released Bollywood blockbuster, poor production values, bad sound and repetitive programming.

Balcony TV isn’t the only one of its kind. There is a rapid mushrooming of online music shows, and another show that might interest music lovers is on www.sofarsounds.com, which features music performances in living rooms. The Sofar website describes its events as “pop-up gigs” because the venue, always a living room, is kept secret, with the date, time and venue announced only to its community of subscribers. Of course, the videos from the pop-up gigs are later uploaded on their website, so if you can’t be present at the gig, you can always watch the video online. I watched a neat video of Shaa’ir + Func performing Embrace at what was described as the first Songs from a Room session in Asia.

What I find most admirable about these online shows is that they are often led and supported by people who are passionate about music and are, therefore, able to come No frills: Gigs from balconies around the world. together as a community or a loosely organized collective to enjoy music in simple, unpretentious surroundings. These are no-frills music sessions where the music remains in sharp focus, and creates that special bond between the performer and the listener. It doesn’t matter then that the stage is so small that the bass player in the band has to position himself on a step leading up to the landing. It doesn’t matter that there are no smokescreens, confetti showers and fireworks, or the glittery garish stage décor that is so much a part of music shows on television.

To be fair, there is a downside to the shows too. At times, the music can be amateurish and mediocre or just way too startlingly different to be immediately palatable.

But at least it isn’t the same fare that is served up day after day, night after night, on Indian television, mindlessly, and with fairly predictable histrionics thrown in now and again. Now if only our desi community of music lovers could come together to create one or more online shows that do justice to the immense diversity of musical expressions to be found in our amazing country!

Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

Where the books have no name Artist Shilpa Gupta furthers her engagement with notional boundaries B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· handwoven ball of thread stands on a pedestal, in a transparent case. In it, on a brass plaque, is written: “1:14.9 1188.5 miles of Fenced border—West, North-West Data Update: Dec 31, 2007”. It is so ridiculous a figure, it could be random. The ratio is in fact the proportion of the ball of thread to the 1,188.5km of fencing on the India-Pakistan border. The figure is as specified by the Union home ministry, says artist Shilpa Gupta. “Can you imagine fencing a border?” she asks.

To underline the futility, next to it is a video of a hand pulling an endless string of thread from the earth. How do you fence the world? How do you draw the line?

A

Defining that line—whether of the self, the state, or the shrine—is Gupta’s preoccupation at the ongoing exhibit, Someone Else, at the Chemould Prescott Road gallery, Mumbai.

Gupta unpacks stacks of 100 stainless steel books to set into her installation wall, the original covers etched in detail upon the steel.

They are all by authors who chose pseudonyms. On the book spines are the reasons why the authors were trying so hard to be Someone Else, as the installation is titled.

“Fear of Colonial Pressure” reads one by Dhanpat Rai, better known as Munshi Premchand. Pablo Neruda’s was a fear his father would find out he was a poet. Even J.K. Rowling, who was told by her publisher that little boys would not want to read a book by a woman called “Joanne”, is there. And so it goes; stories within the stories of writers wrapped in their own “heartbreaking” narratives of identity. There is also a range of women writers who feared gender bias. The novella I Never Promised You a Rose Garden reads: “To not

be considered the mad protagonist of the book.” It was a fear that haunted even the author of The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath: “It’s a funny thing, even for an artist, every work comes out because there’s something about you that slips into the work. She felt that her life would be too exposed,” Gupta says.

Her personal favourite is the quirky Japanese novelist known as Banana, who liked the fruit, and Emma Blair, who is in fact an Irish male writer of romances. “There are many reasons why you would try to be someone you are, in fact, not—some are intensely personal, and others, political,” Gupta says.

Showing in Mumbai after four years, Gupta has expanded her preoccupation with borders, both notionally and spatially: “I am often asking the same question.

Earlier, in 1999, it was with my project with Menstrual Blood; at some point in Blame, where it was about perception. How do you define the other? Growing up in cosmopolitan Bombay and seeing it turn into Mumbai, you wonder whether it is home, street, nation

SHRUTTI GARG

Off the shelf: (above) Steel books in Someone Else; and Shilpa Gupta. or shrine—how are you defining the lines?”

Someone Else is new, but others in this show, like Singing Cloud and the untitled flapboard or airline ticker, are 2009 works created for an installation at the Labo, or The Laboratory, an art institution in France. They have visited two biennales and have been acquired by a museum in Denmark.

All her themes come together in Speaking Wall, a new installation, which is a distance sensor. The

viewer wears headphones and faces the LCD screens on a wall.

The wall triggers audio comments: “Step away one step” or “come forward”, it says, and brings you to a particular position, and speaks to you. The poetry is Gupta’s own. It asks: “Are you not able to see the border? Maybe the wind shifted the border. The rain shifted the border by a few centimetres and I am no longer able to enter my house.”

It follows a loose process that reflects Gupta’s own openness to interpretation. There is always the risk the listener won’t comply.

“My process is fragile,” she explains. What does it take for an artist to relinquish control over what her viewer takes away? “I think of it as creating pathways to the viewer. The viewer may choose to walk along the path. I would like for the viewer to absorb it and then leave it openended. It is almost not possible for anything to have identical meaning. I would not ask for it. But what is possible is some amount of overlap in emotion.”

Someone Else opens today at Chemould Prescott Road, Fort, Mumbai, and will show till 16 February.

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SALIL TRIPATHI

The lamp­man of Paris MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP

George Whitman, of the Shakespeare and Company book store in the French capital, was a guiding light in literary lanes

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y early afternoon, the sky had turned pale, and Notre Dame was visible in full glory, its beauty no longer hidden by the ugly scaffoldings that I remembered from my last time here, when the church was covered as though there was something embarrassing about its appearance. The trees had discarded their leaves, and their delicate branches curved like the curlicues of an intricate window.

I sat looking at the river, in front of a bookshop where I had spent many pleasant afternoons and evenings on several visits over the years. In his short book—no, a love poem—to Paris of the 1920s, A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway had described the river from a spot similar to where I was last week: “With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the great elms on the stone banks, the pine trees and the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river.”

The bookshop behind me made sure I wouldn’t be lonely. Once called Le Mistral, it later became Shakespeare and Company.

I had come to say goodbye to George Whitman, the literary bon vivant who had run that shop for so long that you might think he was there when Notre Dame was being built. Whitman, who was 98, died in December.

The original Shakespeare and Company in Paris was the one that Sylvia Beach set up on Rue de l’Odeon, and over the years, Berkeley, New York, Moscow, and Bogota too had their

versions of Shakespeare and Company. Like Gertrude Stein’s apartment at Rue de Fleurus, Beach’s shop in Paris became the place of comfort for American writers of the “lost generation”—Hemingway himself, but also Francis Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Whitman came to Paris in 1951 after leaving military service, and decided to set up his own bookshop. Like Beach’s shop, his too became the honeypot attracting a new generation of writers, including Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso. Magazines like Merlin made their office in the shop; the first editors of The Paris Review had their early meetings here; and Whitman himself encouraged visiting writers to come and stay, or read to the people visiting his bookshop. In 1962, he met Beach and they agreed that Le Mistral could be renamed Shakespeare and Company. He named his daughter Sylvia.

He nurtured thousands of writers. Anaïs Nin, who had stayed at the store, sometimes with Henry Miller, describes it in her chapbook, Paris Revisited: “There, by the Seine, was the sort of book store I had known: a Utrillo house, not too steady on its foundations, small windows, wrinkled shutters. And there was George Whitman, undernourished, bearded, a saint among his books, not eager to sell, lending books, housing penniless friends upstairs, a haven bookstore…

All those who came for books

Shop window: A picture of George Whitman at the book store.

remained to talk, while George tried to write letters, to open his mail, to order books.”

Appropriately, he called the location of the store at Rue de la Bûcherie, “kilometre zero”. This was the centre of the universe, and a short tour of his bookshop would take you around every corner of the world, covering every topic. That disorganized charm continues, with books piled over two floors, the shelves stacked with new, quirky and difficult-to-get-hold-of titles. You can squat in a corner and read.

You come to browse, to smell books. You also buy books.

Earlier this month, the day after my visit, the American novelist Lionel Shriver was going to read from her new novel. Two summers ago, my

son Ameya had joined a group of new writers reading from their work. Ameya was 17; his short story was about cricket, and the others were European or American. None of that mattered; this was Paris, it was open. Whitman didn’t turn away anyone, for, who knew if the person turned away was an angel in disguise? And Whitman was the guardian angel.

On the windows outside the shop, there is a text in white chalk, which reads like his manifesto, called Paris Wall Newspaper. Dated 1 January 2004, it says: “Some people call me the Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter because my head is so far up in the clouds that I can imagine all of us are angels in paradise. And instead of being a

bona fide bookseller I am more like a frustrated novelist. Store has rooms like chapters in a novel and the fact is Tolstoi and Doestoyevski are more real to me than my next door neighbours.

And even stranger is the fact that even before I was born Doestoyevski wrote the story of my life in a book called The Idiot.

And ever since reading it I have been searching for the heroine, a girl called Nastasia Filipovna.

One hundred years ago my bookstore was a wine shop hidden from the Seine by an annex of the Hotel Dieu Hospital which has since been demolished & replaced by a garden and further back in the year 1600 our whole building was a monastery called La Maison du Mustier. In medieval times each monastery

had a Frère Lampier whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall.

I have been doing this for fifty years. Now it is my daughter’s turn.” (sic).

His daughter Sylvia has been illuminating Paris in her own way now—running the shop, reviving The Paris Magazine which Whitman had started as the poor man’s Paris Review in 1967, and launching a literary festival. The shop is in safe hands; angels in Paris needn’t despair—there is home at the Tumbleweed Hotel.

Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Salil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/detours

FOOT NOTES | GOPAL SATHE

Rate my trip dot­com Travel websites are adding research to the list of services they provide

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nline travel bookings make it a lot easier to choose between different airlines, hotels and make your bookings quickly, but—unlike offline travel agencies—there can’t be much suggestion or advice about your trip.

The best that users can expect is to see comments and ratings from other people who have used the website. But there have been cases in the past of unscrupulous businesses gaming the system by praising their own services and disparaging the competition.

Now, Bangalore-based start-up MyGola has introduced a new form of travel search that offers users the best of both worlds. At heart, MyGola is a pay-what-youwant travel concierge service. They have hired researchers; users can seek travel advice, and will get a reply within 24 hours. If users don’t want to pay, then they can only ask one question. But if they pay minimum $1 (around `52),

they can ask a second question, and so on.

For example, one user on the site asked about wildlife photography workshops near Delhi on weekends; another wanted to know where to catch good jazz performances in Goa. The answers given on the site are backed up with sources such as the Lonely Planet, as well as Internet-based searches, and the links checked are also given with the answer.

People who don’t have the time or the patience to plan their holiday by working through pages of Google results could find the service useful.

Anshuman Bapna, who started and sold his start-up RightHalf when he was studying at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, co-founded MyGola in 2009. The company has recently received $1 million in venture funding. Bapna says it plans to use these funds to increase the number of international researchers. Eighty researchers, who are paid per task, are being added every day. Most of them are from India at the moment.

MyGola isn’t the only one doing this any more either. Bangalore-

based travel bookshop Yellowleg has a website, Yellowleg.com. Users pay to ask questions, which are researched and answered by people with both depth and breadth of knowledge.

Yellowleg’s owner and founder is former software developer Aashish Gupta.

When he moved back to India from the US five years ago, he found it hard to find travel books—book stores only kept a few titles, making it hard to find anything different.

He says, “I would have to order online and face high shipping charges, so I decided to set up a facility in India that offered more than the run-of-the-mill guidebooks.” Yellowleg allows you to trade in your travel books for store credit, which can be used to buy new books.

Aside from this, Gupta also offers his services as a researcher for travel.

If you purchase books worth `599, you can ask five questions; for `999, you can ask up to 10 questions. “We archive many articles from various sources, besides which we have access to many travel books from where we pull

Travel desk: (clockwise from above) Yellowleg; Ask a Nomad; and MyGola all try and redefine online travel sites as expert Q&A forums.

out this information,” says Gupta.

As with MyGola, again, the questions could range from fairly simple—“What are the different places I can take my children to in London?”—to ones that are harder to answer, such as a list of places in Kenya that are accessible to senior citizens.

Another option, which is completely free, is the iPad app Ask a Nomad. It works like the knowledge-based networking service Quora. You ask a question, and

people with knowledge about the place respond. As you answer more questions, your trustworthiness rating increases; people can also give feedback on your answers, and this too contributes to your rating. This ensures people are more likely to give detailed and useful answers, and you can expect largely accurate and helpful answers to your questions within a day or two.

Of course, sometimes even waiting a day can be a problem. If

you’re travelling within India and need an answer rightaway, check online forums.

Established ones such as IndiaMike are reliable. The forum is largely an expat’s guide to India, and you’ll get some extremely detailed information about most tourist locations in the country. If you need to ask a new question, though, it might take some time to get an answer, unlike services like MyGola and Yellowleg, which aim to answer questions in 24 hours or less. gopal.s@livemint.com

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MUMBAI MULTIPLEX | GAYATRI JAYARAMAN

Art house blues

Flashback: (clockwise from left) The plaque is the only link Novelty cinema has to its cinematic past; Royal Talkies; and the decrepit interiors of Naaz, once the hub of the film industry.

Grant Road went from being Mum­ bai’s Times Square to the seat of decrepit theatres.

We revisited to find the survivors

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aj kal voh aate (hain) yahan jinka kal ka bharosa nahin hota (Nowadays, the people who come here are those who do not have faith in their tomorrows),” says Sanjay Vasawa, 25. He inherited the post of manager at the gold and white, three-tier seating Edward Theatre at Dhobi Talao, Mumbai, from his father, who was the manager for 56 years when it was originally owned by Bejan Bharucha. The theatre was inherited by the Punebased industrialists and Bharucha’s nephews, the Poonawalas, in 2005 when Bharucha’s wife Gertrude died.

Every morning, outside Moti Talkies, once Dargah Talkies, in the heart of the old theatre district at Grant Road, you’ll find a man who claims to be actor Mithun Chakraborty’s former personal assistant. Nursing his fractured foot, he waits for someone to recognize his former glory.

Contrary to media reports on the phenomenal rise of single screens, the fact is that within the halls, it’s a bleak story: “Many owners fund cinemas from their pockets, ticket sales are low and many shows are cancelled. We survive off Fri-

days, Saturdays and Sundays,” says Vasawa, who himself takes on additional work as a building society accountant to survive.

Among single screens, the Edward is in better shape: The Poonawalas are now collaborating with Pranav Ashar, founder of the film club Taj Enlighten Film Society. “From February onwards, we have a number of film festivals lined up, starting with a comedy festival,” says Ashar. The theatre will, in phases, receive air conditioning, a new projector and a Dolby system. “We’d like to lift the theatre, from its B-grade days, back up to what it was ,” he says.

Harminder Sandhu, editor of Boxofficeindia.com, says that single screens form 50% of the collections of any film, and there has been no rise in collections.

“In some years, like 2008, when Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi qualified as a single-screen hit, collections seem more, but in a year like 2011 when films like Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara are multiplex films, single screens are at status quo.” The “status quo” is that single screens are barely scraping through. Pahlaj Nihalani, owner of the over 100-year-old Nishaat theatre, says: “The figure used to be 50%, but now earn-

ings have dropped to 35% as films are no longer made for single screens. Even during communal riots, these theatres have never been shut. We have been closed for just ten days since 1952. It is a family business, so we will run it come profit or loss. Owners are funding theatres from their own pockets. We will not sell or redevelop.”

The single-screen theatres of yesteryear—down Grant Road, Lamington Road, Bellasis Road and Sandhurst Road up to Golpitha, and the ghosts that stand on the strategic junctions intersecting Khetwadi Main Road—are testimony to the forgotten history of Indian cinema.

Some of these landmarks today live on in nomenclature—in the form of shoe shops, barber

shops and restaurants that once paid tribute to these theatres by adopting their names.

Shekhar Krishnan, a Mumbai-based urban historian completing his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, stumbled across mention of many of these theatres during his ongoing, historical documentation work for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Built when the plague struck Mumbai in the late 19th century, these, the first streets of Mumbai, were meant to divide the city as part of the effort to restore hygiene, explains Krishnan. They also fulfilled the colonial desire to bestow a sense of order on a rapidly growing “native” city. As new streets came up, so did the

first houses of entertainment.

“This (the Sandhurst RoadGrant Road stretch) was the Times Square of Bombay (in 1910),” Krishnan says.

The exact dates of construction of most of these theatres remain unknown. Many were noted only by their listing in The Times of India directories, its The Indian Year Book and Who’s Who street guides, published annually and every decade, respectively, by Bennett, Coleman & Co. between 1864 and 1960 to map the new streets of a growing Mumbai.

Culturally, it is not insignificant that poets found in these areas the creative stimuli for their work, be it Nissim Ezekiel’s On Bellasis Road to taxidriver poet Namdeo Dhasal’s Golpitha in 1972 and Guru Dutt’s poet Sahir (in Pyaasa).

The juxtaposition of Mumbai’s rich and poor made the fantasies of these spaces play out within the halls that sprung up on these roads.

In her book Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, film theorist Ranjani Mazumdar explores how the city without architecturally reflected the cities within Mumbai’s cinema, and how cinema turned to the fringe images—prostitutes and the decay mirrored around these spaces—to reflect the city’s downturn.

To retrace the existence of these movie houses in history is important because they expand the focus from solely single screens such as Regal, Eros and Metro (which came much later), dispel the myth that stretches like Bellasis Road are culturally insignificant, and that English-language cinema is a post-independence import.

Most marked, though, is the view that the only theatre architecture worth saving, like that of the Royal Opera House recently TURN TO PAGE L18®

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SCREEN TEST

A timeline of the history of theatre halls in Mumbai

Old­world charm: (clockwise from left) Theatre tickets from the collection of Deepak Rao, a member of the Bombay Local History Society; Rao; an image of the premiere of V. Shanta­ ram’s Chandrasena at Minerva theatre (1931) from the private collection of Rao; and Rumi (left), the Parsi projectionist at Moti theatre.

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marked by Unesco for heritage restoration, is the theatre architecture of British colonial India.

Indigenous architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries continues to crumble to dust here.

For Rafique Baghdadi, a film and music buff and social historian, the theatres of this area still stand as photographic landmarks in his memory: “There were around 19 theatres within that 1-mile radius. You start in Girgaon with National (now Moti Talkies), also once Dargah Talkies, go up the road to Kamal (now the recently defunct Alankar); on the left is Silver, then comes Gulshan, New Roshan and you end with Alfred (once Ripon). Opposite Alfred was Victoria, which was renamed Taj Talkies before being razed. Further down, near the Parsi Fire Temple, was Daulat (which does not exist any more). Daulat was originally the Baliwala Grant Theatre, owned by the great comedian Khursetji Mehrwanji Baliwala. Further down what is now Maulana Shaukat Ali Road was Royal, and opposite it is Nishaat. Down the road, towards Grant Road Station end, begins Shalimar, opposite which are Super and Novelty.

Take the left and you will come to Imperial, Naaz, Swastik, Majestic (where Alam Ara was screened and which does not exist any more), Lamington (now Apsara), Minerva (now a hole in the ground) and Dreamland (once Krishna),” says Baghdadi. Minerva, where Sholay premiered, was razed in the late 1970s when owner

Sohrab Modi sold it to the Mehra family, who then sold it to art entrepreneur Neville Tuli in 2006—he razed it to build Osianama, a museum.

Grass grows in its place now.

The shutters of Naaz theatre, in the eponymous building that was once the epicentre of the film industry in the 1960s, stand at half-mast every morning.

Inside, it seems deserted. Mera Naam Joker premiered here.

Mughal-e-Azam was bought and sold in its offices. Sunil Dutt and Amitabh Bachchan, strugglers in front of Dilip Kumar, and later a Rajesh Khanna, sat sipping cutting chai in the canteen here, hoping to be noticed. The theatre once had crib boxes where babies could sleep, a soundproof enclosed glass cry box where a mother could sit with her wailing baby and still watch the film, and ayahs to tend to playful children on both floors, such was the import of a “family film”. It now has a single working light bulb which shafts a ghostly light on broken chairs, is home to two stray dogs, the stench of rats, art deco mirror work and chandeliers that have surely seen finer days on the stucco walls and ceiling.

Rajiv Anand, the son of Naaz’s legendary owner R.P. Anand, works out of the offices ringing the balcony, where his father worked. He recalls a time when tickets were booked “by eights, not in ones and twos”. Entertainment is a function of society, he explains.

When society changes, the business changes. “The odds for a profit today are 1:10.

Which business has such odds?

It is a gamble, not a business any more. The crowd, once elegant, demanded such facilities,” he says. “The films are no longer family viewing, and anyway, the residences have moved to the suburbs, and technology has made entertainment downloadable/viewable at home.” Those who now view films in this historic building are day labourers and workers.

“If we put in brass taps, they are stolen,” Anand says.

Single-screen owners, no matter how historic, are a dying breed. “It is not worth investing in restoring this past. It is best to change with the times,” he says. Naaz is in the market for redevelopment, and Anand hopes he can find a bid that will help him install an “adaptable cultural centre” with a banquet hall, which will allow him to cater to those occupying Grant Road’s new high-rises.

One of the centenarian theatres here, Alankar, shut down in November last. Only a board marking its demise in Marathi hangs above the pavement dwellers who have begun occupying its front steps.

Imperial, which once had the luxury of 50 fans, is a poor man’s shelter. At the ugly structure of the “new” Novelty, only the name on the side of the building, a broken posterboard that hangs precariously above the street, and a plaque commemorating its membership of the National Theatre

• 1846: The Shankersett Theatre (for stage plays, magic shows, etc.) is built and inaugurated by Jagannath Shankersett. It is later converted into a movie hall, which is now the B­grade film­playing Gulshan Talkies near Delhi Darbar restaurant on Grant Road.

• 1879: Gaiety (now Capitol Cinema) and Wellington theatre (now Framjee Cawasjee Institute) house Mumbai’s first fixed screens. Wellington famously screened Queen Victoria’s funeral procession.

• 1896: On 7 July, the first film is screened by Lumiere films at Watson’s Hotel in Mumbai. Novelty (now Excelsior) opens.

• Until 1896: Mobile films play in tents, the Oval Maidan and the Mahim fair.

• 1899: Film­maker H.S. Bhatavdekar films a wrestling match at Bombay’s Hanging Gardens.

• 1900: Footage of the Boer Wars is screened at Novelty cinema.

• 1905: Dadasaheb Phalke watches ‘The Life of Christ’ at Wellington thea­ tre, which deeply influences him.

• 1910: Sandhurst Road is constructed. The theatres: American­Indian (Sandhurst Road­Charni Road crossing), Coronation (Sandhurst Road­Khet­ wadi junction), Olympia (next to Coronation) and New Alhambra (in front of today’s Sir JJ Hospital). They screen primarily episodic “serials”.

• 1912­16: Theatre activity moves to Sandhurst Road.

• 1912: ‘Pundalik’, directed by P.R. Tipnis, who later became a Delhi­based distributor, and produced by N.G. Chitre, manager of Coronation, becomes India’s first film. It was shot at Bombay’s Mangalwadi compound near Grant Road and released at Coronation on 18 May 1912.

• 1913: Phalke screens ‘Raja Harishchandra’ at Coronation.

• 1913­18: Ticketing begins; show timings become functional for the first time.

• 1915: The Royal Opera House opens.

• 1916: By now, theatres are commonly known as “Picture Palaces”.

• 1917: The focus of theatres shifts to the Grant Road­Lamington Road axis. The Mangaldas Bungalow is converted into Imperial cinema (it is now known by its landmark “Do Haathi” pillars). El Dorado, a first in balcony seating, opens. ‘Subodh Patrika’ (10 December 1917; Page 15) dubs Girgaum “the film district of Bombay”.

• 1918: Majestic and Precious open on Lamington Road.

• 1919: Empress opens on Lamington Road. Globe opens on the corner of Lamington and Charni Roads.

• 1920s onwards: Theatres open in Parel, Sewri, Dadar and Bandra. Univer­ sal Studios and Pathé sell Hollywood aggressively.

• 1925: The gradual shift to full­length feature films is complete.

Sources: Historian Kaushik Bhaumik’s essay Cinematograph to Cinema, and film historian and music buff Rafique Baghdadi.

Gayatri Jayaraman

Association, remain. Super, or Super Plaza as it is now known, screens primarily Bhojpuri films for Mumbai’s migrant population from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Ripon, also known as Alfred, is the best maintained of the remaining theatres, says Baghdadi.

The preservation of this history falls to the lot of passionate men like Deepak Rao, a retired IPS officer and member of the Bombay Local History Society. Rao has built a careful collection of tickets that document the half-anna priced shows of his boyhood.

His eyes sparkle as he reads from the columns of Behram Contractor in The Evening Standard: “Contractor embodied the careful old-world charm and the studied ethos of movie-going for an entire generation,” Rao says. He retains a schoolboy’s diary written by Adil Batliwala, a young Parsi boy, who noted all the shows he saw from 1967-72: “With Kurush. It’s a Mad Mad Mad World. Half annas. After school. V. Good,” says one entry. Rao can tell you that it was Jimmy Irani, of Paradise Café at Colaba, who first introduced sizzlers to cinema at Excelsior (now New

Excelsior) in 1963. The patti samosas came into being as regular cinema food fare with the original Bohri owners of the Grant Road cinemas, recalls Baghdadi. Automatic ticket vending machines were first instated by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at the Metro cinema in Dhobi Talao in 1942.

The loss is not so much mere historical fact, as it is the underpinnings of an ethos that shaped Mumbai. As Rao puts it: “This viewing of American culture as foreign, of foreign films as a distant influence, is new. This knowledge of the world through its cinema; it shaped us, our city. What we saw in these theatres did not fall into the narrow definition of ‘Bollywood’.”

At the Edward theatre, Vasawa, basking in the long afternoon shadows of the art deco structure where he grew up, is unwilling to let go of an era that shaped films in India.

“There was a time,” he says, “when the owners would give us monthly bonuses. Mr Bharucha would win at the races every week, and he would distribute the wins to us. Now, when I know the theatre is not doing well, how can I ask for more?” he says.

“Why none of these buildings are on any sort of heritage list or recipient of any government grant for restoration, preservation or refurbishment is anybody’s guess,” Krishnan says. A theatre owner, who requests anonymity, says they do not want this: “In the name of heritage, people try to save these buildings, but we theatre owners suffer because the movie business is not making money. We cannot even modify a heritage structure to make money in any other way.

The theatre industry will be gone in 20 years.”

Krishnan recounts the tale of the owner of New Alhambra, who was given the land where Moti now stands as compensation during road widening. As Moti was being built, crashing land prices in the 1920s drove him to the lunatic asylum. The timely intervention of a fakir, whose dargah is now in the backyard, is said to have saved him from insanity. Krishnan hopes that for today’s theatre owners, holding on a bit longer can bring hope and a change in fortunes, as it did for the owner of the Moti. gayatri.j@livemint.com