Lounge for 26 May 2012

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

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 21

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE Passengers on board the New Delhi­Bhopal Shatabdi Express.

THE 1947­BORN BILLIONAIRE RETURNS >Page 8

NEVER BACK DOWN

That’s the motto Yogeshwar Dutt lives by. At the 2012 Olympics, he will face his most crucial test yet >Page 6

TRACK

RECORD

REPLY TO ALL

With the Indian Railways in crisis, we travel the same route as the first Shatabdi Express, India’s fastest train, that will soon celebrate its silver anniversary >Pages 9­11 CULT FICTION

SHOBA NARAYAN

WHY ONLY INDIANS YOUR HEALTH IS WATCH BOLLYWOOD IN YOUR HANDS

W

The gypsy trail of music started in India. A visit to Jerez de la Frontera follows it to its vibrant present >Page 12

THE GOOD LIFE

AAKAR PATEL

hy can’t we export Bollywood? We should ponder this as the great Jackie Chan retires from action movies. His announcement made international news, and rightly. The retirement, when it comes, of Amitabh Bachchan and the Khan triumvirate, will pass unnoticed in the journals of Europe and the US. They don’t know who these men are and haven’t watched any of their hundreds of movies.

On the other hand, Bruce Lee starred in only seven films, but is remembered... >Page 4

FLAMENCO NIGHTS

A

year ago, I took a routine blood test and discovered that I have hypothyroidism; a condition in which the butterfly-shaped thyroid gland produces lower levels of the thyroid hormone. An estimated 42 million people in India suffer from thyroid disorders, according to a 2011 article in the Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism. Typically, with hypothyroidism, you have to take medication (Eltroxin) for life to substitute for the hormone depletion. I do that, but I also decided to explore... >Page 5

R. SUKUMAR

THE TRAIN TO ROYAPURAM

The subcontinent’s oldest surviving railway station is in Chennai. This book extract talks about one of the symbols of modern India >Page 18

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

THE ONLY WAY IS ESSEX

H

e’s now making his name writing the rebooted version of Animal Man, but there is more to young Canadian writer-artist Jeff Lemire than superhero comics.

Although, as the work of Lemire and another young artist—this one, Scott Snyder, working on reboots of Batman and Swamp Thing— proves, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good superhero comic. Lemire has previously made an appearance in this column, courtesy Lost Dogs, and I have also... >Page 17

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

SATURDAY, MAY 26, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Juicy: The burgers at the Monkey Bar are a must­try.

LOUNGE REVIEWS SEGWAY TOURS Delhi It was with that mix of trepidation and timid delight which accompanies the amusement park ride that I approached my first ever Segway venture.

Segway PT (personal transporter) I2 is the self-balancing, battery-operated mini-push scooter—that you don’t push—commonly seen at airports, golf courses and hotels.

Now, you can ride it around the Capital’s scenic monuments, wobbling a bit at its 20 kmph maximum speed as you dodge pigeons and senior citizens, in the city’s first Segway tour. It was launched on 4 May by conglomerate Bird Group, which claims to be organizing permissions for tours of Humayun’s Tomb, Dilli Haat and the Garden of Five Senses.

For the moment, it’s 45 minutes of fun, thrice daily, starting from Rashtrapati Bhavan, down Rajpath, past buildings like Parliament House, and ending at India Gate, for a maximum of six people at 5.15, 6.15 and 7.15 in the morning (individual entry to some of these buildings requires permission, but as a sort of highend bicycle not exceeding 25 kmph, Segway does not require permission to operate in the area, says Bird Group). Children under 13 must be accompanied by adults.

Having booked online the day before in just 2 minutes, I met the tour supervisor at the traffic light near Rashtrapati Bhavan.

After signing the agreement/ booking form, I strapped on a helmet and elbow pads, and was given 15 minutes to master the little monster—that’s what I was calling it in the first half-hour, which constituted 15 minutes of practice and 15 minutes of persistent failure in riding it. You have to use your toes to control the device, and if you’re panicky, it gets jumpy. So at one point I

even jumped off, grabbing at the tut-tutting hand of the patient supervisor. “You play with it, it plays with you,” he warned.

The good stuff It’s wonderfully empowering to glide past the scrawl of traffic with that indefatigable marshal and supervisor efficiently controlling traffic for you. This is the part of Delhi we most often want to linger around and if you’re feeling lazy or have trouble walking, it’s perfect. Also, it’s a fun, easy-to-organize activity with clear instructions that a family or group should be able to follow, as long as they’re within the 40-110kg weight restrictions.

Other plus points: It’s easy to stop—all you have to do is press back on your heels, and the speed can be externally controlled by your supervisor, who helps you park your machine while you take pictures. Even if you’re scared or going too fast for comfort, the Segway will check itself, keeling forward so you can’t speed or injure yourself seriously.

The not­so­good Some might find it unfair to get up so early to see the sights; more of a drag was the short span of the tour—just when I got my wings, I wasn’t able to enjoy them, or venture past Rajpath.

An ideal expanded itinerary should feature more of Lutyens Delhi, even Connaught Place, and run for a full hour—particularly as at least a few will need extra time for practice and many will enjoy more riding time.

Additionally, the tour was factually rather spare; guides would do well to bone up on entertaining tales around this historical area to properly sustain the attention of a mostly local audience.

Talk plastic A 45-minute tour costs `1,350 on a weekday and `1,630 on the PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Easy riding: You have to control the sensor­operated Segway with your toes.

weekend, service tax included.

This includes the tour supervisor, two security marshals (I got only one as I rode alone), plus a bottle of water.

Book in advance at www.segwaytour.in

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com THE IDEA OF INDIA

Rajni George

MONKEY BAR Bangalore It’s a surprise offering from the owners of Olive Beach, Bangalore, and the Olive Bar and Kitchen, Mumbai, because Monkey Bar, their new venture, is not a sophisticated restaurant.

Started in partnership with Manu Chandra, the chef at both the other restaurants, and Chetan Rampal, business development manager, Olive Bar and Kitchen, the gastropub opened in Bangalore on 25 May.

The good stuff With its stone tables and weathered wooden floors, Monkey Bar is welcoming and warm, as is its music. They play everything from Ozzy Osbourne to Coldplay to The Dave Matthews Band—mostly rock, with some jazz thrown in. There is a snooker and foosball table in the basement, where one can play and continue to drink.

The most impressive feature is the menu. Try the Mangaa cocktail, made from vodka, aam panna (mango squash), sweet lime, mint, jeera (cumin) and salt.

It fits right in with the warm season and is refreshing.

I ordered spiked nachos, served with jalapeno salsa, lime and coriander, beans, avocado, sour cream, onion and cheese—lots of toppings, but they formed an interesting medley.

You get all the toppings when you order. The Bombay vada pav gets pretty close to what you’d eat on Mumbai’s streets (some Mumbaikars at the venue vouched for it).

To complete the Mumbai experi-

inbox

ence, they even serve it with fried mirch (chillies) and ghati masala.

The absolute must-try are the burgers. Made with buns baked in-house, and patties that are grilled over wood-fired ovens, the burgers are soft and succulent.

The vegetarian burger—served on a wooden platter with a stand to hold a cone of French fries and cup of mayonnaise—made a complete, if not necessarily healthy, meal.

The not­so­good The place is not small at 3,500 sq. ft and can seat about 70 people, allowing standing space for 30 people. But going by the buzz the place is already creating, getting a table is going to be tough. The management does not take reservations.

Vegetarians have limited options, with just one or two choices in every section.

Talk plastic An evening for two, including drinks, will cost, on an average, `1,800-2,000. The hamburger, with a 200g beef patty, costs `230, while one with a 300g beef patty comes for `340. Cocktails are priced at `250 each. These prices don’t include taxes.

14/1, Wood Street, Richmond Road, Ashok Nagar, Bangalore.

For details, call 41116878/79.

Pavitra Jayaraman

The first evidence of insecurity Aakar Patel displays in “Why the Congress represents Indian values best”, 19 May—and which is quite common among Indians—is the Tinc factor, viz., there is no alternative to the Congress. It is this insecurity which permits him to equate the current Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, with Jawaharlal Nehru and maybe Rahul Gandhi tomorrow.

The second frailty Patel displays is found among most intellectuals in India, viz., secularism is the only basis of a state’s existence. No doubt it is an important plank, but not the only one.

Third, Patel allows his sympathies to replace rational thinking. Inclusivity as followed by other societies is imperative, but we must first get to that point. In India, we have actually gone back. Take higher education. It is in a shambles. Now, middle and primary education will be too. I have no doubt about this, even if it sounds like middle­class angst.

The idea of India must grow beyond one family, one caste, one religion and one caste or one party.

HARI PARMESHWAR

THE MIGRATION FACTOR With reference to “Banglawood”, 19 May, the multiplex exhibition format, with its capacity to sustain niche markets, does motivate product differentiation. But apart from the new interest in West Bengal, whatever the reasons, D there is also a certain logic of BANGLAWOO migration at work here. Over the last two decades or so, many Bengalis have migrated and settled in cities such as Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.

If you go to film/media­ related spaces in Mumbai, for example, you will find a S W sizeable population speaking M in Bengali.

Bengali names started appearing in production credits with visible regularity from the early 2000s or so. The sheer number of Bengalis in the industry has reached a critical mass, so ‘Kaminey’ has a Bengali mafia gang, ‘Sankat City’ has a Bengali girl thief, etc. These films use Bengali dialogue, something that Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ‘Devdas’ did towards ethnic effects.

MONIKA B. Bangalore, Kolkata,

Chennai, Ahmedabad,

Hyderabad, Chandigarh,

Pune

Saturday, May 19,

2012

Vol. 6 No. 20

LOUNGE New Delhi, Mumbai,

www.livemint.com

MAGAZINE THE WEEKEND

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH BCCI CHIEF >Page 8 N. SRINIVASAN

ars, Tollywood superst contemporary Bengali city of cinema and the g Kolkata are weavin i their way into Mumba exes studios and multipl >Pages 10­12

WENLOCK MUCH TO good little town, whose

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

THE ANSWERING NS BIG QUESTIO explains the importance Mustansir Dalvi translation of his of Iqbal in a new classics >Page 17

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

AL SPECTATOR THE IMPARTI HYAKSHA

N. RAJAD

YOUR HOW TO MAKE T CHARITY COUN

THE MERRYMAKER’S SHAHJAHANABAD

ALL REPLY TOPATEL

AAKAR

Y WHY ONE PART GETS IT RIGHT

BREAD OUR DAILY HALARNKAR

SAMAR

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

THE POWER OF MINIMALISM

most?” food do you miss from o, what Indian American friend inded nation.

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ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MAY 26, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Why only Indians watch Bollywood films

W

LOIC VENANCE/AFP

hy can’t we export Bollywood?

We should ponder this as the great Jackie Chan retires from action movies. His announcement made international news, and rightly. The

retirement, when it comes, of Amitabh Bachchan and the Khan triumvirate, will pass unnoticed in the journals of Europe and the US. They don’t know who these men are and haven’t watched any of their hundreds of movies.

On the other hand, Bruce Lee starred in only seven films, but is remembered and watched today 39 years after his death.

Globally, only three film industries have produced a star system: Hollywood, Bollywood and Hong Kong. All three are successful but only two are exporters. Hong Kong and Hollywood movies are universal and watched around the world, not Bollywood movies. The Indian is present in sufficient numbers abroad for Bollywood to now receive dollar collections, but I’m not talking about that.

Indian cinema is watched only by Indians, and their neighbours.

Especially those in states incapable of producing their own popular entertainment.

Is the audience limited for Bollywood because our cinema is bad?

Author C.S. Lewis said that to know if something was of good or bad design, whether a cathedral or a corkscrew, we must first know what it is intended to do. What is its function?

At the core of the Hong Kong movie is action. The choreographed athleticism and gymnastic style of fighting makes it export quality.

Dubbing the movie into English does not alter the appeal, which is physical.

At the core of the Bollywood movie, even the action movie, is sentimentalism.

The sentimentalism of the dialogue and acting is reinforced with an obvious soundtrack (“dhan te daan!”).

It is punctuated with songs charged with emotion that carry sentiment even more purely.

This cloying sentimentalism is not of universal nature, cannot be

communicated in translation, and is highly culture-specific. Its characters—brother, neighbour, boss, uncle, tawaif (courtesan), Parsi, priest, servant, God—are invested with peculiar behavioural attributes that are not explained because the audience already knows them. The foreign movie that uses the Indian setting—Slumdog Millionaire—does not work here because the actors are off-character. A raped heroine is unacceptable to the audience.

Because it is overly emotional and obvious, Indian cinema holds no appeal for the outsider. Unless you buy the story about how Rajinikanth is a great star in Japan, something that Indians visiting Japan see absolutely no sign of.

Raj Kapoor was famous in Russia, but only as a character he plagiarized, the Communist hero Charlie Chaplin.

In his finest book, From Heaven Lake, Vikram Seth writes of Chinese musicians in Nanjing being familiar with “Awara hoon”, also from Kapoor’s Chaplin phase.

Indians will be surprised at the number of Israelis who know a song from yet another Kapoor-Chaplin movie, Shree 420. Strangers in Tel Aviv too shy to talk to me would quickly mutter “Ichak dana bichak dana” as they walked past, informing me they identified me as Indian and were familiar with our cinema.

This is not the same familiarity as they would have with Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee. Lata Mangeshkar has sung a thousand truly great songs, but is unknown outside our culture. Why? Not because she’s not been heard but because she expresses a sentiment that is Indian, not universal. Only we receive it.

We can see our cultural isolation elsewhere. Let’s turn from cinema to music.

The primary function of Hindustani music is to communicate melancholy.

It is so beautifully efficient at doing this that it does not even need words

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

A MOTHER’S BIG PASSPORT CHASE “Maine shaadi naheen ki hai. Maine yeh bachcha gode liya hai.”

G

eet Oberoi stepped back from the counter and raised her voice.

“I have never been married. I have adopted this child.”

This is the passport office in Bhikaji Cama Place in New Delhi. It is nearly time for the counters to close. Geet has been here since 9 in the morning, her fifth visit since August. Nine months later, there is still no clarity. This time, she refuses to leave till she gets a commitment that the government will issue a passport for her seven-year-old daughter, Indya.

“But, madam, the application form is not complete. What is the father’s name?”

“There is no father,” she repeats. “I have never been married. I have adopted this child. The adoption deed is attached with the application.”

“Adoption deed. Ha! Anyone can get an affidavit made,” says the officer. How do we know you didn’t just pick up the child from anywhere and get a false affidavit made? I want the court order.”

“The court order is also attached with the application,” Geet says. “Here is the original.” The order from the Tis Hazari court clearly states that she is a single parent adopting a child.

“Oh, this is a legal adoption?” the officer says, looking at the papers, as if for the first time.

He sends her to another desk, then to another room.

She is told to wait till they call

The last action hero: Jackie Chan, 58, was at Cannes last week to launch his latest film, Chinese Zodiac. to carry the emotion. With two opening notes, the quality singer can fling out a shroud, into which his audience can slip, entering this melancholic space, eyes shut. This is highly unusual and is specific to us alone. Others are unable to penetrate the sentiment because melancholy as entertainment is abnormal. But mainly because the sounds that make us melancholic are not the sounds of melancholy for other cultures.

Linguists are uncomfortable with my conflation of sound, language and cultural behaviour. They prefer a more universal explanation, but I cannot let go of it.

Let’s see a demonstration of what I mean. The great Hindustani musicians who settled in the US are: Ravi Shankar, Zakir Hussain, Ali Akbar Khan, Vilayat Khan, Shujaat Khan, Shahid Parvez and Swapan Chaudhuri.

her name. Then asked to return another day.

Everywhere, the same line: “But the father’s name is necessary.

He is the guardian.”

I was in my car on the long drive home from work earlier this week when Geet called me.

She has two little children, I have three. Sometimes months go by before we connect with each other.

I first saw Geet on our first day in college. She was sitting on the teacher’s table in our classroom. Tall, attractive girl.

Permed hair. Talking to many people at the same time.

Bossy, attention seeker, I thought in my head.

Fortunately for me, she didn’t rule me out. I was right about her being bossy. She made sure we became friends.

She made me do ludicrous roles in college skits, playing Michael to her Teja. When I said library, she wanted canteen. I would go for debates, she’d drag me to fashion shows.

I spent pocket money on second-hand books. She would splurge on the moment. In Geet’s company, I learnt to eat bread pakodas and sev puri. We took lifts in the hot afternoons on Delhi roads.

They live there because that’s where most of their students are and many, if not most, of their students are white.

One thing is common to them: They’re all instrumentalists. Locating a fret, plucking a string and bending through the fifth are motor skills, easily taught to one willing to learn technique. No cultural barrier is present, and some of these students are musicians of the highest quality.

The great khayal vocalists—Bhimsen Joshi, Pandit Jasraj, Mallikarjun Mansur, Kumar Gandharva, Gangubai Hangal, Kesarbai Kerkar, Kishori Amonkar, the various ustads—all remained in India.

They couldn’t settle in the US because there are no crowds of foreign vocalists for them to train. Jasraj runs schools for vocals and tabla in the US but I’m not aware of a single foreign singer of quality they have produced.

I asked Geet about her father.

He had died when she was five years old. Her two younger sisters, who are twins, were two years old. Their mother is an international-level athlete, who had held the India record for shot put and discus throw. She became a sports professor in Delhi University. That there is no father is a matter of fact in this family. Nothing more, nothing less. Their youthful father’s photographs are part of

THINKSTOCK

Reproducing the khayal emotion, even without the words, which are unimportant in our vocal tradition, is only possible for Indian singers.

We can make our films exportable not by making them better (because they’re already quite good at doing what they’re supposed to do), but by making them less Indian.

But this cannot happen, because their primary audience will still be Indian.

This is why it is so difficult to export Indian culture.

Aakar Patel is a writer and columnist.

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

every living room they move to.

We finished college and moved on. Higher studies, careers, love lives, homes and travels.

Six years ago, I was in my office when Geet called.

“I have brought Indya home,” she said to me.

She was on her way back from the Welfare Home for Children in Delhi. Geet, her mother and her 10-month-old daughter had come to a temple nearby. I went to meet them.

All these years later, Geet was in a khadi kurta and salwar.

I was wearing a business suit. Geet was holding Indya on her hip. Tears streamed down my eyes.

Someone has to do the crying bit too, I consoled myself. I took photos.

“It was as if they could not hear me,” Geet is saying to me after her day at the passport office. “I kept thinking that these guys just don’t understand what I am saying.”

“Oh God, I know what is going on here,” I say. “They are just harassing you unnecessarily. We’ll have to find someone who can

influence them from above.”

My trained Indian brain scans my memory for “contacts”. Who can we call?

Getting a passport made for one’s child is a perfectly legal, simple procedure. All we need is some “influence” to get it done.

“Help me find the word for what I am feeling,” she says to me. “It’s not outrage, not even humiliation. It was as if I was being pushed into a corner and made to apologize for my choices. As if I have done something wrong by adopting my daughters. I just feel very sad.”

Soon she will reach home to her children, Indya and Maya. I didn’t realize it till I started writing this, but in all these years together, Geet has never called me for help before.

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

COLUMNS L5

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, MAY 26, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

THINKSTOCK

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Your health is in your hands

A

year ago, I took a routine blood test and

discovered that I have hypothyroidism; a condition in which the butterfly-shaped thyroid gland produces lower levels of the thyroid hormone. An estimated 42 million

people in India suffer from thyroid disorders, according to a 2011 article in the Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Typically, with hypothyroidism, you have to take medication (Eltroxin) for life to substitute for the hormone depletion. I do that, but I also decided to explore the holistic options that I am naturally drawn to.

Even the most conservative allopathic physician will admit that endocrine disorders—more than other pathologies—respond to mind-body medicine. It makes sense. Anything that has to do with hormones, depression, memory and balance has a mind-body component to it. Any time a doctor tells you that you have to reduce your “stress” in order to get better, you might as well explore alternative remedies.

Stress is a nebulous thing—you can’t see it; and often times, you cannot even feel it till it gets the better of you and leads to a breakdown. Stilling the mind through yoga or meditation has been proven to help.

With this in mind, I returned to one holistic field that I have been studying for years: Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM.

Let me begin with the caveats: Although I am deeply interested in holistic medicine and have practised various forms on myself, I am not a trained practitioner. The suggestions below are just that—suggestions; and do not substitute for a visit to a qualified physician. My goal in writing this piece is a simple takeaway: Ultimately, people have to take charge of their health. You consider all options, consult experts, and decide what works for you. For all their good intentions, allopathy and alternative medicine, in general, operate within silos. They don’t talk to each other. It is up to us to find the rare doctor who is proficient in both practices. Failing that, we could look into gentle options like meditation, yoga, su jok and acupressure.

One option I am considering is acupuncture, mostly because I am familiar with it. For about three years, I interned with an acupuncturist. Eileen Karn had a thriving practice in Stamford, Connecticut, US. Every day, I assisted her in the office and learnt treatment protocols from her.

Chinese medicine, perhaps more than any other system, connects the mind and body, inside and outside, in a

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

WHERE THE (CREAM) HORN STILL LIVES

T

ucked behind a cart dishing out khichdi to rickshaw-wallahs in Lal Kuan, Old Delhi, is a tiny little bakers’ paradise. Unlikely though it might seem, Matchless Machine Tools sells everything you could possibly want, and quite a bit that you would need a diplôme from Lenôtre to find a use for.

Over the years, I’ve acquired cutters in every possible shape, including mango; heart-shaped sponge tins and a gadget for piping biscuits in a hundred different forms. Last week, I found something I’d never seen before: conical metal moulds for making cream horns, an old-fashioned British pastry in which a puff pastry cone is filled with jam and cream.

In India, cream horns are ubiquitous, sold in every local bakery alongside pineapple pastries. In Old Delhi, the sight of vendors wandering through the lanes with trays piled high with cream horns always stirs dim memories from my childhood. Dim, because in Britain, the cream horn has almost completely disappeared; in fact, I had to refer to blogs with names like Wartime Housewife and my mother’s ancient cookbooks—the sort that offer recipes for Prawn Cocktail and Vol-au-Vents—to find any mention at all.

Since India has been such a loyal friend to the cream horn, I decided to give them a bit of a desi makeover. So out goes the awful fake gloop and in comes real fresh cream spruced up with seeds from a Keralan vanilla pod.

Instead of the usual fluorescent fruit jam, and because I’ve been longing to use them in my baking, I’ve made a syrup from the beautiful falsa berries which are in season at the moment.

With the addition of good-quality cream and fruit, they turned out to be utterly delicious, and quite a sophisticated little mouthful too. They wouldn’t be out of place as a dinner party finale or an afternoon tea.

What are we waiting for—it’s definitely time for a cream horn revival.

Falsa and Vanilla Cream Horns Makes 12 Ingredients 300g readymade puff pastry—keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it (this will make it easier to handle) A little milk for brushing Caster sugar for sprinkling 300ml whipping cream 1 vanilla pod M tbsp sifted icing sugar For falsa syrup (if falsa are not available, use a good-quality raspberry or strawberry jam) 150g falsa berries, washed 100g apricot jam 50ml water Method You will need 12 5-inch metal cream horn moulds and a large baking sheet.

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Lightly butter the baking sheet, then cover it with a sheet of baking parchment paper. Grease the metal moulds with melted butter.

Take the pastry out of the fridge and on a clean, lightly floured surface, roll it out thinly. Cut the pastry into 2cm-wide strips. A strip about 40cm long will be enough to cover one mould.

Slightly dampen one side of the strip with a few drops of water. Starting at the pointed end of the mould, and with the moistened side of the pastry next to the mould, wind the pastry around the mould, overlapping the layers slightly. Don’t roll the pastry all the way to the rim of the mould as the pastry will puff over the edge and make it difficult to remove the mould after baking. Press the pastry gently to

way that is both pragmatic and profoundly philosophical. As Ted Kaptchuk, author of The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine, a seminal book on acupuncture, said in a December New Yorker profile, “an important component of medicine...involves suggestion, ritual, and belief”.

Acupuncture considers these mental and emotional components to be as important as the physical, both in terms of disease and healing. Kaptchuk, a trained TCM practitioner, is testing the mind-body balance as director of Harvard Medical School’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter, a remarkable programme that every physician would do well to get acquainted with.

Chinese medicine takes a composite approach that views organs as having a mental component as well. The “kidney”, for example, in Chinese medicine is thought to be the seat of willpower. If you want to strengthen your willpower to get a task done—run a marathon, for example—Chinese acupuncturists will work on the kidney meridian. Similarly, one reason for sadness or depression could be “stagnation” of liver qi (chi). An oft-recommend herbal powder for depression is xiao yao san, which means “free and easy rambler or wanderer” in Chinese. The Chinese word for deep sadness—yu—is also used for stagnation. In TCM forums and mailing lists, a protocol often recommended for depression goes something like this: regulate liver qi, tonify spleen, nourish blood.

A site I visit frequently, www.acupuncturetoday.com, has a few protocols for hypothyroidism. Interestingly, there is a correspondence with chakra healing. The crown of the head, for instance, is important both in Indian and Chinese healing.

In TCM, this location is called “baihui”. Ta’i chi and other martial arts masters will ask you to “lift your baihui” by gently lowering your neck and tucking your chin in, both to combat stress and in real-life combat.

Seed therapy or su jok is based on two interesting concepts. One, it believes that the whole body can be condensed into hands, feet or ears. There are specific locations in our hands and feet that correspond to different organs. The thyroid point, for instance, is at the crease where the big toe meets the foot. Second, su jok uses the notion of “Like cures like”, or “Similia similibus curantur”, as they say in Latin. Kidney beans, for example, are supposed to help the kidney, so presumably, if you have a kidney stone, you could bandage a few kidney beans over the area in your feet or hands which relate to the kidneys. I sleep overnight with these seeds strapped on my thyroid points, but others take them off after 20 minutes.

Meditation has a great impact on the mind. Everyone from the late icon Steve Jobs to author Matthieu Ricard, often called the happiest man on earth, has

seal all the edges.

Place the covered cream horn moulds on to the baking sheet and bake for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and brush all over with a little milk and sprinkle with caster sugar. Put back in the oven for 5-10 minutes until the horns are golden brown. Take the tray out of the oven and leave the horns to cool completely before removing the moulds.

For the falsa syrup, place the berries, jam and water in a pan and bring to boil. Lower the heat and let it simmer for 10 minutes. Pour the mixture through a sieve to remove the falsa pips. The

mixture should be fairly thick, not runny.

Leave to cool.

Split the vanilla pod in half lengthways, scrape out the seeds and add to the whipping cream along with the icing sugar. Whisk until thick, then refrigerate until needed.

When the pastry horns are cool, take them off the metal moulds. Into each horn, pipe or spoon about a

Holistic: Alternative remedies look at the mind­body component of the problem.

practised meditation in a fairly intense way. There are many methods to still the mind—through breathing techniques, sound and light meditation, or using guided meditation tapes. It depends on your personality. Those of us who are of a restless predisposition need all the help we can get. Guided meditation tapes will help. Others who are naturally calm and able to concentrate might be quickly able to follow the main injunction of meditation: be here now.

Shoba Narayan is not here now. She would like to be, though. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

dessertspoon of the falsa mixture, then pipe or spoon in the vanilla cream. Eat immediately.

Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at Eatanddust.com Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com

www.livemint.com For a slide show on how to make cream horns, visit www.livemint.com/creamhorns.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

L6

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SATURDAY, MAY 26, 2012

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LOUNGE DIVYA BABU/MINT

Courage under fire: Yogeshwar Dutt (in red).

WRESTLING

Never back down That’s the motto Yogeshwar Dutt lives by. At the 2012 Olympics, he will face his most crucial test yet

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.

B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA

LOUNGE SERIES

rudraneil.s@livemint.com

································· ver 50 athletes are training in full swing at the Chhatrasal Stadium wrestling hall in Delhi. The usual cacophony fills the room: Stocky men of muscle hit the mat with a thud; wrestlers scuffle and slap, trying to get a hold of their opponents; others warm up by running around the periphery of the hall; and coaches hoarsely scream instructions.

Yogeshwar Dutt, 29, is in a cinch with a training partner in the middle of the mat. Dutt looks like he is about to lose his balance, and spotting the opening, his opponent swoops on his ankle. In a movement almost too quick for the naked eye, Dutt sidesteps, and as his opponent’s momentum carries him towards the mat, Dutt swings around, grabs him by the waist, and takes him down.

Dutt is at his best when he’s at his most vulnerable—this is what makes him so dangerous in the wrestling arena. “I’m all about the attack,” Dutt says, “even while I’m defending, it’s with a counter-attack in mind.”

Put him down, and watch him rise.

He did it in the 2006 Asian Games in Doha. In the final month leading up to the Games, Dutt would wrap up his practice sessions and head straight to the hospital in Delhi where his father was admitted with a terminal disease.

Two days before Dutt was scheduled to leave for Doha, his father died. Dutt was all set to drop out of the team. “I went only because my family and friends told me that I should go ahead, keep doing what I’m doing,” he says.

“They told me that those who have left us are not coming back.”

So Dutt tapped into the reserves of his inner strength, and stepped into the arena. He numbed his mind, ate and slept and fought without thinking, and he hardly spoke to anyone.

He made it all the way to the semi-finals, and won a bronze. “But there was no happiness,” he says. “I was just blank. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it taught me a great lesson— never back down.”

Two years later, Dutt proved his wrestling credentials beyond doubt by winning the 2008 Asian Championships, becoming the first Indian in 21 years to do so. In the wrestling circle,

O

Dutt was then seen as India’s best medal prospect for the 2008 Beijing Games. He almost fulfilled those expectations—he was a match away from a medal fight when he lost in the quarter-finals in Beijing.

But almost is not good enough.

Dutt’s compatriot Sushil Kumar walked away with a bronze at the Olympics that year, making him an instant national hero.

This time around, Dutt, who has retained his status as one of the top wrestlers in the world in the 60kg freestyle category, has quietly booked his place for the 2012 London Games, his third straight Olympics. There was little fuss around his qualification. Kumar, who had been defeated in two different qualifying events, finally made the cut for the Games on 27 April.

Yet again, Dutt will be going into the Olympics after bouncing back from adversity. He tore a ligament in his knee in 2009, and spent nine months in South Africa for surgery and rehabilitation. This was organized by the Mittal Champions Trust, a not-for-profit body that helps Indian athletes with funding and expertise.

His plan to fight before a home crowd at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi was almost derailed.

He put it on track at the last minute, pouring all his energy and will into his training and rehabilitation to get back on the mat in time for the tournament.

Then, watched by family and friends, he won a gold. “Every victory has a different meaning, a different feel,” Dutt says. “Every one of them has changed the way I look at the sport, even the way I look at life. All this experience, all the things I did right, the lessons from the mistakes I made... I need them all to come together at this Olympics.”

It’s at the nondescript akhara at Chhatrasal stadium that both Dutt and Kumar began their careers on the mat, after being initiated into the traditional form of Indian wrestling, practised in mud pits, in their villages.

Dutt was just 7 when he got his first taste of the game at the traditional akhara in Bhainswal, his village in Haryana. “It was just pure fun,” he says. “The perfect game—you got dirty in the mud, and your parents didn’t scold you. What could be better?”

Though Dutt’s family doesn’t have a strong heritage of wrestling, most of his uncles and nephews have dabbled in the sport at some time or the other. But for Dutt, it quickly turned into an addiction. “I felt like never leaving the akhara,” he says. “I would often just lie there in the cool mud for hours after the training was over.”

By the time he was 9, Dutt was already fighting at a dozen dangals, or local wrestling tournaments, in a year.

“It was a great time,” he says. “I would go to various villages and akharas to fight in these tournaments. There were always hundreds of people who would come to watch, and I would earn 50 paise for every fight I won.” By 13, Dutt was winning national school-level tournaments, and had moved in as a resident trainee at Chhatrasal Sta-

DREAM CATCHERS

dium, entering an athlete’s life of structured training at one of India’s best wrestling centres.

It was only then that he discovered wrestling wasn’t just confined to village dangals but had global appeal. “It was almost impossible for me to comprehend where you can go with a sport that just a few years back was something I did for fun,” Dutt says. “I did have a vague idea that pehelwans

(wrestlers) even went outside India for kushti, but it was only now that I began to understand the sport’s potential.”

In 1999, at 16, Dutt went for his first international tournament—the World Cadet Championship in Poland. “It was incredibly exciting,” he says.

“Everything was new for me—I saw an airport for the first time, got into an aeroplane for the first time. But I was not nervous at all, it was just too

much of a thrill.” Dutt won a gold at the tournament, cementing his reputation as one of India’s most promising new wrestlers.

From then on, it has been a steady rise through the ranks for Dutt, though medals at the Olympics and world championships have eluded him. “This is it,” Dutt says. “This has to be the turning point for me. I’ve waited for a long time, I’ve prepared, I’ve worked harder than ever before, and I’ve trained smarter. Now I just have to do what I know I can.”

As one of the most experienced international wrestlers in India, Dutt knows that the onus is on him, and that if he fails to make his mark in London, it might be his last appearance at the Olympics. But these are thoughts for another day.

“All I can do is train and focus on my strengths, and keep myself sharp physically and mentally,” Dutt says.

“No one can predict what will happen on the mat.”

For the man whose role model is the Russian pehelwan Buvaisar Hamidovich Saitiev, six-time world champion and thrice Olympic champion, the first Olympic medal beckons. www.livemint.com To read our previous stories in the Dream Catchers series, visit www.livemint.com/dreamcatchers

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SATURDAY, MAY 26, 2012

L7

Style

LOUNGE

t Woodland: Ankle­ hugging sandals, at F­Block, Connaught Place, New Delhi; Shop No. 44, Bri­ gade Road, Banga­ lore; and InOrbit mall, Vashi, Mum­ bai, `3,695.

t Clarks: Criss­cross romans, at E­Block, Connaught Place, New Delhi; Koregaon Park Plaza, Pune; and Phoenix MarketCity, Whitefield Road, Bangalore, `2,999. p Charles & Keith: Bows at your toes, at Ambi­ ence Mall, Gurgaon; and Atria mall, Worli, Mumbai, `2,999.

PICKS

Going gladiator Stylish yet subtle, Graeco­Roman sandals in earth tones take centre stage p Promod: Tie­ups in shimmery nudes, at Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; Atria mall, Worli, Mumbai; GVK One mall, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad; and Ambience Mall, Gurgaon, `2,450.

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

···································

u Tod’s: Toe sandals in tan, at DLF Emporio, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and The Galleria, Trident hotel, Nariman Point, Mumbai, `25,000.

t Gucci: White strappy sandals with a thin black lining, at The Galleria, Trident hotel, Mumbai; and The Oberoi, New Delhi, `34,000.

p Kala Niketan: Metallic romans, at South Extension­II, New Delhi, `990.

t Charles & Keith: Buckled glossy basics, at Ambience Mall, Gurgaon; Atria mall, Worli, Mumbai; GVK One mall, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad; and Jewel Square mall, Koregaon Park, Pune, `2,999.

p Steve Madden: Ankle tie­ups in coral, at DLF Prom­ enade, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `4,499.

t Venus Steps: Beaded ankle­strap sandals, at South Extension­II main market, New Delhi, `1,380.

t Aldo: Studded sandals, at Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi; Atria mall, Worli, Mumbai; and Forum Mall, Elgin Road, Kolkata, `3,000.

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

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SATURDAY, MAY 26, 2012

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MIAN MOHAMMAD MANSHA

The 1947­born billionaire returns ARIJIT SEN/HINDUSTAN TIMES

The richest man in Pakistan on investing millions in the country his family fled during Partition

B Y R ESHMA P ATIL ·································· akistan’s first billionaire strode up to cricketer Kevin Pietersen at the ITC Maurya lounge last month in New Delhi. “Why don’t you coach my (future) cricket team?” Mian Mohammad Mansha, 64, asked by way of introduction.

“I am only 31, not 36,” exclaimed the tattooed batsman, here for the Indian Premier League (IPL), in which he represented the Delhi Daredevils for part of the season. The Englishman went on to add that he would rather play for the tycoon’s imagined Lahore league.

The richest man in Pakistan, who in 2010 became the first Forbes billionaire in the unstable economy, ordered a drink—masala chai—and discussed a longing to launch his own IPL-like cricket league and, perhaps, invite Indian players.

Naturally, making the next billion was not far from his mind. Pakistan’s all-rounder Mohammad Hafeez is a personal favourite, but in the eye of the soft-spoken businessman in a blue suit, striding thoughtfully with long fingers clasped behind his back, Sachin Tendulkar is like a “walking business”.

“I find the IPL example inspiring,” says the chairman of Pakistan’s largest business conglomerate, the Nishat Group. As of April, the group says, its market capitalization was $2.3 billion (around `12,600 crore). “There are fortunes to be made here. One of my sons, Umer, who went to the Babson college in Massachusetts (US), tried to get me to invest in an American football team on offer at the time. I knew little about such investments, so I skipped the opportunity. I realize today that if I had listened to him, I would have made a fortune.”

Mansha, who has interests in the cement, energy, insurance and banking sectors, may well make his next fortune in India. He plans to launch textile franchises, a cement plant and branches of his MCB bank (it was known as the Muslim Commercial Bank, but Mansha has branded it simply MCB for the sake of “convenience”) here.

He was in the Capital because the political timing is right for business.

Prospects for genuine economic ties between the nuclear-capable, missiletesting neighbours are on the verge of a breakthrough; notably just over three years after the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai.

The lean and fit man of Chiniot ancestry from Pakistani Punjab, who relishes his healthy dal-and-gobi diet as much as his red Jaguar convertible, has stepped out as the face of the beleaguered economy’s overtures towards India, to promote the lesser-known side of Pakistan, where business goes on as usual even in the shadow of political and economic instability.

“The major challenge for Pakistan is not one of reality,” he is eager to explain, “but of the perception that it’s so dangerous a country that there is no law, order or security. This is a fictional scenario vigorously fed by the media. I am not saying we don’t have difficulties and challenges. As the sixth most populous country on the planet, we have huge opportunities too, especially for India.”

Businessmen like him have lobbied for political and military consensus to normalize trade with India.

He argues at home that Pakistan is

P

“fortunate” to have the fastest emerging economies of China and India on and near its borders. While China may be Pakistan’s best geopolitical friend, he emphasizes that it is India which shares language and cultural traditions that enhance the scope to do business. Geographic proximity makes India-Pakistan trade tantalizing against the backdrop of rising manufacturing and trading costs in China.

If terrorism and politics don’t get in the way, bilateral trade could grow from $2.7 billion to $10 billion by 2015, according to the Confederation of Indian Industry. So with an Indian SIM card slipped into a cellphone that he answers himself (Pakistani mobiles don’t work in India), Mansha flew in his Gulfstream jet to New Delhi in April. There was no corporate publicity entourage on board. For the first time, his pilots received visas to stay in the Capital instead of staying on board or flying back to Lahore.

We met on the weekend before India and Pakistan inaugurated the `150 crore Attari integrated check post to increase trade volume from approximately 150 to 800 trucks per day (the volume of traffic going to Pakistan from this check post). The first traders to cross the border would be from his DG Khan Cement Co., Pakistan’s largest cement manufacturing unit. “You’re going to meet the Ratan Tata of Pakistan,” chuckled an Indian CEO who does business with Mansha.

Dhaka-born Mansha’s family gave up a leather business in Calcutta (now Kolkata) to make the dangerous journey across the Radcliffe Line during Partition in 1947. “I was six months old when we moved to this part of the world,” he reminisces. “My father always spoke to us about his life in undivided India, especially about his time in Calcutta. He would talk about struggling to establish his business and the breakthrough from his first business order from Bata.”

Mansha took over his father’s textile business after his demise. He was a 22-year-old with an accountancy degree from Hendon College, London.

He turned around the lone textile plant his father had started in Faisalabad after leaving Calcutta. It has expanded to 18 textile plants under the Nishat Group. His empire includes Adamjee Insurance and four power plants that produce 10% of the electricity for the country’s national grid.

“Pakistan gave us opportunities and a platform on which we built our business,” he continues. “I believe that had Pakistan not been created, the kind of growth we (his companies) have achieved would not have been within our grasp.”

“No matter what anybody else may say,” he says, as he does in several of his interviews, “we have never paid a bribe to anyone…. I’m well-known for having had differences with every government. It never really bothered me.”

Rumour, which he has denied in past interviews, had it that he was close to former Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif, but not Benazir Bhutto.

In March, Pakistan finally overcame a mental block in border trade to switch from a “positive” to “negative list” that permits trading with India in almost all but 1,209 items. The list permits Pakistan to import over 6,800 items, compared with 1,900 previously. This list is likely to be further pruned by year-end, when Pakistan is expected to reciprocate and grant India most favoured nation status.

Opinion in Pakistan is divided on whether this is a good thing. Naysayers complain that Indian manufacturers will swamp their economy, while Mansha says he is not afraid of competition.

Asked how he succeeded where others in Pakistan seemingly failed in setting up profitable businesses despite the uncertainties, he claims

New opportunities: Mian Mohammad Mansha also owns the St James’s hotel in London. he is not “somehow exceptional”, and credits his success to the “culture” of snap decision making. “Most of my decisions taken in haste went right. The ones that took long have gone wrong.”

One decision that went right

unfolded when the textile and cement magnate moved swiftly to acquire MCB, the first bank privatized in Pakistan, in 1991—it has become the country’s fourth largest bank. He’s now eyeing the investment potential in gradually reforming

Myanmar and exploring 10 African markets for cement.

Pakistan is thirsty for petrol and energy from India. It pinches even a home-made billionaire to pay “10 times more” for software from Europe instead of next-door India. Writing on the Financial Times blog on 20 February, he noted that India accounted for only 1.2% of Pakistan’s total exports and 4% of its imports. “Obviously, vested commercial interests on both sides will try and thwart such (trade and investment) initiatives. Some of these are in the security business, while others are in high-cost industries that may be threatened by bettervalue imports,” he wrote. “But this too shall pass if the ruling establishments in both countries see the folly of their past ways and welcome new opportunities for their impoverished people.”

“You can change your husband,” he tells me, “but you can’t change your neighbour.”

Reshma Patil is a Mumbai-based writer and author of a forthcoming non-fiction book on China.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, MAY 26, 2012

Cover

LOUNGE

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Running on time: A passenger on the New Delhi­ Bhopal Shatabdi Express.

CROSSROADS

TRACK

RECORD

With the Indian Railways in crisis, we travel the same route as the first Shatabdi Express, India’s fastest train, that will soon celebrate its silver anniversary B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

···························· here is a stench of urine, and cockroaches and rats scurrying around. It is 6.05am. At the New Delhi railway station, the Bhopal Shatabdi Express is on platform No.1, the Ajmer Shatabdi Express is leaving from No. 3, and the Shatabdi to Lucknow is on No. 9.

Seventeen pairs of Shatabdis ferry passengers across the country, connecting cities like Delhi and Amritsar, Howrah and Ranchi, Mumbai and Ahmeda-

T

bad, Bangalore and Chennai.

Every morning eight Shatabdis leave New Delhi for cities as far apart as Ajmer and Dehradun.

Running at an average speed of 90-100 kmph, it is India’s fastest train service, though the speed of each Shatabdi may vary depending on the rail traffic, track quality and maintenance work on the route.

In 2013, the express—flagged off in 1988 to commemorate the 100th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru—will turn 25.

We boarded the Bhopal Shatabdi Express one morning to travel from New Delhi to Jhansi

and back—the route of the first Shatabdi. The Shatabdi, which means centenary in Sanskrit, was launched during the tenure of railway minister Madhavrao Scindia, whose parliamentary constituency Gwalior is on the route. As the country’s first train to reach a speed of 140 kmph, it covered 410km in 4 hours and 40 minutes. The route was later extended to Bhopal. Today, the Delhi-Bhopal distance of 700km is the longest of all Shatabdi routes, covered in 8 hours. The train is also the fastest of all Shatabdis, hitting a top speed of 150 kmph on the tourist-heavy

Delhi-Agra stretch, making a same-day return possible.

In some ways, the Shatabdi is a metaphor for the state of the organization. And it is heading towards a milestone at a particularly embarrassing moment for cash-strapped Indian Railways.

Soon after presenting his annual budget in March, railway minister Dinesh Trivedi was forced to resign following pressure from his own party, the All India Trinamool Congress, a coalition partner in the Union government, though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself had praised the rail budget.

Trivedi had proposed modest fare hikes across all classes of coaches, the first in 10 years—this would have raised an additional `4,000 crore, he said in a post-budget interview to The Hindu Business Line newspaper.

Just weeks before, in February, an expert committee headed by Sam Pitroda, adviser to the Prime Minister on public information and innovations, had said the railways needed `9 trillion over the next five years for safety and modernization. This sum is 225 times the amount Trivedi TURN TO PAGE L10u L10®

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® FROM PAGE L9

intended to raise.

The scale of the crisis in “India’s lifeline” is so enormous that it is hard to see it as a whole—the parable of the blind men touching different parts of an elephant, each understanding the beast as a widely different creature, comes to mind.

According to the Vision 2020 document presented to Parliament by then railway minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee in 2009, “`14 lakh crore is needed for augmentation of capacity, upgradation and modernization of railways in the next 10 years”.

Trivedi’s replacement, Mukul Roy, also from the Trinamool Congress, scrapped all proposed hikes other than for the first- and second-class air-conditioned coaches. So when I boarded the Shatabdi chair car to Jhansi, I paid the same fare—`540—that was applicable 10 years ago. The charge for New Delhi-Jhansi in the train’s sole executive class has risen from `964 to `1,180.

As the Indian version of the bullet train started making its way out of Delhi, zipping past Humayun’s Tomb in seconds, waiters in black suits, bow ties and caps busied themselves serving hot-water flasks, tea bags, creamers, biscuits and toffees, along with the morning newspapers. Unlike the Kalka Shatabdi’s executive class, there is no TV screen on the back of each seat. The Agra-bound foreign tourists aren’t delighted.

“This train isn’t impressive,” says Alexandra Olano from Colombia, waving her Lonely Planet guidebook. “The waiters can’t speak English beyond ‘veg’ and ‘non-veg’, and the loos aren’t clean.” The truth about Shatabdi’s toilets is universally acknowledged.

The problem of dirty toilets is so pressing that the railways announced a plan earlier this month to give free disinfectant to passengers in long-distance trains.

In his first and last budget speech, Trivedi also announced green toilets would be installed in 2,500 coaches in the coming year.

According to the railways, which operates 160,000 toilets round the clock on coaches moving at 100 kmph-plus, the discharged waste corrodes the tracks, costing `350 crore annually. The bio-toilet will process the waste inside a tank.

Toilets that function on vacuum technology, similar to those in airplanes, will be installed in Shatabdi and Rajdhani express trains, says A.S. Negi, public relations officer, Northern Railways.

“Foreign tourists appreciate Shatabdi’s speed and convenience,” says Sheema Mookherjee, publisher, Lonely Planet India, who last took a Shatabdi in January, on her way to the Jaipur Literature Festival. “But the pantry services and cleanliness of loos could improve greatly.” Author and columnist Shobhaa Dé, who has travelled on the Shatabdi, says on email, “Shatabdi’s stinking, filthy loos are the worst put-offs!”

Ranting against the Shatabdi is easy. Start with the toilet, frown at the dirty vestibules splattered with yesterday’s dal, point to the cracked glass windows, curse the broken doorknobs, and end with a flourish about the greasy food.

But there are also passengers with happy Shatabdi memories.

In March, Gurgaon-based novelist Anuja Chauhan travelled on the Dehradun Shatabdi to meet her mother-in-law Margaret Alva, then governor of Uttarakhand.

“There were these big comfy blue chairs. The AC didn’t freeze us to death, which happens often on trains in India, and there were bhooley bisre (old, forgotten) songs playing on the sound system,” she says. “The train ran on time. There were flasks of piping

First among equals: (clockwise from left) The chair car coach in the New Delhi­Bhopal Shatabdi Express; the train at Agra station; passengers boarding at Agra; the guard showing the green flag as the train prepares to leave Jhansi; and breakfast being served near Mathura.

hot tea, coffee and Marie biscuits and a choice of veg and non-veg breakfast. The young service staff were sassy. When I asked the boy after having the tea, biscuits, breakfast and coffee, ‘What will come next?’, he smirked at me and said, ‘Dehradun!’”

On the Bhopal Shatabdi, the breakfast comes about 1 hour from Delhi, as the train pulls out of the Mathura station. Vegetarian option: English-style butter toast, vegetable cutlets and boiled carrots; or the south Indian (when available) upma, vada and sambhar. The non-vegetarian packet: masala omelette. In the train’s executive-class coach, you are upgraded to fresh fruit, cornflakes and unlimited helpings. This is, of course, apart from cutlets, toasts and Real fruit juice (it’s Frooti for the non-executive majority seated in the 11 chair cars).

“The breakfast is prepared at a base kitchen in Okhla (south Delhi) and is ready by 3.30am,” says Lalit Sharma, the day’s quality controller of food for the Bhopal Shatabdi. “It’s reheated in microwave ovens just before being served.”

Sharma, who is dressed in a black suit, is supposed to taste the dishes. He is employed by a firm called RK Enterprises. Although the menu is decided by the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the catering service for all Shatabdis is outsourced to private companies.

Thanks to the complimentary food, the Shatabdis are usually free of passengers armed with plastic bags full of the classic home-made train meal of paratha, aloo subzi and pickles, the pungent smell of which normally makes you either sneeze or salivate.

Delhi-based poet Ashok Vajpeyi keenly misses these meals, and the sharing and chatting that came with them. “That’s one of the fallouts of the Shatabdi subculture,” says Vajpeyi, the founder of Bhopal’s Bharat Bhavan art centre and a Bhopal Shatabdi veteran. He last travelled in 2010 to attend a literary meet in Gwalior. “Indian trains have been vehicles of imagination and carriers of creativity, which are sometimes provoked by looking out of the window or talking to a passenger, by sharing experiences and meals with people of other castes and religions.

“But the Shatabdi emphasizes

ie being v o m A . t to grow e s s tively i a i t n n a e h t d s j i a of the R der Paes n a e L r e The cult y ennis pla t h t i w e mad press’ x E i n a h jd titled ‘Ra getting there fast. Travelling on it is an action with a beginning and end that has no middle. Its tinted windows block the outside. It’s as if there is an effort inside the aircooled train to keep you from seeing the more discomfiting reality that you rush through between Delhi and Bhopal. The Shatabdi passengers, if not always of the same economic class, seem to share a uniform culture of hurry, business and the unavoidable mobile phone. Everyone eats the same boiled peas. You don’t find the plurality seen on other trains.”

However, a poet’s perspective cannot deny the truth of the Shatabdi making life easier for business travellers who must regularly commute to other cities without the expense of air travel.

“The Shatabdi is perfect for Mumbai’s business travellers who come to Surat at 9.40am and leave by 6pm to get home 3 hours later,” says Micky Khurana, a businessman in India’s diamond hub, Surat, where the MumbaiAhmedabad Shatabdi stops for 5 minutes. “(The train) is popular among surgeons and models who come to Surat regularly from Mumbai for day-long assignments,” adds Khurana.

Vajpeyi, who regularly took the Bhopal Shatabdi to Delhi to attend classical music concerts when he lived in Gwalior, says, “Yes, if you reduce things to functionality alone, then the Shatabdi is good.”

Vajpeyi now lives in Delhi.

The Shatabdi’s concept of making daytime connections to nearby cities became so popular that in 2002, then railway minister Nitish Kumar introduced Jan Shatabdi—a cheaper version of the original, with just one AC chair car—between Mumbai and Madgaon. In 2009, then railway minister Banerjee announced the Duronto non-stop fast trains.

Today, there are 21 pairs of Jan Shatabdis and 29 pairs of Durontos.

Exodus at Agra Two hours after leaving Delhi, our train enters Agra. Almost half the passengers disembark and are immediately replaced by a group of noisy Italians on their way to Orchha, a touristy temple town in Madhya Pradesh close to Jhansi.

orizon h e h t n o let trains e l u b o n e s who us r r a e e g r n e e h s s T ‘ illion pa b t h g i e e year.’ y r e v for th e s y n Railwa the India Heading towards Gwalior, the train slows a little but is still fast enough for the countryside to remain a blur.

The fabled speed of the Shatabdi is more a thrill for trainspotters than for its sleepy-eyed passengers. YouTube has dozens of videos celebrating the Bhopal Shatabdi’s WAP 5 locomotive, the train’s blue LHB coaches, and the “music” that comes off the tracks. The clip “Raging Bastard WAP5 Bhopal Shatabdi” has more than 2,000 hits. The clip of a couple crossing the track at the Faridabad station a fraction of a second before the Bhopal Shatabdi comes rushing in like a tsunami is a must-watch for its hairraising thrills.

The Shatabdi, however, was not the first train to enter India’s imagination for its speed, air-conditioned comfort, complimentary meals and elite status. That credit goes to the Rajdhani Express, introduced in 1969, which connected Delhi to Howrah at a maximum speed of 130 kmph. Today, there are 26 pairs of Rajdhanis linking Delhi to various state capitals, and running at almost the same speed as the Shatabdis.

When the train finished its 40th year in 2009, singer Usha Uthup, actor Prosenjit Chatterjee and other stars joined railway staff and passengers at the Howrah rail terminus to celebrate the occasion.

The cult of the Rajdhani is set to grow. A movie being made with tennis player Leander Paes is ten-

tatively titled Rajdhani Express.

According to press reports, the plot centres on a terrorist travelling on the Mumbai-bound Rajdhani—the Mumbai Rajdhani completed 40 years this week. It is the same train that Delhi-based novelist Advaita Kala, who co-scripted the Vidya Balan blockbuster Kahaani, boards each time she goes to Mumbai. “In this age of air travel, it may seem like a waste of time to take a train, but for me, it is a wonderful disconnect from experiences with the outside world,” Kala says. “I know the regular commuters of the Mumbai Rajdhani and they know me, so it’s home-like.”

Maybe because, unlike the Rajdhani, no one on a Shatabdi spends a night on board, the passengers rarely talk to each other. It is hard to warm up to your theme when the journey is only a few hours long and the meal tray needs attention. The classic elements of rail travel are absent here.

A view of Chambal It has been half an hour since we left Agra. We are entering the Chambal ravines, which used to be the home of outlaws like Phoo-

lan Devi and Paan Singh Tomar. As the Italians continue chattering, the Indians, aware of the valley’s legends, take photos with their mobile phones.

Coincidentally, an article in the April issue of Rail Bandhu, the railways’ first on-board magazine, launched last year for free distribution on Shatabdis and other fast trains, describes the same scenes: “It looks like they (passengers) are craving to spot a sign of life, a horse, a gun shot, a gallop, a hood flying behind a roaring Robinhood, a bandit with a brandished sword.”

But all this cannot mask the crisis the railways is in.

“There are almost no countries left in the world in which railway services, railway stations and railway tracks look as bad as ours do in India,” says author Tavleen Singh, a “frequent flier” on the Amritsar-bound Swarna Shatabdi—Singh’s weekly column in The Indian Express frequently talks about India’s woeful infrastructure. “This is because we have so far not had a single railway minister who has understood the importance of changing methods of governance, which remain the same as they were in colonial times.”

Railway officials assigned to the Bhopal Shatabdi, who talk on condition of anonymity since they are not authorized to speak to the media, say a shortage of funds is

directly responsible for the poor quality of maintenance and abysmal passenger amenities. In our coach, for instance, the missing liquid soap container in the toilet was substituted by a mineral water bottle. “We have to raise the ticket prices, otherwise we will sink,” one official says.

Travelling on the Shatabdi inevitably brings comparisons with the progress that the Chinese have made. In June, the Chinese launched a bullet service between Beijing and Shanghai at 300 kmph, double the Shatabdi’s speed. In his new book, Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources, Sydney-based business journalist Geoff Hiscock writes: “In sharp contrast to the speeds reached in China, India’s fastest train, the Bhopal Shatabdi Express, has a theoretical maximum of 160 kmph on its relatively sedate 700km, 8-hour journey between Delhi and Bhopal. There are no bullet trains on the horizon for the eight billion passengers who use the Indian Railways every year.”

Singh says: “There would be more than enough money to pay for dramatic modernization if the railways used their vast tracts of urban land for commercial purposes. There are magnificent railway hotels that could bring in money, and why should there not be shops, restaurants, spas and bars at our railway stations that could also bring in money? Why should railway colonies continue to sprawl over huge areas of

expensive railway land that could be put to much better use?”

This is, finally, beginning to happen. The railways has 43,000 hectares of vacant land. The land not required for operational purposes is being identified and entrusted to the Rail Land Development Authority (RLDA), a statutory authority, for commercial development. The RLDA is developing multi-functional complexes (MFCs) through the public and private sectors which will provide shopping areas, restaurants and budget hotels to rail passengers, according to the RLDA website.

“This is the only option,” says Samar Jha, who retired as financial commissioner of Indian Railways in 2011. “The railways are unable to move more traffic because we don’t have the capacity, which can only be built by improving the infrastructure, which can only be possible by injecting more money.

RLDA was created for the exploitation of railway land. But there needs to be political will to raise funds through real estate, for land is a sensitive issue.”

The ministry of railways sanctioned 67 and 93 MFC sites in 2009-10 and 2010-11, respectively. According to the cover story in the 2 April edition of Outlook magazine on the “creeping privatization” of Indian Railways, the RLDA has identified 52 sites that seem commercially feasible, with the potential of earning `5,500 crore. Five sites are being leased out for 30- to 90-year peri-

ods. The largest site, the magazine said, is in Sarai Rohilla in Delhi, where Parsvnath Developers has struck a `1,651-crore deal, under which it will build luxury residential flats along with 750 railway staff quarters.

Jhansi junction In Gwalior, the Bhopal Shatabdi picks up lunch packets. As it leaves the town behind, the train makes a steep curve around a hill so that all the 14 coaches are visible from the guard’s cabin. Half an hour later, as we pass Datia, the Italians swoon with delight on sighting a ruined palace.

It’s almost 11am, nearly 5 hours since the train left from New Delhi station. It is about to reach Jhansi, our stop.

According to station deputy superintendent M.K. Mishra, more than 200 trains pass through Jhansi junction daily—yet it feels like a place that has fallen off the map. A Raj-era pink-and-white building with a gabled roof, the station has a tonga stand, among other facilities. The foyer has a painting of Rani Lakshmibai, the warrior queen of Jhansi who was killed in the 1857 uprising. The walls are painted with slogans praising the importance of Hindi as India’s national language. The platforms are mostly crowded with people waiting for locals that go to towns with names like Orai and Banda. Unlike most railway stations in India, there are no dhabas (roadside eating joints)

outside the building.

Only a few coolies and vendors are aware that Jhansi used to be the first Shatabdi’s final destination. Most of them don’t care about the train. It stops a mere 8 minutes and passengers, unless they have to get off in Jhansi, do not bother to step out on the platform to stretch their legs or buy samosas.

Killing time in the station’s airconditioned VIP waiting room, Sanjay Srivastava, the rail crime reporter for the Rashtriya Sahara newspaper, confesses that he has never been inside the Shatabdi—“because I cannot afford it”.

Nevertheless, Srivastava says low ticket prices are killing the railways. “While the fare of an ordinary state-bus ride from Jhansi to Kanpur has increased to `160 over the years,” he says, “a ride on the passenger train to Kanpur still costs `32.”

Across the road from the station is the office of the North Central Railway Men’s Union. R.N. Yadav, the union’s secretary, explains the crisis by complaining of staff shortage, heavy workload, lack of funds and no rise in fares. “Ten years ago, 60 trains were running between Jhansi and Delhi,” he says. “Today, that number has increased fourfold, but the staff strength is the same.”

Only a couple of coolies gather at platform No. 4 as the Shatabdi for Delhi arrives at 5.47pm. It has the same catering staff we met in the morning. The welcome snacks are wafers instead of biscuits.

As darkness descends, it is difficult to see the countryside through the window. If he limits himself to the Shatabdi, Vajpeyi will never be able to discover a new word for his poetry, as he did once during his student days. “I was going home from Delhi in the general compartment of a slow-moving passenger train,” he says. “We were somewhere in Madhya Pradesh. It was raining at dawn, and there was this beautiful light coming into our compartment. The rain looked like an embroidery work of beautiful gold threads. A Bundelkhandi peasant squatting on the floor described the sight as ‘chamatkaron’, a word I had never heard before and which language experts I later consulted didn’t know existed.” Vajpeyi used that word in his verse.

But any Shatabdi traveller can find memories to take home. “My daughter, who is in class XII, was on the same Shatabdi on that trip,” Chauhan says of her most recent journey to Dehradun. “Her batch was going to a rafting camp for their school summer camp. My husband and I had to keep ducking so all these cool, scruffy teenagers wouldn’t see us and think that we were some weird, paranoid, child-shadowing parents. I think they saw us.”

I experienced my Shatabdi moment shortly after the train left Agra. Everyone was busy with the dinner when a passenger slapped a waiter for not bringing more paneer (cottage cheese). Sympathy for the “poor man” flowed across the coach. Railway police arrived and hauled the paneer lover to the vestibule for prolonged questioning. By the time the train reached the outskirts of Delhi, the passenger had apologized to the waiter.

We reached New Delhi at 10.30pm. By midnight, all the Shatabdis that had left New Delhi that morning were back.

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SATURDAY, MAY 26, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, MAY 26, 2012 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

® FROM PAGE L9

intended to raise.

The scale of the crisis in “India’s lifeline” is so enormous that it is hard to see it as a whole—the parable of the blind men touching different parts of an elephant, each understanding the beast as a widely different creature, comes to mind.

According to the Vision 2020 document presented to Parliament by then railway minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee in 2009, “`14 lakh crore is needed for augmentation of capacity, upgradation and modernization of railways in the next 10 years”.

Trivedi’s replacement, Mukul Roy, also from the Trinamool Congress, scrapped all proposed hikes other than for the first- and second-class air-conditioned coaches. So when I boarded the Shatabdi chair car to Jhansi, I paid the same fare—`540—that was applicable 10 years ago. The charge for New Delhi-Jhansi in the train’s sole executive class has risen from `964 to `1,180.

As the Indian version of the bullet train started making its way out of Delhi, zipping past Humayun’s Tomb in seconds, waiters in black suits, bow ties and caps busied themselves serving hot-water flasks, tea bags, creamers, biscuits and toffees, along with the morning newspapers. Unlike the Kalka Shatabdi’s executive class, there is no TV screen on the back of each seat. The Agra-bound foreign tourists aren’t delighted.

“This train isn’t impressive,” says Alexandra Olano from Colombia, waving her Lonely Planet guidebook. “The waiters can’t speak English beyond ‘veg’ and ‘non-veg’, and the loos aren’t clean.” The truth about Shatabdi’s toilets is universally acknowledged.

The problem of dirty toilets is so pressing that the railways announced a plan earlier this month to give free disinfectant to passengers in long-distance trains.

In his first and last budget speech, Trivedi also announced green toilets would be installed in 2,500 coaches in the coming year.

According to the railways, which operates 160,000 toilets round the clock on coaches moving at 100 kmph-plus, the discharged waste corrodes the tracks, costing `350 crore annually. The bio-toilet will process the waste inside a tank.

Toilets that function on vacuum technology, similar to those in airplanes, will be installed in Shatabdi and Rajdhani express trains, says A.S. Negi, public relations officer, Northern Railways.

“Foreign tourists appreciate Shatabdi’s speed and convenience,” says Sheema Mookherjee, publisher, Lonely Planet India, who last took a Shatabdi in January, on her way to the Jaipur Literature Festival. “But the pantry services and cleanliness of loos could improve greatly.” Author and columnist Shobhaa Dé, who has travelled on the Shatabdi, says on email, “Shatabdi’s stinking, filthy loos are the worst put-offs!”

Ranting against the Shatabdi is easy. Start with the toilet, frown at the dirty vestibules splattered with yesterday’s dal, point to the cracked glass windows, curse the broken doorknobs, and end with a flourish about the greasy food.

But there are also passengers with happy Shatabdi memories.

In March, Gurgaon-based novelist Anuja Chauhan travelled on the Dehradun Shatabdi to meet her mother-in-law Margaret Alva, then governor of Uttarakhand.

“There were these big comfy blue chairs. The AC didn’t freeze us to death, which happens often on trains in India, and there were bhooley bisre (old, forgotten) songs playing on the sound system,” she says. “The train ran on time. There were flasks of piping

First among equals: (clockwise from left) The chair car coach in the New Delhi­Bhopal Shatabdi Express; the train at Agra station; passengers boarding at Agra; the guard showing the green flag as the train prepares to leave Jhansi; and breakfast being served near Mathura.

hot tea, coffee and Marie biscuits and a choice of veg and non-veg breakfast. The young service staff were sassy. When I asked the boy after having the tea, biscuits, breakfast and coffee, ‘What will come next?’, he smirked at me and said, ‘Dehradun!’”

On the Bhopal Shatabdi, the breakfast comes about 1 hour from Delhi, as the train pulls out of the Mathura station. Vegetarian option: English-style butter toast, vegetable cutlets and boiled carrots; or the south Indian (when available) upma, vada and sambhar. The non-vegetarian packet: masala omelette. In the train’s executive-class coach, you are upgraded to fresh fruit, cornflakes and unlimited helpings. This is, of course, apart from cutlets, toasts and Real fruit juice (it’s Frooti for the non-executive majority seated in the 11 chair cars).

“The breakfast is prepared at a base kitchen in Okhla (south Delhi) and is ready by 3.30am,” says Lalit Sharma, the day’s quality controller of food for the Bhopal Shatabdi. “It’s reheated in microwave ovens just before being served.”

Sharma, who is dressed in a black suit, is supposed to taste the dishes. He is employed by a firm called RK Enterprises. Although the menu is decided by the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the catering service for all Shatabdis is outsourced to private companies.

Thanks to the complimentary food, the Shatabdis are usually free of passengers armed with plastic bags full of the classic home-made train meal of paratha, aloo subzi and pickles, the pungent smell of which normally makes you either sneeze or salivate.

Delhi-based poet Ashok Vajpeyi keenly misses these meals, and the sharing and chatting that came with them. “That’s one of the fallouts of the Shatabdi subculture,” says Vajpeyi, the founder of Bhopal’s Bharat Bhavan art centre and a Bhopal Shatabdi veteran. He last travelled in 2010 to attend a literary meet in Gwalior. “Indian trains have been vehicles of imagination and carriers of creativity, which are sometimes provoked by looking out of the window or talking to a passenger, by sharing experiences and meals with people of other castes and religions.

“But the Shatabdi emphasizes

ie being v o m A . t to grow e s s tively i a i t n n a e h t d s j i a of the R der Paes n a e L r e The cult y ennis pla t h t i w e mad press’ x E i n a h jd titled ‘Ra getting there fast. Travelling on it is an action with a beginning and end that has no middle. Its tinted windows block the outside. It’s as if there is an effort inside the aircooled train to keep you from seeing the more discomfiting reality that you rush through between Delhi and Bhopal. The Shatabdi passengers, if not always of the same economic class, seem to share a uniform culture of hurry, business and the unavoidable mobile phone. Everyone eats the same boiled peas. You don’t find the plurality seen on other trains.”

However, a poet’s perspective cannot deny the truth of the Shatabdi making life easier for business travellers who must regularly commute to other cities without the expense of air travel.

“The Shatabdi is perfect for Mumbai’s business travellers who come to Surat at 9.40am and leave by 6pm to get home 3 hours later,” says Micky Khurana, a businessman in India’s diamond hub, Surat, where the MumbaiAhmedabad Shatabdi stops for 5 minutes. “(The train) is popular among surgeons and models who come to Surat regularly from Mumbai for day-long assignments,” adds Khurana.

Vajpeyi, who regularly took the Bhopal Shatabdi to Delhi to attend classical music concerts when he lived in Gwalior, says, “Yes, if you reduce things to functionality alone, then the Shatabdi is good.”

Vajpeyi now lives in Delhi.

The Shatabdi’s concept of making daytime connections to nearby cities became so popular that in 2002, then railway minister Nitish Kumar introduced Jan Shatabdi—a cheaper version of the original, with just one AC chair car—between Mumbai and Madgaon. In 2009, then railway minister Banerjee announced the Duronto non-stop fast trains.

Today, there are 21 pairs of Jan Shatabdis and 29 pairs of Durontos.

Exodus at Agra Two hours after leaving Delhi, our train enters Agra. Almost half the passengers disembark and are immediately replaced by a group of noisy Italians on their way to Orchha, a touristy temple town in Madhya Pradesh close to Jhansi.

orizon h e h t n o let trains e l u b o n e s who us r r a e e g r n e e h s s T ‘ illion pa b t h g i e e year.’ y r e v for th e s y n Railwa the India Heading towards Gwalior, the train slows a little but is still fast enough for the countryside to remain a blur.

The fabled speed of the Shatabdi is more a thrill for trainspotters than for its sleepy-eyed passengers. YouTube has dozens of videos celebrating the Bhopal Shatabdi’s WAP 5 locomotive, the train’s blue LHB coaches, and the “music” that comes off the tracks. The clip “Raging Bastard WAP5 Bhopal Shatabdi” has more than 2,000 hits. The clip of a couple crossing the track at the Faridabad station a fraction of a second before the Bhopal Shatabdi comes rushing in like a tsunami is a must-watch for its hairraising thrills.

The Shatabdi, however, was not the first train to enter India’s imagination for its speed, air-conditioned comfort, complimentary meals and elite status. That credit goes to the Rajdhani Express, introduced in 1969, which connected Delhi to Howrah at a maximum speed of 130 kmph. Today, there are 26 pairs of Rajdhanis linking Delhi to various state capitals, and running at almost the same speed as the Shatabdis.

When the train finished its 40th year in 2009, singer Usha Uthup, actor Prosenjit Chatterjee and other stars joined railway staff and passengers at the Howrah rail terminus to celebrate the occasion.

The cult of the Rajdhani is set to grow. A movie being made with tennis player Leander Paes is ten-

tatively titled Rajdhani Express.

According to press reports, the plot centres on a terrorist travelling on the Mumbai-bound Rajdhani—the Mumbai Rajdhani completed 40 years this week. It is the same train that Delhi-based novelist Advaita Kala, who co-scripted the Vidya Balan blockbuster Kahaani, boards each time she goes to Mumbai. “In this age of air travel, it may seem like a waste of time to take a train, but for me, it is a wonderful disconnect from experiences with the outside world,” Kala says. “I know the regular commuters of the Mumbai Rajdhani and they know me, so it’s home-like.”

Maybe because, unlike the Rajdhani, no one on a Shatabdi spends a night on board, the passengers rarely talk to each other. It is hard to warm up to your theme when the journey is only a few hours long and the meal tray needs attention. The classic elements of rail travel are absent here.

A view of Chambal It has been half an hour since we left Agra. We are entering the Chambal ravines, which used to be the home of outlaws like Phoo-

lan Devi and Paan Singh Tomar. As the Italians continue chattering, the Indians, aware of the valley’s legends, take photos with their mobile phones.

Coincidentally, an article in the April issue of Rail Bandhu, the railways’ first on-board magazine, launched last year for free distribution on Shatabdis and other fast trains, describes the same scenes: “It looks like they (passengers) are craving to spot a sign of life, a horse, a gun shot, a gallop, a hood flying behind a roaring Robinhood, a bandit with a brandished sword.”

But all this cannot mask the crisis the railways is in.

“There are almost no countries left in the world in which railway services, railway stations and railway tracks look as bad as ours do in India,” says author Tavleen Singh, a “frequent flier” on the Amritsar-bound Swarna Shatabdi—Singh’s weekly column in The Indian Express frequently talks about India’s woeful infrastructure. “This is because we have so far not had a single railway minister who has understood the importance of changing methods of governance, which remain the same as they were in colonial times.”

Railway officials assigned to the Bhopal Shatabdi, who talk on condition of anonymity since they are not authorized to speak to the media, say a shortage of funds is

directly responsible for the poor quality of maintenance and abysmal passenger amenities. In our coach, for instance, the missing liquid soap container in the toilet was substituted by a mineral water bottle. “We have to raise the ticket prices, otherwise we will sink,” one official says.

Travelling on the Shatabdi inevitably brings comparisons with the progress that the Chinese have made. In June, the Chinese launched a bullet service between Beijing and Shanghai at 300 kmph, double the Shatabdi’s speed. In his new book, Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources, Sydney-based business journalist Geoff Hiscock writes: “In sharp contrast to the speeds reached in China, India’s fastest train, the Bhopal Shatabdi Express, has a theoretical maximum of 160 kmph on its relatively sedate 700km, 8-hour journey between Delhi and Bhopal. There are no bullet trains on the horizon for the eight billion passengers who use the Indian Railways every year.”

Singh says: “There would be more than enough money to pay for dramatic modernization if the railways used their vast tracts of urban land for commercial purposes. There are magnificent railway hotels that could bring in money, and why should there not be shops, restaurants, spas and bars at our railway stations that could also bring in money? Why should railway colonies continue to sprawl over huge areas of

expensive railway land that could be put to much better use?”

This is, finally, beginning to happen. The railways has 43,000 hectares of vacant land. The land not required for operational purposes is being identified and entrusted to the Rail Land Development Authority (RLDA), a statutory authority, for commercial development. The RLDA is developing multi-functional complexes (MFCs) through the public and private sectors which will provide shopping areas, restaurants and budget hotels to rail passengers, according to the RLDA website.

“This is the only option,” says Samar Jha, who retired as financial commissioner of Indian Railways in 2011. “The railways are unable to move more traffic because we don’t have the capacity, which can only be built by improving the infrastructure, which can only be possible by injecting more money.

RLDA was created for the exploitation of railway land. But there needs to be political will to raise funds through real estate, for land is a sensitive issue.”

The ministry of railways sanctioned 67 and 93 MFC sites in 2009-10 and 2010-11, respectively. According to the cover story in the 2 April edition of Outlook magazine on the “creeping privatization” of Indian Railways, the RLDA has identified 52 sites that seem commercially feasible, with the potential of earning `5,500 crore. Five sites are being leased out for 30- to 90-year peri-

ods. The largest site, the magazine said, is in Sarai Rohilla in Delhi, where Parsvnath Developers has struck a `1,651-crore deal, under which it will build luxury residential flats along with 750 railway staff quarters.

Jhansi junction In Gwalior, the Bhopal Shatabdi picks up lunch packets. As it leaves the town behind, the train makes a steep curve around a hill so that all the 14 coaches are visible from the guard’s cabin. Half an hour later, as we pass Datia, the Italians swoon with delight on sighting a ruined palace.

It’s almost 11am, nearly 5 hours since the train left from New Delhi station. It is about to reach Jhansi, our stop.

According to station deputy superintendent M.K. Mishra, more than 200 trains pass through Jhansi junction daily—yet it feels like a place that has fallen off the map. A Raj-era pink-and-white building with a gabled roof, the station has a tonga stand, among other facilities. The foyer has a painting of Rani Lakshmibai, the warrior queen of Jhansi who was killed in the 1857 uprising. The walls are painted with slogans praising the importance of Hindi as India’s national language. The platforms are mostly crowded with people waiting for locals that go to towns with names like Orai and Banda. Unlike most railway stations in India, there are no dhabas (roadside eating joints)

outside the building.

Only a few coolies and vendors are aware that Jhansi used to be the first Shatabdi’s final destination. Most of them don’t care about the train. It stops a mere 8 minutes and passengers, unless they have to get off in Jhansi, do not bother to step out on the platform to stretch their legs or buy samosas.

Killing time in the station’s airconditioned VIP waiting room, Sanjay Srivastava, the rail crime reporter for the Rashtriya Sahara newspaper, confesses that he has never been inside the Shatabdi—“because I cannot afford it”.

Nevertheless, Srivastava says low ticket prices are killing the railways. “While the fare of an ordinary state-bus ride from Jhansi to Kanpur has increased to `160 over the years,” he says, “a ride on the passenger train to Kanpur still costs `32.”

Across the road from the station is the office of the North Central Railway Men’s Union. R.N. Yadav, the union’s secretary, explains the crisis by complaining of staff shortage, heavy workload, lack of funds and no rise in fares. “Ten years ago, 60 trains were running between Jhansi and Delhi,” he says. “Today, that number has increased fourfold, but the staff strength is the same.”

Only a couple of coolies gather at platform No. 4 as the Shatabdi for Delhi arrives at 5.47pm. It has the same catering staff we met in the morning. The welcome snacks are wafers instead of biscuits.

As darkness descends, it is difficult to see the countryside through the window. If he limits himself to the Shatabdi, Vajpeyi will never be able to discover a new word for his poetry, as he did once during his student days. “I was going home from Delhi in the general compartment of a slow-moving passenger train,” he says. “We were somewhere in Madhya Pradesh. It was raining at dawn, and there was this beautiful light coming into our compartment. The rain looked like an embroidery work of beautiful gold threads. A Bundelkhandi peasant squatting on the floor described the sight as ‘chamatkaron’, a word I had never heard before and which language experts I later consulted didn’t know existed.” Vajpeyi used that word in his verse.

But any Shatabdi traveller can find memories to take home. “My daughter, who is in class XII, was on the same Shatabdi on that trip,” Chauhan says of her most recent journey to Dehradun. “Her batch was going to a rafting camp for their school summer camp. My husband and I had to keep ducking so all these cool, scruffy teenagers wouldn’t see us and think that we were some weird, paranoid, child-shadowing parents. I think they saw us.”

I experienced my Shatabdi moment shortly after the train left Agra. Everyone was busy with the dinner when a passenger slapped a waiter for not bringing more paneer (cottage cheese). Sympathy for the “poor man” flowed across the coach. Railway police arrived and hauled the paneer lover to the vestibule for prolonged questioning. By the time the train reached the outskirts of Delhi, the passenger had apologized to the waiter.

We reached New Delhi at 10.30pm. By midnight, all the Shatabdis that had left New Delhi that morning were back.

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Travel

LOUNGE ANDREA PISTOLES/GETTY IMAGES

Gypsy’s journey: (clockwise) A flamenco singer; cantaor Lucas Ortega (second from extreme right) and guitarist Idan Balas perform at El Corralón, Seville; and the Cathedral of San Salvador, one of Jerez’s chief attractions.

ANDALUSIA

Flamenco nights ALBERT DAHLIN

THINKSTOCK

The gypsy trail of music started in India. A visit to Jerez de la Frontera follows it to its present

B Y R AJNI G EORGE rajni.g@livemint.com

···························· t was a signature Andalusian winter night: clear, calm, with the cool friction of anticipation. A line of well-heeled young men and women passed through a large wooden door on Calle Cabezas (Calle is Spanish for street). Inside, they joined a couple of hundred people spread out over several dance floors; a hundred more were entertained by flamenco—a renowned Andalusian genre of music, song and dance noted for its energetic, staccato style—from behind the velvet ropes, on the gilded first floor. We were at a palace-turned-nightclub called El Tablao del Bereber and it was 10pm in the charming town of Jerez de la Frontera.

Flamenco was elegantly alive here and on other local stages, and would play, wonderfully loud and tremulous, till sunrise. We would stroll home, perhaps not quite knowing where home was, after having danced much of the night, veritable gypsies; nicely upended, yet sated in the temporary home of just rendered flamenco music.

I had travelled to Jerez to follow the electric gypsy trail of music and dance which leads from Rajasthan to Spain’s Andalusia, focusing on its farthest and southernmost crescent.

The Moorish invasion in 711 established the Umayyad caliphate in Córdoba and marked Spain from the rest of Western Europe forever, leaving striking examples of Moorish architecture like Granada’s Alhambra and an infusion of contrasting cultures which make Andalusia uniquely robust. Musicians from around the world were drawn to influential Córdoba and the foundations for the Andalusian nubah (suite form) and the Moorish guitar—which eventually

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TRIP PLANNER/ANDALUSIA You will need a Schengen tourist visa. Apply in person at the embassy of Spain or apply for one through www.ivs-spainvisa.com.

You can fly to Madrid, break journey or linger, and then take the 3.5- to 4-hour train from Madrid to Jerez at €69.50-86.40 (around R4,865-6,050).

Current return airfare to Madrid from Indian metros: Emirates Brussels Airlines Lufthansa

Madrid Spain

Madrid

SPAIN

Seville

Jerez de la Frontera Delhi R49,296 R51,465 R52,995

Fares may change.

Mumbai R50,953 R53,981 R50,105

Bangalore R47,992 --R66,893

Stay

Do

Nuevo Hotel, Calle Caballeros, 23 (€42 for double occupancy; www.nuevohotel.com); Hotel Bellas Artes, Plaza del Arroyo, 45 (€45 for double occupancy; www.hotelbellasartes.com/EN/hotel.html); Palacio Garvey, Plaza Rafael Rivero, Torner A, 24 (€75.4 for double occupancy; www.sferahoteles.com/Hoteles-Palacio_Garvey.php?lang=es) Flamenco venues: In addition to professional flamenco courses, there are a cluster of flamenco ‘peñas’ (clubs) where you pay only for your drinks—centrally located Los Cernicalos, more than 35 years old, is said to have been the first ‘peña’ in the province of Cádiz.

Other venues: La Taberna Flamenca (restaurant and show), Angostillo de Santiago, 3 (www.latabernaflamenca.com); El Lagá del Tio Parrilla (restaurant and bodega), Plaza Becerra, 5, Barrio de San Mateo (www.andalucia.org/ocio-y-diversion/salir-de-noche/cadiz/ el-laga-del-tio-parrilla/); La Bodega de la Casa, Calle Conocedores, 24 (www.labodegadelacasa.com/); and El Tablao de Bereber, Calle Cabezas, 10 (www.berebercopas.com/). For details of flamenco shows in Jerez, visit www.flamencotickets.com/jerez

became the flamenco guitar—were laid. Joining them soon were the Roma, who had begun leaving India since the fifth century owing to war and famine.

Today, there are roughly 12 million Roma people in Europe, according to various sources.

Often colourful, iconic characters—legends like Django Reinhardt pioneered “gypsy jazz”—gypsies were also victimized during the Holocaust and continue to be discriminated against by those seeing them as restless encroachers often in and out of jobs, one casualty of their famously instinctive need to

move. In Andalusia, they gave us flamenco, making a powerful new music from the sounds of the empire which had set them in motion.

My own journey was charted by night after night of flamenco in the hot spots of Andalusia, starting in Seville and ending in Jerez.

Charming old houses turned to gracefully appointed inns and a gorgeous local Alcázar (a former Moorish fortress; one with the same name is famous in Seville); a classic Arab hammam by a divey gypsy bar; sherry bodega tours and horse mania—Jerez is the lodestone of the flamenco map

and it became my base. Here were the parties of today’s flamenco, still adored by the young—who chose it over new sounds and made it contemporary—and cherished by the old. Even old legends like Camarón de la Isla, considered modern flamenco’s most popular and decisive cantaor (singer), who died in 1992, are decidedly of the moment in Jerez; his potent Como el Agua wails at frequent intervals.

Deceivingly sleepy, Jerez is populated seasonally by flamenco apprentices and aficionados and is increasingly popular.

For two weeks every year, the town hosts the famous Jerez Flamenco Festival starting February-end, and many stay on to apprentice and admire. Here, flamenco is everywhere.

In the mornings, it played while I drank my strong-brewed Spanish coffee; at lunchtime, it was in the chatter of the locals who planned to attend the latest concert; in the evenings, it was in my tapas and wine at Bar Gitaneria (literally “bar of the gypsies”), where, minutes after we saw him on television, local maestro Diego Carrasco entered. With local friends Irene and Nuria and a handsome new gypsy friend, Israel Santiago, we entered a Roma salon of sorts.

Tall, fair and lanky, Santiago looked like the member of an alternative Brit band; it was hard to believe he was a gitano (gypsy). “Being gitano might not be the primary fact of my existence, but I cannot ever imagine living anywhere else; the gypsy community is so integrated,” he

said. He went over to greet Carrasco then; soon the maestro had joined us and the men at the bar were clapping, singing, dancing, while Santiago enacted several classic flamenco positions. It was utterly normal for even the least gitano among them to be gypsies, flamencos, in this town.

Even I’d immersed myself in flamenco—feeling a little foolish, but also like I’d joined an enjoyable cult I had some pretensions to—when I met Inma Peña, a resident expert in gypsy affairs whose hooked nose and changeful eyes would have been at home in the Thar desert. “We’re all gypsies,” she confirmed.

I combined the bucolic Spanish countryside with classic Tony Gatlif gypsy film Latcho Drom (1993) on my laptop in a twin voyage, on the next leg of my trip: from gypsy homelands in India to new heartlands in Europe, from the pure flame of flamenco in small-town Jerez to its louder, more cosmopolitan self in Seville.

At El Corralón, an insider Seville flamenco hot spot and a former stable filled with students, artists and academics, guitarist Idan Balas and cantaor Lucas Ortega performed for an hour, sometimes with a shapely dancer. Around midnight, the crowd simultaneously thinned and intensified.

Here was that rare thing for an amateur witness, the juerga, an authentic flamenco atmosphere which occurs usually spontaneously, with much to drink and only a few flamencos and aficionados present.

A ruddy and inebriated Roma

cantaor of incredible talent took the improvised stage. “He drinks, has no home, but is good,” a local singer who had once been his student told me. “Sometimes when he has nowhere to sleep, he comes to my place.”

For, ultimately, it was community that sustained flamenco, the music of gypsies. That Jerez night at the Bar Gitanera, at a different juerga, I had asked Santiago why he thinks gypsies wander less, today.

It was the most obvious difference between an old way of life and a new one. “In the old days, we travelled together,” he said.

“Now, we would feel lonely, travelling alone, as people do.”

CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Not all children will appreciate the finer aspects of flamenco; also, its venues are usually a club or bar.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

Flamenco performances usually start late. However, formal clubs have early shows.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

While there are no active LGBT campaigns of note in Andalusia, the flamenco space is open­minded.

SEE RELATED STORY >A photo essay on gypsies in Mint

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Culture

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ART

Breaking the box The inaugural exhibition at The Loft’s new avatar takes art out of the ‘white cube’

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

···························· natches of the French avant-garde pianist Erik Satie’s compositions and sentimental Bengali love songs emanate from an ornate “music box” in one corner of The Loft—located in Lower Parel, Mumbai’s erstwhile mill district.

Look inside the 1x1x1ft box through a peephole and there’s a video that walks you through an ancestral Bengali home—possibly the partFrench, part-Bengali artist Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s own.

Mazumdar’s exhibit is part of Reconstructing (White)³ , an exhibition curated by Himali Singh Soin, which flags off The Loft’s year-long Square Foot Project.

Originally a printing shed in an old mill, and utilized as an experimental art project space since 2008, The Loft will be restaged as a studio apartment for one year as part of the project.

In keeping with the reinvention of the physical space, and as a comment on the “luxury” that an art space like this evokes among the ghosts of its cramped, industrial past, Reconstructing (White)³ is an affront to the idea of an art gallery as a white cube.

The show, which opened on 23 May, deconstructs the perfect “white cube”, giving artists a logistical constraint: to create a work of art that exists inside a 1x1x1ft box fabricated from a material of their choice.

It includes some of the spiffiest names from the Indian contemporary art circuit: Mazumdar, Hema Upadhyay, Mithu Sen, Abir Kar-

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Box stories: The crazy dream that got over (2012) by Hema Upadhyay; and (below) The Good Life (2012) by Gautam Bhatia. markar, Prajakta Potnis, Gautam Bhatia, Zuleikha Chaudhari, Niyeti Chadha and Praneet Soi. Soin’s line-up of artists covers broad ground, ranging from those like Chaudhari and Soi to Bhatia, an architect, whose art has consistently commented on space and scale. The others, including Mazumdar, Sen and Potnis, have played with notions of memory and reinvention.

Mazumdar’s Untitled inverts the idea of a white cube as a space emptied of memory and history by creating a cube that invites you to peer in. As a voyeur, you see what is not meant to be seen; you go beyond the six walls of the cube. It turns on its head the notion of the white cube

as a space of objective viewing, in which “art” is displayed under controlled conditions, excluding all that is irrelevant and distracting—and about making the experience of viewing easy, smooth and uninterrupted.

The most literal of the exhibits, Sen’s installation is a 1ft cube of ice which symbolically “melted” away on the exhibition’s opening day. Reconstructing (White)³ shatters the white cube. It is up to you to pick up the pieces.

In tune with The Loft’s new avatar as a residential studio—fitted with a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom—the exhibition angles off a fictional character, a woman who

occupies this space. The artworks are hidden around her “home”: The music box is in the living room, the ice cube is in the kitchen. The viewer must seek them out among the furniture and personal paraphernalia, adding another dimension to the notion of the art gallery as we know it.

Anupa Mehta, independent arts consultant and director, The Loft, says: “Visitors will be compelled to see the artworks along with the furniture. This young girl (who lived here) appears to have left in a hurry but we don’t know why. It’s up to the viewer to construct their own narrative.”

Reconstructing (White)³ suggests this sort of meta narrative on several planes. While this is exciting, it puts the exhibition in danger of appearing “over-curated”. Consider the things at work: the gallery space as the non-white cube, each of the nine artworks as the non-white cube, the idiosyncrasies of the fictional character who inhabits the space, and finally, the onus on this inaugural exhibition to introduce the year-long Square Foot Project.

Soin introduces herself as a poet rather than curator. Her poetry, which appears in the exhibition as accompanying notes, is elegant but extraneous.

For Mazumdar’s Untitled, for instance, she says: “What do you remember? A Banyan tree, a Horse-Chestnut? Return. Carve your name and your lovers’ into their barks. Stained years later, you happen upon it again. This time, you are not alone. They pull you away from it, but the music in your stomach stays.”

One of the curatorial interventions, though, is bound to impress: The only perfect white cube in the exhibition is the curatorial box—which houses Soin’s notes.

Reconstructing (White)³ is on till 14 July. The works are priced between `40,000 and `3.5 lakh. Visit www.theloft.in for future exhibitions that will be part of The Square Foot Project (May 2012-April 2013).

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

A WEIGHTY ISSUE

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ishwarya Rai Bachchan’s post-delivery weight gain has caused a storm too large to contain within any kind of teacup. Even the British newspaper Guardian weighed in on the issue, using the Twitter-fuelled brouhaha that followed the publication of photographs of a rather large but content-looking Rai Bachchan, to explore “Bollywood’s attitude towards women and motherhood”.

Meanwhile, newspapers ran editorials and stories exhorting their learned readers to leave the actress alone even as they devoted several pages to tracking the fashion trends of the day and unleashing their in-house fashion police on the fashion sense of stars and starlets. Television channels, which look forward to wardrobe malfunctions the way some drought-struck Indians wait for water tankers, also invited the usual suspects to yank their heads off. In short, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It will never be known whether Rai Bachchan’s act of letting go, in a sense, of her famed slimness is an act of defiance. Rebellion is tantamount to suicide in a business in which your body is never your own, and where physical beauty is measured from the hair on the head down to the toenails. Vidya Balan is the flavour of the season, but she paid a price in the pre-Dirty Picture days for having a body that didn’t resemble a fashion magazine model as much as your colleague in the next-door cubicle. Surely that’s what made Balan likeable despite her often indifferent performances—and that’s what endeared her to male fans whose wife-and-whore divide is engraved into their brains. The tendency of actresses to wear gowns over saris, perhaps in an attempt to appear more sophisticated and Westernized, only means much more effort in trimming and tucking in the tummy. Balan has smartly elected to wear Sabyasachi saris over Cavalli gowns, recognizing her limits as well as the source of her appeal in one stroke.

Looking set to follow in Balan’s footsteps is Sonakshi Sinha, who has a face that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1950s movie and a Mala Sinha-like body. Sonakshi may look too mature for some of her co-stars, but at least she doesn’t look strange romancing men old enough to be her uncles. Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan, by sheer dint of having brought the gym into their homes, have managed to maintain the youthful appearance necessary to carry off the roles that they continue to be Not size zero: offered at their advanced age (usually Sonakshi Sinha. youngish men embarking on their first proper romance or their first real job). Put them in the same room as Deepika Padukone or Anushka Sharma and it’s hard not to notice the gap in age and vigour.

Male and female stars haven’t made it easier on themselves by trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of their increasingly short-lived careers by electing to endorse all kinds of products, perform at big-budget weddings and cut ribbons for sundry businesses. Page 3 didn’t create the anorexic, always-readyto-party star, but paid news and a spike in entertainment reportage have certainly resulted in a population cluster of photogenic clothes horses. Even Kajol, who eschewed designer wear and would turn up at film functions in delightfully mismatched clothes, is now paying attention to her wardrobe. Her unibrow remains largely untrimmed, so perhaps there is some hope.

Nandini Ramnath is the film critic of Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net).

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

A carnival of emotions Roysten Abel’s new production, ‘Old Town’, expresses the upheaval of the artistic process B Y S HREYA R AY shreya.r@livemint.com

···························· t’s the story of a 2,000-year-old town that nobody has seen or heard about—yet a place we’ve all been to.

There’s a gleaming red merrygo-round, a Ferris wheel and a video parlour that screens Hindi soft-porn. Centre stage, actors in thick face paint role-play the nine human emotions: anger, ugliness, fear, sadness, bravery, joy, wonder, love and finally, peace.

This is the latest production from Roysten Abel, an alumnus of

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the National School of Drama (NSD), whose previous production Manganiyar Seduction—a theatrical showcase of Rajasthan’s Manganiyar singers that ran for six years—dazzled the world with its brilliance, but also affected his creative energies.

After the last song was sung, and the last claps had died down, Abel was faced with the worst creative block of his career. The 90-minute-long Old Town, which he has devised and directed for the NSD Repertory Co. in New Delhi, is an expression, and a product, of that creative crisis.

The fictitious “Machaaland” is a town of performers—singers, actors, puppeteers and even chefs. The story goes back to the time when performers’ egos had become inflated with success and the town had come to be cursed by the gods—nobody would live beyond 25 years of age, they pro-

nounced. The Tree Goddess comes to the rescue, modifying the curse, albeit with a precondition: Each performer can choose his or her age for death, provided they put up a show every day.

“This basically means that as long as you perform every day, you are ageless. To perform is to live,” says Abel.

The play is set in carnival mode, with over-the-top lighting, joyrides and actors with loud face paint.

But the carnival is also the inner narrative of a performer, it’s the physical manifestation of the emotional upheaval that goes on in the life of a performer.

“When I took on this production, I was experiencing near creative death and had nothing to offer. All I felt at that point was a carnival of emotions, and then I decided that the play would also be an expression of that carnival,” says Abel.

Such fluid content had to be matched by equally fluid use of form. For instance, there are no dialogues in the second half of the play, and audiences can walk into the carnival and interact with the performers.

In the play, after the pronouncement of the Tree Goddess, the performers are building up for their first show; a carnival that

they will have to put up every night thereafter. It is in the course of the production that the performers experience the “navrasas” (nine emotions).

The accompanying carnivalesque music borrows from folk to Bollywood numbers such as Chikni Chameli. The production also weaves in puppetry, the folk tradition of nautanki and Koodiyattam, PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Neverland forever: A rehearsal of Old Town at the NSD campus.

AFP

a classical acting tradition from Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

To train actors in these specialized forms, Abel brought in experts like Ram Dayal Sharma (for nautanki), Ammannur Rajaneesh Chakyar (for Koodiyattam), actor Adil Hussain (last seen in Ishqiya and Agent Vinod) and an NSD teacher, as acting coach.

Like all his 25-odd plays, Old Town has been conceived by Abel, but developed with inputs from the cast and crew. The team worked with no bound script.

“From developing the script, to enacting what performers go through in the process of a production, felt so uncanny,” says Ajit Singh, who plays Ninaji Mocha, a nautanki singer, in the play. “As performers, this is what our lives are all about, every day,” he says.

Old Town opened on Friday and will be staged at 7.30pm daily till 30 May at the National School of Drama Repertory Co., Bahawalpur House, 1, Bhagwan Das Road, New Delhi. Tickets can be bought at the venue.

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CRIMINAL MIND

THE HOUSEHOLDER | AMITABHA BAGCHI

ZAC O’YEAH

Reporting for duty

Why they hate us MERCHANT IVORY/MICHAEL WHITE/THE KOBAL COLLECTION

A novel about a mid­level Delhi bureaucrat is both insightful and compassionate

Our columnist looks back on a tradition of evil foreigners in Western fiction, and the lure of the Orient

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address these lines—written in India—to my relatives in England.” So goes the first line of the first, and some say best, detective novel published in Queen’s English.

The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins was hailed by T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers. Although essentially belonging to the now unfashionable genre of Epistolary Gothic Horror Pulp Detective Fiction (EGHPDF), it was advanced for its day and age. It featured red herrings and thefts committed under trance, it introduced a professional detective of the Scotland Yard (other early mystery stories tended to favour brainy amateurs), and threw in a locked room murder.

What struck me when reading it are its Indian elements. The eponymous Moonstone, belonging to an idol and stolen by a corrupt British soldier in the aftermath of the battle of Srirangapatna, gives three Brahmins reason to travel all the way to inauspiciously foggy and spooky Yorkshire, masquerading as a band of juggling gypsy fakirs.

The mysterious priests are, in a way, the real heroes and they eventually return the sacred jewel to its home.

Collins never visited India but started a fashion in popular pulp: The sacred but cursed jewel as well as the secret Oriental society would both feature in innumerable thrillers.

It is probably no coincidence that such exotic ingredients were used to spice up mysteries when the British empire was at its mightiest.

Consider The Adventure of the Speckled Band (1892)—Arthur Conan Doyle’s favourite Sherlock Holmes story. It had suspicious gypsies and weird wildlife (a cheetah and a baboon) frolicking outside a British mansion. The murder weapon is an extremely deadly Bengali swamp adder trained to kill. Although quite unscientific (Bengal never exported swamp adders to be used by Western murderers, simply because there are no swamp adders in India), the corrupting influences of colonialism loom large and the culprit, if you recall, turns out to be a brutish British Calcutta-returned self-taught snake charmer.

In the 20th century, the motif of purloined Indian jewels featured in two Agatha Christie plots (The Secret of Chimneys and The Rajah’s Emerald) and she furthermore tried out an innovative murder weapon in The Big Four: a toxic chicken curry, presumably because the spiciness hides the taste of poison (poisoning was Christie’s preferred murder method).

Chesterton wrote several detective stories in which a Catholic priest battles the

B Y A RUNAVA S INHA ·························· mitabha Bagchi could easily have been viciously funny about the characters of his second novel,The Householder. After all, the middle-level bureaucrat, steeped in stereotypical petty-to-middling corruption and well integrated into the cash and favour-lubricated processes favoured by India’s babus, is grist to the mill for black humour. In his own imitable way, Upamanyu Chatterjee has done it twice over, first in English, August: An Indian Story and then in The Mammaries of the Welfare State.

But Naresh Kumar, aka the householder—father of the quintessential married daughter and wayward son, husband of the oh-so-familiar wife chosen for him all those years ago, and now a depot of doubts, despair and desire for a colleague (most inappropriate, but there it is)—is not an outsider like Agastya Sen. He has no ironic outlook on his existence and the futility of effort. In Bagchi’s hands, he is a complete insider who seeks to play the system without the slightest selfconsciousness or qualms.

But not because he is immoral. On the contrary, Kumar is keenly aware of his dharma—his responsibilities as a father and husband—and that he must use his influence and power to secure his family’s happiness. At this stage, a comedy of manners, or what is referred to as “family drama” by television professionals, could have been on the cards. But this is where Bagchi’s vision as a novelist becomes evident, as he effortlessly elevates the story into the realm of the dilemma for the householder as dictated by Indian tradition: when to shed the superhero’s cape of being the domestic provider—economically, physically and psychologically—in order to retreat into a life in closer communion with the inner self and the afterlife.

But wait. Don’t imagine that the outcome is a philosophical journey. Instead, like the best writers do,

Orient express: (left) Films like The Deceivers, star­ ring Pierce Brosnan, have long exoticized India; and an action scene from the film Gunga Din.

superstitions of the Orient. In The Salad of Colonel Cray, a British officer appears to have been cursed by monkey-worshippers while looking for strong Trichinopoli cigars in India; The Wrong Shape features an enigmatic Indian conjuror; the title of The Red Moon of Meru refers to a sacred, and perhaps cursed, ruby, and so on.

Simultaneously, an avalanche of “thugs” and other exotic sects lavished their thuggery in numerous superficial flicks. A sampling: Gunga Din (1939), starring Cary Grant; Sabaka, The Hindu (1953), starring Boris Karloff (better known for his portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster); The Black Devils of Kali (1955), starring Lex Barker (who also played Tarzan in five jungle flicks); Zarak (1957), starring Anita Ekberg; The Stranglers of Bombay (1960), directed by Hammer heavyweight Terence Fisher; The Mystery of Thug Island (1964), starring nobody you’d ever heard of; Help! (1965), starring The Beatles; the James Bond movie Octopussy (1983), starring Roger Moore; Indiana Jones And the Temple of Doom (1984), directed by Steven Spielberg; and The Deceivers (1988), starring Pierce Brosnan.

Entertainment epics that sustained popular prejudice are as endless as they are mindless.

This “Eastern influence” wasn’t limited to India. There was, for example, Fu Manchu waging jihad against the West with ray guns and poisoned prostitutes, nastier and far more long-lived than any other megalomaniac.

Fu Manchu debuted in a story by Sax Rohmer in 1913 and survived the author’s death in 1959 by becoming the inspiration for several 1960s cult movies starring Christopher Lee. Lee is best known for playing Dracula in B-film shockers produced by the ultra-low-budget Hammer Studios whose success formula is summarized in two Bs: Boobies and Blood.

Gradually, with the Western pulp writer maturing intellectually, the idea of evil Orientals fell out of fashion.

Recent Hollywood attempts to produce Fu Manchu sequels have failed because of the character’s political incorrectness—after all, such films might harm US trade with China, now that relations are thawing. I can’t for the life of me recall any major motion picture with Kali-worshipping Thugs over the two last

decades while (coincidentally?) post-liberalization India’s importance has grown as an export market for the West. Of course, in the latter half of the 20th century the bogeyman from the East was usually typified by KGB agents from the far side of the Iron Curtain, and thriller heroes (be it “007”

by Ian Fleming or Smiley by John le Carré) all fought the Cold War. However, that genre died abruptly with perestroika and is now but nostalgia.

This bogeyman syndrome appears to be a fundamental element of Western culture, and the examples listed above may, in fact, be precursors to what we see today. In the last decades, we’ve been bombarded with blockbuster action featuring Muslim groups plotting against the US, like The Peacemaker starring George Clooney or True Lies with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As usual, I have a theory.

At the root of such (mis)representations is perhaps a fear of anything that cannot be explained in rational market-economy terms, a dread of everything mysterious and idealistic that inspires a dedicated following. In many of these examples, the antagonist is (if at all characterized in a multifaceted way) a criminal mastermind who could have been a Mensa top-scorer if circumstances were different, but for inexplicable reasons now wants to destroy the Western way of life.

This makes him quite superior to the archetypal Western natural-born killer who has an IQ barely touching 70 and who commits crimes for short-term gain—typically clobbering somebody to death in an unsophisticated way to steal a six-pack from an off-licence or, at best, a cursed diamond. Such criminal acts are quite logical and do not baffle the Western mind at all.

It’s just a theory, but if you have another I’d love to hear from you.

Zac O’ Yeah is most recently the author of Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan.

Write to Zac at criminalmind@livemint.com

The Householder: Fourth Estate (HarperCollins), 239 pages, `399.

Bagchi simply tells his story about Kumar’s family and colleagues, which is an utterly absorbing one. The larger issue is stirred in so well that its flavour imbues the narrative without standing out separately. As with all memorable novels, only after you have finished reading the story—a culmination that leaves you unhappy that it’s over—do you confront the choices that the householder, any householder, must make at some point in their lives.

In continuation of his refusal to tread the path of satire, Bagchi draws his characters with gentle, compassionate strokes. Even amid the utter immorality of their acts, they are as hardpressed as you and I to simply survive everyday life, and more sensitive to the softer aspects of existence than you and I can hope to be with our deadened metropolitan senses and sensibilities.

Almost miraculously, they are all human, rising above the animal instincts of instant fulfilment of desires.

The Householder makes old-fashioned demands of the reader: to get involved with the people, to will them on their way, to curse at the mistakes and smile at their achievements. Astonishingly, not to judge them.

It is in capturing the helplessness of the Indian forever seeking a slightly better life—not just for themselves, but also for their children—that this novel pulls at the heartstrings without the least bit of sentimentality.

The story in here is manyhued but not gaudy, complex but not complicated, and carries within itself just the right degree of wish-fulfilment that raises it above the lack of pattern in real life.

The writer’s eye and ear for authenticity are in remarkable evidence. Every setting is described in meticulous but not tiresome detail, and the dialogue is pure joy because although the words are English and the sentences are grammatically correct, the idiom is uniquely smalltown-north-India-transplanted-to-Delhi. It’s the neatest possible way to skirt the problem of writing in English about people who obviously don’t conduct their conversations in that language.

With Above Average, his first novel, Bagchi had promised great things ahead. The Householder proves him to be an assured writer after only two novels, and, perhaps more important, an insightful reader of the human condition as well.

Arunava Sinha translates Bengali fiction into English. His forthcoming translations include Wonderworld And Other Stories by Sunil Gangopadhyay and The Rhythm of Riddles: Three Byomkesh Bakshi Mysteries, by Saradindu Bandopadhyay.

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BOOKS L17

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IMAGINE: HOW CREATIVITY WORKS | JONAH LEHRER

CULT FICTION

R. SUKUMAR

The creative class DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES

Pop neuroscience offers new interpretations about the human brain, but not always deep ones

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B Y J ACOB K OSHY jacob.k@livemint.com

···························· omewhere around the early 1990s, MRIs—the technique of magnetic resonance imaging—tiptoed out of the pall of cancer wards into the sunnier campuses of universities, and forged a melange among the departments of psychology, neuroscience, management and economics. The result of this academic straddle is a literary niche called pop neuroscience, into which science writer Jonah Lehrer’s newest offering, Imagine: How Creativity Works, neatly slots itself.

Much of the work that pop neuroscience draws its inspiration from tries to track changes in the brain when people exhibit emotions, or are involved in a cognitive process (such as thinking). They do this by using a particular kind of MRI, called functional magnetic resonance imaging, and measuring the flow of blood in different regions of the brain when engaged in a task, or by attaching electrodes to the scalp and monitoring the frequency and location of electrical activity when participants are performing certain activities.

While there has been some success in correlating certain phobias and learning disorders to abnormalities in specific regions of the brain, there’s almost no success in ascribing everyday processes of happiness, optimism and intelligence to specific brain regions or a predictable interaction of certain neural chemicals.

The book’s bait is the word “how” in the title. You will expect Lehrer, who has written for science publications such as Wired and New Scientist, to shed light or make a solid case for neural activity that is unambiguously associated with creativity. It would be immensely interesting to know what goes on in the brain when it chances upon insight, whether scientific insight works differently from artistic insight, and apart from hard work, whether neural

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Grey matter: Pop neuroscience is driven by our increasing interest in how neurology affects our inner lives. machinery plays any major role in generating moments of eureka.

Promisingly enough, the first few chapters cite research to suggest that some regions of the brain do show distinct patterns of activity just before people have “aha” moments. For instance, when participants in a study were asked to solve puzzles that could only be solved by abstract reasoning, researchers found that prior to chancing upon answers, specific regions of the brain called the anterior superior temporal gyrus showed distinct electrical activity.

However, Lehrer’s use of the “research finding-conjecture-real world example” formula often leads to glaring inconsistencies in a span of pages. In chapter 2, for instance, Lehrer cites research to suggest that relentlessly focusing on a difficult problem could tense the brain so much that it prevented an insightful answer from surfacing. In the next chapter, he says that without dogged persis-

Lehrer’s use of the ‘research finding­conjec­ ture­real world example’ formula leads to glaring inconsistencies

tence and “…forcing oneself to pay attention…”, creative solutions almost never emerge.

In his scheme of explanations, stimulants such as coffee and nicotine may be a hindrance to creative insight, while stronger drugs such as Benzedrine have positively contributed to the qualitative output of celebrated poet W.H. Auden. It isn’t actually clear whether particular drugs can make poets out of anybody persevering enough or the wrong kind of stimulants can render even the gifted, mediocre.

Similarly, he draws upon research to show that people, when relaxed and happy, were more likely to come up with imaginative solutions to vexing puzzles; then, a few pages down, he makes a case for the opposite,

Imagine—How Creativity Works: Canongate, 276 pages, £14.99 (around `1,300).

a preponderance of depression and sadness among extremely creative artists.

While it isn’t surprising that the complexity of the creative process defies easy generalization, Lehrer employs something of a cheat to extricate himself from this mess of contradictions by proffering that “…different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking…” without clarifying what exactly the different kinds of creative problems are.

Lehrer’s breezy writing can’t dress up these conceptual dilemmas, and soon, rather unfortunately, the bulk of the book implicitly digresses into the utilitarian, self-help book grail of how to be more creative, resulting in such insipid revelations that when stuck on a problem, a short walk or a change of scenery could help; or that traders and entrepreneurs with more contacts and networks generally do better than those with fewer connections.

Lehrer shovels up tonnes of anecdotes about how daydreaming played a crucial role in research and development powerhouse 3M’s invention of Post-its, or how advertising executive Dan Wieden’s stumbled upon Nike’s Just Do It slogan by randomly remembering a convicted criminal’s last words. All these stories make for interesting trivia, but don’t build up into any larger insight about the workings of creativity. Dressing up common sense in the flimsy satin of neuroscience doesn’t really need a science book, especially when this science itself is tenuous. A self-help guide would have been quite as effective.

Drawn from memory A tribute to the art that a loving couple, folk singers from Rajasthan, practised together B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· ll Teju wanted as a little girl was to get aboard the trains that ran along the edge of the dusty village in Rajasthan where she grew up. On occasions, she would walk to the station 8km away, wait for a train to stop, and whisper, “Take me to the city.”

At 13, when her family migrated in search of work, Teju did get to the city. Later, she also travelled with her husband, the folk singer and artist Ganeshbhai Jogi, to Ahmedabad and Mumbai. In a beautifully illus-

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THE ONLY WAY IS ESSEX

trated book by Tara Books, Drawing From the City, Tejubehan, in her late 50s now, and based in Ahmedabad, gives us the story of her life.

The energetic lines and rich detail of her work flesh out the memories of the utopian world of her childhood—though the accompanying text betrays a life of endemic poverty. The streams are always full of fish and turtles; the trees—sometimes as many as 16 different kinds on a double page—are robust and flowering.

“It is like magic,” says Tejubehan, over the phone. “Lines, dots, more lines, more dots…my hands started to draw these things.”

When she sees a girl going somewhere on a bicycle, she draws a whole group of girls, “all of them on their way somewhere”. Not one to use the words “feminist” or “women’s liberation”, Tejubehan likes drawing women doing things, being mobile, travelling,

working. In her paintings of urban scenes, the cars always carry two women: one drives and the other looks out of the window. “I want to be both those women,” she says.

Against the norms of their community, Ganeshbhai encouraged his young bride to sing with him. Their repertoire included Kabir, the Vaishnava saints of Gujarat and songs from the Sufi tradition; songs of hope and faith, the passing of seasons, and of love and surrender. In the late 1980s, they even travelled to Mumbai to give playback vocals to a Hindi film, Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala.

But when it became impossible to sustain their growing family (the couple have six children), they returned to Ahmedabad, where the artist Haku Shah encouraged Ganeshbhai to paint.

He developed a style all his own—two-dimensional composi-

Drawing From the City:

By Tejubehan, Tara Books, 27 pages, `750. tions made up of extraordinarily complex dots and lines. Ganeshbhai then encouraged Tejubehan to take up paper and pen. Eventually, their children came to paint as well, and art became a means of survival for the entire family. Ganeshbhai and Tejubehan were invited to art and craft

e’s now making his name writing the rebooted version of Animal Man, but there is more to young Canadian writer-artist Jeff Lemire than superhero comics. Although, as the work of Lemire and another young artist—this one, Scott Snyder, working on reboots of Batman and Swamp Thing—proves, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as a good superhero comic.

Lemire has previously made an appearance in this column, courtesy Lost Dogs, and I have also mentioned in passing, his take on H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, The Nobody, but the graphic novel that really established his credentials was Essex County.

Essex County is a fictional rural setting, based on the Ontario community where Lemire grew up, and it at once reminded me of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, a fictional part of south England he once referred to as a “realistic dream country”.

The similarity goes beyond the names. Hardy’s stories are about the powerlessness of man in the face of the elements.

Most of his books portray the contrast between nature and civilization; sometimes the contrast becomes a clash, usually to the detriment of the lead characters. Essex County has the same feel about it, and Lemire uses three intersecting graphic novellas and two short graphic stories to tell the story.

The first novella, Tales From the Farm, tells the story of a young boy, Lester, coming to terms with reality after his mother dies and he is taken in by his uncle.

Lester constantly sports a cape and a mask, doesn’t get along with his uncle, but builds an unlikely friendship with a former hockey player, Jimmy Lebeuf, who now operates a gas station after a crippling injury put paid to his career.

The novella ends with Lester discovering (although Realistic dream country: Lemire’s Essex. he doesn’t accept it or realize it till later) that Jimmy is his father.

The second novella, Ghost Stories, is about the estranged Lebeuf brothers, Jimmy’s grandfather Vince and grand uncle Lou (although Lou is really his grandfather and Vince, his grand uncle). The third, The Country Nurse, is about Anne, who takes care of a senile Lou and the other assorted crippled and injured of Essex County. One of her patients is Eddie, who appears in the short story The Sad and Lonely Life of Eddie Elephant-Ears, about a young man who has spent 10 years in coma after an accident killed his entire family, yet has only four memories of his past. Anne is the thread that binds the stories and novellas together, although I quite liked Lemire’s use of a crow to present a literal bird’s-eye view of the characters.

Together with another story, The Essex County Boxing Club, that adds up to a meaty 500-page graphic novel that spans generations and relationships. The stories are sentimental, even melancholic sometimes, an impact only magnified by Lemire’s stark black and white illustrations. Yet, unlike Hardy’s characters who surrender to nature, Lemire’s persevere, even in their death.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to Sukumar at cultfiction@livemint.com

fairs across the country.

It was at one such craft fair, in Chennai’s Kalakshetra in 2009, that Tara Books publishers Gita Wolf and V. Geetha met the couple. “We discussed the possibility of a book with them,” says Geetha, who was particularly drawn by how distinctive Tejubehan’s drawings, womencentred for the most part, were.

Together, they discussed the scenes from her life that she would illustrate: her childhood, her wedding, her first impressions of the city, seeing the sea for the first time in Mumbai (and being so terrified that she had to sit with her back to it).

“When Teju sent us her drawings, we felt that we needed to do something more to capture the worlds she had drawn, her sensibility, of growing up in a village and leaving it behind. We requested a Tamil writer, Salai Selvam, who has just such a lively sense of being from a village, to help us capture the spirit of Teju’s story, without adding or detracting from the events she had narrated,” says Geetha. The English

text in the book is a translation of Selvam’s idiomatic recounting.

Though Tejubehan and Ganeshbhai have been written about extensively, and their story has been told and retold not only in English, but in German as well, they hadn’t authored anything of their own. Given that, this book is a seminal, painstaking effort.

Each double-page spread took her four-five days, says Tejubehan, “if she worked fast”.

Last year, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, when Tara Books was presenting Tejubehan’s visual story—and before she could exult in being the first woman author from her community—Ganeshbhai died. He was 72, and singing at a temple. Drawing From the City is dedicated to his memory.

Tejubehan says she won’t sing any more. But she will continue to draw, using the Rotring pen that she shared with “Jogi”.

Drawing From the City is silkscreen printed and bound by hand on hand-made paper. It will be available on www.tarabooks.com from 1 June.

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CHENNAI KOTHU | BISHWANATH GHOSH

The train to Royapuram PHOTOGRAPHS

The subcontinent’s oldest surviving railway station is in Chennai. This book extract talks about one of the symbols of modern India

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ike every other modern institution in India, railways too originated in Madras, in the sense that the Madras Railway Company was formed way back in 1845, when the first-ever train ride in India, from Bombay to Thane, had not even been thought of. But the Great Indian Peninsula Company, set up much later, beat Madras by opening the Bombay-Thane line in 1853.

Since the original structures of Bombay and Thane stations no longer exist, Royapuram station, declared open in 1856, is today the oldest railway station in the entire subcontinent.

Captain (Barnett) Fort’s sketch depicting its inauguration shows a large crowd of elegantly-attired Europeans gathered on the low-lying platform of the station. The eagerness to board the train is palpable. The platform looks strikingly grand because of its Corinthian pillars. From above the tall pillars hang large flags that add to the regal air. Two tracks run in front of the platform: a train waiting on each of them.

The train farther from the platform, carrying the natives, already has the steam-spewing locomotive attached to it.

They are witnessing the inauguration ceremony from the train; while the Europeans, gathered on the platform, are part of the ceremony.

This afternoon, however, Murali and I find neither the crowds nor any train as we drive into the Royapuram station, which is now painted in deep red and its Corinthian pillars in white. Murali parks the car right under the porch of the historic

station, as if he owns the place.

No one stops us: there is hardly a soul around anyway. In the hall described in The Illustrated London News as ‘very elegant and most superbly furnished with handsome punkahs & c.’, a couple of dogs are sleeping.

Given Chennai’s notorious neglect of its heritage, Royapuram station had nearly gone to the dogs. When I saw it outside during my first trip to north Chennai with Murali, it was a crumbling building, left to fall on its own. But good sense eventually prevailed upon the railways which restored the station in 2005.

In the hall, there are pictures of the station before and after restoration. Inside the ticket window, a lone clerk is marking time. The train services may have increased since the restoration, but this does not seem to be a busy station, even though it was Madras’s main railway terminus until 1907. All I can hear is the chirping of birds.

Standing on the main platform, I try to visualise the scene of the station’s inauguration in 1856. The few Corinthian pillars that remain unmistakably belong to Captain Fort’s sketch. So it was here that the journey of railways in south India began. A railway employee, who has been watching Murali and me looking around and taking pictures, comes over. He tells us that some of the old pillars had to be broken to facilitate

electrification of the line, and that how it had been nearly impossible to bring them down—so strong they had been.

He also tells us that the Burma teak furnishings in the hall were stolen during the restoration.

Our conversation is cut short when a passenger train suddenly whizzes past, startling both Murali and me.

Since this platform has no shade and the sun is beating down mercilessly, we too get back to the hall and emerge on the platform on the other side of the building, which is shaded by what appears to be a fibreglass roof, red which has faded into patches of yellow. The slanting roof is held up by antique cantilevers.

The platform is clean and empty and bears a historic look.

While Murali takes pictures, I

Tamarind City—Where Modern India Began: Tranquebar, 315 pages, `295.

sit on the lone wooden bench whose backrest has ‘M.S.M.R’ engraved on it. M.S.M.R stands for Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway, which came into being in 1908 following the merger of the Madras Railway Company and the Southern Mahratta Railway. The company had its headquarters in Royapuram until 1922, when it shifted to the Central station.

The bench, therefore, is about a hundred years old. If only it could speak. It must have seated countless genteel Europeans and distinguished Indians, and countless vagabonds and rowdies in the dark decades before its restoration.

The harbour is in close view: I can see the cranes and containers. At some distance is the Royapuram bridge, which we had taken to get here; the sound of the traffic on it is now no louder than the buzzing of flies. Right in front of me are three pairs of rail tracks, covered in places by vegetation.

A dog is sleeping close to my feet. If you want to spend a quiet day with a book, this bench is the place to be.

The door to the station master’s office is right next to the bench, and all this while, perhaps because of the silence, we’ve assumed that he must not be in. But he has been on his seat all along. He looks up from the paperwork and smiles nervously at us when we step in.

He is puzzled that two strange men should be barging into his room and asking him questions related to his work. Murali, with his gift of the gab, puts him at ease by explaining to him, in Tamil, the purpose of our visit.

The station master tells us that at present, twenty-seven pairs of local trains pass through Royapuram station each day, apart from the occasional goods train; and that there is one train which still originates from Royapuram station—a goods train—and goes straight to Delhi.

As he talks, my eyes travel around his office. On the wall is a large diagram of the station, down to the minute detail which only a railway man can decipher. There are homilies too, in English, about the dangers of drinking and

driving—a train, that is. In a corner of the room, on an antiquated table, lies an assortment of iron equipment related to rail tracks. To my untrained eye, most of the iron pieces appear to be fishplates.

I also spot a piece of childhood fascination—the signalman’s lantern!

I lift it with great excitement and call out to Murali to take a look. The station master smiles at us. We are still examining the lantern when we hear a rattling sound on the tracks outside and soon find a goods train passing by. We rush out to the platform with the lantern. I hold it up pretending to be the signalman, with the moving train in the backdrop, as Murali takes pictures. Then we quickly

BY

G NATHAN/MINT

History house: (above) A view of the Royapuram railway station; and the station’s porch. exchange positions. We put the lantern back in place and thank the station master for his time.

Only much later, when we are back in the bustle of the traffic, does it strike me that I had forgotten to ask the station master something pertinent: how does it feel it to be presiding over the country’s oldest surviving railway station?

Bishwanath Ghosh’s Tamarind City: Where Modern India Began was launched in New Delhi on Friday.

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