Lounge for 27 Aug 2011

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

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Saturday, August 27, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 35

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Behind the defunct chimney of India United Mills No. 1, the skyline of Lalbaug in central Mumbai is changing dramatically.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH DFJ INDIA’S MOHANJIT JOLLY >Page 8

SIX WAYS TO DRESS FOR FALL

The Lakmé Fashion Week Winter/Festive 2011 trends to make your own this season >Page 7

SUNNY SIDE OF THE STREET

MEMORIES OF AN ELEPHANT

Beyond the tourist traps, America’s blues city keeps its glorious musical traditions alive >Pages 14­15

In a historic Mumbai neighbourhood, the start of the festive season brings the layers of an ongoing urban transformation into sharp focus

AN AMERICAN QUILT

Hari Kunzru’s new novel is a majestic work with memorable characters and a credible plot >Page 16

>Pages 10­11

THE GOOD LIFE

GAME THEORY

SHOBA NARAYAN

A PHANTOM AND OTHER NIGHT LIFE

I

got Delhi-envy at 1.43am on a soft summer night when I met a man called Honey. The evening began at 10pm at an art gallery opening. Hotelier Priya Paul (whom I had first met a week ago) and her friends, Vivek Sahni and Nikhil Khanna, were going out with a group of friends and they invited me to come along.

The group included a contemporary artist-couple, a gallery owner, some expat curators, a design guru and some advertising folk. Some 15 of them debated... >Page 4

LEARNING CURVE

ROHIT BRIJNATH

THE VOICE FROM WITHIN

E

ffort is a voice in the athlete’s head. Effort to wake up at 4.17am, which is what Ian Thorpe did every day, effort when confidence is dying and the body hurts. Effort which gives sport a certain nobility. It is Rafael Nadal saying: “I fight, I fight, I fight”, and you can literally see his willingness to pursue his best self. This cliché which suggests a talent fully exhausted—“I gave 100 per cent”—is not easily lived. But it becomes the separation point between athletes. Not just skill... >Page 5

GOURI DANGE

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

LESSONS IN APPRECIATION

T

he process of getting any child—particularly one on whom so much adult attention and hard work has been lavished—to be appreciative and grateful should begin much before the age of 15. Ideally, the seeds for this must be sown early, and not when we see disturbing signs that our children are taking us thoroughly for granted. Teaching a child to be grateful and appreciative of what the adults around him or her do for him doesn’t mean we get our children to feel... >Page 6

SATURDAY Q&A WITH

LAVANYA NALLI

HOME PAGE L3

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

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ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI

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HOME WORK

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ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT JASBIR LADI ©2011 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

Works of art: Prabhu has been collecting vintage bikes for 19 years; and (right) macaroons and chocolate mousse at Debailleul, Mumbai.

Legends Motorcycling Café and Museum, Bangalore

Elma’s Bakery, Cakes and Tea Room, New Delhi

The old stone building on Wheeler Road which houses the Legends Motorcycling Café and Museum is at least six decades old.

Though the café opened recently, the atmosphere and decor reflect the times in which the structure was built. It’s an unusual combination of a café and a museum under one roof. The ground floor accommodates the dining area, while the first floor houses more than 20 vintage motorbikes belonging to café owner S.K. Prabhu, a biker who began collecting in 1992.

Prominent among the exhibits is a red- and cream-coloured scooter, the Cezeta, a 1962 model made in erstwhile Czechoslovakia.

A white grand piano takes up an entire wall of Elma’s Bakery, Cakes and Tea Room, a quaint new addition to Hauz Khas Village, named after the owners’ dog. Run by Gautam Arora and Smita Singh, who also own The Living Room Café in the vicinity, Elma’s is set to open officially on 1 September after months of tastings.

The teas—black, green, jasmine and other floral infusions—are sourced from an organic estate in Coonoor, Tamil Nadu; the chocolate, cheese and butter come from Europe.

The décor is fitting: green and white tiles for the open kitchen; carved wooden furniture, gingham drapes, lace doilies and porcelain curios for the parlour. A sideboard displays the best of Elma’s gold-rimmed china.

Reserved for special occasions, these are teasets that Singh has foraged over the years from vintage shops in London. There’s even the customary coat hanger to prepare the scene for servings of Raspberry Courting Cake and Yorkshire Curd Pudding.

The good stuff Jazz and blues notes playing from an old record player compete with the din of bikers discussing spare parts and accessories. The aroma of coffee wafts through the space.

There is a hand-operated coffee grinder and roasted beans (the south Indian Arabica variety) are ground every day, so an aromatic cup is assured.

The handwritten menu lists eggs (omelette and scrambled) and toast for breakfast. Lunch and dinner options include chicken and vegetarian steaks, chicken and vegetarian biryanis and paya (a spicy stew) with bread. Served with brinjal cooked in spicy gravy and a small bowl of raita, the chicken in the biryani was tender and mildly spiced—not heavy at all. Walk in on Sundays to see crowds of bikers stop over, and if you ride in on a bike that impresses Prabhu, he might just throw in some free engine oil along with your coffee.

The good stuff

Though open, the café is not entirely ready.

On the day I visited, the chef who makes the steaks and baked dishes wasn’t around, leaving us to choose between the biryani, sandwiches and breakfast options. Prabhu assured us that all items on the menu are available on all days usually. Only one of the three floors is meant for dining, and the fivesix tables available are too few on a busy day.

On offer are a commendable variety of breads: walnut and raisin, pumpernickel, chocolate, bacon and sausage loaves. Pastries include traditional preparations with deviant twists. Take, for instance, the palmyras that have a touch of cinnamon and the rich chocolate brownies with their subtle orange notes (yes!). It’s also one of the few places in the city you’ll get madeleines—made famous by Proust: a simple small cake that serves as a good test for a pastry chef.

There are plenty of options for vegans and the gluten-allergic too—soy milk desserts and flourless zucchini cakes.

We recommend the walnut and raisin bread with some of chef Shelly Sahay’s home-made mixed-berry jam.

Try the chorizo puffs and the mushroom and corn quiche with the heavenly coarse mustard that she serves.

Talk plastic

The not­so­good

The café offers main course items in halfportions as well. So while a full chicken steak costs `200, half a portion comes at `110. A plate of chicken biryani costs `125, and the vegetarian one, `75.

What is a let-down is the limited range of teas (eight) for a place that calls itself a “tea room”. While the kali zoolph and kali moti organic black teas were fabulous, the jasmine and rose infusion was not well brewed, with too much jasmine and too little rose (`125 per cup).

With the plan to introduce scones, waffles, home-made ice cream, fondue and macarons (this is a British bakery with a French twist), we fear the boutique outfit might be on the verge of a manic expansion.

The not­so­good

Legends Motorcycling Café and Museum, 15, Wheeler Road, Fraser Town, Bangalore.

Pavitra Jayaraman PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Talk plastic High tea for two, which includes a pot of tea and a three-tiered serving of an assortment of sandwiches, puff pastries, quiches, brownies and biscotti, costs `800. Other pastries are priced at `120-250; breads, `100-250.

Private high-tea spreads can be arranged for up to 30 people for `1,500-2,000 each (you’ll also be paying for the pianist).

Elma’s Bakery, Cakes and Tea Room, 24/1, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi. Opening 1 September.

Anindita Ghose

Debailleul, Mumbai The patisserie that opened on 1 August will serve in predominantly four categories: pastries, including tarts and macaroons, chocolates, ice creams, with variations like sorbets and ice-cream cakes, and a selection of breads, rolls and croissants.

The good stuff The ‘propah’ touch: Chef Shelly Sahay at Elma’s cake counter.

The patisserie’s first outlet in India is

spacious for a takeaway, with sufficient seating for 10. Debailleul also delivers everywhere in the city.

The raspberry tart (`350-400) was succulent, the cool pastry offset by a slightly warm fruit. The macaroons (`91), which come in four flavours, melt in your mouth. The two chocolates I tried from their elaborate collection, Perpetué (with praline, hazelnuts in 70% dark chocolate) and Princesse (with ganache, raspberry and 70% dark chocolate) were extraordinary.

The not­so­good Debailleul imports everything from Belgium, including the bread (which needs to be used within two days) and cakes, because they feel that’s the only way to maintain quality. What is missing is the smell of fresh warm bread.

With reference to Natasha Badhwar’s “Right at the start”, 20 August, I completely agree with the columnist.

In our busy lives, we do not realize the importance of such basic aspects as spending time with each other as a family. Even if we look at it commercially, from a returns perspective, these are definitely long­term, profitable acts. Because I am still single, I relate this sentence not only to children, but to all in my family—including my close friends: “The most important work any of us will ever do is at home, within the oasis of our family and relationships. This is not even work, is it? It is everyday life.” Thanks for the beautiful column.

Keep writing.

FAISAL LAKDAWALA

VIEWS FROM PAKISTAN I was happy to see Anindita Ghose’s story on the provocative Pakistani film ‘Bol’ (“A shout­out from Pakistan”, 20 August) in ‘Lounge’. I’m a reader from across the border, and having loved the movie myself, I was waiting to see an Indian publication write about it. It was a frank piece that addressed all the dialogue around the film. I’m sure there will be more on the film closer to its release in India, but this was a good early read.

ZUBEIDA ANSARI

MUTED CELEBRATIONS

Debailleul, Memca Sadan, Appasaheb Marathe Road, Prabhadevi, Mumbai. For details, call 9619487395.

Your Independence Day special issue, 13 August, was a collector’s edition. The articles correctly captured the changes that have taken place in our everyday lives, with economic reforms having raised the standard of living in the last 20 years. But the 20th anniversary of India’s economic reforms went unnoticed because the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has been entangled in various corruption charges and pressure is being built by civil society for an effective Lokpal to deal with corruption. Ironically, Manmohan Singh, who paved the way for economic reforms in 1991 as the Union finance minister, is now viewed as the weakest prime minister ever.

KETAN R. MEHER

Arun Janardhan

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Talk plastic The chocolates, which can be bought per piece, cost `91 and `95. The cakes cost `2,250-3,000 (they come in sizes/portions for 1-10 people).

L4 COLUMNS

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SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

A Phantom and other nocturnal animals

I

got Delhi-envy at 1.43am on a soft summer night

when I met a man called Honey. The evening began at 10pm at an art gallery opening. Hotelier Priya Paul (whom I had first met a week ago) and her friends, Vivek Sahni and Nikhil Khanna, were going

out with a group of friends and they invited me to come along. The group included a contemporary artist-couple, a gallery owner, some expat curators, a design guru and some advertising folk.

Some 15 of them debated about where to go and ended up choosing Boombox Café, a bar in Khan Market.

Delhi, I discovered, dines at 11pm.

Boombox was full of people. We all squeezed into a corner booth and spent the next couple of hours smoking fragrant sheesha and drinking everything that was on offer. Sahni, I learned, owned an eponymous design firm and was co-founder of Kama Ayurveda, whose products I use on my head in the hope of growing hair. I complained that his products were not fragrant enough. We debated the merits of fragrance versus benefits in massage oils; and the metaphysical question: Why do things that are good for you, such as Dead Sea mud and Ayurvedic potions, smell so bad? I am sure both of us made valid points—if only I could remember them. I was concentrating on grabbing the sheesha pipe that kept disappearing. “Do you realize that it is all the ex-smokers who want the sheesha-fix?” asked the lady-sculptor with a British accent.

Two hours later, there was another spirited debate about where to go. We

ended up outside Cibo at Janpath and were told that nobody would be allowed in. “Gudda” (fashion designer Rohit Bal) was in the house, said the bouncer, and they were turning people away. Sahni walked up and whispered something to him. The doors opened. Paul and I seemed to be the only two women in the compound. Bal, who co-owns the place, held court in the open courtyard, offering drinks, discussing his fashion show and introducing the male models who surrounded him.

One particularly handsome man introduced himself as Honey.

Everyone around chuckled.

Unbelievable, said Paul. Can’t be your real name.

It is, insisted Honey. “His full name is Honey Makhni,” said Bal amid much laughter.

Then it struck me. It was 2am on a Saturday night. Cibo was full of men enjoying “boy’s night out”. Vodka shots were being downed; techno music that sounded like a heartbeat on steroids was being pumped through the sound system. The ladies room was taken over by men making out behind the partitions. An editor from GQ walked by, clad in a white kurta-pyjama, air-kissing everyone in sight. Toto, I told myself. I have a feeling we aren’t in

Bangalore any more.

There are two kinds of people in the world. Some are rabid city patriots.

Listen to south Mumbai types talk about their city and you’ll know what I mean. Others are oblivious to place.

They can be happy anywhere. I used to be rabid. I once refused to date a man because he made the mistake of dissing my hometown. I am different now.

After living in Bangalore for the last five years and learning to love this city, after exploring Mumbai and Delhi in a fairly intense way and learning to love their quirks, I’ve morphed into the kind of person who, I think, could be as happy—or unhappy—in any metro.

That said, there is one thing that we Bangaloreans mourn: the 11.30pm curfew. Bars and restaurants close before Cinderella got home. They kick us out. To watch Delhiites revel way past our curfew time gave me Delhi-envy.

Around 2am the police came. The bar could stay open, they said. But the music had to stop. I watched a Delhi version of what we Bangaloreans complain about every weekend.

“What’s the point of keeping open a bar without music?” said Bal, wringing his hands. I felt a twinge of perverse and juvenile joy. Take that, Delhi. Now you know how we feel.

Cities have rhythms. Chennai comes alive at 6am, Bangalore at 11am, Mumbai at 8pm and Delhi at midnight.

For a visitor, Mumbai’s vibe is casual.

Whether you are quaffing beer at Leopold Café along with a room full of delirious tourists, enjoying the view atop the Dome at the Intercontinental Marine Drive with your sweetheart and a Cosmopolitan, listening to live music at Blue Frog, doing the—what’s it

called—dubstep at Bonobo, drinking Suleimani chai with the intellectuals at Prithvi Theatre’s café, or ending the night at Zafran, Mumbaikars have the worldly sophistication of having seen everything and been everywhere. They are glad you are visiting their fair city but you know what, they get immigrants every day, so have a great night, amigo. But get caught without a cab on your way home and the same Mumbaikar who appeared nonchalant, almost offhand, will insist on dropping you home with an equally casual, “Don’t be silly. Get in the car.”

The best of Chennai’s nightlife happens in the farmhouses lining ECR (East Coast Road). The setting is magical—swaying coconut palms, the Arabian Sea, water that has been warmed by the blistering daytime heat to encourage skinny dipping, and lots of hard liquor. Chennai folks hold their drinks either very well or very badly.

You sweat out your hangover the next day and build tolerance.

Bangalore has some great places.

Take 5 in Indiranagar has live acts by musicians Radha Thomas and Amit Heri, who are very good, perhaps because Take 5 is co-owned by singer Arati Rao. Although I despise franchises, Hard Rock Café in Bangalore is housed in a lovely building. Opus, owned by Carlton and the late, great Gina Braganza, is an old favourite. Newer outlets such as Sky Bar, Bacchus, F Bar and Cloud 9 are popular with college students. But none of them have the sprawling spaces that I saw in Delhi.

The next stop in Delhi was Lap, where actor Arjun Rampal—still handsome—was spinning discs when we entered. In the VIP area, fashion

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Feel the pulse: (clockwise from left) At Lap, a lounge bar in New Delhi owned by actor Arjun Rampal; the old­world charm of Hard Rock Café attracts many Bangaloreans; and if you want to listen to live music, Blue Frog is the place to head to in Mumbai.

designer Suneet Verma and co-owner A.D. Singh chatted with Paul and exchanged hugs and Delhi gossip.

Vineet Jain of The Times of India group came by to chat. More gossip. People thronged the outside garden and everyone seemed to know each other.

That’s the other thing. Both Cibo and Lap have lovely outdoor spaces, something I haven’t seen in space-starved Bangalore.

Close to dawn, we stumbled out.

There was a line of pretty young things, clad in miniskirts, waiting for their cars.

One 20-something said hello to Paul, who didn’t recognize her. A minute later, her car rolled up. It was a Rolls-Royce Phantom. The girl’s escort got into the driver’s side beside her and they pulled away, waving at us. How can you not remember a girl who owns a Phantom, I asked.

Who’s that girl, asked Paul. And then I had my only-in-Delhi moment of the night. “Oh that,” said the bouncer in Hindi. “That’s Pooja bhabhi.”

Apparently the girl got the Phantom as a wedding present. Only in Delhi.

I have never seen a Rolls-Royce in Bangalore, and you know what? I am kind of proud of it. We have our nouveau riche in Bangalore too, but the new rich play it quiet in Maruti Swifts.

The next weekend, I was at Kyra, a bar in Bangalore, where the Nathaniel School of Music’s students played a gig. Grey-haired grandmothers in Parsi-embroidered saris sat around tables eating chilli chicken. Bindi-sporting mothers held up video cameras to record their children’s performances.

Square fathers shook their hips and tried to act cool. Children ran around. The only thing missing was a wailing baby. It was a world away from the edgy hipness of Lap but it felt like home.

Shoba Narayan loved her Delhi noir experience. She cannot wait to go back.

Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan ANIRUDDHA CHOWDHURY/MINT

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

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ROHIT BRIJNATH GAME THEORY

The voice from within

E

AL BEHRMAN/AP

ffort is a voice in the athlete’s head. Effort to wake up at 4.17am, which is what Ian Thorpe did every day, effort when confidence is dying and the body hurts. Effort which gives sport a certain nobility. It is Rafael Nadal

saying: “I fight, I fight, I fight”, and you can literally see his willingness to pursue his best self.

This cliché which suggests a talent fully exhausted—“I gave 100 per cent”—is not easily lived. But it becomes the separation point between athletes. Not just skill, not fast-twitch fibre, not planning, not schedules, but first this voice of desire.

“Who do I want to be?”

Every day.

Peel back the great player. Look. See Michael Jordan, not just a competitor but the polished competitor. Before official practice with the Chicago Bulls, he’d lift weights first at home, till some teammates joined in and it became known as the Breakfast Club. Jordan heard this voice which was echoed by that masochist Lance Armstrong, who said: “Pain is temporary. It may last...an hour, or a day...but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”

For me this is what India—not every player but some—lacked somewhat in

PHILIP BROWN/REUTERS

England, the response to this urgent, disciplined voice within. Effort in concentration when the ball was doing some swinging dance; in pushing the body Anil Kumble-like into one more hard over bowled, then another, then 40; in keeping the right body language in the 89th over.

Yes, it’s bloody hard. It’s supposed to be.

Failure in England wasn’t simply lack of effort for that diminishes England and reduces sport to the simplistic.

India unravelled, like a seam in a faded dress, because its cricket is confused.

It’s as if No. 1 in Test cricket—a grand achievement—had been earned and there it ends, instead of resetting the bar. It’s as if a system is infected by the wrong type of greed because the right one is about being unsatisfied. Wherein you say, screw luck, damn conditions, forget injuries—they’re sporting staples—every series just has to be won, till this greed infects the system, till suddenly one day you’ve won 16 Tests in a row and still ask, what about 17?

To say this great team has morphed into a poor one is to be glib, the issue really is of understanding how fickle greatness can be.

Of course, India’s players hear the voice, else they could not have journeyed so far, but you cannot hear the voice selectively—you need to hear it every day. It’s why Kobe Bryant used to make, not take, 500 shots in practice.

When Jerry Rice, the legendary wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers, wasn’t at his precise weight, well, then, he’d just get on the Stairmaster and work out to get to that weight.

Before a match!

I remember an Adelaide night in 2003, sitting in Rahul Dravid’s hotel room, listening to a “thud, thud, thud” from next door and asking, what’s that, and he smiled: “It’s Tendulkar.” His form hadn’t arrived on that tour, but there he was, in front of a mirror, practising his bat-work, hitting the ground with every desperate, practice stroke. This was the voice and Sachin Tendulkar always hears it and in an Indian world, replete with distractions, it is the voice young players have to listen to.

India’s team can draw up a persuasive litany of reasons for defeat, from scheduling, to bench strength, to overplaying. But what folks like to see, even in the inevitability of defeat—or especially in the inevitability of defeat—is effort, effort to be better, to learn. Wherein sport becomes not about money (and I’m not saying it is here), or trophies, or even Rice saying “Whenever I stepped into that stadium, I felt like I owed the people something”, but something more essential. An answering to the voice when really you’re too tired to goddam listen.

A voice that keeps you cautious about diet, so when India calls you up suddenly, you’re ready; which makes

JOHN GICHIGI/ GETTY IMAGES

The grit: (clockwise from above) Rafael Nadal, Michael Jordan and Rahul Dravid—all of them are sportsmen known for their rigour and tenacity.

you practise against short bowling till weaving becomes an instinct; which makes tail-enders tell a batting coach at the nets, no, not done, 40 more balls; which makes bowlers remember every ball requires their complete, undistracted, thoughtful selves. Effort is Amit Mishra trying with the bat, it isn’t S. Sreesanth, on the Oval’s last day, just capitulating with it.

I return to great players like an addict because of the promise they give themselves and therefore us: to train, to try, to endure, whatever the weather, the rival, the fever in their body, anything.

They might fail, form might abandon them, but it’s all we can ask for. It’s why the moment of this series for me—and I didn’t even see it but was told about it by my friend Sharda Ugra—came at a moment, ironically, of Dravid failure.

He’d been catching like an arthritic old man and when he dropped one again at Edgbaston, he was embarrassed, furious, he tore off his cap, hurled it to the ground, a quiet man not given to theatre suddenly animated. Because he demands from himself a high standard, because he practises for it.

It was lovely picture. A picture of a man in pain who clearly hears the voice.

Rohit Brijnath is a senior correspondent with The Straits Times, Singapore.

Write to Rohit at gametheory@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Rohit’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/rojit­brijnath

L6

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011

Parenting

LOUNGE

TEENAGE

Thirteen is the new eighteen What’s driving more and more 13­year­olds in our cities to stress, depression, drugs and sexual experimentation?

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

··························· he most common function of a teenage guy’s girlfriend is to be someone who comforts you when you cry,” says Tanay Chadda, 15, Don’s Deepu and Slumdog Millionaire’s Jamal junior.

Chadda has spent the last three years working on a film script on the secret lives of teenagers, interviewing teens from cities, even NRIs in London and New York. “The average teenager is trying to be five years older than he actually is. At the end of the day, everything a teenager does stems from the need to be ‘cool’ and ‘different’,” he says.

The class X student from Dhirubhai Ambani International School, Mumbai, describes a world where friends are “scoring home runs off their girlfriends”, where teens don’t always use condoms the first time “to know how it feels”, where AX shirts, Louis Vuitton and Hermès belts and Hugo Boss wallets are school fare, and where Facebook comments can result in depression.

T

Market­driven angst According to an Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) survey in April, the average monthly allowance of urban youth in the age group of 10-17 is up from `300 in 1998 to a staggering `12,000 in 2011.

With such purchasing power, teens are increasingly on the radar of marketing agencies.

Chadda explains how teenagers worry about their image. “I have friends who work out to get six-pack abs so their profile pictures on Facebook can look good. When they upload it and it doesn’t receive enough comments, or when it receives negative comments, they’ve sunk into a depression.” The ad world, reality TV and movie sets are filled with tales of teen models and actors pushed to sensuality by over-ambitious parents.

As Thylane Lena-Rose Blondeau, 10, pouts from the cover

of a recent issue of French Vogue in all-too-adult make-up, sensuous designer wear and stilettos, closer home it’s Malvika Hoon and Aarti Chhikara, the 15- and 14-year-olds, respectively, who were recently profiled by Hindustan Times (published by HT Media Ltd, that also publishes Mint). Both teens were posing as miniadults in advertising shoots; both are symbolic of their grown-too-soon generation.

Chhikara, a class X student at Springdales School, Dhaula Kuan, New Delhi, sees being older as being more sensuous.

“They could have said I looked 18, instead of 20. I have a good male following, who might think I’ve been lying to them. I don’t look so old,” she says. Her event-manager mother, Dolly, says people who say Chhikara has been forced into behaving older are jealous they haven’t had the opportunity. Even the negative publicity is welcome.

“It gives us status,” she explains over the phone. “In Delhi, this is how society is.” Hoon will only speak on the promise that her photographs, in which her cleavage dwarfs her face, are featured prominently.

Valued differently Thirteen is the new 18 as children pick careers sooner, achieve faster, earn more and cope less than their parents ever did at that age. M. Renuka, associate professor at the JSS Medical College, Mysore, documented depression rates in Mysore using the Center for Epidemiological Studies— Depression Scale for Children (CES-DC). And tabulated a whopping 93% rate of depression in teens aged up to 16 for the year 2010. Roli Srivastava, secretary, Adolescent Society of Kanpur, says it is important for parents to keep in mind that the emotional needs of today’s adolescents are greater than those of adults. While everyone wants to be appreciated and loved, it’s the only feeling that keeps teens going in an increasingly alienating world, which is why teens

Teen talk: (clockwise from above) Sara D’Souza, 18, says drugs and sex come too easy; Aayushi Sharma, 16, wants to make it in a man’s world; and Aarti Chhikara, 14, would like to be thought of as a ‘cute 18’. there is little colleges and schools can do to restrain heavily influenced teens. “They step out of uniforms and come into a life of freedom. Some take advantage of it in terms of the clothes they wear, others seek the thrill of dating and sex.

Most can’t cope.”

A possible way out seek sexual partners early.

Oral sex, Srivastava says, is popular because children believe it keeps them virginal and safe from pregnancy. In a paper on “Love and the Sex Life of your Teenagers” in New Adolescent Today—a special issue by the Indian Academy of Paediatrics, published in May— Srivastava writes: “Today’s teenagers are under enormous pressure not only from their hormones and peers, but also from a sexualized pop culture that bombards them with explicit, erotic images on the TV, movies, music videos and Internet. It’s normal for kids to experiment and enact what they’ve seen or heard.” Straight talking and connecting is the only way to get through to them, she says.

Meanwhile, teens are being forced to explore where they fit

in a world they don’t feel equipped to handle. Nasreen (name changed on request) is a 15-year-old Muslim girl from a conservative family in Mumbai.

A hurdler, she has been taking part in the National Games for over seven years. While achievement is important, sport has also given her the space to explore her first personal and sexual freedoms. For years she has watched her classmates date, drink and experiment. “When girls from equally conservative families get boyfriends, you start to think, ‘is something wrong with me?’” she says.

Her best friend Aayushi Sharma, a year older, and a shotputter at the National Games level, is the only girl in her extended family. Sharma describes herself as “loud; I walk and talk like a boy”. She is

often the one to ask a boy out.

It’s her life mission to prove that whatever boys can do, girls can too. Both measure themselves against peers, against TV soaps, films, songs and books that talk of young romance and constantly feel inadequate, despite medals and top scores.

Sex, alcohol and drugs are rampant, say teens, especially in homes where both parents work, and apartments are empty. Sara D’Souza, 18, a student in a Mumbai city college, describes the scene: “It’s so easy. Drugs are available at `100 and almost everyone has an empty apartment to go home and have sex in. My parents are pretty cool with my boyfriend, but they would flip if they knew I had experimented with drugs.”

Kirti Narain, principal of Jai Hind College, Mumbai, says

Success, career, hobbies make for a great crutch away from peer pressure. In Microtrends: The Small Forces behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, co-author Mark J. Penn documents how teens have taken up knitting and crochet as a means to ground themselves. It’s a backto-basics movement. Girls like Nasreen are increasingly turning to the security of systems set up by their family structures. “I am considering wearing a burqa when I travel to college. When I do, I (will) see how men treat you with respect.”

Aryanish Patel, 28, a model who was bullied as a teen, turned counsellor and now works to help children of all ages, “It’s a changing world and a generation of parents who’ve coped with technological changes are conflicted. This age should not be about saving the planet, it should be about saving our children.”

THINKSTOCK

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

LESSONS IN APPRECIATION How do I get my very talented sportsperson son, now 15, to become more aware of, and acknowledge, the nearly invisible contribution of my wife and her father, and sometimes myself, in his successes? They have played chauffeur, dietitian, counsellor, masseur/ masseuse, secretary and emotional supporters to him, but I get the feeling that while he says thanks ma, thanks ‘appa’, etc., he takes the support for granted. He has shown irritation and impatience when the “system” has let him down because of some domestic trouble. I don’t know how to change this without sounding as if I am resenting what we

have been doing for him.

The process of getting any child—particularly one on whom so much adult attention and hard work has been lavished—to be appreciative and grateful should begin much before the age of 15.

Ideally, the seeds for this must be sown early, and not when we see disturbing signs that our children are taking us thoroughly for granted.

Teaching a child to be grateful and appreciative of what the adults around him or her do for him doesn’t mean we get our children to feel “obliged” and “beholden” to us. It really isn’t so much about parents feeling validated and appreciated, it’s more about the child becoming a

better person when he learns to value what he gets from the world of loving adults around him. While children necessarily must feel entitled to your love and the nurturing of their talents, there is a time when they must understand that sometimes the adults in their lives provide this at the cost of their own opportunities and personal goals. It is a part of a child’s maturing and developing process to see his parents, grandparents, godparents and other concerned and loving adults as people in their own right who go out of their way to enable his/her growth.

In our anxiety to have our children become achievers and successful at academics, sports, music or any other special talent, many of us let some simple lessons fall by the wayside. And, in this way, your star son begins to totally take for granted all the little invisible and mundane things taken care of that go into the

Offline: Don’t let your child take your concern for him for granted. making of his career. If we want our children to keep it real, it’s important that we too keep it real. Which means that however talented, busy and “in demand” our children may be, we must expect them to do a little work around the house, take note of the needs of all the people who usually play, as you say, chauffeur, coach,

dietitian, counsellor, etc.

Taking note means the child must sometimes be called upon to do things in return to help with things adults need help with (cellphones and computers, perhaps). Some parents introduce a tiny before-bed or morning ritual of “giving thanks” to everyone real and spiritual who makes

the child’s day possible.

As for the impatience and dismissive behaviour on the part of your 15-year-old about some system not working on one particular day and inconveniencing him, I think, this behaviour is just not acceptable. You will be doing your son a big favour if you pull him off the road for a bit and talk to him about this, reminding him gently that the adults in his life are not his staff. You would do well to introduce even a 10-minute window in his day in which he does something selflessly for his mother or grandfather.

Making a child feel secure and special is one thing, but letting him take it all for granted without any appreciation is bad for his personality development.

Gouri Dange is the author of ABCs of Parenting.

Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011

L7

Style

LOUNGE PICKS

Six ways to dress for fall The Lakmé Fashion Week Winter/Festive 2011 trends to make your own this season B Y V ISESHIKA S HARMA viseshika.s@livemint.com

····························

Heavy metal: Embroidery ran the gamut from folk to French-inspired, but metallic detailing stood out the most. Sidharta Aryan made his fashion week debut last week in Mumbai with a heavily studded collection. Though it didn’t have the vintage-style tailoring you’d expect when the designer is inspired by Steampunk, it did embrace punk elements wholeheartedly. Deux A made a strong impact with sequinned graphic separates.

Waist time: While many accessory designers showcased their work, the standout accessory of the season has to be the belt. Saris have been styled with belts for a couple of seasons now and a lot of bridal wear is shown with little belted bags. But a couple of designers made the waist their focus for fall. Belts at Swapnil Shinde were studded with polished chunks of brass and stone that inspired instant lust, while Paris-based Deux A showed hardwareencrusted harnesses.

Kolkata-based Vizyon too paid homage to the waist with armour-like detailing at the midriff of a flowing gown.

Scarlet wave:

Soft focus: Ombré was an oft-used element in collections this season and, whether in pastels or brights, was used to great effect.

Nachiket Barve’s collection used reds, pinks and black, and paired them with sequins and Ikats for fantastic impact. Aneeth Arora’s Péro featured a panelled dress where shades of brown and greige melted into each other despite the many seams involved.

Wendell Rodricks sent out a draped column in soft washes of peach.

Nothing but the brightest of reds will do this season. Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s voluminous trousers came down the runway in a range of shades but the scarlet ones remain the first to spring to mind.

The hue popped up strategically in Vizyon’s vibrant collection and was spotted over and over again as detailing and in key pieces in several shows over the course of the fashion week.

Manish Malhotra, J.J. Valaya, Drashta, Vivek Kumar and Paromita Banerjee all flashed a bit of scarlet.

Sabyasachi Mukherjee

Sculpture vulture: Several designers attempted sculpted detailing—some pulled it off and some failed spectacularly. Swapnil Shinde’s collection was among the successful ones, with conical PVC detailing draped over feminine silhouettes.

Vizyon was by far the most impressive— art deco detailing constructed in unforgiving satin betrayed absolutely no puckering, a feat most designers aren’t able to manage with a simple satin churidar.

PHOTOGRAPHS

Vizyon PHOTOGRAPHS

COURTESY

LAKMÉ FASHION WEEK

Sidharta Aryan

Nachiket Barve

COURTESY

LAKMÉ FASHION WEEK

Swapnil Shinde

Kallol Datta

Having a bad hair day The fashion week also held a few lessons about how not to accessorize B Y V ISESHIKA S HARMA viseshika.s@livemint.com

···························· veryone has heard that lastditch hair tip at least once—the one about using a light dusting of talcum powder to freshen up tired hair. However, Chennai-based designer Rehane took it to the extreme by liberally dousing her models in Johnson’s Baby Powder. The unmistakable smell wafted as a fine mist of powder enveloped the audience, causing most to scrunch up their

E Tressed up: (from left) At Neeta Lulla, Rehane and Abhi Singh.

Monochrome: Black and white, or nero and eggshell if you’d like to be fancy, were rampant on the runways for fall/winter 2011.

Kallol Datta’s collection featured dresses with folding instructions.

J.J. Valaya’s collection was photography-inspired, starting with black-white and ending in an explosion of digital colour. Sabyasachi Mukherjee gave it a twist by using striking silver embroidery on black in garments as well as on bags, shoes and hairbands that accessorized his collection.

Whether ombré-dyed like the demi-sari at Nikhil Thampi or checkered details at Digvijay Singh, monochrome was used in a big way.

faces, and distracting them thoroughly from the clothes.

Another hair offender was Neeta Lulla. The popular Bollywood and bridal designer went all out on fake braids roped around her models’ heads— some were even reminiscent of Princess Leia, with golden braids looped above their ears.

A few others had golden and velvet braids wrapped around, turban-style. The otherwise pretty look of smoky eyes with gold glitter was completely overshadowed by the hairy story.

While the clothes at Abhi Singh were pretty enough, the hair really stole the show. Carrying on from the collection’s obvious references to the sea, the hair was styled into beautifully sculpted waves that encircled the

head. The lesson here is to not create a beauty look that totally overshadows your clothes, unless that is the point, of course.

One designer who didn’t get carried away by a tidal wave of hairspray was Kallol Datta, who rocks some beautiful tresses himself.

While his models sported demure ponytails, the clothes told another story. Seams sprouted what the designer describes as hair inserts, which make sense when he explains the reason.

“We did a draped collection the prior season,” says Datta, “and used braids as design elements. Using human hair inserts is just a way of taking the material story forward.”

Well, when he puts it that way.

L8

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011

Business Lounge

LOUNGE

MOHANJIT JOLLY

Making the connection B Y D EEPTI C HAUDHARY

The managing director of DFJ India has the ability to get along with anyone—and it reflects in his business

deepti.c@livemint.com

···························· am already 20 minutes late for my appointment with Mohanjit Jolly at his Bangalore office, but Jolly flashes his trademark warm smile and brushes aside my apology, saying he has often been a victim of Bangalore’s snarling traffic.

Dressed in a red and white polo shirt with sleeves rolled up, the 42-year-old looks dramatically different from his counterparts in the venture capital (VC) world. For one, this investor believes in giving people a chance.

“Any person who comes to your door deserves respect. I have the ability to connect with anyone from a baseball bum in Los Angeles to a Fortune 500 company’s chief executive,” he says.

Jolly’s ability to connect with people across the spectrum reflects in the kind of investor companies he has added to the Silicon Valleybased global venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s (DFJ’s) portfolio since he joined in 2007 as managing director of DFJ India.

DFJ’s India portfolio currently has 20 companies, including Cleartrip, Komli Media, Gingersoft Media and iYogi. The VC firm has exited one investment in India so far—Reva Electric Car Co. last year—with a profit, after Mahindra and Mahindra bought a 55.2% stake in the car maker. Jolly refuses to discuss the returns from the Reva deal, saying a fund’s success is measured by its portfolio, not by individual companies.

Globally, DFJ has been investing for over 25 years and has backed at least 600 companies. Last year, DFJ raised $350 million (around `1,575 crore) for its 10th fund. Of this fund, DFJ India manages about $50 million. Early stage investment funds are of particular importance in an emerging market like India, where over 90% of start-ups die prematurely owing to lack of capital and mentoring support.

Emphasizing his personal focus on technology, Jolly has just closed DFJ’s latest deal, which is in the clean technology space.

The deal will be announced in mid-September.

Jolly spent the latter part of his childhood in the US. His family—parents and younger brother—moved from New Delhi to Los Angeles when he was 13, in search of better job prospects.

His father Inderjit Singh Jolly used to work as part of the ground staff at Delhi’s Palam airport (now called Indira Gandhi International Airport). The feisty teenager was infatuated with

I

Right investment: Mohanjit Jolly says failure does not frighten him.

‘I don’t strive for it, but I am not afraid of it.

That’s what makes a VC investor.’

planes and could watch them taking off and landing for hours.

The migration to California was not easy for the family. The US was grappling with unemployment. His mother Baljit Kaur, a trained nurse, worked double shifts to keep the family going. His father faced many rejections in job interviews because he was a Sikh. “I caught him crying several times,” remembers Jolly. Americans live in a state of “ignorance and arrogance”, they don’t want to learn, he adds.

He was singled out too for his patka (the turban that young Sikh boys wear), and his inability to understand the American accent, but Jolly quickly learnt to cope—he studied hard, topped every subject in class and would help his American classmates.

Soon, he was friends with most of them—perhaps the first sign of his ability to “connect with anyone”. His mother became a fulltime nurse, while his dad got a job at a bank, where he rose to the post of a loan officer.

Jolly recalls the first American classic he was introduced to: a McDonald’s burger, which he was quick to dislike because of the “strange meat smells”. The quick service restaurant chain is still not his “go to” destination.

Yet, the Jollys stayed on in the US because they saw opportunity.

“In 1983, everything was big there—cars, buildings, even people were big. There was 24x7 colour TV. Capitalism at its best got the best of us,” he says.

For someone who was so fascinated by planes, a BS in aeronautics and astronautics, and a master’s in the field of space propulsion from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), were perhaps natural choices. After his master’s in 1993, he joined Bostonbased Itek Optical Systems (then a Fortune 500 company) as a structural engineer. But he was yearning to be on the business side and two years later, approached the chief executive of the company, requesting a change. He got it, and was part of the team which clinched a $100 million contract for spy cameras. It was then that he began thinking about getting into business school.

But with loans to pay off from his MIT days, Jolly was not sure if he could manage without his salary. Around this time, he accompanied a friend to an interview at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

As luck would have it, the dean of admissions was excited about Jolly’s background and asked

IN PARENTHESIS Mohanjit Jolly loves collecting things that don’t occupy too much space or cost too much money.

He has a collection of currency notes from across the globe, as well as memorabilia from the two World Wars, which have always fascinated him. He also collects stamps and medals. His most prized possession is a piece of the Berlin Wall, which he acquired when it came down in 1989. Jolly also collects shot glasses, though he does not use them much, and has an assortment of over 400 such glasses from all over the world. He is not overtly religious, but takes his children to the ‘gurdwara’ every week or two.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

him to apply. “I applied and got a scholarship. By then, I was pretty sure that I wanted to do something related to entrepreneurship and technology.”

After his MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA in 1998, he joined Mattel, Inc. as a strategic planning manager. The toy company was developing technology that could be embedded in the toys of the future. The turning point came when he got a call to join investment banking firm Garage Technology Ventures in mid-1999.

This took him on a different career path. “We were supposed to go public. As the markets were bad, we couldn’t. But as we had raised capital, we shifted from being an investment bank to a seed fund,” says Jolly.

When Garage was at the end of the first fund, Jolly visited India to see if there was any interest among limited partners (corporate houses) here for investment funds.

While here, he was invited to an ISB/TiE (Indian School of Business/The Indus Entrepreneurs) event in Hyderabad. Sitting next to him was Raj Atluru, a managing director with DFJ. Atluru and Jolly got talking and three months later, Jolly joined DFJ and shifted back to India with his wife and children.

“My DNA is early stage investing, which comes down to the gut,” he says. “In early stage, there is no data to go back to and cross-check things. You look into the eyes of entrepreneurs and ask if they can execute, is the market opportunity large enough?”

While early stage investments, or investments in start-ups less than five years old, will always remain close to Jolly’s heart, DFJ will now also start scouting for growth stage deals in India. DFJ Growth Fund, a partner fund that focuses on growth stage deals in the US, has started looking for a pipeline in India and has identified at least two-three technology companies with an average annual revenue of more than $10 million, the investment threshold for DFJ Growth.

Jolly, who has seen the Indian VC market developing over the last four years, says investing in both early and growth stage has become difficult, with deals getting more competitive. But despite the competition, high valuations and lack of fast-growing companies, he is hopeful of creating “gems” in his portfolio. A few are shaping up really well, he says. “There is nothing on the exit side that I can discuss right now, but we will be in good form with some of them.”

When not scouting for deals and mentoring start-ups, Jolly likes to spend time with wife Vini and their three children—two girls and a boy aged 11, 8 and 7, respectively.

He travels at least once a week domestically, so he is zealously possessive about his weekends.

“This is the time to see them grow,” says Jolly. Besides domestic travel, he goes to the US four times a year to meet DFJ’s global partners, besides visiting Dubai and South-East Asia for conferences and conclaves.

Jolly is a romantic at heart. He proposed to his wife at the stroke of midnight on 31 December 1997, at Half Moon Bay (a coastal city in San Mateo County, California), after they had been dating for a year. Thankfully, she said yes, chuckles Jolly. “She is my support system,” he says, adding that his Gucci-loving wife is still trying to get him to wear designer brands.

“I refuse to wear anything that I cannot spell or pronounce.”

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011

L9

Play

LOUNGE ON THE GO

Travelling cinema With the right gadgets, you can turn any smartphone into an entertainment centre B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· ost mobile phones today can store movies, allowing you to watch them on the go, but the tiny screen and tinny speakers really kill the experience. A 1-inch Gandalf squeaking, “You will not pass!”, is not impressive. With the right accessories though, turning your mobile phone into a portable entertainment station is easy enough, and doesn’t require any technological expertise.

M

The big picture A smartphone or tablet already has a powerful processor, and many can even play high-definition (HD) video without a problem. While this handles the portable part of the equation, there are a few more things that are needed.

First up is the screen. Even the biggest smartphones are only 4 inches diagonally, and tablets, up to 10 inches. Watching a movie on these screens is not a great experience, and for a group of people, completely useless. Using a pico projector, you can get a big screen that you can carry in your pocket.

We recommend: Samsung SP­H03, `14,000

An inch-and-a-half in size, the SP-H03 is rated at 30 lumens and projects a bright, high-contrast screen, reaching a size of 80 inches from a distance of 8ft.

It also has a rechargeable battery that works for almost 2 hours, making it even more portable. The lamp is rated for an impressive 30,000 hours of use.

To use, you need a phone with a video out (most phones support this, but require you to buy the cable separately) that you can just plug into the projector directly, and then run the movie on your hand-held.

Perfect pitch Second, the sound on smartphones and tablets is usually

worse than the screen.

Almost all tablets place their speakers in strange corners, leaving them even less useful. While some of them have good sound quality, none can deliver volume. A good set of portable speakers will set that right. The ideal option is wireless speakers, so you don’t need extra cables.

Seagate GoFlex Satellite

Samsung SP-H03

Tata DoCoMo Wi-Fi Hub

We recommend: Creative D200 Bluetooth Wireless Speaker, `7,499

There are cheaper portable speaker options such as the Logitech Z120 (`1,025), but wireless speakers that connect using Bluetooth allow easy speaker set-up. Connecting them to the phone is as easy as syncing a hands-free set. Creative’s D200 speakers are a good option, offering great clarity at the price. The D200 delivers 18W RMS, loud enough for watching a movie or listening to music.

ETO Brute

Easy backup A few other gadgets can help take the experience from good to great. The first is a Wi-Fi hard disk. A portable device fills up quickly, and it’s impossible to carry your entire library of books, movies and music with you. To get around this limitation, a new generation of Wi-Fi hard drives, which can send files directly to your smartphone without needing a computer as a bridge, are now available.

We recommend: Seagate GoFlex Satellite, `10,000

Smartphones and tablets don’t offer more than 64 GB memory.

This sounds like a lot till you start filling it up. The Seagate GoFlex Satellite is a 500 GB hard

disk drive (HDD) that can hold around 300 HD movies, and stream them to up to three devices connected by Wi-Fi simultaneously. The GoFlex is compatible with both iOS and Android devices, and comes with a free app to access the data on the HDD. It’s simple to set up, and connects to a new device effortlessly.

Non­stop power The next step is to get a battery backup. Smartphone batteries can handle movies, but possibly not after a day of calls. The battery will always die during the best part of the movie.

That’s practically a universal rule. Portable batteries are sim-

ple inverters—you charge them up at home, and when your phone is low on battery, you simply plug it into the battery pack.

We recommend: ETO 2000/ 3000/3800/Brute, `2,450/2,990/ 3,590/7,450

It adds 4/6/7/12 hours, respectively, of power backup to your smartphone or tablet while you’re on the move. Instead of desperately looking for a power point to plug into when the low-battery indicator pops up, the ETO is a power point you can carry. It is the most compact range of battery backups, and no battery offers backup to match the ETO Brute. These are simple solu-

Creative D200 Bluetooth Wireless Speaker

tions with multiple jacks to charge a wide range of devices.

Internet everywhere

`750/1,000 for 2 GB/5 GB

The final option is wireless connectivity. Since 3G in India is a relatively recent phenomenon, many people with smartphones and tablets don’t have 3G models. If you want to stream music or movies on the move though, a 3G connection can make a big difference. Instead of changing your handset just for this, buying a 3G to Wi-Fi hub makes a lot of sense.

If you don’t have a 3G phone or tablet, this device will act as a bridge between your Wi-Fi and 3G. DoCoMo has a higher entry cost than others but offers the best combination of speed (7.2 Mbps) and usage charges. All other cellular networks also offer options, and while DoCoMo has the best entry price, they all offer deals to existing customers, so you should try and find the best deals where possible.

We recommend: Tata DoCoMo Wi­Fi Hub, `5,999 plus monthly

GAME REVIEW | FRUIT NINJA KINECT

Slicing and dicing The latest ‘Kinect’ game will get you excited, but it is unlikely to keep you hooked B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

··························· ruit Ninja began as an iPhone game with a silly concept. You were a ninja who was swiping, slashing and committing all kinds of violence—against fruit. The silliness of the concept in no way diminished the fun that was to be had from the game, and it quickly became one of the top 10 games on the iPhone, Android phones and tablets.

As a `50 download on the app store, it was successful, but Microsoft is hoping that the Kinect camera will add enough value to the game to make it worth paying 800 MS Points (approx. `750) to download.

From a technical perspective,

F

Microsoft and Halfbrick Studios have created something impressive. When you stand in front of the camera, your shadow appears on screen. A friend can take over from you at any point, and the shadow reflects this change. As you move around and wave your hands to play the game, the shadow moves in tandem, and the movements are faithful to your own.

The game, on the other hand, remains essentially unchanged.

Fruits fly up wildly from the bottom of the screen, and you need to slash them before they fall back. Miss three fruits, and the game ends. The only change is the addition of one extra mode, where two people can play side by side.

The shadow shows you where your body is, and allows you to slash with great accuracy, and as the game picks up speed, you’re going to be flailing fast with both hands and even moving around to get just the right slice.

Fruit Ninja Kinect is one of the most energetic and enjoyable games available for the Kinect since its launch in December. It’s easy to lose yourself in the silly, cartoonlike graphics and audio (which is made up of Adam West-era Batman onomatopoeia).

The game, which requires some violent moves, is pretty tiring. The two-player mode is a little more physical than was probably intended. You will end up knocking elbows and probably even “accidentally” slapping the people you play with. Making sure that there’s nothing, and no one, near the area you’re standing is a good idea.

Fruit Ninja Kinect has the potential to be an amazing party game. There’s something

High intensity: The game looks silly but is energetic and enjoyable. approachable about it—the concept is really focused on just one core mechanic and it doesn’t add any complexity except by increasing the amount of fruit being flung.

Watching the game for half a minute is enough to learn everything you need to know about it. Coupled with the bright and colourful visuals, it’s easy to see why many, particularly children, will really enjoy it.

While the technology behind the Kinect turned a lot of heads, few games have been able to use it effectively. Before Fruit Ninja Kinect, the only other games that really stood out were Dance Central and Child of Eden. More games are expected for the new system in a few months, but for now these three games are the best reason to own a Kinect.

On the other hand, there is no depth to the game. If you’ve

played it once, you’ve seen everything there is to it. The different game modes are all similar—the zen mode takes away the bombs, while the arcade mode is a timed mode with unlimited lives. The essence remains unchanged.

That the game is a wellcrafted use of the Kinect technology is undeniable. Fruit Ninja has a limited repertoire, but the few things that it does, it does well. It is a lot of fun, far more so than it was on phones.

But the real question is whether that is enough for you.

Luckily, you don’t need to pay anything to experience Fruit Ninja Kinect. You can download the free demo, and if after some time you’re still having fun with it, then go ahead and unlock the full version with all the game modes. Even if you get bored with it in a week, a week’s fun at no expense is a win-win situation.

Platform: Xbox 360/ Xbox Live download Cost: `750

L10 COVER

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COVER L11

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Flyover country: (clockwise from extreme left) Artisans have been working in Lal­ baug’s Ganesh workshops since June; posters of the film Moryaa, which is playing to packed houses in Lalbaug’s Bharatmata Cinema; the Lal Shah Dargah in Tavripada may be one of the origins of the name Lalbaug; and the newly opened Lalbaug flyover stands 7.1m above the neighbourhood.

COMMUNITIES

MEMORIES OF AN

ELEPHANT

In a historic Mumbai neighbourhood, the start of the festive season brings the layers of an ongoing urban transformation into sharp focus

B Y S UPRIYA N AIR

supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· albaug is staying open late these days. Sometime in early June, the first murti shalas, or idol workshops, raised their makeshift studios along Sane Guruji Road and drove in a few hundred plaster-of-Paris models of Ganesh, designed, moulded and spray-painted with uniform colours: peaches-andcream for the skin tone, white for the dhoti and stole, and a deep, matte crimson for the crown.

Now the workshops are engaged in the business of “touch-up”. From 9 in the morning to 1 in the night, artisans work on the idols, burnishing the crown with a final coat of gold, gently breathing red and purple glitter into the tilaks, sticking on diamanté work to embellish ornaments. On the pavements in front of the clothing stores, makeshift racks of shiny, sequinned fabric billow over the traffic on Ambedkar Road. The flower marts begin to work longer and longer after dinner, making kanthis—short garlands—of darba grass, particular to this season.

Lalbaug, even more than other parts of insomniac Mumbai, has a history of staying awake. For a century, it housed men and women who worked in Girangaon, the Marathi term for the mill district of south-central Mumbai. As the machines worked around the clock, so did the people. Homes, canteens, bars and theatres stayed open to serve each returning shift. Decades after the industry’s decline, central Lalbaug remains a bustling, all-day neighbourhood of the sort that European urban planners have begun to praise for their “mixed utility”, where shops, businesses and homes coexist to create a hybrid, fluid urban space.

L

It is much prized by property developers; it is here that the world’s tallest residential tower (on completion, according to the Lodha Group), World One, is coming up on the 17.5 acres of land that used to be Srinivas Mills.

As the monsoon gears up for its last onslaught, and Mohammed Ali Road and Bhendi Bazaar to the south take a breather after the festivities of Ramzan and Eid, the neighbourhood will be plunging into its own whirlpool: the public celebrations of Ganeshotsav.

It is a time of carnivalesque devotion for the area’s Hindu residents, and millions of people who pour in to worship at Lalbaug-Chinchpokli’s sarvajanik or public Ganesh idols. It is a time of pop-up markets, bruising crowds and dramatic political displays. It is also a time when the ongoing transformation of the mill district comes into sharp focus.

The historic Bharatmata Cinema, which gives the new flyover over the neighbourhood its name, has just begun to play a new Marathi film, Avadhoot Gupte’s `1.5 crore extravaganza Moryaa; it is the story of rival Ganesh mandals and their conflict with the developers who want to take over their chawls.

This is a recurring theme in Mumbai life. Communities in dilapidated or crowded buildings remain eager for change, but wary of being deprived of their rights over areas they have claimed and tended for generations. In one of the world’s most frenetic property markets, where an annual 50,000 houses a year are built against a minimum demand of 1.2 million, tenants of old properties frequently find themselves at cross-purposes with developers. Perhaps nowhere has this been more acute than in Girangaon.

Like many things in Mumbai,

the story of its most famous idol, Lalbaugcha Raja (the king of Lalbaug), also begins with a consuming interest in real estate. In Peru Chawl, a multi-religious settlement of Maharashtrians who migrated to the city in search of work, a group of small traders found themselves locked in conflict with an intransigent landlord to whom they appealed for space to build a market for their wares.

In 1934, having won the land, a portion was dedicated to the annual Sarvajanik Ganesh Mandal, as thanksgiving for the granting of their wish.

Since then, the number of people drawn by the navas, the power of wish-fulfilment imputed to this Ganesh, has grown “from thousands to lakhs to crores”, the Mandal’s secretary, Sudhir Salvi, says. “We are re-routing the queues this year to keep devotees moving continually. You used to be able to sit before the idol for a short while and pray, but this year you will have to keep walking. It will help us to cut down time spent waiting in line; in the last few years we’ve had average waiting times of 24-30 hours.”

Hours?

“Hours.”

There’s never a dull moment.

The vertical height of the new flyover was raised to 7.1m, just to accommodate Lalbaugcha Raja’s visarjan procession from underneath. Residents from Shraddha Co-operative Housing Society in the vicinity recently named in a complaint about police harassment during the 10-day celebrations, an indignity the Raja has never been said to suffer before (although the police did arrest organizers in the 1940s more than once for excessive anti-colonialism. In 1947, Lalbaugcha Raja went to ritual immersion dressed as Jawaharlal Nehru). The Mandal has been deep in talks about

security concerns with municipal authorities, doubly serious since the bombings of 13 July. Already heavily policed, the doubling of CCTV cameras will make the Ganesh Maidan and its surrounding areas a panopticon.

As with the crowds, so with the money. Last year, the organizers reported that their collections from the festival approached `17 crore; this year, the Mandal has insured its Ganesh for `14 crore (up from `5 crore last year).

Historians like Maria Misra and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar have written about how Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s fostering of the public, nationalist gatherings of Ganeshotsav actually served to

supplant the vibrant Muharram tolis of the early 20th century, in which both Hindus and Muslims participated. The template for public Ganesh celebrations, with their devotional chants and political performances, borrowed greatly from the rhythms and energy of the street Muharram processions of old.

Today, when you exit the Lalbaugcha Raja complex on to the fragrant Chivda Galli, past the automated masala-pounding machines and the dingy kitchens in which chivda is mixed in miniature cement mixers, the centuries-old Chand Shah Vali Dargah stands as a quiet testimony to the layers of Lalbaug society.

Even Girangaon’s history of communal clashes could not prepare the area for the riots of 1992-93, a time when Lalbaug’s history of active Communism, mixed occasionally with Congress-led nationalism, had completely given way to the divisive politics of the Shiv Sena. The Chand Shah Vali Dargah was destroyed in the violence.

“It was a time when Muslims fled from their old neighbourhoods to other parts of the city,” points out Neera Adarkar, architect and urban researcher, and the editor of a recent anthology, The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life. The dargah itself has been cared for by a Hindu family, the

Gaikwads, for many years; they continue to serve the rebuilt shrine today.

Shriti Tyagi, who does history walks through Lalbaug in the month leading up to Ganesh Chaturthi, leads visitors through the mossy lanes of the Tavripada settlement, to a shrine that may be even older: the Lal Shah Dargah, said to be the tomb of Hazrat Chand Shah’s elder brother. Like the neighbouring deity of the Ganesh Maidan, these dargahs too have long been the repository of devotees’ mannats, or wishes.

“One story about the origin of the name ‘Lalbaug’ goes that it was called after this dargah,” Tyagi says. But concrete evidence

is difficult to find. Tyagi says it is equally plausible that “Lal Baug” was the local name for a sprawling estate owned by an old Wadia, from the shipbuilding family which built what is now the Parsi colony of Nowroz Baug. Both Nowroz Baug and Tavripada currently stand in the shadows of residential complexes (“towers”, as everyone in Lalbaug calls them), closing in on their skyline. Even these are not as homogenous as they look from the road: the 20-storey Hilla Towers is built in the compound of the MJ Wadia Fire Temple.

The towers might yet achieve ubiquity. “The mill areas further up north were what you might call ‘islands of opulence,’” Adarkar says. “Taking them over was much more dramatic because they were mill lands rebuilt completely. Lalbaug has always been a more residential area, so change is slower to manifest. Many people in the chawls think redevelopment is inevitable—some will welcome it, others object. But in one way or another, everyone is engaged in the process of transformation.”

Some older houses have already crumbled: One of the small residences bordering the Ganesh Gully Maidan, home to another famous local idol, is being pulled down for a tower even as the art directors of Ganesh Gallichya Raja construct a replica of Karnataka’s Mallikarjuna temple to install their divine guest.

The site of the old Hanuman Theatre, once Maharashtra’s prime destination for its thriving Tamasha troupes, is a community function hall these days. It undergoes another change during the monsoon, when it becomes a workshop for makhars, elaborate thrones for idols built out of thermocol. In the humid afternoons, the scent of roses from the open windows of the Chand Shah Vali

Dargah next door, still drifts in.

In other buildings, transition occurs visibly in stages. The developers who bought over the dilapidated Ganesh Talkies on Sane Guruji Road in 1997 have begun, of late, to rent out premises in the old theatre to Ganesh workshops.

The murtikars (idol makers) raise the musty shutters of the main gate and square off their portions with marquee cloth, the kind used for weddings, when they move in.

The heavy wooden doors, some of which still have brass handles labelled “PULL”, are heaved open.

Red carpets are laid down, and the theatre is filled with fluorescent light from bulbs strung low along the corridors. In the former cinema hall, now recognizable only because of the massive wooden doors with cracked EXIT signs dangling above them, hundreds of Ganesh idols made by the Vaikars of Satara sit encased in plastic, silently facing a nonexistent screen.

Business starts slowly on weekdays, when Mumbai rushes past to work in the mornings. On the newly opened Lalbaug flyover, a 2.1km-long feat of public engineering that snakes above the locality, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has recently affixed showerheads. The flyover is so high above the street that the rains pour off it on to the neighbourhood below in torrents; bad for vehicles, worse for business.

The engineers are hoping the sprinklers will minimize damage.

In the evenings, traffic flows slowly back past the workshops, and people stop to place orders.

Shree Siddhi Vallabha Arts, two pillars down from the Vaikar Bandhu, have already sold their initial batch of 2,500 idols, transported in from Pen in western Maharashtra. But the orders keep coming at this late stage, no dif-

ferent from last-minute festival shopping anywhere in the world.

Shree Siddhi Vallabha Arts is new to the business. “I’m not the murtikar,” says Kiran Jadhav, whose name is on the workshop’s card as “proprietor murtikar”.

“I’m from here,” he says, indicating the neighbourhood around him. “This is just something I have wanted to do for years.”

With six friends from the area, Jadhav rented out an L-shaped passage at Ganesh Talkies’ main gate, at `1.5 lakh for the quarter, and started small. They are learning on the job, Jadhav says; maybe next year they will make more idols for last-minute sales, the way more established murtikars do.

“Pivlet chamki aahe (Can we get the yellow in sparkles)?”. Customers weave through the large steel bookshelves, looking for styles (seated, standing, reclining, Krishna-hued—even, at the nearby Siddhesh Shilpakala Mandir, holding the Cricket World Cup). They take pictures on their cameraphones; mothers call back after seeing the messages, and tell them which one to reserve.

Their idol makers in Pen began work after Dussehra last year: When the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay high court passed an order this February banning the use of plaster-of-Paris in idol making (because of environmental damage), it was too late to do anything; almost every big murtikar was 70% through with the year’s work.

“I’ll put yours near the door if I can,” Jadhav assures one buyer.

“But it’s each man for himself on Ganesh Chaturthi; you’ll be in the middle of a big rush.”

Outside, the food stalls have fired up their stoves. Others are more quotidian, but still delicious.

In the mornings, the batata-wada sellers set up their carts; in the afternoons, the sour-battered dosa

makers; in the evenings, the purveyors of the fiery cabbage-inSzechuan-sauce entrée known as Chinese bhel; at all times, the tea sellers with the tang of ginger rising from their saucepans.

At this time of the year, Lalbaug might be Mumbai’s best-smelling workplace. Some aromas, like the kesari sheera made under the winding staircase of the Lalbaugcha Raja Mandal offices, are sanctified. Local legends Laadusamrat (literally, the Emperor of Laddoos) Stores and Restaurant, diagonally opposite Bharatmata, are turning out the first modaks of the season. And on Sunday mornings, the smells of flour and coconut from open kitchen windows have begun to mingle in the air with the chalky smell of rained-on timber and delicately flaking plaster.

“It comes down to how tenants negotiate when they get together,” Adarkar says, of the buildings redolent with these Old Bombay smells. “If there is even a little organization, it’s possible for people to come together and raise the finances to develop their buildings themselves.” She says it is difficult.

Most cooperatives may have the wherewithal to negotiate, “but not everyone in the largely workingclass population here is entrepreneurial, or willing to take risks.”

Meanwhile, the people slow the towers down; Ganesh holds on to Lalbaug as it is for a little longer.

Perhaps Ganesh Talkies will even be here next year, and the year after, for Shree Siddhi Vallabha, and the Vaikar brothers, and Tanvi Arts and the others, to return to.

“Who knows when this redevelopment is going to happen, or even if it’s going to happen?” Jadhav says.

“You want to talk about change? But what in the world doesn’t change?”

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Flyover country: (clockwise from extreme left) Artisans have been working in Lal­ baug’s Ganesh workshops since June; posters of the film Moryaa, which is playing to packed houses in Lalbaug’s Bharatmata Cinema; the Lal Shah Dargah in Tavripada may be one of the origins of the name Lalbaug; and the newly opened Lalbaug flyover stands 7.1m above the neighbourhood.

COMMUNITIES

MEMORIES OF AN

ELEPHANT

In a historic Mumbai neighbourhood, the start of the festive season brings the layers of an ongoing urban transformation into sharp focus

B Y S UPRIYA N AIR

supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· albaug is staying open late these days. Sometime in early June, the first murti shalas, or idol workshops, raised their makeshift studios along Sane Guruji Road and drove in a few hundred plaster-of-Paris models of Ganesh, designed, moulded and spray-painted with uniform colours: peaches-andcream for the skin tone, white for the dhoti and stole, and a deep, matte crimson for the crown.

Now the workshops are engaged in the business of “touch-up”. From 9 in the morning to 1 in the night, artisans work on the idols, burnishing the crown with a final coat of gold, gently breathing red and purple glitter into the tilaks, sticking on diamanté work to embellish ornaments. On the pavements in front of the clothing stores, makeshift racks of shiny, sequinned fabric billow over the traffic on Ambedkar Road. The flower marts begin to work longer and longer after dinner, making kanthis—short garlands—of darba grass, particular to this season.

Lalbaug, even more than other parts of insomniac Mumbai, has a history of staying awake. For a century, it housed men and women who worked in Girangaon, the Marathi term for the mill district of south-central Mumbai. As the machines worked around the clock, so did the people. Homes, canteens, bars and theatres stayed open to serve each returning shift. Decades after the industry’s decline, central Lalbaug remains a bustling, all-day neighbourhood of the sort that European urban planners have begun to praise for their “mixed utility”, where shops, businesses and homes coexist to create a hybrid, fluid urban space.

L

It is much prized by property developers; it is here that the world’s tallest residential tower (on completion, according to the Lodha Group), World One, is coming up on the 17.5 acres of land that used to be Srinivas Mills.

As the monsoon gears up for its last onslaught, and Mohammed Ali Road and Bhendi Bazaar to the south take a breather after the festivities of Ramzan and Eid, the neighbourhood will be plunging into its own whirlpool: the public celebrations of Ganeshotsav.

It is a time of carnivalesque devotion for the area’s Hindu residents, and millions of people who pour in to worship at Lalbaug-Chinchpokli’s sarvajanik or public Ganesh idols. It is a time of pop-up markets, bruising crowds and dramatic political displays. It is also a time when the ongoing transformation of the mill district comes into sharp focus.

The historic Bharatmata Cinema, which gives the new flyover over the neighbourhood its name, has just begun to play a new Marathi film, Avadhoot Gupte’s `1.5 crore extravaganza Moryaa; it is the story of rival Ganesh mandals and their conflict with the developers who want to take over their chawls.

This is a recurring theme in Mumbai life. Communities in dilapidated or crowded buildings remain eager for change, but wary of being deprived of their rights over areas they have claimed and tended for generations. In one of the world’s most frenetic property markets, where an annual 50,000 houses a year are built against a minimum demand of 1.2 million, tenants of old properties frequently find themselves at cross-purposes with developers. Perhaps nowhere has this been more acute than in Girangaon.

Like many things in Mumbai,

the story of its most famous idol, Lalbaugcha Raja (the king of Lalbaug), also begins with a consuming interest in real estate. In Peru Chawl, a multi-religious settlement of Maharashtrians who migrated to the city in search of work, a group of small traders found themselves locked in conflict with an intransigent landlord to whom they appealed for space to build a market for their wares.

In 1934, having won the land, a portion was dedicated to the annual Sarvajanik Ganesh Mandal, as thanksgiving for the granting of their wish.

Since then, the number of people drawn by the navas, the power of wish-fulfilment imputed to this Ganesh, has grown “from thousands to lakhs to crores”, the Mandal’s secretary, Sudhir Salvi, says. “We are re-routing the queues this year to keep devotees moving continually. You used to be able to sit before the idol for a short while and pray, but this year you will have to keep walking. It will help us to cut down time spent waiting in line; in the last few years we’ve had average waiting times of 24-30 hours.”

Hours?

“Hours.”

There’s never a dull moment.

The vertical height of the new flyover was raised to 7.1m, just to accommodate Lalbaugcha Raja’s visarjan procession from underneath. Residents from Shraddha Co-operative Housing Society in the vicinity recently named in a complaint about police harassment during the 10-day celebrations, an indignity the Raja has never been said to suffer before (although the police did arrest organizers in the 1940s more than once for excessive anti-colonialism. In 1947, Lalbaugcha Raja went to ritual immersion dressed as Jawaharlal Nehru). The Mandal has been deep in talks about

security concerns with municipal authorities, doubly serious since the bombings of 13 July. Already heavily policed, the doubling of CCTV cameras will make the Ganesh Maidan and its surrounding areas a panopticon.

As with the crowds, so with the money. Last year, the organizers reported that their collections from the festival approached `17 crore; this year, the Mandal has insured its Ganesh for `14 crore (up from `5 crore last year).

Historians like Maria Misra and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar have written about how Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s fostering of the public, nationalist gatherings of Ganeshotsav actually served to

supplant the vibrant Muharram tolis of the early 20th century, in which both Hindus and Muslims participated. The template for public Ganesh celebrations, with their devotional chants and political performances, borrowed greatly from the rhythms and energy of the street Muharram processions of old.

Today, when you exit the Lalbaugcha Raja complex on to the fragrant Chivda Galli, past the automated masala-pounding machines and the dingy kitchens in which chivda is mixed in miniature cement mixers, the centuries-old Chand Shah Vali Dargah stands as a quiet testimony to the layers of Lalbaug society.

Even Girangaon’s history of communal clashes could not prepare the area for the riots of 1992-93, a time when Lalbaug’s history of active Communism, mixed occasionally with Congress-led nationalism, had completely given way to the divisive politics of the Shiv Sena. The Chand Shah Vali Dargah was destroyed in the violence.

“It was a time when Muslims fled from their old neighbourhoods to other parts of the city,” points out Neera Adarkar, architect and urban researcher, and the editor of a recent anthology, The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life. The dargah itself has been cared for by a Hindu family, the

Gaikwads, for many years; they continue to serve the rebuilt shrine today.

Shriti Tyagi, who does history walks through Lalbaug in the month leading up to Ganesh Chaturthi, leads visitors through the mossy lanes of the Tavripada settlement, to a shrine that may be even older: the Lal Shah Dargah, said to be the tomb of Hazrat Chand Shah’s elder brother. Like the neighbouring deity of the Ganesh Maidan, these dargahs too have long been the repository of devotees’ mannats, or wishes.

“One story about the origin of the name ‘Lalbaug’ goes that it was called after this dargah,” Tyagi says. But concrete evidence

is difficult to find. Tyagi says it is equally plausible that “Lal Baug” was the local name for a sprawling estate owned by an old Wadia, from the shipbuilding family which built what is now the Parsi colony of Nowroz Baug. Both Nowroz Baug and Tavripada currently stand in the shadows of residential complexes (“towers”, as everyone in Lalbaug calls them), closing in on their skyline. Even these are not as homogenous as they look from the road: the 20-storey Hilla Towers is built in the compound of the MJ Wadia Fire Temple.

The towers might yet achieve ubiquity. “The mill areas further up north were what you might call ‘islands of opulence,’” Adarkar says. “Taking them over was much more dramatic because they were mill lands rebuilt completely. Lalbaug has always been a more residential area, so change is slower to manifest. Many people in the chawls think redevelopment is inevitable—some will welcome it, others object. But in one way or another, everyone is engaged in the process of transformation.”

Some older houses have already crumbled: One of the small residences bordering the Ganesh Gully Maidan, home to another famous local idol, is being pulled down for a tower even as the art directors of Ganesh Gallichya Raja construct a replica of Karnataka’s Mallikarjuna temple to install their divine guest.

The site of the old Hanuman Theatre, once Maharashtra’s prime destination for its thriving Tamasha troupes, is a community function hall these days. It undergoes another change during the monsoon, when it becomes a workshop for makhars, elaborate thrones for idols built out of thermocol. In the humid afternoons, the scent of roses from the open windows of the Chand Shah Vali

Dargah next door, still drifts in.

In other buildings, transition occurs visibly in stages. The developers who bought over the dilapidated Ganesh Talkies on Sane Guruji Road in 1997 have begun, of late, to rent out premises in the old theatre to Ganesh workshops.

The murtikars (idol makers) raise the musty shutters of the main gate and square off their portions with marquee cloth, the kind used for weddings, when they move in.

The heavy wooden doors, some of which still have brass handles labelled “PULL”, are heaved open.

Red carpets are laid down, and the theatre is filled with fluorescent light from bulbs strung low along the corridors. In the former cinema hall, now recognizable only because of the massive wooden doors with cracked EXIT signs dangling above them, hundreds of Ganesh idols made by the Vaikars of Satara sit encased in plastic, silently facing a nonexistent screen.

Business starts slowly on weekdays, when Mumbai rushes past to work in the mornings. On the newly opened Lalbaug flyover, a 2.1km-long feat of public engineering that snakes above the locality, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has recently affixed showerheads. The flyover is so high above the street that the rains pour off it on to the neighbourhood below in torrents; bad for vehicles, worse for business.

The engineers are hoping the sprinklers will minimize damage.

In the evenings, traffic flows slowly back past the workshops, and people stop to place orders.

Shree Siddhi Vallabha Arts, two pillars down from the Vaikar Bandhu, have already sold their initial batch of 2,500 idols, transported in from Pen in western Maharashtra. But the orders keep coming at this late stage, no dif-

ferent from last-minute festival shopping anywhere in the world.

Shree Siddhi Vallabha Arts is new to the business. “I’m not the murtikar,” says Kiran Jadhav, whose name is on the workshop’s card as “proprietor murtikar”.

“I’m from here,” he says, indicating the neighbourhood around him. “This is just something I have wanted to do for years.”

With six friends from the area, Jadhav rented out an L-shaped passage at Ganesh Talkies’ main gate, at `1.5 lakh for the quarter, and started small. They are learning on the job, Jadhav says; maybe next year they will make more idols for last-minute sales, the way more established murtikars do.

“Pivlet chamki aahe (Can we get the yellow in sparkles)?”. Customers weave through the large steel bookshelves, looking for styles (seated, standing, reclining, Krishna-hued—even, at the nearby Siddhesh Shilpakala Mandir, holding the Cricket World Cup). They take pictures on their cameraphones; mothers call back after seeing the messages, and tell them which one to reserve.

Their idol makers in Pen began work after Dussehra last year: When the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay high court passed an order this February banning the use of plaster-of-Paris in idol making (because of environmental damage), it was too late to do anything; almost every big murtikar was 70% through with the year’s work.

“I’ll put yours near the door if I can,” Jadhav assures one buyer.

“But it’s each man for himself on Ganesh Chaturthi; you’ll be in the middle of a big rush.”

Outside, the food stalls have fired up their stoves. Others are more quotidian, but still delicious.

In the mornings, the batata-wada sellers set up their carts; in the afternoons, the sour-battered dosa

makers; in the evenings, the purveyors of the fiery cabbage-inSzechuan-sauce entrée known as Chinese bhel; at all times, the tea sellers with the tang of ginger rising from their saucepans.

At this time of the year, Lalbaug might be Mumbai’s best-smelling workplace. Some aromas, like the kesari sheera made under the winding staircase of the Lalbaugcha Raja Mandal offices, are sanctified. Local legends Laadusamrat (literally, the Emperor of Laddoos) Stores and Restaurant, diagonally opposite Bharatmata, are turning out the first modaks of the season. And on Sunday mornings, the smells of flour and coconut from open kitchen windows have begun to mingle in the air with the chalky smell of rained-on timber and delicately flaking plaster.

“It comes down to how tenants negotiate when they get together,” Adarkar says, of the buildings redolent with these Old Bombay smells. “If there is even a little organization, it’s possible for people to come together and raise the finances to develop their buildings themselves.” She says it is difficult.

Most cooperatives may have the wherewithal to negotiate, “but not everyone in the largely workingclass population here is entrepreneurial, or willing to take risks.”

Meanwhile, the people slow the towers down; Ganesh holds on to Lalbaug as it is for a little longer.

Perhaps Ganesh Talkies will even be here next year, and the year after, for Shree Siddhi Vallabha, and the Vaikar brothers, and Tanvi Arts and the others, to return to.

“Who knows when this redevelopment is going to happen, or even if it’s going to happen?” Jadhav says.

“You want to talk about change? But what in the world doesn’t change?”

L12

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE DIY

How to store basil Basil is happiest when it’s treated like a delicate hot­ house flower. As soon as you get your bunch home, trim about K inch off the stems, put the basil in a glass of cold water and put a plastic bag over the set­up.

Leaving plenty of air around the basil leaves, tie the bag closed around the glass with twine or a rubber band and refrigerate; change the water daily. Encased in its greenhouse, really fresh basil will keep for five days or more.

Alternatively, you can wrap the trimmed stems in a wet paper towel and store the basil in a sealed plastic bag in the refrigerator. For long­term storage, make a thick purée of basil and olive oil, and freeze the almost­pesto in an ice­cube tray. When the basil is solid, pop the cubes and seal them in airtight plastic bags.

Basil and friends IS TOCK

PHOTO

Pair it with everything from salmon to strawberries—this pretty herb brings out the best in every dish it meets

Basil, Mozzarella and Plum Salad

RAYMOND HOM FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; FOOD STYLING BY MARTHA BERNABE, PROP STYLING BY DSM

The classic caprese made completely new with plums, jalapeño and emerald basil oil Serves 4

W

Salmon with Basil Tapenade

Simple, fast, really flavourful and pretty enough for parties Serves 4 Heat the oven to 232 degrees Celsius. Mince 4 tbsp basil and set aside; zest and juice of 1 lemon, and set aside. In a small bowl, stir together 4 tbsp black olive tapenade, 2 tbsp minced basil, K the lemon juice and K the lemon zest; season with pepper. Spoon all but one generous tablespoon tapenade mixture into a small Ziploc bag; seal and snip off a small corner to use as a piping bag. Reserve the remaining tapenade for later use. Lay four salmon fillets (centre­cut, skin on) on a clean workspace. Working with one fillet at a time, cut two slits, each about 1­inch wide, near the plump middle of the salmon. Holding the filled Ziploc bag, squeeze a bit of tapenade into each slit. Season fillets lightly with salt and pepper. Heat 2 tbsp olive oil in a large oven­proof skillet over high heat, then slip the fillets into a pan, flesh­side down.

Cook for 2 minutes, turn, cook for 2 more minutes, then slide the skillet into the oven. Roast for 4­6 minutes, or until fillets give just slightly in the centre. Remove from the heat, cover skillet with foil and let the fish rest for 5 minutes. To make the sauce, stir 3­4 tbsp olive oil into the reserved tablespoon tapenade mixture. Add the remaining lemon zest and the remaining 2 tbsp minced basil, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Drizzle sauce over each fillet and serve immediately.

RAYMOND HOM FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; FOOD STYLING BY MARTHA BERNABE; PROP STYLING BY DSM

hoever worked on basil’s public relations campaign deserves a gold medal. Given that basil contains hints of liquorice—a loveit-or-loathe-it flavour that’s got plenty of loathers—it borders on miraculous that it has become such a go-to herb.

It gets pride of place in urban window boxes (it’ll withstand almost anything except cold), in country gardens (planted next to tomatoes, it provides saladon-the-vine all summer) and in recipes with roots all around the globe.

Basil deserves the love: Few other herbs play so well with others that they can turn up in both sweets and savouries, soups and salads and with

pasta, fish and fowl—and neither steal the show nor fade into the background.

Though cooks in the 1980s (the heyday of pesto) acted as though they’d discovered basil, the herb has been around since ancient times, used for such wildly divergent purposes as warding off dragon attacks, curing scorpion bites, opening heaven’s gates, calming rumbling tummies and winning a woman’s love (hint: sport a sprig of basil in your coif).

Then, as now, the most common variety of the herb was sweet basil, or what we call Genovese, but there are almost as many kinds of basil as there are flavours from Ben & Jerry’s, and they’re all fun to play with. Try lemon basil with fish, opal basil (which is dark reddish purple) as the finishing touch on a caprese salad, pointy-leafed Thai basil when you want a strong anise flavour—and any and every kind of basil you can get your hands on when dragons are spotted in the neighbourhood.

Dorie Greenspan

Bring a small pot of salted water to a boil. Drop in L packed cup of basil leaves, cook for 30 seconds, then drain and run under cold water to cool. Squeeze as much water as possible from the leaves, then chop finely. Put the basil and K cup extra­virgin olive oil in the food processor, add a pinch of salt and process until well blended. Let it rest for 15 minutes, then pour through a fine­mesh strainer. Discard the solids and reserve the oil. Toss two handfuls mixed salad greens with 1 tbsp basil oil, salt and pepper and divide among four plates. Slice eight basil leaves and toss with K­pound fresh mozzarella, cubed, two black plums, pitted and cubed, K jalapeño pepper, finely chopped, the juice of K lime and 1K­2 tbsp of the basil oil (refrigerate the remaining oil for another use).

Season to taste with salt, pepper and lime juice, and spoon equal amounts of the mozzarella mixture over the greens.

IS TOCK

PHOTO

Chilled Zucchini­Basil Soup

An icy, bright green soup that’s good as an afternoon pick­me­up or for brunch, supper or a picnic Serves 4

Write to wsj@livemint.com Adapted from Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan.

Bring four cups chicken or vegetable broth to a boil in a large saucepan. Drop in 1K pounds zucchini, trimmed (but not peeled), seeded and cut into small chunks, 1 spring onion trimmed and sliced and two cloves garlic, coarsely chopped. Season with salt and pepper and return to a boil. Lower heat to a simmer, partially cover pan and cook for 10­12 minutes more or until the zucchini is easily pierced with a knife. Working in small batches, purée soup in a blender until smooth. Refrigerate until chilled. Just before serving, purée one packed cup basil leaves with one cup chilled soup. Stir the purée into the remaining soup. Season with salt and pepper to taste, then pour into soup bowls or glasses to serve. Garnish with a swirl of heavy cream, if desired.

Corn, Crab and Basil Salad

While any type of basil is fine in this salad, Thai basil or a mix of sweet and lemon basils is even finer Serves 4

RAYMOND HOM FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; FOOD STYLING BY MARTHA BERNABE; PROP STYLING BY DSM

Sweet Avocado­Basil Cream with Mangoes and Berries

A dessert with beautiful colour, rich textures and the surprise of finding avocado and basil double­teaming a sweet Serves 4 Bring a small pot of salted water to a boil. Drop in one packed cup of basil leaves, cook for 30 seconds, then drain and run under cold water to cool. Squeeze as much water as possible from the leaves, then chop finely and reserve. Zest and juice 1K limes and set aside. Gently mix together one large mango, cubed small, 10 strawberries, quartered, and K tsp honey. Stir in a pinch of fleur de sel and L of the lime juice.

Taste and add more honey, salt or juice, if desired. Tear eight small basil leaves, stir into the mixture and set aside. Scoop the flesh of four ripe Hass avocados into the bowl of a small food processor. Immediately add the remaining lime juice and process until smooth. Blend in the zest, a pinch of salt and 1K tsp sugar. Add additional sugar to taste. Turn the mixture into a bowl and stir in the reserved chopped basil leaves. Spoon the avocado cream into short glasses or custard cups. Top each with the fruit mixture and K tbsp chopped pistachios.

Green guide: Basil comes in many varieties, including Genovese, aka sweet basil (top), and pointy leafed Thai (above, left), which has a distinct liquorice flavour.

RAYMOND HOM FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; FOOD STYLING BY M ARTHA B ERNABE; PROP STYLING BY DSM

Slice one pink grapefruit in half and remove the segments, taking care to catch the juices in a small bowl. Lay the segments between a triple thickness of paper towel to drain. Squeeze the remaining juice from the grapefruit halves into a bowl and reserve. Cut the ker­ nels from four ears corn and toss with salt and pepper. Place the kernels in a steamer, cover and cook until just tender (about 3 min­ utes). Remove the kernels from the strainer, pat dry and set aside in a bowl. To make the dressing, combine 1 tbsp grapefruit juice, K tsp Dijon mustard, 2 tbsp extra­virgin olive oil, 1K tbsp mayonnaise, 1K tbsp Thai sweet chilli sauce, a dash of sriracha and salt, and pepper in a small jar. Cover and shake to blend. Add additional salt, pepper or sriracha to taste. Mince 3 tbsp chives and shred M cup packed basil leaves and set aside. Cut the reserved grapefruit sections into small chunks and toss into a bowl. Add K­pound lump crab meat and 10 cherry tomatoes, halved. Sprinkle two pinches pink pepper­ corn, crushed, over the crab. Top with 2 tbsp of the chives and L of the shredded basil. Season with salt and pepper, and stir gently.

When the corn has cooled, combine with six finely sliced scallions, one red bellpepper diced small, K minced serrano or jalapeño pepper and the remaining basil and chives. Season with salt and pepper, and toss. Shred one head romaine lettuce and place in a salad bowl.

Toss with 1 tbsp dressing. Toss the corn mixture with 3 tbsp dressing and spoon over the lettuce. Sprinkle the crab­meat mix with 2 tbsp reserved grapefruit juice, stir gently and spoon on top of salad. At the table, toss the salad once more and season with salt, pepper and dressing to taste.

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011

Culture

LOUNGE ART

STALL ORDER

Seeing the invisible

NANDINI RAMNATH

FLIP THE SPOTLIGHT INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

Ganesh Haloi’s abstract landscapes in his new show are a flight from the burden of reality

B Y S HAMIK B AG ···························· ust outside Ganesh Haloi’s home in the quaint neighbourhood of Kolkata’s Salt Lake City, the sky portends rain. There is a rustle in the trees as the monsoon-green leaves catch the breeze. Against the darkening northern sky and a mellow sun, they gain glowing outlines. Crows wait on parapets, stray dogs scamper for cover. Men hurry.

How would one of India’s foremost painters—well-regarded as a master of the abstract landscape form—react to the scene?

“It is not merely about looking at an object or a situation. It is about trying to look beyond the object and seeing what is absent,” says Haloi, sitting in the spacious drawing room of his home. The room is austere in its decor—his paintings and books lend it a warmth beyond the ostentatious, a spartan lifestyle that has preceded his art.

“For me, what is present is what makes the absent present.”

At 75, Haloi has lost none of his artistic vigour, even though ageattendant ailments like recurring back pain have somewhat crippled his daily painting routine. The fact that the artist continues to be occupied by the canvas is apparent from the 28 paintings that will be on display at Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery in the coming week in an exhibition presented by Akar Prakar, Kolkata, and Patrimonio Gallery, Mumbai. The paintings are his recent works, completed between 2007-08, and introduce new visuals from Haloi’s search for minimalism while portraying his lifelong instinct for nature.

In quite a few of the paintings, Haloi moves away from his distinctive blending of colours and tones, relying instead on white, unfettered spaces. The spaciousness that has been inherent in his work is possibly, at the ripe end of an artistic career spanning over half a century, giving way to an unpolluted, pure white. It perhaps extends what art critic Man-

J

Unreal art: Ganesh Haloi at his Kolkata home, ahead of his show in Mumbai. asij Majumder feels is Haloi’s ability to “transform naturescapes into mindscapes”.

Having interacted closely with the artist over the last decade, gallerist Abhijit Lath of Akar Prakar admires Haloi’s willingness to move out of the mould, yet be in it enough to be recognized for his distinguishing style—the “thin line” he continues to tread successfully. “He belongs to a generation of artists who painted for the self and when there was hardly any market for art. For them, there is never any need for additional motivation,” says Lath. “After a point, every artist becomes a slave of habit,” Haloi continues. “One has to rescue oneself from it. For me, every sunrise and sunset is different from the other.”

The earth-coloured kurta Haloi is wearing is a reminder of the matir taan—the magnetic tug of the land—of a home to which he can no longer return. Extraction—as a 14-year-old fatherless boy, Haloi had to escape from his birthplace in Jamalpur in East

Daylight erotica An exhibition of adult movie posters turns the lights on the Indian blue film B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· sk V. Sunil, the executive creative director of Wieden+ Kennedy (W+K), New Delhi, why he has had posters of movies with names like Junglee Bulbul, Sarphira Aashiq and Meri Dhoti, Tera Ghagra on his office walls for the last five years, and he’ll say it’s because they’re ingenious. “And ‘mind-blowingly’ funny.”

Sunil is putting his personal collection of adult movie posters up for display in an exhibition titled Morning Show, which opens today.

Sunil started collecting in 2001, when a friend who works in film

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production in Mumbai mailed him a bunch of posters. Around 30 posters from his collection will be on display at W+K Exp, the advertising agency’s gallery space.

Apart from the obvious kitsch factor in these Hindi movie posters from the 1980s and 1990s, Sunil is intrigued by their pre-Photoshop aesthetic. With paltry budgets, these posters were created with cut-outs from international magazines juxtaposed with handpainted titles and other imagery. This cutpaste creation was then photographed and printed on flimsy poster paper.

“There’s no concept of perspective or scale,” says Sunil. “But there is a language running through

Pakistan (now Bangladesh) following Partition—and the emotional pain is a reality that has lived with him. But it never quite captured his creative imagination.

It would have been easy for Haloi to lapse into realistic art. His pre-teen life was lived along the Brahmaputra river in Mymensingh; every monsoon, the bloated river would spill into their village home’s courtyard. Even now, whenever Haloi smells bleaching powder, his mind travels back to when his penniless family was living in the refugee quarters of Cooper’s Camp in West Bengal’s Ranaghat. There, the constant surfacing of emaciated dead bodies in canals and alongside roads would be followed by the antiseptic spraying of bleaching powder by authorities.

It was by dint of his painting—an inclination Haloi picked up as a young boy after watching the artist Biren De at work—that Haloi got admission to Kolkata’s prestigious Government College of Art and Craft. A year after college, Haloi took up an assignment for the

Archaeological Survey of India, to copy the Ajanta murals; he describes the time spent doing the copies, 1957-63, as “invaluable years”, says Haloi. “I was drowned in an ocean of creativity.”

“Having struggled so much, people often wonder why I didn’t become a protest artist,” he reacts.

“I could never reconcile to the fact that my work on poverty would be sold for millions and allow me to live in comfort. How many protest artists have even opened a clinic?”

Nature in its many abstractions, it can be presumed, has been Haloi’s way of taking flight. In nature, he sees continuity, reuse and regeneration: the mango kernel giving birth to a tree giving birth to a fruit and yet another kernel.

“Reality”—and no one can blame Haloi for not wanting to encounter it up close—“can be suffocating.”

S

ometimes, it takes a death to remember the living. So it is with Samir Chanda’s sudden death last week. Obituaries highlighted his achievements, with a special mention of his work in Mani Ratnam’s Iruvar, Dil Se.., Guru and Raavanan/Raavan. Some articles bemoaned the anonymity that governs the contributions of production designers like Chanda, who create the world within which movie plots unfold, but who often don’t get recognized for it.

The truth is that at least in recent years, greater attention has been paid to the processes that go into making a film. The spotlight has swung beyond the star’s shoulder to cinematographers, art directors, costume designers and sound recordists. In comparison, you will be hard-pressed to find a proper interview with film technicians from the past. Sudhendhu Roy created the definite Indian aesthetic for several landmark movies. He imagined rural India in Bandini, captured working-class Mumbai in Bluffmaster and created Bond-inspired fantasy spaces in the original Don. Yet, it’s difficult to find a decent interview with Roy or a discussion on how his work influenced the way the movies were received.

It isn’t that journalists and writers haven’t tried. Writing about popular cinema has caught on, and it’s only a matter of time before star biographies and books about landmark movies give way to accounts of behind-the-scenes players. But researchers will find this tough. History can only be as good as the available material. Indians in general don’t write things down and don’t file away anecdotes in their memory bank. They’re slippery on dates and hazy on details.

Or they will indulge in the great Indian sin of self-aggrandizement.

Jerry Pinto, the author of a wonderful new Penguin anthology, The Greatest Show on Earth, said that you can dig for the past only when you have the right tools at hand—and you know you will find something valuable. “I believe that we all hold firmly to the myth that this material must be somewhere,” Pinto said. “It isn’t. It isn’t because no one in Bollywood writes anything down. Not the script, not the storyboard, not anything.” The magazine or newspaper feature story can be a good starting point for a dialogue, but many of the technicians working in Hindi cinema don’t make things easy.

Few cinematographers, for instance, can intelligibly tell you why they shot what they did. It all depends on the script, they will say.

Not too many production designers are articulate enough to express their approach to the sets they created. We followed the director’s instructions, is their explanation. Few people hold on to their anecdotes, probably because they feel that nobody cares to listen.

Among the art directors working today, the creations of Sabu Cyril and Wasiq Khan deserve greater attention. Cyril is a master of the make-believe, while Khan is the go-to man for gritty realism for directors like Anurag Kashyap. Khan’s contributions to Kashyap’s upcoming That Girl in Yellow Boots (releasing on 2 September) are on a par with the director and actors of that movie, as is the lovely work by cinematographer Rajeev Ravi. Not many films being made in Mumbai these days merit a second look, but for the ones that do, it would be nice if somebody maintained a diary or took notes—or at least remained alert.

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

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

Ganesh Haloi’s solo exhibition will run from 29 August-4 September at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Gritty: Wasiq Khan is the art director of That Girl in Yellow Boots.

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

them. The use of words and the art direction is intriguing.” He points to a poster in which a man’s head is superimposed on a woman’s breast. Another, for a film titled Air Hostess Girls, features American actor Brooke Shields.

Scores of Web shops stand evidence to the fact that classic Bollywood posters have become collectibles around the world. But adult movie posters have remained underground, as have the movies they promote. Interestingly, none of the posters are particularly graphic. They bring forbidden fantasies to life through layered visuals and bizarre titles like Tambu main bamboo ke baad.

Graphic novelist Vishwajyoti Ghosh, whose book Times New Roman & Countrymen (Blaft, 2009) borrowed pop-visuals from movie posters, stamps and matchbox art, says one would be hardpressed to find these low-brow gems today. “There are no archives or even personal collections,” he says. “For a social

observer or commercial artist, these are particularly interesting as a sub-category of kitsch...it’s innovation within limitations.”

Before W+K, Sunil ran his own agency called A and worked as an art director with a number of agencies, including Ogilvy and Mather and McCann Erickson. He is keenly tuned to Indian sub-cultures. “For me, Morning Show is a throwback to those groups of school students and men in collar shirts nonchalantly emerging from adult-only shows. For many of them, this represented the only form of eroticism when the joint family system made a private life impossible,” he says.

The posters on display are original 4x5ft prints. The exhibition will also include a few 12x6ft hoardings. Sunil plans to package it all with video and sound projections.

Peep show: Sunil sorting the posters for display in Morning Show.

Morning Show will run till 17 September at W+K Exp, Sheikh Sarai, New Delhi. The posters are priced between `15,000 and `50,000.

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011

Travel

LOUNGE

NEW ORLEANS

Sunny side of the street RUDRANEIL SENGUPTA/MINT

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/DSB NOLA/DEREK BRIDGES

Beyond the tourist traps, America’s blues city keeps its glorious musical traditions alive

B Y R UDRANEIL S ENGUPTA rudraneil.s@livemint.com

························· t was all a mistake.

Attracted by the neon signs and the jostling crowds, I was walking down the famed Bourbon Street, looking for a pub throbbing with hot jazz or earthy blues. Hundreds of people staggered from pub to pub, clutching oversized fluorescent green plastic cups with alcohol; prostitutes and erotic dancers in lacy thongs and high heels hollered out at anyone who looked interested, and then the horror—a band blaring Pour some sugar on me in a brightly lit bar, and another band playing Summer of ’69 just across the narrow street. Is this really what’s happened to the birthplace of jazz?

New Orleans, the mythical place where African musical traditions, the blues, field hollers, spirituals, European classical music, military marching music, French ballads and Spanish dance tunes collided in a heady Big Bang that produced jazz, Cajun, Zydeco, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and swinging brass bands, had turned into a dark Disneyland of bad music, terrible cocktails and sex for sale.

Basin Street, home to the palatial bordellos that midwifed the birth of jazz by providing its earliest exponents a place to play regularly in the early 20th century, is now a residential area with a smattering of bars and restaurants. The place where Louis Armstrong learnt to play on a borrowed clarinet, hopping from bordello to bordello as a teenager to listen to the best musicians, offers no hints to this history.

This was a personal tragedy.

The New Orleans of my mind is a massive collage of lines from jazz standards, rock ‘n’ roll classics, and 1960s songs—all the blues singers “going down to Louisiana”, Creedence Clearwater Revival “pumping pain down in New Orleans”, Ella Fitzgerald singing the haunting Basin Street Blues and Bob Dylan singing about a house they call the Rising Sun. I was determined to find this city, but I had to leave Bourbon Street.

A strange encounter with a middle-aged man on the banks of the Mississippi sent me hurtling in the right direction. He started by trying to scam me: “How y’all doing?” he said, “I bet I can tell you where you got those shoes from.” “Why should I pay for something I already know?” I asked. Suddenly, he dropped the act.

“You here for the music, brother? What ya doin’ tonight? You want to hear some real music? Music that’ll make y’all jump up? You gotta head down to Frenchmen Street. That’s where it’s at. I’m gonna put my head on the chopping block if you don’t

I

TRIP PLANNER/NEW ORLEANS

You will need a visa for the US. Apply for one through VFS (www.vfs-usa.co.in). Depending on which city you are applying from, there can be a long wait for an appointment with the consulate, so apply well in advance. Air India, Continental Airlines, United Airlines and Jet Airways operate direct flights from Mumbai and New Delhi. All major cities in the US also offer direct flights to New Orleans.

La ke Pontch ar trai n

US

Louisiana

Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport

Little Woods French Quarter Garden District

Stay

Eat

Do

LOUISIANA G ulf o f Mexi co

The hotel and B&B options in New Orleans are endless, and cater to every budget. Take advantage of the city’s Spanish and French past and stay in a hotel housed in a heritage building.

The 1896 O’Malley House B&B, a 10-minute walk from the French Quarter, is beautifully furnished with antiques, and offers en-suite jacuzzis. Rates vary from $100 (around R4,600) in the off-season to $250 (www.1896omalleyhouse.com). Prices are higher during the Mardi Gras and other big festivals. The Columns Hotel, in the middle of the French Quarter, is a New Orleans institution with its winding staircase, Victorian furnishing, and a jazz lounge. Rates are $120-250 (www.thecolumns.com). A cheaper option is to stay at the quaint Frenchmen Hotel, yet another lovely heritage building, but with utilitarian rooms. Rates range from $59 in the off-season to $250 during festivals (www.frenchmenhotel.com).

Creole food is a matter of great pride in the south, and New Orleans is as serious about its food as its music. There are hundreds of restaurants serving Po’ Boys (massive submarine sandwiches stuffed with roast beef, prawns or fried oysters), gumbos (a seafood soup made with roux, shallots, garlic, rice and okra) and all manner of fried seafood. Acme Oyster House (www.acmeoyster.com) gets long lines of tourists, but the oysters on the half-shell are worth it. The city is also home to some very high-end restaurants, led by Arnaud’s (www.arnaudsrestaurant.com) and Antoine’s (www.antoines.com), two legendary Creole restaurants with Victorian dining rooms. American celebrity-chef Emeril Lagasse’s eponymous restaurant combines modern urban chic with classic down-home recipes for an updated and highly regarded version of Creole food (www.emerils.com). Definitely drink the local New Orleans brew Abita, a malty, sweet, amber beer. And of course, head to Café Du Monde for the beignets. All these restaurants are in the French Quarter, but if you get tired of Creole food (it can get repetitive), head to the business district for Italian, Thai and American diners.

Musicology: (clockwise from above) A member of the Lagniappe Brass Band plays the trombone; musicians in the French Quarter; and a tuba player in second line costume. jump to that scene, brother.”

Then he asked for money to buy a skin cream for the itch.

I had my own itch, and needed the balm quick.

There was no time to waste, and I hurried to Frenchmen Street, just about a 10-minute walk from Bourbon. Straight away, I could hear strains of the blues floating through the air.

The source was a lovely little restaurant called Mojitos Rum Bar and Grill, with a lush, open garden area with wrought-iron furniture, and a corner patio with a band churning out the blues. Peter Novelli, the frontman of the band, has been a blues guitarist for more than three decades, and has shared a stage or recorded with New Orleans legend Dr John, Eric Clapton, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Steve Cropper and other blues and R&B legends. His set jumped from standard 12-bar

WIKIMEDIA COIMMONS

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The best reason to be in New Orleans is for the music, but the city and its outskirts also offer a chance to relive the colonial past of the US. If the French Quarter features Spanish and French architecture, the Garden District is home to some magnificent American villas. A heritage streetcar ride takes you from the French Quarter to the Garden District. South Louisiana is also known for its beautiful antebellum architecture, and there are plenty of plantation homes that are within an hour’s drive of New Orleans. Most of these plantations offer guided tours as well as fabulous lunch spreads. You could also opt for a tour of the lush Louisiana swamps in a boat, and get up close to alligators. There are several tour operators that offer both plantation and swamp tours, so ask your hotel for a recommendation. Rates are $50-75 per tour per person, including hotel pick-ups and drops.

New Orleans is also a festival city, and the Mardi Gras, held in the last week of February and the first week of March, is the mother of all festivals. Satchmo SummerFest (4-7 August) pays tribute to Louis Armstrong with concerts, seminars, food, and second line parades. The Southern Decadence Festival (31 August-5 September) celebrates the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, or LGBT, community. The Ponderosa Stomp (15-17 September) is an American roots music festival that celebrates lesser-known musicians who have shaped American musical traditions.

GRAPHIC BY AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

blues like Rollin’ & Tumblin’, Got my mojo working and Walkin’ blues, to more jazz-influenced blues originals, with Cajun rhythms played on a metal washboard worn around the neck. It was hot stuff. Halfway through the set Novelli’s band introduced Irvine Bannister Sr, a shuffling old man with a sailor’s cap and a white Fender Telecaster guitar—a local R&B legend who had played on the earliest R&B records and helped define the genre’s sound.

Down the road from Mojitos, Checkpoint Charlie, a bar with large open windows looking out on to the street, was hosting an open mic night, with a California band playing a funk- and R&B-influ-

enced set of originals, with a whole line of young guitar-toting musicians following them up with folk tunes, and existential originals. Two steps from that is The Maison, a deep, dark bar with a huge mahogany counter and exposed brick walls, and sizzling music that drags you in from the street with no effort on your part. The band on show was the cheekily named Soulabilly Swampboogy, a jam band heavily influenced by the blues, funk, and bluegrass. The band’s singer had a powerful, gruff voice that leapt out of the microphone and stung you.

The trombone, saxophone, bass, drum and electric organ lay down a wall of sound for the guitarist to dance on. A little Buddha sat calmly atop the guitar amplifier as lightning solos flew out. The Allman Brothers’ furious Whipping Post slipped seamlessly into the Grateful Dead classic I

TRAVEL L15

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

RUDRANEIL SENGUPTA/MINT

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Know You Rider.

When Bourbon Street turned into a carnivalesque tourist trap, the locals turned to Frenchmen Street for the music. Located just off the French Quarter, the beautifully preserved 19th century residential area of the French and Spanish settlers, and hemmed in by Tremé, the oldest African American neighbourhood in the US, Frenchmen is a mix of quaint and colourful 19th century houses and smoky dives dripping with local music.

On any given night, the 20-odd bars and restaurants on the street will feature everything from hip hop DJs (rare) to bands playing ragtime and Dixieland—the oldest forms of jazz. As the night deepens, people set up barbecue operations on the sidewalk. Heaps of crawfish, thick steaks and greasy burgers sizzle to the tune of the music. Almost none of the bars have a cover charge (unless there is a big-ticket name on the bill), and the house rules call for just one drink per set.

Unlike Bourbon Street, no one has a problem if you hang out for a song to check out the band before you make your decision to buy a drink.

As a counterpoint to the electric music, head off into any small street that leads into the French Quarter. Most of the streets in this 1 sq. km area are quiet enough to let you hear the buzz of tropical insects.

Row after row of beautiful houses in bright pastel, with filigreed wrought-iron balconies as intricate as lace, stretch out before you. Each more quaint

and more spectacular than the other.

Oaks dripping with Mardi Gras beads, cypresses, myrtle, bougainvillea and banana trees line the streets, with ferns reaching out seductively from hanging pots. French mansions and Spanish villas jostle for attention.

Ten steps from any direction will take you to a good Creole restaurant. But to fortify yourself for an entire night of great music and senseless dancing, look no further than Café Du Monde, a legendary New Orleans establishment that has just three things on the menu—coffee, hot chocolate and beignets. It’s all you’ll ever need. I had no idea that a simple thing like a beignet, which is just deep-fried dough topped with an inch of icing sugar, could be so addictive. Sit in the crowded and large covered courtyard of the café, open all day and night, and bite into the crispy exterior of the hot doughnut, feel the fluffy interior melt in your mouth and disappear, and watch the icing sugar fly and cover your clothes with each bite with childlike delight. I tried beignets at other places, including a place called Café Beignet, but they didn’t compare. You can’t fight perfection.

Time to get back to the music, back to Frenchmen Street, and to a dive called Bal-

cony Music Club. A fivepiece band—guitar, bass, trombone, drums and vocals were playing jazz standards. Fronted by the waifish Caroline, who sings in the style of Billie Holiday, Caroline and Moonshine featured some beautiful guitar work, but the vocals were just not powerful enough to stand up to the song list.

Down the street from the Balcony Music Club, Kermit Ruffins, a local musician who keeps the Armstrong tradition alive, and has become a nationwide sensation in the US, was playing at The Maison. It was so overcrowded that people were not being allowed inside.

A few steps from there, at a pub called Dba, a funk band called the Soul Project was laying down tough grooves. Razorsharp guitar riffs and chops that could have lasted an entire week coupled with cool horns and some laid-back singing kept their set alive.

Even on Bourbon Street, the Fritzel’s European Jazz Bar fea-

tured an excellent quartet of musicians playing old-style jazz, Dixieland and ragtime.

The band jumped from traditional and ragged jazz classics such as St James Infirmary Blues to bright little Swing gems and bluegrass romps with comical lyrics.

An hour past midnight, I was ready to call it a day when I saw a stream of musicians entering the Balcony Music Club. Trumpeters, trombonists, saxophone players, a tuba player and a drummer with a minimalist set-up. It was time for one more drink, and to indulge in yet another New Orleans musical tradition. The Lagniappe Brass Band is part of a very special heritage of this dulcet city—the jazz funeral, where a brass band playing jazz dirges follows the hearse along with friends and family to the burial grounds. On the return march, the life of the deceased is celebrated with more upbeat tunes.

These brass bands soon became a staple of the Mardi Gras, as well as the local music scene.

Lagniappe began with a simple threestep descending bass riff that immediately made your feet tap.

T h e d r u m s entered in bouncy, syncopated rhythms, sending your body into involuntary spasms of dance, and when the horns blew out the main riff, it was like a punch that made you fly halfway across the bar. The night was alive. The young ensemble chased down euphoria one upbeat, rowdy, bluesy number at a time. They played their heart out on every song—sweat dripping, eyes rolling up to the whites, hips shaking, trading solos, playing counterpoint. If the three trombone players played the main riff of Fire, a brass band classic, then the two saxophone players played the timeless opening lines of John Coltrane’s Blue Train underneath that. Deep, drunken, poetic solos blared out of the horns, and funky polyrhythmic beats kept everyone in the club on their feet much longer than they had thought possible. More than a century of different musical traditions coming at you all at once from all angles.

At my funeral, I want it to be like this.

Let the good times roll: (clockwise from left) Beignets covered in icing sugar and coffee at the Café Du Monde; revellers dance to jam band Soula­ billy Swampboogy in the French Quarter; a jazz quartet at the French Quarter farmer’s market plays for tips; and the drinking starts early at a traditional New Orleans pub near Bourbon Street.

CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

In New Orleans, you walk, eat, drink and party all night and all day long. Not the ideal situation to be in with children.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

It’s friendly and small enough to be comfortably navigated, but there isn’t much in terms of wheelchair access or easy public transport.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

This is a city that likes wearing its sexuality on its sleeve. There are lots of pubs and clubs, such as Café Laffite in Exile, Bourbon Pub and The Friendly Bar, meant only for the gay and lesbian community.

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Books

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SPOTLIGHT

An American quilt DOUG DOLDE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Creator and canvas: (extreme left) Kunzru; and the Mojave Desert in which the author’s new novel is set.

Hari Kunzru’s new novel is a majestic work with memorable characters, all disparate but connected through a credible plot SANJEEV VERMA/HINDUSTAN TIMES

B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ···························· owards the end of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as the alien spacecraft is about to make contact with the planet Earth, among the people who have gathered to see the landing is a scientist, played by the talented French film director, François Truffaut. Setting aside his rational scepticism, Truffaut looks at the extravagant sight of the spacecraft with a childlike wonder, visible on his face as his eyebrows widen, eyes go bigger, and the flicker of a smile appears on his awestruck face. Years of reasonbased digital logic fade away; innocent amazement replaces that, and he looks as if he is witnessing a miracle.

The fresh-faced nature of that discovery has an older cinematic parallel: Think of young Apu and Durga rushing to the palash field after they hear the sound of the train, looking for the engine both ways, stunned as the train rushes through the Bengali landscape, in Satyajit Ray’s film, Pather Panchali (1955). Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, who wrote the novel, had titled that chapter Achenar Anand, or the delight of the unknown.

In his new novel, Gods without Men, Hari Kunzru seeks to capture that sense of wonder about contact with the unexplainable. Kunzru does not have a personal interest in unidentified flying objects, but he is interested in the people who are fascinated by them. Whether there is life in outer space, and whether the aliens are interested in contacting us interests him less than the certainty with which people believe that is the case.

For his fourth novel, Kunzru takes us to the Mojave Desert in the American West, where a

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Gods without Men: Hamish Hamilton, 384 pages, £12.99 (around `975). strange formation has attracted all sorts of believers—former scientists, hippies, and, as we discover in this novel, a New York-based hedge fund trader called Jaswinder Matharu and his wife Lisa, an editor—trying to figure out if there is someone else out there, and if so, what it means. Kunzru doesn’t provide an answer, but he creates a majestic, magical canvas filled with memorable characters, all disparate, none likely to meet the other in real life, and yet, through the quirk of coincidences and credible turns of plot, he connects them, weaving a narrative as rich as a Native American quilt.

In the process, he writes what the writer and critic Lisa Appignanesi calls Kunzru’s Great American Novel. The landscape is epic: a military site, a desert, a place where missiles are developed, and where an ancient culture persists; the interest, the supernatural. “The people who were fascinated by the UFOs were also interested in theology and a particular form of spiritualism, as an anxious response to the nuclear world. Humanity has always been interested in aliens,”

he says when we meet over coffee on a sunny morning in London.

The psychic content, the end-ofcivilization quality of the experience interests Kunzru.

Born in Britain, Kunzru’s Kashmiri family on his father’s side produced lawyers. Kunzru’s father, an orthopaedic surgeon, came to Britain in the 1960s. He married an Englishwoman; Hari was born in 1969, named after Haribaba, as his grand-uncle, Hridaynath Kunzru (an associate of the freedom fighter Gopal Krishna Gokhale), was known within the family. Kunzru studied the humanities at Oxford, wrote for magazines like Wired, and later The New Yorker, and was named one of Britain’s best young novelists by Granta magazine in 2003.

Kunzru’s first novel, The Impressionist (2002), was, as he describes it, “an elbow nudge” to the English in India and the stories it spawned. Transmission (2004) was a comic novel, a satirical take on a software engineer who creates an artificial entity that might devour the computing world. My Revolutions (2007) captured the eternal cyclicality of radicalism, a teleological argument about aggression. Gods without Men, Kunzru says, is about faith, reason, the unknown, and the unexplainable.

The America that Kunzru introduces us to is truly off the beaten track. There is New York, and there are some references to cities on the West Coast, but essentially, this story is about the desert. Kunzru loved the desert, which he travelled through a couple of years ago with friends. He was in America as a fellow at the New York Public Library, working on a book about Akbar and Birbal, getting caught up in the exciting whirl of US presidential elections, when friends suggested

he join them for the trip. While travelling through the desert, staying in motels in small towns, the idea of the novel was born.

“That landscape connects everything—a single person, the empty space, a civilization,” he says.

Gods without Men begins with a Native American tale about a coyote and its many lives, and quickly moves to the story of an aircraft engineer who has seen visions, and who is obsessed by the sky at night, hoping to contact the planet Venus. He thinks there are signs there, and messages to be deciphered. There is also a miner, who hears sounds in stones. There are Native Americans and émigré Iraqis, who delight in assisting the American army learn how to win hearts and minds in Iraq. The soldiers prepare for their mission in Iraq through simulation, and the Iraqis play hostile natives. There is a British rock star, trying to find meaning in his life, a caricature of drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, sex and fame.

At the centre of the story is a four-year-old boy, an autistic child, managing whom takes a toll on the relationship of the parents, Lisa and Jaz. Lisa is Jewish, and has crossed a cultural barrier in marrying Jaz, just as Jaz has. Kunzru describes the charms and awkwardness of a cross-cultural relationship.

Circumcision is a ritual of great importance for Lisa, because not subjecting her son to it is the denial of Jewish identity; Jaz doesn’t want it, because refusing to submit oneself to that ritual is symbolic of the Sikh-Muslim conflict. Neither is particularly religious; neither likes all the traditions that are part of their heritage. Yet, neither is able to remove his and her self from the ingrained expectations of the community, finding the partner

they’ve chosen to make home with to be unreasonable instead.

Cross-cultural dynamics have rarely been shown with such empathy in fiction. “People have intimate, sentimental attachments with their culture, and that interests me,” Kunzru says.

But the main story is about the boy, whose needs bring the couple to the desert. Raj is a difficult child to handle, and Lisa has become a full-time mother; Jaz finds the stress-filled life at a hedge fund, and the moral choices it forces upon him, difficult, and they leave for the Mojave Desert. What has also prompted Jaz’s decision to go west is his hunch, that an extremely powerful computer program called Walter that he and his colleagues have developed, has somehow precipitated the crash of the Honduran economy. Trained to identify market inefficiencies and gaps between prices, the program seeks out opportunities for traders, and when traders leave the program on autopilot, it buys and sells commodities, currencies, products and futures with ruthless efficiency, sucking profits, leaving the real economy on the ropes.

Walter attempts to model reality and chaos follows. Is it the butterfly in Indonesia flapping its wings that caused the hurricane in New Orleans? Who knows? Is it the program and its determined trades that brought about the global economic chaos? Who knows? Jaz is uncomfortable with that; his boss tells him to enjoy the bonus. Jaz wants time out.

So they reach the desert. But the demanding child brings the couple to breaking point. Lisa leaves them for a night out; the following day, when they attempt reconciliation as they walk away from the stroller, Raj disappears. Kunzru shows how the public mood shifts from sympathy to dislike to horror and hatred for the couple because Lisa and Jaz are not emotive enough (a reference to a similar British story involving the McCanns in Portugal, whose daughter was abducted in 2007 and has not yet been found). “In America you externalize your emotions to show that you possess them,” Kunzru says. Lisa and Jaz don’t. The child is found months later, and nothing really explains how; and Jaz—the man of science, of certainties, of logic—begins to look for hidden meanings and messages.

“If you take faith seriously, you have to follow through how it shapes people’s lives. There are experiences of the unknown and the unknowable. How do people negotiate with them? Through reason? Or faith? Or a bit of both?

What do you do when you reach the limit of your ability to explain through only reason, or only faith?

How comfortable are you with that?” Kunzru asks.

These are profound questions.

They don’t have pat answers. If we knew those, we could claim to be gods. But we are women and men, and sometimes children.

That reality will continue to elude us. But that makes our lives more interesting. What would be the point of living it, if we knew all the answers?

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

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THE SECRET OF THE NAGAS | AMISH

THE READING ROOM

TABISH KHAIR

Snakes on a plain MS GOPAL

TRANSITIONS, TRANSLATIONS

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amit Basu’s novel Turbulence is a funny and fast-paced fantasy yarn that makes tongue-in-cheek use of almost everything in contemporary life: politics, socio-historical trends, comic books and super-hero films, etc. The story is simple: Everyone on BA flight 142 from London to Delhi gets off the plane with a unique superpower, the power that they wanted most in life. For instance, Tia, an oppressed and home-bound housewife who loves her children but also dreams of other lives, gets the ability to split into multiple selves. Vir, an Indian Air Force pilot, becomes a flying superman; a schoolgirl becomes a manga comic figure at will; and an aspiring starlet gets the power of being adored by everyone, etc.

There are negative powers too. And very soon it appears that someone is killing off some of these passengers. What happens next? Read it and find out.

“You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll gasp, and you will demand a sequel,” claims the blurb by Ben Aaronovitch, author of cult TV series such as Doctor Who. For once, we have a blurb that is not off the mark.

The art of comics

A new pulp phenomenon tells a great story, but is derailed by corporate­speak and sloppy editing

B Y A ADISHT K HANNA ···························· here are probably years to go before an Indian book series achieves the level of devotion (or the sales) of the Harry Potter series. We do not have costumed fans thronging book stores for midnight readings (which the Shops and Establishments Act would make impossible anyway), or websites dedicated to picking apart plot points and sneaky hints.

But the last month has shown that we’re capable of getting there, with the explosion of interest in The Secret of the Nagas, the second book in Amish’s Shiva Trilogy. The Shiva Trilogy brings two new things to Indian books. Commercially, it brought its publishers blockbuster sales in a new segment. Chetan Bhagat’s raging sales have been helped in large part by Rupa and Co. pricing his books at `95, a tactic quickly adopted by other mass-market publishers such as Srishti. The Secret of the Nagas, though, is retailing at `295

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The Secret of The Nagas—Shiva Trilogy 2: Westland Press, 396 pages, `295. (the first book, The Immortals of Meluha, which has sold more than 125,000 copies, is published in two editions, for `195 and `295).

The other new thing is its genre: the mundane mythological, where gods and heroes are shown to be just regular guys from ancient or prehistoric times, but who did things that then grew into legends.

This trope has long been popular with comics writers, but few Indian writers have used it yet—and none with the sort of success that Amish has achieved.

This raises a question: Is this relative novelty all that The Shiva Trilogy has to offer, or can it stand by itself? There are things I loved about The Secret of the Nagas. It’s a labour of love by Amish, who has spent a lot of time thinking about

the characters and planning the plot. Amish also humanizes his characters, something which most popular Indian writers fail miserably at. Bhagat, the original massmarket author, is especially terrible at this, creating characters who are uncompromisingly and unidimensionally mediocre—but who still get happy endings handed to them through a deus ex machina. Since Shiva is his own deus, you get to see the machinery operating.

Amish’s Shiva isn’t as complex or nuanced as the one in Ramesh Menon’s The Siva Purana Retold (2006), but his characters are capable of showing more than one emotion or motivation. Shiva and Sati are military tacticians, lovers and loving parents, and the villains are weak rather than wicked.

Spending time on drawing out his characters has meant that Amish has also sneaked in a joke about a gold-bedecked prime minister of ancient Bengal called Bappiraj.

But along with some good action sequences, those are the only virtues of The Secret of the Nagas.

Amish’s dialogue is weak, with too many characters delivering unrealistic expository speeches to each other. The book is also a chamber of grammatical horrors. It is possible that—like “prepone”— using “may” instead of “might”, “would” instead of “will” and “one hour back” will eventually get recognized as widely practised Indian English usage, and so sanctified by the Oxford English Dictionary, but until then these should not show

Myth­maker: Amish’s novels are a labour of love. up in publication. Similarly, there is absolutely no excuse for an error as glaring as “it’s” instead of “its” making it into a published edition.

Amish has also not paid enough attention to keeping the book free of corporatese, which means that every so often the fast-paced narrative is interrupted by a glaringly out-of-place word, like a speed breaker across a national highway.

It is possible to use anachronisms to good effect, but Harraparyans saying “as per” and “vis-a-vis” to each other does not achieve the positive effect that playing We will rock you in A Knight’s Tale did.

The idea of The Shiva Trilogy excited me because this sort of experimentation with Indian mythology is long overdue in popular literature, especially by an Indian author (Grant Morrison, a Scotsman, has been doing it for almost 10 years).

As far as plotting and pacing are concerned, Amish is very skilful.

It’s a shame, then, that The Secret of the Nagas is so badly let down by the clumsy use of language. With time and better editing, Amish will be capable of writing a great fantasy adventure. Unfortunately, he’s not there yet.

Though I enjoy a graphic novel once in a while, I am not a great fan of the genre. It seems to me that very few artists can be good enough in such different fields— writing and drawing—and the better collaborative efforts usually seem to cater to the tendency of people to be unable to read at any great stretch. If graphic novels grew out of a culture of 2-hour films and comic books, the current culture of YouTube, Internet and TV serials, with its even shorter attention span, should lead us to the Perceptive: Sarnath Banerjee next genre—glimpsic novels. comments adroitly on India.

Having done the requisite grumping, I have to concede that when graphic novels work—as art, literature and social criticism—they are as good as anything else in the world. One recent graphic novel by an Indian that works is Sarnath Banerjee’s The Harappa Files. Though stronger in the field of language than images, it still manages to combine the two adroitly to comment on the current state of India. From babudom to huge cars with a chauffeur driving a lunch box in the back seat, from Che to Gemini (the market beggar), from gargoyles to wig makers in Bethnal Green, this graphic novel provides a humorous and perceptive graph of the nation and its denizens.

Found in translation In an earlier column, I had complained about the fact that translations and translators are not properly valued or rewarded in India. As such, in this column I take pleasure in announcing two excellent translations of two important novels by two major bhasha writers.

Jnanpith-awardee U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Bharathipura is a modern classic of Kannada literature. Susheela Punitha’s English translation seems to do it full justice, at least in the eyes (and ears) of a non-Kannada speaker like me. A major work of what is sometimes termed “caste literature”, first published in 1973, Bharathipura examines the tensions between caste and new economic forces in a small temple town. Its concerns— particularly those of human complicity in resistance to and perpetuation of injustice, as well as the need and limits of human intention—remain deeply valid even today.

The other translation that I can recommend this month is Shashi Deshpande’s translation from Marathi of Gauri Deshpande’s Deliverance: A Novella. Gauri Deshpande (1942-2003) was a bilingual poet, essayist and fiction writer in Marathi and English, and in Deliverance we find her at her best as a woman writer who was accused of “writing like a man”—that is, boldly and fearlessly about societal mores and sexuality.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS If God spoke like a banker

Tabish Khair is the Denmark-based author of The Thing about Thugs.

Write to Tabish at readingroom@livemint.com

THE VALLEY OF MASKS | TARUN TEJPAL

The spiffy truth fantasy When tired philosophy comes wrapped in grand storytelling B Y A RUNAVA S INHA ···························· his is not my story. It is the story of a book I have read.

It is not a long book. Some people would read it in the time it takes to look up the Wikipedia entry for Ayn Rand, even though every sentence in it is meant to be one of the eternal truths, crafted with the conviction of the philosopher, the grandeur of the illusionist, and the immutability of the artist, who will never tell in 30 pages what can be told in 330.

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Many were the tests I was subjected to. I cast aside the doubts that arose from the congruency with Rand’s Anthem, where, too, the protagonist—his name also alphanumeric—eventually rises in revolt against the submerging of the individual “I” in the collective “we”. I even suppressed my giggle successfully on reading that you do not find the master, the master finds you. For my easily distracted mind instantly replaced the prophet figure in the book with Rajinikanth.

I repented, I assure you, despite the uneasiness engineered by the arrival of the stock characters—the prophet; the wise one (or three); the idealistic follower who is the real hero; and, inevitably, the woman who is the embodiment of passion and reason.

I soldiered on. After all, was this not a fable, an allegory, even the first draft of a universal myth?

What need does such a story have of real characters with qualities and quirks, or of an actual setting rooted in a space and a time, or even of a textured richness of background and context? What if the people in the story are referred to as birds and other forms of flora and fauna—when they are not addressed by their digital code—a form of address that, forgive me, o Hornbill, brought to mind the characters from Kung Fu Panda?

Converted as I was by the power of the central idea—that the quest for perfection turns humans into brainwashed, unfeeling beasts of burden who actually see purity and salvation in their own inhuman behaviour—I embarked on a

The Valley of Masks: Fourth Estate, 330 pages, `499. journey that paralleled the protagonist X470’s. This, after all, was a story of ideas rather than real fiction, of the collision of world views, of the conversion from innocence to misplaced power and then to realization.

I was drawn in, became one

with the narrative, when it appeared to import the proposition that it is the interpretation of the prophet’s words—rather than the words themselves—that guides people’s actions in the real world. I was seduced, too, by the possibility that this was actually a journey into the heart of a terrorist organization, showing how the seeds of distorted thinking are planted in tender minds and then nurtured to full-blown impulses on which murderous individuals act, confident that they are doing it for the preservation of the idea.

But how wrong I was. Eventually, my journey through the pages led me to a cul-de-sac of staleness rather than an avenue of exhilarating ideas.

What did I learn?

That love and relationships are more important than sex and respect. That the imposition of uniformity—the wearing of identical masks, in the valley or elsewhere—is doomed to fail, for

human beings are fundamentally unalike. That art and artists have the power to subvert the quest for imagined perfection.

And so I disengaged from the book, numbed by the tired familiarity of its premise—presented though it was with the grandness of narrative that only the truly gifted among storytellers can attain. And now I wait here for the faithful to hunt me down, and I wonder whether they might not want to reread this book. This time, not as a Novel of Truth, but as a rather spiffy fantasy yarn, with cracking good fights, plenty of superhero powers, some tonguein-cheek philosophizing and over-analytical sex.

Arunava Sinha is the translator of Rabindranath Tagore’s Three Women and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s The Chieftain’s Daughter.

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Salman’s ‘yes man’ Shera SEBASTIAN D’SOUZA/AFP

Hiding the star from his fans, the media, even the police, Shera puts his son, turban and life on the line

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

···························· hera has always been a Mumbai brat. An Andheri boy, he grew up in Manish Nagar, Four Bungalows, tinkering with the Fiats, Bajaj scooters and Gypsy cars in his father’s garage—A to Z Singh’s Garage & Automobile Shop. His most potent childhood memory is of the “two times I was caught by police riding the scooter in front of my own school; the Seth Chunilal Damodardas Barfiwala High School. I was fined and my father was also fined.”

A lo v e f o r m i s c hi e f , c a r s , weightlifting and flirting with danger, with no fear of a fight, seem to have been the perfect trajectory for where he is today, and has been for more than 15 years—actor Salman Khan’s personal bodyguard. Payback for the years of dogged loyalty comes in the currency Bollywood knows best—a share of the spotlight.

Shera is now the lead subject of, and has a dance number in, Salman Khan’s forthcoming Eid release Bodyguard.

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Shera is convinced; Khan is good­hearted, he does a lot for charity that he does not need to show to the press

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

“I am the lone son of my father, my real name is Gurmeet Singh Jolly. Shera is the nickname my father gave me,” he introduces himself. Ask him his age, and he laughs “I am 28. I have been with Khan for 15 years. So then, I was chhota (small) bodyguard.” In other interviews, Shera has said that he is as old as Khan.

There is a merging of identities with his “bhai” that Shera is barely conscious of.

He is after all the only man ever allowed to tower over “Salmanbhai”. He manages to look menacing even when he smiles, and at the gym on the top floor of the Reliance Big Entertainment offices in Andheri West, the photographer eventually gives up coaxing him to smile. His black leather shoes with stern metal buttons look bulletproof. In a black shirt, rippling muscles and a “let’s-get-this-overwith” air about him, he seats himself between gym equipment and barbells he can no longer lift with the ease he once used to—he won a bodybuilding title in the 1980s.

He has brought a friend with him—Ronnie of Uncle’s Kitchen, the restaurant after which Malad’s Uncle’s Kitchen junction is named—for moral support. “I am feeling (a) little nervous, you see,” he explains.

Shera dropped out of Bhavan’s College in class XI to work with cars in his father’s garage nearby.

“I had a craze for body,” he says candidly. He won the junior Mr Mumbai 1987 and came second in the junior Mr Maharashtra in 1987-88. “Salman is a star so he needs to train accordingly. I don’t need that any more. I keep fit, but I need mental fitness more to do my job,” he explains. Despite his hulking presence, he says he rarely

Shadow lines: Actor Salman Khan (right) has been shadowed by his bodyguard Shera (left) through good times and bad. uses aggression. “I am a gentle person. Being a bodyguard is about how you respond to situations.” What would he do if someone came too close for comfort?

“Send someone like that. And see,” he replies.

It was under the guidance of Andre Timmins, founder of entertainment events company Wizcraft, that Shera opted for the security business. “He was my neighbour, we grew up together, his brothers are close to me. He told me ‘Why don’t you do security?’ So, I started with Wizcraft.”

Shera began in 1995, providing protection to Hollywood stars who came to India for shows, undertaking security arrangements for Amitabh Bachchan Corp. Ltd (ABCL) and the mega-dandiya events of Sankalp, a famous dandiya organizer in Mumbai. His first encounter with a celebrity was Slash—the guitarist for Gun N’ Roses. Shera had met Khan twice during this time. Once, when Khan accompanied his sister Arpita to meet Danish singer Whigfield; the second, when Khan joined a party for actor Keanu Reeves on the terrace of The Orchid, Andheri East.

“I had just set up my own company—Tiger Security—and that year (1995) Sohailbhai (Khan’s brother) called me because he wanted someone to go with Salman for shows and all. Sohailbhai was impressed with me, seeing my talking and all. He asked me: ‘Eh yaar, bhai ke saath tu rahega kya?

Rahega na? (Will you stay with bhai? You’ll stay, won’t you?)’.”

The deal was sealed. “That time I used to wear a turban. I am a Sikh.

Because of my job I had to leave the turban. It was not possible to keep because of the crowds. So I had to cut my hair. I started wearing a cap and all. We went for a show and gelled well.”

Khan’s film Veergati had

Muscleman: Shera won the junior Mr Mumbai 1987 and came second in the junior Mr Mahar­ ashtra in 1987­88.

released and he was the nation’s heart-throb, freshly minted from blockbusters such as Andaz Apna Apna, Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! and Karan Arjun. Khan’s troubled future was nowhere in sight. It was the year that saw the start of a 15-year relationship between the soon-to-be controversial star and his protective silent shadow.

Shera recalls his first assignment with Khan. “Now, I travel with him. That time, I used to go one day before to set up the security arrangements and then come to the airport to pick him up. My job was to secure him from the crowd. We were in Indore. The crowd is mad there because it is Khan’s hometown. We had to go to a place which is little far away.

There was only one small road to go and come, and we were getting late. I was little tired also. He gave me a pill. Bole (Khan said) ‘Have this’. One dose of something he gave me. I had it. You can’t believe it: I ran 8km in front of his car to clear the road (of fans). That was the job I did with bhai.”

Where other stars are concerned, security men and bodyguards come and go. What is the special bond Shera shares with Khan? “We have an understanding. Because he knew I was a ‘yes man’ for him. ‘Whatever I tell him, he will do it’—that confidence (about me) I got in Salmanbhai.”

Shera’s face is troubled, his voice dropping in tenor as he describes the most difficult period of his own, ergo, his employer’s life. “The most difficult moment for me was that accident case which happened. Then, the story of that accident case is going on, then that Jodhpur case is going on. To take him to courts—this court, that court—it was difficult. I was not feeling good, seeing this for a star” (in 2002, Khan allegedly ran over four workers sleeping outside the American Express Bakery in Bandra, killing one man). “Whenever all these cases happened, I was with him through all of it. I used to make him hide somewhere that people don’t see him.”

How did the police allow a bodyguard to accompany an arrested star? Shera laughs with an underlying childishness that apparently even flummoxed the Mumbai police then. “The police didn’t allow me, but I used to.

Somehow I used to get in. I used

to just get in. Bas.” Shera was at hand even when Khan’s family could not be.

When Khan had to keep court dates in Jaipur for the blackbuck case, flying on day trips via Jodhpur or Udaipur because direct flights were not available, Shera was there. “Things happen with everybody, but things were more exaggerated at that time. I used to request the police, ki, ‘Sir, mujhe bhi aane de. Ek jan ko saath mein rehne de (let me go too)’, so they used to allow.”

Shera’s loyalty lives on in a denial of the fate his star bhai suffered. “Media ne kuch zyaada cheezon ko uchchaala hai (the media brought things up too much). At that point of time, media didn’t have a liking for him or something.

But I don’t think so he was in any way in the wrong side of the…” He trails off. His conviction that his employer is innocent doesn’t waver, however.

Shera is convinced; Khan is good-hearted, he does a lot for charity that he does not need to show to the press. He is also much misunderstood. Fans understand him. That is why they love him. He loves him, “as a brother. Naturally, 15 years, he is my family. It’s not just Salmanbhai, it’s Sohailbhai, didi (Alvira), Arpita, they are like my brothers and sisters. Wherever I have travelled in the world, I am given the room next to him. He has made this film (Bodyguard) about me, he has made me dance, he has begun the publicity for it from me, he has worn my company’s logo in the film, how much mileage he has given me...”

In return, Shera has sacrificed his turban, and the time he spends with his son: “My son’s name is also Tiger. When I am in Bombay, I get time with him, when I am travelling I am not able to... but that is life.” He adds, “I have no timing for Mr Khan.”

Fifteen years of proximity implies there are many secrets Shera could have, and could still spill, but he won’t. “I never talked to the press actually. He told me, if you want you can talk. I said ‘No, no’. Now, you see, things are changed. Slowly we are getting to know that things are cleared, nothing is there. I will never write the book Salmanbhai joked about, that if I write he will be doomed. Don’t try to lead me there. It won’t work.”