Lounge for 29 Oct 2011

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

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 44

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

Close Close to to 500 500 labels labels are are registered registered with with the the All All India India Wine Wine Producers Producers Association.

Association.

SHOESHINE >Page 6

THE AGE OF KAEL

A new anthology and a biography of Pauline Kael reassess her influence on film criticism >Page 12

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE The editor of ‘National Geographic’ on travelling and photographing the untamed >Pages 14­15

The great Indian wine boom was short­lived. Ten years after the green flag, the Indian wine industry is still looking for that sparkle >Pages 9­11

REPLY TO ALL

CULT FICTION

SHOBA NARAYAN

HOW TO LISTEN WILL THE HONOUR KILLING BILL WORK? TO A GUEST

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We revisit the Royal Opera House under restoration. Can it again become a usable cultural space in Mumbai? >Pages 17­18

THE GOOD LIFE

AAKAR PATEL

he Congress government has drafted a Bill against honour killing. It is called “The Prevention of Crimes in the Name of ‘Honour’ and Tradition Bill”. Strangely, all the acts which find mention in this Bill—murder, coercion, abetting murder—are already punishable. What is new is that soon we will be prosecuting people specifically for doing honour killing. Will it work? No. It will in fact promote honour killing. Let us see why. On 10 July 2010, Surat’s Pooja Rathod, 21, was killed... >Page 4

OPERA AROUND THE CORNER

I

t was 12.45 when I walked into the new Leela in Delhi to check in. I had scheduled a business lunch at the hotel’s Qube restaurant at 1pm and was worried I’d be late.

All I wanted to do was go to my room, drop my bag, wash my face and get to the restaurant in 10 minutes. I said as much to the smiling young lady who came to greet me. “Sure, ma’am.

Please sit down and make yourself comfortable. I’ll get the check-in form.”

Minutes ticked by. >Page 5

R. SUKUMAR

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

MAGIC (COMIC) REALISM

3

2, 21, 28, 41, 11, 33, 38, 47, 76. Brás de Oliva Domingos, an obituary writer, dies nine times, at different ages (mentioned above) in Daytripper, a book that’s a bit about life and a lot about death (but not in a morbid way), written and illustrated by Brazilian twins Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. Between his deaths, he manages to live, love, realize his lifelong ambition of emulating his father Benedito, a famous writer, and becomes a good friend/husband/father. >Page 13

PHOTO ESSAY

THE TWITTER PEOPLE

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FIRST CUT

LOUNGE LOVES | ORGANIC GARDEN

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

The garden detox Painstakingly grown vegetables benefit not only the farmer, but your palate too

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT JASBIR LADI

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©2011 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

Sorry syllabus: So many girls battle hygiene and safety issues to get an education.

A GIRL’S GUIDE TO PUBLIC SPEAKING

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udhakar, a Mumbai taxi driver I’ve known forever, asked me what career his third son should pursue (his other two sons opted for law and fire extinguisher salesman). Banker, I said.

It’s still easy money in India. Banks are expanding their networks everywhere.

In August, HDFC Bank announced excitedly that it had opened its first branch in Leh, 10,500ft above sea level.

The bank said it would add 600 new branches during the current fiscal.

But I was more interested in knowing what Sudhakar’s daughter was doing.

Oh, she stopped studying after class X, he said. Why? She felt scared to go to college, he said. Groups of jobless young men hung outside the neighbourhood college in their Uttar Pradesh town and harassed the women.

We’ve tried to convince her, but she just refuses to step out (of course he blamed it on Muslims and lower castes, but we all know that Indian men of all castes, classes and religions DEBATE stand united in their harassment of women).

Coincidentally, the issue raised by my discussion with Sudhakar had just been deliberated by VAWMonth (Violence Against Women Awareness Month), an exhaustive, month-long blogger initiative on Twitter. These are some of the points that #VAWAM highlighted: 1) Until a few years ago, women who left home after puberty to educate themselves routinely faced danger in Afghanistan where acid attacks on schoolgirls were a common phenomenon. 2) In January this year, Bangladesh said the phrase “eve-teasing” was a euphemism to describe sexual harassment and one that trivialized a serious crime. The court said all “eve teasing”—physical and electronic stalking too—must be considered sexual harassment. 3) Sexual abuse is rampant in our schools.

Many girls in that vast swathe of Other India drop out of school after

inbox

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com THE POWER OF GIVING “Sunil Mittal’s ‘ma ka khana’ model”, 22 October, was an excellent and moving write­up. It should inspire companies and the wealthy to make meaningful contribution to society. In our country, even government policies are tweaked to favour a few by ministers who are blatantly aligned with a few companies.

Congratulations to Sunil Mittal who cares about the unprivileged masses.

DILIP AGARWAL

THE KOLKATA OF DREAMS Since the launch of ‘Lounge’, I have been an ardent reader. The initial years with Jared Sandberg (I thought he was outstanding), Vir Sanghvi (a perennial favourite—though I may not agree with his viewpoint all the time) and Shoba Narayan were a must­read for me. In fact, one of the first letters to the editor featured in ‘Lounge’ was mine, and a short

puberty because of the lack of toilets and sanitary napkins. Obviously India doesn’t think girls are important enough to provide for their basic public space needs.

A colleague who travelled to Salola village in Haryana for last week’s brilliant Mint Lounge Diwali issue found that while the old reasons to diss girl children such as a hefty dowry remain, among the newer reasons cited to skip the whole baby girl experience are, ironically, the rise of violence against women and concern among parents about whether they will be able to protect their daughter’s chastity.

Women have always negotiated our male-dominated public spaces with trepidation. In their 2011 book Why Loiter? authors Sameera Khan, Shilpa Phadke and Shilpa Ranade argued that even in a city like Mumbai—where students and working women zip around with relative ease—it was difficult for women to access public spaces for pleasure, just to hang out.

Of course it’s easier for women to unite and reclaim their right to public spaces in halfway egalitarian Mumbai.

Hollaback! Mumbai, a global movement dedicated to ending street harassment—“one of the most pervasive forms of gender-based violence and one of the least legislated against”—encourages women to share their street experiences online. The city’s college students are doing their bit too—go visit the Facebook pages of Freeze the Tease and Chappal Maarungi, both began in response to class assignments.

I know it’s very defeatist but I can’t help thinking that all these brilliant urban initiatives won’t help Sudhakar’s daughter be brave/foolish enough to get an education.

You can write to me at lounge@livemint.com

note from the founder­editor Raju Narisetti is something I still cherish.

I think Aakar Patel’s columns are a breath of fresh air. I enjoyed reading his piece on Kolkata (I wish it was still called Calcutta), “Why Kolkata will win in 20 years”, 15 October.

I have been in Delhi since 1995 with a two­year break in Mumbai, and have been a constant cynic about the state of my hometown, Kolkata. I abhorred the idea of ever going back to the city which has now degenerated to a small town.

Although Aakar Patel paints too rosy a picture of the city, it struck a chord.

My nephew shares my sentiments. The term ‘bhadra’ is still very Bengali, and relatively alien to a large part of the region which I have made home over the last 15 years.

Having said that, Delhi has given me a lifestyle which Kolkata would not have been able to provide.

I loved the comparison with Gujarat and Gujaratis, and the take on hand­pulled rickshaws was different and refreshing. The fact that festivities and religion practised in Kolkata are inclusive and not menacing or threatening was an interesting insight.

After reading the piece, I have resolved to go back to my roots one day and settle down in the city of my dreams.

AHIJIT DUTTA

here are no twin packs of red and yellow bell peppers, perfectly waxed red apples, parsley and thyme, or the ubiquitous mushrooms on this grocer’s shelves. It’s like ducking into one narrow refrigerator aisle at your local supermarket; the store reminds you of a sanitized “santhi” or farmers’ market of the kind that seats itself at Bandra or Hiranandani Estate in Thane on a weekly or monthly basis—sans the physical presence of the farmers. Organic Garden is down the street from that other pricey store for everyday vegetables—Nature’s Basket at Breach Candy, where the focus is more on providing variety (it doesn’t claim to be organic, though many vegetables are locally sourced).

Organic Garden, which opened last week, serves up rows of crisp, green vegetables: broccoli (hari phool gobi), fresh basil (tulsi); each shelf labelled neatly with the local and English names. A menu lists tomatoes at `25 for 500g and Chinese cabbage at `54 a head.

The prices here are not negotiable and do not fluctuate like those at your vegetable vendor.

This is because the vegetables are sourced directly from 15

farmers in Maharashtra who receive a fixed compensation for their efforts. Organic certification by the French company Ecocert means even the plastic packaging is biodegradable.

That’s the thing about organic farming, says owner Manisha Temkar. A local resident of Breach Candy, she was inspired to source organically grown produce when she realized that few vendors actually knew the provenance of their vegetables. “We eat a lot of these vegetables raw, and for that, you must know how it’s grown, otherwise you are just putting toxins into your system.” Growing up on her father’s farm near Ratnagiri helped her gain some of her knowledge about farming.

When Temkar began Organic Garden, she first spent time looking for farmers from whom she could buy. Being organic, she says, means seeing that the farmer is involved with his land every single day. It required getting into the nitty-gritty of how farmers live. “For instance, we realized our farmers in rural areas get electricity at 2am. So the husband and wife have to take turns waking up to operate any machinery required. So we decided to fund generators. So also with the water tanks.”

Removing the use of pesticide meant replacing it with a trust in the farmer’s indigenous methods of farming. “There is great knowledge within the farming community. Farmers use the natural order to grow crops that mutually benefit each other; car-

rots and onions, for instance.

They create handmade traps for rodents. They collect 27 different herbs to make a spray for pests.”

To trust a farmer to his homegrown methods means a slower rate of growth and more potential wastage. While pesticidetreated crop may allow a farmer to be less hands-on and provide, say, a 80% yield, organic crop will lose some produce to pests eventually. That, says Temkar, is part of the deal and a risk they are willing to take.

The produce at the store—try the blackened curry leaves or the guavas, and custard apples or basil—may look “smaller and less pretty” but they have a deep, earthy smell. But that also means they rot faster. Lionel Dharmai, the store manager, says they have to destroy or give away almost 50% of their produce every day. Quite the cost for health. Expats form the base customer group here, he says, and the few Indians with knowledge of crop appreciate the taste of the vegetables.

“But many come and say why should I pay more for the same carrots? We tell them, take them home, boil them and see if it leaks orange chemical water and come back.”

Organic Garden, ground floor, Sagar Villa, opposite Navroze Apartment, Breach Candy, Mumbai. Open 9am-9pm. For home delivery, call 67495555, 9664025555 or 180002665555.

Gayatri Jayaraman HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

Green revolution: Removing the use of pesticides means trusting the farmer’s indigenous methods.

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: MS GOPAL/MINT CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In “Do you have a ‘rurban’ in you?”, 22 October, Shoba Narayan is not a part of The Ugly Indian.

In “A thought for every gift”, 22 October, the product identified as Signature pochette at Tod’s was Single Zip Travel Pouch, at Ermenegildo Zegna, DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `27,100.

L4 COLUMNS

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Why the honour killing Bill won’t work HINDUSTAN TIMES

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he Congress government has drafted a Bill

Blood feuds: Every year, Indians murder more than 1,000 daugh­ ters for falling in love; and (left) Nirupama Pathak.

against honour killing. It is called “The Prevention of Crimes in the Name of ‘Honour’ and Tradition Bill”. Strangely, all the acts which find mention in this Bill—murder,

coercion, abetting murder—are already punishable. What is new is that soon we will be prosecuting people specifically for doing honour killing.

Will it work? No. It will in fact promote honour killing. Let us see why.

On 10 July 2010, Surat’s Pooja Rathod, 21, was killed by her brother Mukesh. She was in love and had spent two weeks with her lover. When she returned, Mukesh bashed her head in with a log. The Rathods are from a martial caste Gujaratis call Bapu, and claim Rajput ancestry.

They include cricketers Ranjitsinhji, Duleepsinhji and Ajay Jadeja.

On 16 August 2010, Amthaji Rathod, his brother Vijayji, his wife Manchaba and his grandson Udaysinh were dismembered with axes in Bhuj. Amthaji’s son Dehuba had eloped with a girl from the Sodha family. The Sodhas are also Rajputs and the girl was missing.

On 21 June 2010, Dilbag and Kuldeep, the father and uncle of 18-year-old Monika, were arrested for her murder, along with that of her lover Rinku. The couple was beaten to death. Though the police did not reveal their last names, India Today magazine reported that the family are Jats.

On 12 May 2008, 19-year-old Vandana died in Vadodara after her father Jayvirsinh Bhadodiya shot her, and her sister and mother brought an axe down on her head. Vandana had eloped with her lover Mayur Marathe.

Bhadodiya is a retired jawan and the Bhadodiyas are Rajputs.

On 21 February 2011, constable Sandeep Singh, 21, was murdered by Balwinder Singh in Kapurthala.

Sandeep had been in a relationship with Balwinder’s daughter Karamdeep Kaur since they were in school. Balwinder Singh is a Jat. On 25 November 2003, four Rajput

men killed Jasveer Singh, married to Geeta Rani, 20, a Rajput in Hoshiarpur. Jasveer was found in a market, his arms and legs had been cut off with swords.

At a conference on 11 January 2004, the Communist Party of India’s women’s body presented a report on honour killing. It mentioned the following incident.

The Dalits of Jhajjar were prevented from drawing water at the village well till they returned two Jat sisters. One of them had eloped with a Dalit boy. Her sister fled with her, fearing punishment because she was aware. The girls were returned and duly slaughtered by their family.

On 11 June 2011, Rameshwar Singh and his sons killed his daughter Ritu, 17, in Hisar. Ritu had just passed her SSC exams and had been stopped by her family from going to school because she had fallen in love.

Rameshwar Singh is a Jat. On 13 June 2010, Asha Saini and her lover Yogesh Jatav were killed by Asha’s family. The lovers, who were both 19, were electrocuted and beaten through the night, their moans being heard by neighbours in Delhi. The Sainis are Rajputs.

On 20 June 2010, three Delhi men, Mandeep Nagar, Ankit Chaudhary and Nakul Khari, were arrested for the murder of Ankit’s sister Monica and her husband Kuldeep, and Mandeep’s sister Shobha. All three were shot for eloping, and were from the peasant Gujjar caste. The Times of India reported the boys were applauded for their action by their community in Wazirpur.

Reuters’ Simon Denyer reported on 16 May 2008 that the village of Balla in Haryana was proud of its action in killing Sunita and her husband Jasbir Singh. Sunita, 21, was five months pregnant, and was punched and kicked in the stomach as she was

taken away with Jasbir in cars to her father’s house. Sunita was strangled by her mother, and her father Om Prakash left the bodies on display outside his house. Accompanied by applauding villagers, Om Prakash walked up to the police station to proudly announce the act. The village of Balla, Denyer reported, “stands united behind the act, proud, defiant, almost to a man”. Om Prakash is a Jat. On 26 February 2011, the Bangalore police arrested Gowramma and Mooge Gowda, the mother and grandfather of Deepika, 20. Deepika was killed, along with her four-month-old son, for marrying her neighbour Venkatesh. Deepika’s father, two uncles and an aunt were absconding after murdering and cremating the girl and her child.

Gowdas are from the peasant caste called Vokkaliga.

On 30 March 2010, Prabhjot Kaur, 19, and her husband Pardeep Singh were shot dead when Pardeep came to pick up his wife after she sat for an English exam. The couple had just married, and were Jats from Tarn Taran. The couple was under protection from the Punjab and Haryana high court.

On 13 May 2010, Gurleen Kaur, 19, and her mother-in-law Kuljit Kaur were killed by Gurleen’s father, brothers and uncles. Gurleen was found with her fingers cut off, and

with stabs on her neck and shoulders.

Kuljit was stabbed in her eyes.

Gurleen’s husband Amarpreet, 25, tried to fight back, but was shot by the men. The family are Jats from Tarn Taran.

On 22 July 2009, Ved Pal was killed by his wife Sonia’s family. They had opposed the couple’s marriage and Ved Pal had gone to pick up his bride with a police escort in Punjab’s Singhwal village. Sonia’s Jat family lynched him after brushing aside the police. Twelve people, including members of the Khap panchayat, were convicted for the murder on 30 September 2011.

On 15 June 2007, Manoj Banwala and his wife Babli were killed by her family. They were under police protection, but were kidnapped after their escort fled. The couple was strangled after being beaten. The couple were Jats from Karora in Haryana. On 30 March 2010, five people, including Babli’s brother, Suresh, and her uncles, were sentenced to death for the murder.

On 28 October 2008, two minor girls, Geeta and Kali, were killed by their family in Haryana’s Bhiwani district. The girls were returning after meeting their boyfriends, and were stoned and sickled before being set alight with kerosene. The girls were from the peasant Dhanak community.

When on 29 April 2010, the death of Delhi journalist Nirupama Pathak, 22, was reported as an honour killing, I was immediately interested. This is because her name marked Nirupama as Brahmin. Her mother was arrested and the press, always unhinged, took the family to task.

The clues were all there that this wasn’t an honour killing. For instance, the mother attended Nirupama’s shradh ritual, unimaginable in the light of the bestiality we have seen above. On 2 March 2011, the mother was let off after the police accepted Nirupama had committed suicide.

The Brahmin does not feel honour, nor does the merchant. Two communities feel honour in India, the

peasant and the warrior. Any law on honour killing must address these communities specifically, else it is useless. Every year, Indians murder over a thousand daughters for falling in love. Of these, 900 are from the peasantry of Haryana, Punjab, Delhi and north-west Uttar Pradesh.

In our peasant cultures, family honour is reposed in the body of the woman. This is because she is seen as a possession, though not necessarily an asset. Honour is lost when the girl is taken away, and gained when we kill her and take it back.

Honour is bestowed on us by others. We cannot honour ourselves.

Honour killing is successful only when society gives the killers honour.

The antidote is to make them feel loss of honour, but this new law actually endorses their act. What is needed is to treat them as criminals, not enemies of honour and tradition, because honour and tradition are on their side.

Hindi newspapers use “aanar killing” to describe these murders.

There is no Hindi phrase for the act.

Izzat kay liye khoon (murder for honour) becomes a positive act. This is because izzat is a positive attribute.

Something done in its defence cannot be bad. There is no negative side to honour in our vocabulary: Laaj, sanmaan, izzat, aabroo, kirti are all positive words, warm words. This is why there are quote marks over the word “honour” in the Bill.

Haryana also has Baniyas, but they don’t do honour killing. Gujarat has other castes, but only one does honour killing. We have seen the Rajputs of Gujarat act as savages with their children. But there are no honour killings in Gujarat’s dominant peasant caste, the Patel.

Why? Because he has absorbed the Baniya’s pragmatism over time.

How? Through culture. There is little value for honour in a mercantile culture, because inflexibility brings pride but always causes loss. Also through religion.

The deity in the homes of Charotar’s Patels is Sri Krishna in his beautiful Ranchhod form. Ranchhod means he-who-fled-from-battle. It refers to Sri Krishna’s act of pragmatism when he chose to save himself by running away from Jarasandh’s fierce general Kalyavan instead of fighting.

This is why there is no Gujarat regiment in the Indian Army—“Jai Ranchhod!” is a most unconvincing battle cry. But the families of all Charotar Patels (Vallabhbhai, Prafulbhai, and my own) bow to Ranchhodrai of Dakor. Problems of culture are ultimately soluble only in culture.

At that CPI conference, former chief justice K.G. Balakrishnan, who heads India’s Human Rights Commission, said a separate law wasn’t needed. All the punishments were already in place. However, Girija Vyas, the force behind this Bill, says: “A law is the need of the hour,” adding, “I get at least two calls every week.”

Putting quote marks around “honour”does not make it less appealing to the peasant. This law is an English-medium solution to a Hindi-medium crime. I can assure Vyas, whose name indicates she is Brahmin, that her law will not work.

In fact, I am willing to bet her that the effect will be the opposite: It will encourage honour killing.

Conviction under this law will be displayed by the peasant with great pride, because the highest point of honour is martyrdom.

Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media. Write to him at replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakar­patel

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SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Is anyone listening to the guest?

I

t was 12.45 when I walked into the new Leela in Delhi to check in. I had scheduled a business lunch at the hotel’s Qube restaurant at 1pm and was worried I’d be late. All I wanted to do was go to my room, drop my bag, wash my face and get to the

restaurant in 10 minutes. I said as much to the smiling young lady who came to greet me.

“Sure, ma’am. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable. I’ll get the check-in form.”

Minutes ticked by. I sat on edge, wondering what I should do to hurry them up. A waitress asked if I’d like anything to drink. Someone got a jasmine garland ready. Five minutes passed. Finally, the lady in red escorted me to my room and continued to fill up the forms, till I told her, for the fourth time, that I was late for lunch. Would it have been different had I walked into the lobby and started yelling for an express check-in? Yes, of course. Hotel staff is trained to deal with problem guests and I wasn’t behaving like one. But I had a distinct need that the hotel didn’t hear, let alone fulfil.

The hospitality industry spends countless hours training employees to act on certain principles: enhancing guest experience, prompt delivery of services, warm welcomes and goodbyes, among others.

Consistency is key. So they embrace rules and uniforms. Always welcome a guest this way; always ask a guest these questions; always wish them a warm goodbye.

The challenge for those in the service sector is to train employees not just to deliver service consistently, but also to discern and act on unusual requests, both stated and unstated. A man checks in with a headache and doesn’t want to be escorted to the room; he wants to go to the spa. A woman with low blood sugar comes in with one pressing need: food. How to get her to ask for it, and even if she does, will the front desk staff stop the check-in formalities to run to the restaurant and get bread? These are not crises, but the way the hotel staff intuit and respond to these needs will enhance or diminish the experience for that particular guest.

For this, hotels have to teach their employees not just consistency but also flexibility. Rather than impose a uniform welcome for all guests, receptionists have to customize. And customization involves figuring out guest needs at that moment in time by looking and listening, something that is hard to do in a busy hotel.

Listening is a key skill for all hotel employees, and it can be taught. For example, hotels could institute a simple rule. Any staff member who welcomes a guest should not leave the guest’s side for the first 5 minutes.

That’s all it takes: 5 minutes. It’s no use asking the guest to “be comfortable” and then walking away, even if it is to get the check-in form. If you want to delve into psychology, you could call this “fear of abandonment”. We all have it, and it influences our behavioural responses, ranging from how we react when a spouse walks out in the middle of a quarrel to why we keep asking the doctor questions so that we can keep him near our bedside.

Hotels, spas and restaurants can factor in this fear of abandonment into enhancing the guest experience.

Some spas do this. The massage therapist is instructed to keep her hand on the guest’s body at all times, even when she is walking around to the other side of the table. Similarly, hotels can give their front desk staff a simple diktat: Do not, under any circumstances, walk away from the guest in the first 5 minutes. That’s all it takes to draw out the guest and get a measure of his state of mind. Is he tense? Is she in a hurry? Do they have a specific need that needs to be addressed? Rather than instructing each guest to sit down and “be comfortable” (how I hate that phrase), the staff should be taught to converse with the guest and find out their psychological state of mind.

This can have dramatic effects on the guest experience.

I stayed at The Leela Palace anonymously in July, paying what was then the standard rate of `13,963 per night. It was a fine experience, except at the beginning and the end. I enjoyed my lunch at The Qube. The salads from Egypt, Morocco, and all over the Mediterranean were fresh and beautifully presented in small plates. A butterfly danced on the glass wall that separated the restaurant from the garden. The tables were nicely spaced and two of the long tables were full of Punjabi ladies who lunched and then paid with wads of cash. The cutlery was stylish, yet easy to handle. The nouveau Indian music—sitar and drums—was at the correct volume.

The staff was uniformly courteous, with nary a misstep.

I am conflicted about this hotel’s decor. I like that they don’t conform to the minimalism that has taken over the world. I like that they use what architect Rahul Mehrotra calls

“local assertions” in their design. I like their Kovalam property’s pared down “assertions” most. But ornamental Indian isn’t for me. The Leela Delhi aesthetic is maximalist with baroque overtones: gilt-edged mirrors, crystal chandeliers, large potted (plastic?) plants, carpets with a faintly Aubusson touch, and flowers everywhere. The liftman told me that the hotel buys 3,600 roses daily. They are arranged artfully all over the hotel. The wood-panelled Club-level floor is stunning. I loved the self-designed wallpaper and upholstery; and the antique prints and photographs that are framed off-centre: a simple idea but so very chic.

When I checked out, I got a rude shock. I had booked for two days through a travel agent and then cancelled the first night. The hotel insisted on having me sign a credit card payment for the first night as a “pre-authorization”. The duty

Small bites: Try the fresh salads from Egypt, Morocco and all over the Mediterranean, at The Qube, at the new Leela in Delhi. manager, Varsha, said she would do her best to waive the charge, but it took two weeks and two emails for it to happen. I can understand hotels doing this during peak season, but The Leela wasn’t full. The hotel eventually returned the money, but the damage was done. Next time, I’ll be more careful when I book The Leela because they don’t allow me to be flexible.

Shoba Narayan sees the triumph of the minimalist aesthetic as one of the triumphs of modern Japan. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

THINKSTOCK

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

TOMORROW IS HERE

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he was just like me except for the diamond earrings and solitaire ring she was wearing. We recognized each other instantly. South Delhi girls, modern Indian women, now professionals.

This was my third pregnancy and she was my ultrasonologist, the doctor who did my ultrasounds.

Well into my second trimester, I had been diagnosed with jaundice.

Afzal and I were oscillating between the extremes of wild panic and a deep sense of calm. If we move slowly, surely, one doctor’s appointment at a time, if I keep lying down and solving Sudokus, listening to my children in the other rooms...my parents’ home, our home, hospital... everything will be fine.

Baby kept kicking and moving inside me, reassuringly.

“It’s not worth the risk,” she said to me.

“No, no,” I reassured her, “my other doctors are quite confident we will recover.”

“Oh well, you already have two daughters,” she said. “I don’t want you to get a shock again.”

Aha, my brain clicked. She can see that baby is a girl.

“You mean we are going to have a pretty little daughter,” I said to her. I felt a surge of pride and happiness, maternal hormones in overdrive.

“I’m just telling you that there is no point taking a risk. You will be disappointed.” She shrugged her shoulders and turned away. I remember a hard, unfriendly face.

One part of me really wants to talk about this and another doesn’t quite feel ready. I take many breaks.

Shampoo the children. Go for a walk in the noise of traffic. Play Uno with family, then come here to type a sentence. To amuse myself, I thought of a tentative title for this article: “One tight slap from a mother of 3 daughters”.

But frankly, I’m not really angry.

Not even sad. How can I be?

Children are glorious, they make us laugh, they are thoughtful teachers, they protect us from ourselves.

Naseem, our bonus love child, is on the floor right here sketching a family of five stick figures. She draws us all with big hair. When she wants my attention, she will make five stick figures on her legs with a sketch pen.

We didn’t plan it this way, but

The power of three: Three daughters make for great company, and a reason for joy. raising children often positions parents in the minefield of political, social and cultural conflicts by default.

I’ll tell you what I am talking about.

We had a fairly protected existence ourselves till we were a dinky little family with two little girls. For some reason, the arrival of the third daughter seems to shake the skeletons in everyone’s closets.

Here’s what I learnt accidentally. I found out that a disdain for daughters and boy-worship isn’t just the domain of the poor, the ignorant and the illiterate. As a big-city snob, I hadn’t expected any better from maids and villagers, and random grandmothers.

My illusions were smashed in one thunderous moment when we became witness to the callous and casual misogyny of my doctors, my city friends and general all around posh “people like us”. It was devastating at that time.

Here we were, flushed with joy, holding a miracle of a baby. And yet I felt that I was stranded in a wasteland, surrounded by debris. Even joy needs validation, I found out.

We call it violence against women, but this is really violence turned inwards. This is a formula for self-destruction. Do we think we are doing our sons any favours by “loving” them better? By giving them better

opportunities, better pieces of mutton at the dining table and those awesome motorcycles?

No, we damage the humanity of our sons as well. We hurt and diminish them. Children have an innate sense of justice. By teaching them to disregard their intuitive feelings, we scar them for life. Spontaneity is replaced with an unexplained visceral anxiety and anger.

Brothers and sisters grow up estranged from each other, resentful of their parents and confused about their own worth in the world. We negate the power of family with our ignorance.

That’s all I know so far.

A couple of paragraphs ago, Naseem came to me with a blue-purple-coloured cardboard we had saved from some chocolate packaging.

“You said we will cut an elephant from this,” she said, offering me the piece.

“Yes,” I say, still looking at my laptop screen. “We will make it tomorrow.”

“Par aaj to kal ho gaya,” she said, showing me the morning light all around the room.

Yes, my dear. Tomorrow has arrived.

It is today.

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

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011

Style

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PICKS

Shoeshine Flash crystals and sequins as you click your heels this season

t Steve Madden: I­Dreemy crystal­ embellished blush satin flats, at Pal­ ladium mall, Lower Parel, Mumbai; Phoenix Market City mall, Nagar Road, Pune; and Ambience Mall, Gurgaon, `6,400.

t Aldo: Moos champagne­ glitter pumps, at Aldo stores in Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune, `4,600.

B Y V ISESHIKA S HARMA viseshika.s@livemint.com

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p Salvatore Ferragamo: Gilia peep­toe pumps with crystal­embellished bows, at UB City mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Banga­ lore; The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mum­ bai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `64,000.

t Gucci: Soraya crystal­embellished sandals, at The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `65,000.

u Steve Madden: Partyy­R platform pumps with crystal­embellished heels, at Palladium mall, Lower Parel, Mumbai; Phoenix Market City mall, Nagar Road, Pune; and Ambience Mall, Gurgaon, `6,999.

t Jimmy Choo: Fairview embellished mesh and leather sandals, at Net­a­porter.com; The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai; UB City mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `1.05 lakh.

u Zara: Ballerinas with crystal­embellished bows, at Palladium mall, Lower Parel, Mumbai; and DLF Promenade mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `2,690.

t Gucci: Crystal­embellished silk­satin peep­toe pumps, at Net­a­porter.com; The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai; and DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, approx. `1,35,650.

GOODIES THAT GLITTER Other ways to work that 1980s sparkle t Mango: Sequined bag with chain strap, at Mango stores in Banga­ lore, Gurgaon, Hydera­ bad, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune, `3,550.

t Aldo: Tamez candy­glitter flats with purple bows, at Aldo stores in Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune, `3,400.

u Miu Miu: Glitter and suede peep­toe ankle boots, at Net­a­porter. com, approx. `56,000.

t Christian Louboutin: Fifi 100 leopard­print sequined pumps, at Net­a­porter.com, approx. `91,600.

t Nine West: Arm­ candy magenta strappy sandals with candy­glitter heels and platform, at Atria mall, Worli, Mumbai; and Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi, `3,690.

u Zara: Crystal­embel­ lished elasticated belt, at Palladium mall, Lower Parel, Mum­ bai; and DLF Prome­ nade mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi, `990. t Ayesha: Crystal­ encrusted hairbands, at Ayesha stores in Auranga­ bad, Bangalore, Chennai, Goa, Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi and Puduch­ erry, `290 each. u Jimmy Choo: Ted cham­ pagne­glitter iPhone holder, at The Galleria, Nariman Point, Mumbai; DLF Emporio mall, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi; and UB City mall, Vittal Mallya Road, Bangalore, `18,500.

u Tarun Tahiliani watches: At The Time Factory stores in Colaba Causeway, Colaba, Mumbai; and Sarojini Nagar Market, New Delhi, `12,945.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011

Play

LOUNGE RECREATION PARK

The second life of Appu Ghar MANPREET ROMANA/AFP

India’s oldest amusement park is getting a reboot with bigger space and more rides. Can it live up to our memories of it?

B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· ppu Ghar was named after the mascot of the 1982 Asian Games, a live elephant called Appu. After the games, the government ordered the building of the park, which was opened in 1984 by the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. Appu’s “home” was the first amusement park in India, and for almost 25 years, it was a place of entertainment for children and their parents alike, located in the heart of the Capital, across the road from the Supreme Court.

It was a wonderful getaway from the city’s din until it closed in 2008 to make way for the Delhi Metro.

Those who tried the rides, from the Columbus and Giant Wheel to My Fair Lady and the Bumper Cars, are probably nodding their heads, remembering their favourite

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moments from the park right now.

It had 20 rides; a water park, Oysters, was added in 1998.

According to a company official, the park saw an average of 1.4 million visitors every year, although the numbers stopped growing near the end as the park’s annexation by the Delhi Metro and Supreme Court took place over several stages, preventing the management from introducing new rides and attractions.

Now Appu Ghar is gearing up for a second coming as International Amusement Ltd (IAL), the company that built and operated Appu Ghar, has announced that it is building a new amusement park in Gurgaon that will open in 2013, and will also be called by the same name.

IAL was founded in 1984 by Gian Vijeshwar, a non-resident Indian (NRI) originally based in Sweden, who moved to India to set up Appu Ghar. In 2004, in a joint venture with Unitech, the company created two more parks—World of Wonder in Noida and Adventure Island in Rithala, Delhi.

Appu Ghar aged a lot over 24 years—from 1984 to 2008—losing its sheen over time.

Theatre personality Lushin Dubey has lived her life oscillating between the US and India, but whenever she and her children were here, she recalls, trips to Appu Ghar were mandatory. “My kids had been to Disneyland and

to the biggest amusement parks in Europe, but they really loved Appu Ghar. There was something very intimate about the place, and I remember going there every weekend with my sister, my cousin and my children,” Dubey says.

“It was not as big or as impressive as the other places, but it made you feel very proud of our country and the children really loved it. My daughter particularly loved the Bumper Cars and the little train because these were rides they could go on without us, so they would feel very independent.

And there was a little roller-coaster that I would go on with the children that we all loved,” she adds.

Through the years though, the park ceased to be the wonder of Delhi, and according to Dubey, she and her family stopped visiting the

Au revoir: Children take a joy ride on 17 February 2008, the last day before Appu Ghar closed down. park well before it closed, because of the sad state it had fallen into.

Dubey says, “There is no civic sense. We take great pride in making something world-class, but then don’t work to maintain it. You would see litter everywhere, and spit on the rides, and it started to feel dirty and unsafe.

Over the years, it became a place where you didn’t want to take your children any more.”

Kathak dancer Shovana Narayan recalls taking her niece and nephew there in the 1980s.

“When it closed though, it didn’t strike a chord, and I didn’t really

notice that it had happened.”

While Appu Ghar was financially successful, the land lease, which had earlier been renewed every three years, was not renewed again as negotiations broke down and instead, some land first went to the Delhi Metro, and then later, in a move that led to the closure of the park, the land was used to build an annex to the Supreme Court. After eight years of legal wrangling, India’s oldest amusement park was closed.

By that point in time, Appu Ghar was already outdated—the number of rides was really low compared with new parks that had opened in 2004 and 2005, and most of them were showing their age. The Giant Wheel had started to look like a dwarf, and the Columbus creaked and groaned in a manner that did not seem all too simulated. Unlike the new parks, which had a lot of space to build on, Appu Ghar’s 18-acre park could barely contain the 18 rides in the park. Every ride was pushed up against the next, and the lanes leading from one to the next were narrow. The My Fair Lady, a carousel designed like a spinning woman, her skirt forming its roof, was a frightful design that would never be seen today.

The idea of the new 58-acre Appu Ghar, almost four times the size of the original one, and brand new rides that are being imported from around the world, a shopping mall and a videogame arcade, and possibly even a full-size roller-coaster, is both exciting and a little disorienting.

The notion of fat little Appu in a place like that is hard to reconcile. But as Benu Sehgal, director, IAL, points out, this is an evolution of Appu Ghar. “The city has

been growing with time and evolving, and so Appu Ghar is also evolving. Everything will be completely new and of the highest quality, with international consultants to ensure a worldclass experience.”

In the plans is a wax museum modelled along the lines of Madame Tussauds in London and a giant wheel along the lines of the London Eye. The proposed giant wheel is set to be the largest in the country—with a diameter of 60m. For reference, 20 elephants stacked one on top of the other would be around the same height. The wheel will be segmented into airconditioned pods from which people will get an “unrivalled view of the Gurgaon skyline”.

Marketing consultant and author Suhel Seth, however, feels it won’t be enough. He says, “In an age of instant gratification, of television and the Internet, Appu Ghar won’t have the same impact.”

The complex will also have a racetrack for go-karting and a water park. Stunt shows are also being planned as unique attractions.

Some of the old Appu Ghar will also continue in the new location.

Sehgal says IAL will incorporate new versions of some of the iconic rides, and there are also plans for a photo gallery displaying images of the old Appu Ghar.

For people who grew up visiting the park, this should be a nice enough perk to return.

But it’s unlikely that the new Appu Ghar will be able to evoke the same feeling as the original. It might, however, finally arrive on an international stage, the way it was always meant to, and the way it did, in 1984.

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE MICHAEL CLARKE/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

GUIDE

The Bordeaux basics

JOHN S DYKES/WSJ

With thousand­dollar bottles and a dizzying number of estates, this great French wine region is difficult to comprehend

B Y L ETTIE T EAGUE ···························· here are only a handful of wine regions that manage to transcend geography to achieve true iconography. One of the first—and arguably still the best—is Bordeaux. This roughly 300,000-acre region in south-west France has been a reference point for the world’s winemakers for hundreds of years and a sought-after address for aristocrats, billionaires and the occasional oligarch too. But Bordeaux is much more than a single region or type of wine; it’s an increasingly fractured place where the big names (Lafite, Latour and Mouton) turn out wines that sell for thousands of dollars while the lesser crus and the unknowns are forced to scrabble after a euro or two.

There’s also a divide separating wine drinkers: While topspending collectors still buy up Lafite and Latour, more and more consumers—and even some sommeliers—shy away from Bordeaux, dismissing it as too expensive, too old-fashioned, too intimidating or simply too dull. But for those who dig a bit deeper, there can be some rewards. Thanks to Bordeaux producers who are investing in the less heralded regions—and a recent great vintage, 2009—there is more good low-priced Bordeaux now than ever before. But where to start looking? This simplified guide offers some Bordeaux basics—and a look at what’s starting to change.

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The lay of the land The most important geographic facts about Bordeaux can be summed up in two words: Left and Right. This has nothing to do with political orientation—it refers to a region’s position relative to the Gironde estuary that divides two sides of Bordeaux.

The Left Bank is home to

Cabernet-based wines and includes famous subregions like Pauillac, St Julian and Graves.

It’s also where the great sweet wines, Sauternes and Barsac, are made, and all the top dry white wines too. On the Right Bank, Merlot and Cabernet Franc are the dominant grapes, and the two primary regions are Pomerol and St Émilion.

Though the best-known subregions tend to dominate discussions—and sales—of Bordeaux, there are actually more than 50 Bordeaux subregions, including little-known appellations such as Fronsac, Entre-Deux-Mers and the Côtes de Castillon. Until recently, most of these smaller regions were considered second-rate or worse, but that has begun to change as ambitious and talented (though often poorer) producers have sought to make a less pricey but still good-quality Bordeaux.

The Bordeaux blend No single grape reigns supreme i n B o r d e a u x ; t h e wines are almost always a blend. Six red varietals are employed—Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, M e r l o t , P e t i t e V erdot, Carménère and Malbec—though the last two are rarely found. As for the whites, they’re largely a blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon with an occasional bit of Muscadelle.

There are many good reasons to make a blended rather than a single-varietal wine. One is consistency. It’s easier to achieve a consistent profile with several varietal players: One grape may provide aromatics, another structure and depth. And in an uncertain maritime climate like that of Bordeaux, it’s good to have options—grapes that not only contribute different characteristics, but ripen at different times. If something happens to the late-ripening Cabernet Franc, the early-ripening Merlot can compensate.

FOUR AFFORDABLE REDS AND ONE WHITE FROM BORDEAUX 2009 La Croix de Carbonnieux, $28 The red wines of Bordeaux receive the lion’s share of the attention, but the whites can be worthy. This one is marked by a zesty acidity.

2009 Château Peyraud, $13 Wines from the Premier Côtes de Blaye region can be easygoing and charming, like the juicy and exuberant, cherry­inflected Château Peyraud.

2009 Château Lamothe­Vincent, $15 This wine from the Entre­Deux­Mers region is sweet and seductive.

2006 Chateau St Julian Bordeaux Supérieur, $15 This wine from the “lowly” appellation of Bordeaux Supérieur is lively.

2009 Clos Floridene, $24 This is a plump, dense Cabernet­dominant red with notes of spice and dark fruit that’s a pure pleasure to drink.

The hierarchy Wine has been made in Bordeaux since the time of the Romans, although it was an exclusively domestic product for the first 1,000-plus years, until Henry II of England married Eleanor of Aquitaine and exports of Bordeaux to England began.

Then, in the 17th century, the French king hired Dutch engineers to drain the Médoc region on Bordeaux’s Left Bank, revealing a large swath of what turned out to be extremely desirable

vineyard land. It was promptly planted with vineyards and peopled by aristocrats who built many of the chateaux that still stand today.

The most critical date in Bordeaux history, however, is 1855: It marks the start of a real wine hierarchy—and arguably the birth of the wine snob. This was the year the Bordeaux Classification went into effect, creating the five “classes” of chateaux that inform wine pricing and valuation to this day. The classifica-

tion came about thanks to Napoleon III, who ordered a group of wine brokers to come up with a list of the best Bordeaux in time for the Paris Exposition, a sort of national trade fair. The brokers compiled a list of 62 chateaux that they ranked from first through fifth growths, or “cru classes”, according to reputation and price. Although the list was intended to be temporary, it remains virtually unchanged.

The wines the brokers selected were all reds from the Left Bank.

The great sweet wines of Sauternes and Barsac were allotted two ranking classes, but all of the wines of Pomerol and St Émilion on the Right Bank were left out (the Left Bank, it seemed, had all the political clout). It took St Émilion producers 100 years to come up with a ranking system of their own; in their system, all the wines are re-reviewed every 10 years.

The hierarchy of the original classification system—however imperfect—gave Bordeaux a measurable sort of prestige that no other regional system has. I’ve met many producers, from California to Germany, who have told me their goal is to make “a first growth”—never mind how far geographically, or spiritually, they happened to be from Bordeaux.

The big names Certain Bordeaux chateaux function as a sort of luxury shorthand. There are the five designated as first growths—Château Latour, Château Lafite, Château Margaux, Château Mouton and Château Haut-Brion—as well as a handful of others that are just as avidly sought-after and exorbitantly priced, including Château Pétrus, Château Cheval Blanc and Château Lafleur.

These command most of the attention in the auction market today, and are largely responsible for the image of Bordeaux as a wine that is forbiddingly unapproachable in its youth—and just as forbiddingly priced.

Everybody else There is a great deal more to Bordeaux than the big chateaux; in fact, many more properties are humble than haute. And while the quality over the years has been spotty at these lesserknown properties, it is, in many

What’s in a name? Vine­ yards in the Bordeaux wine region of Blaye; and (left) a map of Bordeaux. cases, much improved. Thanks to better weather and improved winemaking techniques, there are much better wines at the bottom rung now. But competition in this market is fierce, and consumers have been slow to take notice. Owners of small chateaux rarely travel to the US to promote their wines, and affordable Bordeaux are often lost amid all the cheaply priced Chilean Cabernet and Australian Shiraz.

The good news After a string of less than stellar vintages—2006, 2007 and 2008— Bordeaux was given the gift of the terrific 2009 vintage. This may be the year on which smaller chateaux, as well as the big names, stake their reputations, not to mention their fiscal hopes. These wines are just beginning to arrive in the market, and I was able to taste several 2009 wines in the past several weeks.

What’s next While the famous chateaux continue to command thousanddollar price tags, the small producers continue to flail in a very large global pool. A more concerted outreach to retailers and sommeliers, who may have abandoned Bordeaux in search of edgier wines, could help.

Roger Dagorn, wine director of New York’s Porter House restaurant, thought that Bordeaux producers might try pitching their wines to the growing crowd of wine lovers rebelling against high-alcohol wines. “For people who are tired of tasting California wines with a lot of power and alcohol, the wines of Bordeaux provide more finesse,” he says.

Another idea on the table: sending consumers on a blind date with Bordeaux. This fall, Le Conseil Interprofessionnel du Vin de Bordeaux, the Bordeaux promotional organization, is offering “Matchmaking Parties”, pairing consumers with inexpensive Bordeaux based on their wine preferences.

No word as to whether or not a successful match means bottle and drinker will go home together.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

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STATUS REPORT

HEARD IT ON THE

GRAPEVINE

The great Indian wine boom was short­lived. Ten years after the green flag, the Indian wine industry is still looking for that sparkle

B Y A NINDITA G HOSE & A RUN J ANARDHAN ····························· ambir Gopal Phadtare was a professor of sociology at Michigan State University in the US before he returned to India in the 1980s to take over his family land in Nashik, 180km north-east of Mumbai, in Maharashtra. He took to farming, deciding in 1996 to grow wine grape. He was among those dazzled by the appeal of a debutante industry: Indians were waking up to wine, and the state government was offering wine grape farmers generous subsidies. By 2005, Phadtare had produced his first batch of wines under Mountain View Winery Pvt. Ltd, investing more than `7 crore over a period of time.

“It was like the gold rush in the US. Everyone got on to the bandwagon,” says Phadtare, now 76 and nearing bankruptcy. Earlier this year, he sold most of his 25-acre land and almost all his equipment to pay off loans. He wants to start a wine lounge and tasting room. The reason he is still in the business, he says, is because

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he loves making wine.

Stories like Phadtare’s have remained backstage details for a full-costume opera that’s played out over the last decade. Only last month, two Indian wines flying off the shelves at Waitrose, UK’s leading wine and food retailer, made global newsprint. The two wines were the Zampa Syrah 2008 from a Nashik winery, Vallée de Vin; and the Viognier 2010 by Ritu (the export label of Four Seasons, owned by Vijay Mallya’s UB Group), which has the “intense perfume of blossom, with delicate hints of dried apricots and peaches”. The run was in part sparked by BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen, which recommended the Ritu Viognier to partner a curry dish. Sales exceeded expectations, and Waitrose is now looking at adding them permanently to its wine range.

As the wine atlas expands for European and American consumers, other home-grown brands are beginning to be reviewed favourably too: Labels like York, Reveilo, Good Earth, Mercury, Deccan Plateau and Big Banyan, among oth-

ers, are heard of often enough.

Matt Smith, buyer for Waitrose, is certain that the taste of our wine has improved in the last few years. “I’ve been sent samples from India in the past, and the quality’s never been quite there and the price has been high too.

Now, these show true varietal character,” he said in interviews.

But beneath the veneer of recognition lies an industry—which got the official go ahead 10 years ago—struggling to keep its problems bottled.

Climbing vines The Maharashtra Grapes Processing Industrial Policy was introduced in October 2001. Maharashtra hosts more than 90% of the country’s wine producers, and this first-of-its-kind regulation gave as much as 50% concessions in excise duty.

When Stanford-trained engineer Rajeev Samant quit his Silicon Valley job to set up Sula Vineyards in Nashik, it looked like the wine boom had arrived. With its first bottle out in the 2000, Sula introduced a level of quality that was previ-

Bottle notes: The ‘Proudly Indian’ tag was moved from the back to the front label for the second batch of York wines in 2009.

“We wanted to distinguish ourselves as a good­quality Indian winemaker,” says Ravi Gurnani, director, York Winery. ously unknown in India—and it was well-marketed. Brands like Sankalp Wines’ Vinsura and Seagram’s Nine Hills followed.

Between 2005 and 2007, wine production reached an all-time high.

Ravi Gurnani, director of York Winery, which he confesses is modelled on Sula (and half a kilometre away from their winery in Nashik), says that there was a sudden deluge of winemakers. But that “the growth in the industry was more perceived than actual”.

The imbalance was soon to come. There was more wine produced than there were takers, leaving a lot unsold. The surfeit of brash newcomers also meant that TURN TO PAGE L10® L10

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Behind the scenes: (clockwise from below) Sula Vineyards’ storage facility in Nashik, where wines are aged in oak barrels; plantation workers at Sula; workers at Grover Vineyards in Nandi Hills, Karnataka; Sula’s bottling and labelling unit in Nashik; and Ankur Chawla, Taj Mahal Hotel’s wine specialist in New Delhi.

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several did not have the necessary expertise, so the market was flooded with substandard quality. “People had bad wine for the first time and didn’t go back to it,” says Gurnani, explaining the sudden fall in interest in Indian wine.

The global recession and the Mumbai terror attack in November 2008 didn’t help.

Australia, South Africa, France and Italy—countries that were worse affected by the recession—dumped their wine stocks here at throwaway prices. A report prepared by the All India Wine Producers Association (AIWPA) shows a startling drop in sales of Indian wines in 2009: from 12.5 million litres to 6 million litres.

Indage Vintners, a pioneer set up in 1983, even before Sula and Grover, illustrates the miscalculations that have underwritten the Indian wine story. Before it went down, Indage controlled the market. Then they made bad foreign investments, and collapsed. According to a March 2010 report on the wine news portal www.decanter.com, sales fell to `13.8 crore in the nine months to the end of 2009, compared with `140 crore in the same period the year before. In 2009, it had total debts of about `400 crore and was issued a winding-up order by the Bombay high court.

The aftermath The reason “wine country” Nashik wears a desolate look in the first week of October, when we visit, is because it’s not planting season yet. On the outskirts of the city, vast tracts of rain-induced green dot the land in the villages of Gangapur and Savargaon.

On a small plot in Gangapur, Dynandev Eknath Vishe guides his son to drive a tractor. Vishe has been growing cauliflower and tomato for the last three years. For nearly a decade before that, he grew wine grapes. But he uprooted his fields after another bad monsoon made his crop useless and his bank loan insurmountable.

“Parvadta nahin hai (it’s not feasible),” says Vishe in a cocktail of Hindi and Marathi, when asked why he gave up. He has a family of seven whose lives, he says, cannot depend on the moods of the weather, and the vagaries of the wine trade.

Half a kilometre away, his nearest neighbour, Bhaskar Nakil, switched to table grape. His tryst with wine was shorter but similar to Vishe’s—he grew wine grape only for a year. He could not sell his produce after the local distributor went back on his word. “It’s too risky,” says Vishe, “With table grapes, I can at least go to the market and sell it myself.”

Vishe and Nakil are only two of the many wine grape growers in the region who have uprooted their fields in the last couple of years, switching to table grapes or other crop. According to a recent

AIWPA report on the problems of the wine industry, the area under farming in India has gone down from 9,000 acres in 2008 to 5,000 acres this year.

Industry voices say that while in 2010 there was excess supply (of grapes), in 2012 there will be a shortage.

“It takes around four years after plantation for the first batch of grapes. Even if farmers were to plant now, the shortage is inevitable,” says Jagdish Holkar, the president of AIWPA and the owner of Holkar Estates and Vineyards in Nashik that makes Flamingo wines.

Half empty, half full For this long cinematic intermission in what was turning out to be a blockbuster, insiders name a combination of factors: gullible and sometimes greedy farmers, big companies wiping out boutique wineries, different wine policies in different states, exorbitant taxes and duties and high infrastructure costs. Still, those involved believe that the second half can only get better.

York’s Gurnani believes that there will be a “correction” driven by consumers and wineries; Sula’s Samant expects a “consolidation”, where fewer winemakers will produce better wine. Holkar evokes macroeconomics to call this development “backward integration”— understanding the market demand and then producing, instead of producing first and then trying to sell, which is how the industry had worked all along.

Those like Abhay Kewadkar, director and chief winemaker, Four Seasons, say the Great Indian wine boom is only waiting to take off, while Ajit Balgi, wine trainer at beverage training academy Tulleeho, thinks it will happen in five to seven years.

Even Kewadkar, however, is rueful of the Kafkaesque systems at work, taxes being his primary concern. “In any supermarket in Europe, you can buy a good wine for $5 (around `250). In India, with all the charges slapped on, we start with $10,” he says.

Reva Singh, editor and publisher of Sommelier India, the country’s first consumer magazine dedicated to wine, believes that the early phase of rapid growth has slowed. “The Indian wine industry took off in its earliest days because of visionaries such as Indage, Grover and Sula.

There was a lot of buzz surrounding our potentially large and untapped market. Good money was spent building beautiful wineries and investing in vineyards but other aspects of the business such as developing the consumer market lagged,” says Singh.

“Everyone truly believed that we would turn into a nation of wine drinkers. It was surprising that expectations were so high, given that we had no background or culture of wine consumption.”

Singh was one of those who believed. She started Sommelier India in 2004-2005, then a concept so novel that it made its way

to the Limca Book of Records as “India’s first wine magazine”. She started the magazine because “more and more people were drinking wine, but very few knew anything about it except for the most general clichés.”

“Today there is no public event or private celebration without wine being served. The wines may not always be the best, but they’re there and consumers are more informed,” Singh adds, suggesting an increase in wine awareness over the years.

“Understanding was so low when we started that even women in my book circle didn’t know what ‘sommelier’ meant. In the first few issues, we had to explain that under the edit note.”

Conversations on quality and vintage have taken off, although in a small way. Singh’s husband Kulbir Singh is the vice-president of the 16-year-old Wine Society of Delhi, the oldest of a dozen such clubs. Its 215-odd members pay a one-time or annual fee to meet six to nine times a year to swivel their wine glasses and talk bubbly. There’s also more on the training and education front: academies like Vikram Achanta’s Tulleeho train those in the hospitality industry in spirits and wine.

What holds the most promise is this: Despite the lingering pro-

INDIAN WINES ARE STILL REGARDED AS ‘EXOTIC’ PRODUCTS; THEY DON’T HAVE THE SAME LEGITIMACY AS SOUTH AMERICAN WINES. A LOT OF WORK REMAINS TO BE DONE, BUT IT DOESN’T MEAN THAT WE MODIFY THE SOIL, OR THE CLIMATE—WE ADAPT OURSELVES, WE INTERPRET. —Michel Rolland, whose Bordeaux-based consulting firm works with Grover Vineyards.

duction hurdles, consumption has picked up again since 2009.

The market for wines in India is growing at 25-30% annually according to several projections and is likely to remain so. The wine business is among the fastest growing segments of the Indian alcohol market. While in 2001, there were 20 labels; now there are close to 500 labels registered with AIWPA. The list betrays a fair degree of experimentation too. The Haryana-based Nirvana Biosys manufactures Luca wines and the “wine-for-the young” Zoya by fermenting imported juice concentrate. They’re already out with lychee and mango wines. The Indian Ambience winery, based in Bidar, Karnataka, lays claim to organic wine under its label Yaana, which is currently only available in the south Indian states. Good Earth and Turning Point are “virtual” wineries—they outsource their winemaking to someone else and bottle under their own labels, and hence control their investments.

Spin the bottle When Singh brings down her own bottles from her wine coolers at her Defence Colony residence in New Delhi, Grover’s La Reserve, a Cabernet Shiraz, is the only Indian label we can spot.

Designed by French winemaker Michel Rolland, its inclusion is probably no coincidence. In 2005, in the year it had released, the British wine expert Steven Spurrier called it the Best New World Wine.

Spurrier is an evangelist for New World wines. If it were not for him, it would be absurd to think Indian wines could ever play the international field—or take up a greater share in a wine connoisseur’s cellar. As late as the 1970s, when it was blasphemous to serve Californian wines in France, Spurrier had a panel of leading French oenologists do a blind tasting of French and Californian wines. The Californians won hands down. A journalist from Time magazine, George M. Taber, even wrote a book about the tasting; Judgment Of Paris: California vs France And The Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine (2005). The Judgement of Paris, as the event came to be called, would forever erode the pre-eminence of French wines.

It’s premature to think of a similar fate for Indian wines at this point. As Kewadkar points out, it’s unfair to judge Indian wines against those from European wineries with a 200-yearold tradition. “I don’t have a 50-year-old wine. If you compare

both our seven-year-olds, ours are of good quality.”

Rolland’s Bordeaux-based consulting practice works with prestigious estates across 12 countries, including Grover in India. The globetrotting oneologist agrees that Indian wines are still regarded as “exotic” products; they don’t have the same legitimacy as South American wines.

“A lot of work remains to be done, but it doesn’t mean that we modify the soil, or the climate—we adapt ourselves, we interpret,” says Rolland.

This recognition of ground realities brings us one step closer to understanding the French obsession with terroir—the term used to denote the special characteristics that the geography, geology and climate of a certain place bestow to wine, coffee and tea. Four Seasons, for instance, chose its 300-acre vineyards in Baramati near Pune instead of Nashik, because of its unique soil and climate. Grover’s vineyards are in Nandi Hills in Karnataka, where the altitude makes the temperature relatively cooler, averaging at 30 degrees Celsius. “I try hard to respect the ‘typicity’; to give a wine the charm and consistency to be paired with dishes which are a little spicier than those from a menu from Bordeaux...” says Rolland on design-

ing wines for India.

“The business is like a slow train,” says Pradeep S. Pachpatil, senior vice-president of winery operations at Sula, borrowing a common phrase used with reference to Mumbai’s local rail network. “You will get there, but with patience.”

Balgi explains that the older the grapevine, the better the quality of fruit. Other New World vineyards, in California and Australia, are at least 25 years old.

For Balgi, it is only a matter of time that events such as the Waitrose juggernaut will cease to surprise. “Meanwhile, we need to familiarize wine drinkers with the unique flavour of the Indian soil,” says Balgi. “Indian wine smells too ripe which overpowers delicate international cuisine—this is one of our biggest challenges. We need to campaign for this unique taste or Indian wine will always seem somewhat ‘off’ to a palate accustomed to French or Italian wine.”

The problems that plague the wine industry are at every step of the supply chain. Representatives from different factions have only now come together to iron out the kinks. In 2009, the Union government set up the Indian Grape Processing Board (IGPB) in Pune in an attempt to improve the standards of wine production in India. The board consists of representatives from the wine industry, farmers, the ministry of food processing, state governments and the hospitality industry who will work together to inspect and control the quality of grape growing and wine production, approve labels and lay down standardization norms.

But for all the IGPB sets out to do, you might still be uncorking a bad bottle. As wine remains in storage in our retail conditions, it deteriorates in quality every day.

“Indian wines are getting a bad reputation because even though it might be a fine wine when it left the winery, sitting in the heat on that retail shelf makes it go bad.

Even restaurant staff have little training in serving a wine at its prime,” says Singh.

Kewadkar draws comparisons. “In the UK and US, wine is de-licensed, so there’s better storage, visibility and consumer connect. We have it in alcohol shops where it has to fight for space with other liquor.”

Winemakers spare no blame for star hotels—which would in ideal circumstances be avenues to build a connoisseur base.

“Whatever the landing price of an imported wine at a retail store, a hotel gets 40% reduction because of their import duty waiver,” says Navin Sankaranarayanan, chief commercial officer, Good Earth Winery. “Then when they put their markup and sell, it becomes cheaper than a lot of Indian wines. Hotels want margins and I am not blaming them because that’s how the consumer works too. They’ll think the wine is better because it’s imported.”

Ankur Chawla, wine specialist at the Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi, agrees. “International

guests are more keen to try Indian wines. Indian diners stay with the safe bets: Sula’s Dindori Reserve, Grover’s La Reserve, some Fratelli and maybe the Four Seasons,” he says. After studying sales graphs, Chawla reworked the hotel’s master wine list this January: There are eight Indian wines among the 187 in the list.

Niladri Dhar, a certified sommelier who returned from New Zealand in June to join ITC Hotels as their beverage manager, is determined to change this status quo. Dhar is presently overhauling ITC’s master wine list, and says that there will be more Indian wines, especially in the wine-by-the-glass category. He is considering lesser-known names such as Globus Wines’ Miazma, and thinking of including its Chenin Blanc and Shiraz to complement ITC’s rich dumpukht cuisine. Last month, he spearheaded a 45-day training programme for staff from different ITC luxury hotels across India to take the globally recognized certification by the international Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET). However, WSET’s wine appreciation programme has no Indian wines on its rosters yet.

Sula’s Samant doesn’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. “Sophistication in taste does not mean moving away from us. Sometimes, it could go the other way. How old is the wine? A foreign wine might be making a six-month journey to the bar while an Indian one might make it there in a month.”

Samant believes it will take three or four wine producers in India to consistently bring out great quality over the next few years before Indian wine can have its own rack in an international supermarket. He is working towards that. Sula’s Sauvignon Blanc won a silver at the 2011 Decanter World Wine Awards in the UK. It is the brightest bookmark in the Indian wine story yet.

There are good things forthcoming. Moët et Chandon will launch its indigenous sparkling wine in India early next year, for which the company has bought land near Nashik. And the first Indian wine cooler, by KAFF Appliances (India) Pvt. Ltd, hit the market in September.

Brands like “Proudly Indian” York have been winning awards right from their first vintage—first the Sommelier India top honours for its Reserve Shiraz in 2009, then a recommendation at the International Wine Challenge at the 2010 London International Wine Fair.

“Wine takes time; it can not be made with valuations in mind,” says Gurnani, who has recently started selling outside of Maharashtra, in Bangalore. “It’s a labour of love. You go to a trade fair, and see thousands of great wines, and you realize how inflated your ego is as an Indian winemaker.”

“There is a saying in South Africa,” says Gurnani, smiling.

“How do you make a million dollars in this business?

“Start with a billion.” anindita.g@livemint.com

DIVYA BABU/MINT

Sniff, swirl, sip: Reva Singh at her New Delhi residence.

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE Reva Singh of ‘Sommelier India’ gives us her pick of the 10 most interesting new Indian wines

T

he brand culture is so strong able as you expected it to be. Inevita­ that we tend to think in bly, as you advance in your wine jour­ terms of the brand even where ney, you start to trade up. wine is concerned. If anything, There’s one important proviso, Vinsura Brut, it should really be a wine’s vin­ especially in the Indian context, and Sula Brut tage that is the differentiating that is the wine’s provenance: factor. However, Indian wines are Where and how has it been not so sharply divided by vintage. stored and where was it My suggestion here is to con­ bought? An entry­level Valloné Merlot, sider the varietal, the type of wine can be perfect in Four Seasons grape or style of wine, whether its category. There Barrique Reserve it’s red, white or sparkling. And should be no snobbery Cabernet then, as you develop an informed about it, provided the Sauvignon, York palate, start considering the pro­ wine hasn’t been Reserve Shiraz ducers. Which Sauvignon Blanc do spoilt. Some expensive you prefer as a white wine, for wines may withstand example, or which Merlot heat and other damage bet­ among the reds? Is it from ter, but not all the time. So pick Sula, our biggest producer your wine judiciously.

Big Banyan of wine? Or a lesser I routinely deflect the frequently Bellissima, known winery? asked question “Which is your Reveilo Late The key is to establish favourite wine?” with a Harvest your personal favourites, neutral answer: “The Chenin Blanc and then be adventurous. It’s wine that’s in my glass a wonderful experience to right now!” I find it Fratelli Chenin chance upon a wine you’ve never hard to pin down Blanc, Sula heard of and be surprised by its quality. Or, favourites, but here Riesling, Grover taste another wine, and realize how much are a few suggestions Viognier you’ve progressed in your discovery of wine, for good examples on because the wine in your glass is not as palat­ the road less travelled.

SPARKLING

RED

DESSERT

WHITE

L10 COVER

LOUNGE

COVER L11

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM MS GOPAL/MINT

SEPHI BERGERSON

MS GOPAL/MINT

PRADEEP GAUR/MINT

Behind the scenes: (clockwise from below) Sula Vineyards’ storage facility in Nashik, where wines are aged in oak barrels; plantation workers at Sula; workers at Grover Vineyards in Nandi Hills, Karnataka; Sula’s bottling and labelling unit in Nashik; and Ankur Chawla, Taj Mahal Hotel’s wine specialist in New Delhi.

MS GOPAL/MINT

® FROM PAGE L9

several did not have the necessary expertise, so the market was flooded with substandard quality. “People had bad wine for the first time and didn’t go back to it,” says Gurnani, explaining the sudden fall in interest in Indian wine.

The global recession and the Mumbai terror attack in November 2008 didn’t help.

Australia, South Africa, France and Italy—countries that were worse affected by the recession—dumped their wine stocks here at throwaway prices. A report prepared by the All India Wine Producers Association (AIWPA) shows a startling drop in sales of Indian wines in 2009: from 12.5 million litres to 6 million litres.

Indage Vintners, a pioneer set up in 1983, even before Sula and Grover, illustrates the miscalculations that have underwritten the Indian wine story. Before it went down, Indage controlled the market. Then they made bad foreign investments, and collapsed. According to a March 2010 report on the wine news portal www.decanter.com, sales fell to `13.8 crore in the nine months to the end of 2009, compared with `140 crore in the same period the year before. In 2009, it had total debts of about `400 crore and was issued a winding-up order by the Bombay high court.

The aftermath The reason “wine country” Nashik wears a desolate look in the first week of October, when we visit, is because it’s not planting season yet. On the outskirts of the city, vast tracts of rain-induced green dot the land in the villages of Gangapur and Savargaon.

On a small plot in Gangapur, Dynandev Eknath Vishe guides his son to drive a tractor. Vishe has been growing cauliflower and tomato for the last three years. For nearly a decade before that, he grew wine grapes. But he uprooted his fields after another bad monsoon made his crop useless and his bank loan insurmountable.

“Parvadta nahin hai (it’s not feasible),” says Vishe in a cocktail of Hindi and Marathi, when asked why he gave up. He has a family of seven whose lives, he says, cannot depend on the moods of the weather, and the vagaries of the wine trade.

Half a kilometre away, his nearest neighbour, Bhaskar Nakil, switched to table grape. His tryst with wine was shorter but similar to Vishe’s—he grew wine grape only for a year. He could not sell his produce after the local distributor went back on his word. “It’s too risky,” says Vishe, “With table grapes, I can at least go to the market and sell it myself.”

Vishe and Nakil are only two of the many wine grape growers in the region who have uprooted their fields in the last couple of years, switching to table grapes or other crop. According to a recent

AIWPA report on the problems of the wine industry, the area under farming in India has gone down from 9,000 acres in 2008 to 5,000 acres this year.

Industry voices say that while in 2010 there was excess supply (of grapes), in 2012 there will be a shortage.

“It takes around four years after plantation for the first batch of grapes. Even if farmers were to plant now, the shortage is inevitable,” says Jagdish Holkar, the president of AIWPA and the owner of Holkar Estates and Vineyards in Nashik that makes Flamingo wines.

Half empty, half full For this long cinematic intermission in what was turning out to be a blockbuster, insiders name a combination of factors: gullible and sometimes greedy farmers, big companies wiping out boutique wineries, different wine policies in different states, exorbitant taxes and duties and high infrastructure costs. Still, those involved believe that the second half can only get better.

York’s Gurnani believes that there will be a “correction” driven by consumers and wineries; Sula’s Samant expects a “consolidation”, where fewer winemakers will produce better wine. Holkar evokes macroeconomics to call this development “backward integration”— understanding the market demand and then producing, instead of producing first and then trying to sell, which is how the industry had worked all along.

Those like Abhay Kewadkar, director and chief winemaker, Four Seasons, say the Great Indian wine boom is only waiting to take off, while Ajit Balgi, wine trainer at beverage training academy Tulleeho, thinks it will happen in five to seven years.

Even Kewadkar, however, is rueful of the Kafkaesque systems at work, taxes being his primary concern. “In any supermarket in Europe, you can buy a good wine for $5 (around `250). In India, with all the charges slapped on, we start with $10,” he says.

Reva Singh, editor and publisher of Sommelier India, the country’s first consumer magazine dedicated to wine, believes that the early phase of rapid growth has slowed. “The Indian wine industry took off in its earliest days because of visionaries such as Indage, Grover and Sula.

There was a lot of buzz surrounding our potentially large and untapped market. Good money was spent building beautiful wineries and investing in vineyards but other aspects of the business such as developing the consumer market lagged,” says Singh.

“Everyone truly believed that we would turn into a nation of wine drinkers. It was surprising that expectations were so high, given that we had no background or culture of wine consumption.”

Singh was one of those who believed. She started Sommelier India in 2004-2005, then a concept so novel that it made its way

to the Limca Book of Records as “India’s first wine magazine”. She started the magazine because “more and more people were drinking wine, but very few knew anything about it except for the most general clichés.”

“Today there is no public event or private celebration without wine being served. The wines may not always be the best, but they’re there and consumers are more informed,” Singh adds, suggesting an increase in wine awareness over the years.

“Understanding was so low when we started that even women in my book circle didn’t know what ‘sommelier’ meant. In the first few issues, we had to explain that under the edit note.”

Conversations on quality and vintage have taken off, although in a small way. Singh’s husband Kulbir Singh is the vice-president of the 16-year-old Wine Society of Delhi, the oldest of a dozen such clubs. Its 215-odd members pay a one-time or annual fee to meet six to nine times a year to swivel their wine glasses and talk bubbly. There’s also more on the training and education front: academies like Vikram Achanta’s Tulleeho train those in the hospitality industry in spirits and wine.

What holds the most promise is this: Despite the lingering pro-

INDIAN WINES ARE STILL REGARDED AS ‘EXOTIC’ PRODUCTS; THEY DON’T HAVE THE SAME LEGITIMACY AS SOUTH AMERICAN WINES. A LOT OF WORK REMAINS TO BE DONE, BUT IT DOESN’T MEAN THAT WE MODIFY THE SOIL, OR THE CLIMATE—WE ADAPT OURSELVES, WE INTERPRET. —Michel Rolland, whose Bordeaux-based consulting firm works with Grover Vineyards.

duction hurdles, consumption has picked up again since 2009.

The market for wines in India is growing at 25-30% annually according to several projections and is likely to remain so. The wine business is among the fastest growing segments of the Indian alcohol market. While in 2001, there were 20 labels; now there are close to 500 labels registered with AIWPA. The list betrays a fair degree of experimentation too. The Haryana-based Nirvana Biosys manufactures Luca wines and the “wine-for-the young” Zoya by fermenting imported juice concentrate. They’re already out with lychee and mango wines. The Indian Ambience winery, based in Bidar, Karnataka, lays claim to organic wine under its label Yaana, which is currently only available in the south Indian states. Good Earth and Turning Point are “virtual” wineries—they outsource their winemaking to someone else and bottle under their own labels, and hence control their investments.

Spin the bottle When Singh brings down her own bottles from her wine coolers at her Defence Colony residence in New Delhi, Grover’s La Reserve, a Cabernet Shiraz, is the only Indian label we can spot.

Designed by French winemaker Michel Rolland, its inclusion is probably no coincidence. In 2005, in the year it had released, the British wine expert Steven Spurrier called it the Best New World Wine.

Spurrier is an evangelist for New World wines. If it were not for him, it would be absurd to think Indian wines could ever play the international field—or take up a greater share in a wine connoisseur’s cellar. As late as the 1970s, when it was blasphemous to serve Californian wines in France, Spurrier had a panel of leading French oenologists do a blind tasting of French and Californian wines. The Californians won hands down. A journalist from Time magazine, George M. Taber, even wrote a book about the tasting; Judgment Of Paris: California vs France And The Historic 1976 Paris Tasting That Revolutionized Wine (2005). The Judgement of Paris, as the event came to be called, would forever erode the pre-eminence of French wines.

It’s premature to think of a similar fate for Indian wines at this point. As Kewadkar points out, it’s unfair to judge Indian wines against those from European wineries with a 200-yearold tradition. “I don’t have a 50-year-old wine. If you compare

both our seven-year-olds, ours are of good quality.”

Rolland’s Bordeaux-based consulting practice works with prestigious estates across 12 countries, including Grover in India. The globetrotting oneologist agrees that Indian wines are still regarded as “exotic” products; they don’t have the same legitimacy as South American wines.

“A lot of work remains to be done, but it doesn’t mean that we modify the soil, or the climate—we adapt ourselves, we interpret,” says Rolland.

This recognition of ground realities brings us one step closer to understanding the French obsession with terroir—the term used to denote the special characteristics that the geography, geology and climate of a certain place bestow to wine, coffee and tea. Four Seasons, for instance, chose its 300-acre vineyards in Baramati near Pune instead of Nashik, because of its unique soil and climate. Grover’s vineyards are in Nandi Hills in Karnataka, where the altitude makes the temperature relatively cooler, averaging at 30 degrees Celsius. “I try hard to respect the ‘typicity’; to give a wine the charm and consistency to be paired with dishes which are a little spicier than those from a menu from Bordeaux...” says Rolland on design-

ing wines for India.

“The business is like a slow train,” says Pradeep S. Pachpatil, senior vice-president of winery operations at Sula, borrowing a common phrase used with reference to Mumbai’s local rail network. “You will get there, but with patience.”

Balgi explains that the older the grapevine, the better the quality of fruit. Other New World vineyards, in California and Australia, are at least 25 years old.

For Balgi, it is only a matter of time that events such as the Waitrose juggernaut will cease to surprise. “Meanwhile, we need to familiarize wine drinkers with the unique flavour of the Indian soil,” says Balgi. “Indian wine smells too ripe which overpowers delicate international cuisine—this is one of our biggest challenges. We need to campaign for this unique taste or Indian wine will always seem somewhat ‘off’ to a palate accustomed to French or Italian wine.”

The problems that plague the wine industry are at every step of the supply chain. Representatives from different factions have only now come together to iron out the kinks. In 2009, the Union government set up the Indian Grape Processing Board (IGPB) in Pune in an attempt to improve the standards of wine production in India. The board consists of representatives from the wine industry, farmers, the ministry of food processing, state governments and the hospitality industry who will work together to inspect and control the quality of grape growing and wine production, approve labels and lay down standardization norms.

But for all the IGPB sets out to do, you might still be uncorking a bad bottle. As wine remains in storage in our retail conditions, it deteriorates in quality every day.

“Indian wines are getting a bad reputation because even though it might be a fine wine when it left the winery, sitting in the heat on that retail shelf makes it go bad.

Even restaurant staff have little training in serving a wine at its prime,” says Singh.

Kewadkar draws comparisons. “In the UK and US, wine is de-licensed, so there’s better storage, visibility and consumer connect. We have it in alcohol shops where it has to fight for space with other liquor.”

Winemakers spare no blame for star hotels—which would in ideal circumstances be avenues to build a connoisseur base.

“Whatever the landing price of an imported wine at a retail store, a hotel gets 40% reduction because of their import duty waiver,” says Navin Sankaranarayanan, chief commercial officer, Good Earth Winery. “Then when they put their markup and sell, it becomes cheaper than a lot of Indian wines. Hotels want margins and I am not blaming them because that’s how the consumer works too. They’ll think the wine is better because it’s imported.”

Ankur Chawla, wine specialist at the Taj Mahal Hotel in New Delhi, agrees. “International

guests are more keen to try Indian wines. Indian diners stay with the safe bets: Sula’s Dindori Reserve, Grover’s La Reserve, some Fratelli and maybe the Four Seasons,” he says. After studying sales graphs, Chawla reworked the hotel’s master wine list this January: There are eight Indian wines among the 187 in the list.

Niladri Dhar, a certified sommelier who returned from New Zealand in June to join ITC Hotels as their beverage manager, is determined to change this status quo. Dhar is presently overhauling ITC’s master wine list, and says that there will be more Indian wines, especially in the wine-by-the-glass category. He is considering lesser-known names such as Globus Wines’ Miazma, and thinking of including its Chenin Blanc and Shiraz to complement ITC’s rich dumpukht cuisine. Last month, he spearheaded a 45-day training programme for staff from different ITC luxury hotels across India to take the globally recognized certification by the international Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET). However, WSET’s wine appreciation programme has no Indian wines on its rosters yet.

Sula’s Samant doesn’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. “Sophistication in taste does not mean moving away from us. Sometimes, it could go the other way. How old is the wine? A foreign wine might be making a six-month journey to the bar while an Indian one might make it there in a month.”

Samant believes it will take three or four wine producers in India to consistently bring out great quality over the next few years before Indian wine can have its own rack in an international supermarket. He is working towards that. Sula’s Sauvignon Blanc won a silver at the 2011 Decanter World Wine Awards in the UK. It is the brightest bookmark in the Indian wine story yet.

There are good things forthcoming. Moët et Chandon will launch its indigenous sparkling wine in India early next year, for which the company has bought land near Nashik. And the first Indian wine cooler, by KAFF Appliances (India) Pvt. Ltd, hit the market in September.

Brands like “Proudly Indian” York have been winning awards right from their first vintage—first the Sommelier India top honours for its Reserve Shiraz in 2009, then a recommendation at the International Wine Challenge at the 2010 London International Wine Fair.

“Wine takes time; it can not be made with valuations in mind,” says Gurnani, who has recently started selling outside of Maharashtra, in Bangalore. “It’s a labour of love. You go to a trade fair, and see thousands of great wines, and you realize how inflated your ego is as an Indian winemaker.”

“There is a saying in South Africa,” says Gurnani, smiling.

“How do you make a million dollars in this business?

“Start with a billion.” anindita.g@livemint.com

DIVYA BABU/MINT

Sniff, swirl, sip: Reva Singh at her New Delhi residence.

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE Reva Singh of ‘Sommelier India’ gives us her pick of the 10 most interesting new Indian wines

T

he brand culture is so strong able as you expected it to be. Inevita­ that we tend to think in bly, as you advance in your wine jour­ terms of the brand even where ney, you start to trade up. wine is concerned. If anything, There’s one important proviso, Vinsura Brut, it should really be a wine’s vin­ especially in the Indian context, and Sula Brut tage that is the differentiating that is the wine’s provenance: factor. However, Indian wines are Where and how has it been not so sharply divided by vintage. stored and where was it My suggestion here is to con­ bought? An entry­level Valloné Merlot, sider the varietal, the type of wine can be perfect in Four Seasons grape or style of wine, whether its category. There Barrique Reserve it’s red, white or sparkling. And should be no snobbery Cabernet then, as you develop an informed about it, provided the Sauvignon, York palate, start considering the pro­ wine hasn’t been Reserve Shiraz ducers. Which Sauvignon Blanc do spoilt. Some expensive you prefer as a white wine, for wines may withstand example, or which Merlot heat and other damage bet­ among the reds? Is it from ter, but not all the time. So pick Sula, our biggest producer your wine judiciously.

Big Banyan of wine? Or a lesser I routinely deflect the frequently Bellissima, known winery? asked question “Which is your Reveilo Late The key is to establish favourite wine?” with a Harvest your personal favourites, neutral answer: “The Chenin Blanc and then be adventurous. It’s wine that’s in my glass a wonderful experience to right now!” I find it Fratelli Chenin chance upon a wine you’ve never hard to pin down Blanc, Sula heard of and be surprised by its quality. Or, favourites, but here Riesling, Grover taste another wine, and realize how much are a few suggestions Viognier you’ve progressed in your discovery of wine, for good examples on because the wine in your glass is not as palat­ the road less travelled.

SPARKLING

RED

DESSERT

WHITE

L12

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2011

Books

LOUNGE DEBORAH FEINGOLD/CORBIS

LEGEND

The age of Kael A new anthology and a biography of Pauline Kael reassess her influence on film criticism

B Y L EE S ANDLIN ···························· he Age of Movies is described as the first new selection of Pauline Kael’s work “in more than a generation”.

That the last selection of her work came out just 17 years ago suggests a generation in the US is becoming alarmingly brief. And yet somehow one knows what the Library of America is getting at.

Movie-going today is a completely disposable experience; the only question a reviewer is supposed to answer is whether a movie lives up to its hype. Kael spent her whole career working with the certainty that movies could mean something profound to the audience and to the culture at large—an attitude that belongs not just to an earlier generation, but to a lost geological epoch.

Kael was a movie reviewer at The New Yorker from the late-1960s until 1991. She was an unlikely hire. Before her, the typical New Yorker movie reviewer had been urbane, witty and condescending; none of them appeared to know or care particularly about the movies (this tradition resumed after she retired).

Kael wasn’t often witty, was never urbane and she cared about movies with an intensity bordering on the desperate. One of her early, pre-New Yorker reviews, of Vittorio De Sica’s classic Shoeshine, set out her characteristic manner: “When Shoeshine opened in 1947, I went to see it alone after one of those terrible lovers’ quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming... I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine.”

She was laughed at for passages like this, but movie-goers had never read anything like it, and by the time she settled in at The New Yorker, she had become the most discussed reviewer in the US. What remains vital is the freshness and independence she brought to her trade. She was hostile to theory and believed in going entirely on her own instincts. She revered the classic directors of world cinema such as Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray and thought the then arthouse gods Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman were bores. She loved the vitality of American popular moviemaking, particularly the musicals and screwball comedies and gangster films of her youth, but she didn’t think their directors were major artists. She knew film history but didn’t dwell in the archives; in fact, she was almost supernaturally good at spotting new talent. She wrote rave reviews of the early movies of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Jonathan Demme and David Lynch.

She called the now obscure 1974 The Sugarland Express “one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies”—a judgement that would look preposterous today if the director hadn’t been Steven Spielberg.

She had no use for the pretentious, the overbearing, the sol-

T

Pauline Kael—A Life in the Dark:

By Brian Kellow, Viking, 417 pages, $27.95 (around `1,370).

The Age of Movies— Selected Writings of Pauline Kael: Edited by Sanford Schwartz, Library of America, 828 pages, $40 (around `1,960).

emn, the would-be profound.

Her example of a perfect movie, where the energy of American commercial entertainment was thrillingly balanced against the high style of the European classics, was The Godfather.

It’s hard to believe now just how angry people got at her. When I was in college in the mid-1970s, my film-major roommate made a weekly habit of reading Kael, and about halfway through each review he’d be spluttering with so much rage he could barely speak.

That scorn still persists today. The recent Film Snob’s Dictionary says Kael’s work stood out for “its bracing, provocative prose and the author’s loony, irrational taste”.

Is it necessary to point out the double standard at work behind such haughty dismissals? Any reviewer who writes for long enough is bound to make foolish judgements, but Kael was unmercifully slagged for it while more decorous male reviewers were excused. James Agee, the revered critic for the magazine Nation in the 1940s, simply couldn’t understand what anybody saw in Casablanca—readers shrugged this off as a harmless blind spot. Kael defended Brian De Palma movies, and people thought she was clinically insane.

Still, there was something else behind the hostility. Kael’s prose could make her judgements seem unnaturally lurid. She herself referred to her “crowbar style”.

She bullied readers into going to see movies she liked. She once claimed that Last Tango in Paris was as important a cultural event as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

You’d feel like a real oaf if you skipped it then, wouldn’t you?

Yet she was uniquely good at describing the peculiar intimacy of the movie-going experience. She took it for granted that watching movies was fundamentally erotic.

She liked teasing her readers by brazenly discussing which movies worked for her sexually, and why.

In one early review, she warned her readers not to see a particular Japanese movie “if you’ve never wanted to keep the light on during intercourse”—that was heady stuff for the Mad Men generation. She frequently gave her books doubleentendre titles (I Lost It at the Movies is one of the cleaner ones).

She analysed the sex appeal of both actors and actresses in loving detail, and was distinctly more enthusiastic about the actresses, which caused a lot of speculation about her private life.

To judge by Brian Kellow’s biography, her private life is still a live question. The trouble is, Kael doesn’t appear to have had a private life outside of her own head— or if she did, nobody who knew anything about it was willing to discuss it with Kellow. He dutifully trolls for excitement in Kael’s early years: her childhood in rural California, her salad days in San Fran-

She was hostile to theory and believed in going entirely on her own instincts.

She revered the classic directors of world cinema...

AFP

The critic: Pauline Kael; and (left) she propheti­ cally praised Spielberg’s debut film, The Sugar­ land Express.

cisco, her scattering of early romantic relationships (all with men, it happens) and her career as a freelance reviewer. That gets us up to page 101, when Kael hires on at The New Yorker. And then Kellow draws a blank. Apparently, Kael did nothing after that but watch movies and write about them—as though she were Emily Dickinson with a dirty mind.

The only external drama he can find is in Kael’s fights with her editor, William Shawn. Most writers see themselves as engaged in apocalyptic grudge matches with their editors. Kael’s and Shawn’s barely amount to spats. The high point comes in 1979 when Kael quits The New Yorker and goes to work for a Hollywood studio as a consultant. She didn’t much like it, and Shawn hired her back a few months later. End of story.

Kellow also makes everything he can out of the odd coterie that developed around Kael in her later years, a group of younger (mostly male) movie reviewers who became derisively known as the “Paulettes”. Kellow tries to make them sound somehow sinister—a cult of sleeper-cell infiltrators out to overthrow the movie-

reviewing establishment in Kael’s name. And maybe they were. Hell, for all we know, maybe they even succeeded. If they did, how could anybody tell? The less occult possibility is that Kael liked to sit around and drink and gossip, and lay down the law with a bunch of her admirers—and who can blame her for that?

Stultifying as all this is, it at least permanently closes off any lingering prurient interest the reader may have in Kael’s personal life and puts the focus exactly where it ought to be: on her books. But which books? The Age of Movies isn’t a bad place to start—it does contain a plausible sampling of Kael’s reviews, with the stress on the young directors she championed. But it’s not the definitive retrospective we’ve come to expect from the Library of America. Too many crucial pieces have been omitted—pretty much all of the early controversy and savagery, as well as late hot-button reviews like her pan of Shoah (she thought the subject matter was causing people to overlook Claude Lanzmann’s deficiencies as a director). Many of the weaker ones that are here seem to have been picked only

because they’re about movies that a modern audience is likely to have seen.

No matter what was chosen or left out, even at 800 pages, The Age of Movies feels skimpy. Kael’s own best-of-selection, For Keeps (1994), is more than 1,200 pages of microscopic type. Kael needs to be read the way she wrote: in bulk with all her crotchets, perversities and forgotten controversies intact. Her 10 books of collected reviews can be seen as a single, grandly catch-all chronicle of movies and American pop culture over four decades and an equally exhaustive record of one writer’s intensely rich interior life.

Read on those terms, Kael’s writing grows steadily more impressive. I myself have never thought all that highly of De Sica’s Shoeshine, and I’m guessing that not many viewers now would be so moved by it. But surely it doesn’t make any difference whether or not Kael overrated Shoeshine in particular: What matters is that people really can feel that kind of transformative passion about a movie, as they can about any work of art, and nobody ever described that experience better than Kael did. There’s a famous poem by Rilke that describes with miraculous intensity a surviving torso of a ruined classical sculpture and then ends, without a word of transition or explanation: “You must change your life.” If you’ve ever been stirred that way at the movies and thought, however briefly, that nothing was going to be the same, then Kael is the writer for you.

Write to wsj@livemint.com

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THE SONG OF ACHILLES | MADELINE MILLER

The Achilles­Patroclus affair WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

An elegant interpretation of the most disputed love story in Western literature

The lover: Achilles Discovered by Ulysses, a work by artist Jan de Bray; and (below) actor Brad Pitt in Troy.

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

···························· ook 18 of the Iliad opens with one of the most terrible moments in the classics. Here, the hero Achilles learns that his bestloved comrade, Patroclus, has been killed by the Trojan prince Hector. Robert Fagles’ definitive contemporary translation lays out the starkness of his grief: “Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth / he poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face / and black ashes settled on to his fresh clean war-shirt. / Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust / Achilles lay there, fallen ...”

“Now forward on your hands and thrust your face into the filth,” gurgles Christopher Logue’s spectacular punk adaptation of the Iliad, War Music, at this point. “Push filth into your open eyes, and howling, howling / Sprawled howling, howling, in the filth / Ripping out locks of your long redcurrant-coloured hair / Trowel up its dogshit with your mouth.”

This act of mourning, plucked out of context, may seem embarrassingly alien to a reader unfamiliar with the Iliad. In the epic, having entered fully into its milieu of shame and violence by this time, it is a moment of bonechilling pity. For us, as for Achilles, the world will never be the same again. Having fought Troy for nine years, ostensibly to bring back the abducted Helen, but also to sack this rich and powerful city, the Greeks will rely on the rage of Achilles to kill Hector, and bring about the end of an ancient and superior civilisation. Achilles will pay the full cost of honour, meeting an early death secure in the knowledge that his glory is immortal, and sick with yearning for his dead friend.

It seems redundant at this point to make assumptions about their relationship. Yet, the question of whether Achilles and Patroclus were lovers has been disputed for well over two millennia, sometimes as an inquiry into the nature of love itself, sometimes at the

B

The Song of Achilles: Bloomsbury, 352 pages, £18.99 (around `1,500). simple level of “So, were they doing it?” Plato breezily assumes yes; Bernard Knox says no; Wolfgang Petersen’s Hollywood adaptation Troy debases their bond into a joyless family obligation between cousins, leading the word “cousins” to become an Internet meme, signifying a wilful blindness to the obvious.

Madeline Miller says yes, and goes one step further. In The Song of Achilles, she recasts their lives as the basis for a tender love story between a hero and an ordinary boy, cast in his path like a leaf on the wind.

Juxtaposing myth, classical allusion and textual evidence from the epics themselves, Miller meticulously recreates the childhood of Patroclus, who is sent away from his father’s kingdom to distant Phthia. Achilles, the offspring of the sea goddess Thetis and the Phthian king Peleus, is only a year older than the shy, sensitive Patroclus. They become fast friends, and eventually lovers. They survive several pitfalls, but the divine bargain—early death, immortal glory—which guides Achilles to the Trojan War overcomes them so completely that it is Patroclus who dies first, clad in his lover’s armour, as he tries to trick the Trojans into believing that he is Achilles.

Miller’s Achilles is a delicious specimen of demi-humanity who is also, surprisingly, a nice guy: a people’s hero, saving maidens from sex slavery and being kind to his inferiors. Every adaptation of

AFP

Homer creates a new Homer, as it were, but the consensus in most of them so far has been that the Iliad’s hero is not a nice guy. Indeed, this is usually the thing which gives the Iliad its weight: that this superhuman creature, a law unto himself, must reconcile himself to a human fate. That is his tragedy, and that is what makes this holy terror, this killing machine in the form of a golden young boy, so poignant and bleak.

Patroclus’ niceness is less anachronistic; even Homer sings of him as “the best of the Myrmidons” for his compassion and his calming influence on his famous friend. He is a bad soldier, in Miller’s story, but a talented surgeon, a fledgling diplomat and a loving man, perhaps more contemporary to our time than to Bronze Age Greece.

His is the voice of the novel, a softly erotic murmur filled with hope and fear, even-tempered

but rich with narrative power.

Through him, we watch Achilles grow to meet each challenge of fortune, and then descend into destructive madness. “Name one hero who was happy,” Achilles demands of him at an early stage of the novel. In spite of our knowing the end of their story, Patroclus’ voice keeps us on edge, waiting to see if Achilles will turn out to be the exception.

Such an elegant gay romance is its own reward. But Miller’s transplantation of these characters from epic poem to novel also leads us to ask what it adds to our understanding of Homer.

There is something awkward about moving from the rolling, accumulative sea-rhythms of the Iliad to the flatlands of Miller’s careful prose. The novel is a humanistic form; poetic archetypes do not survive its scrutiny. Can Achilles and Patroclus reach out to us in plain speech as they do from an epic poem?

Trying to explain them in prose is like reading out a line of song. But perhaps Miller’s intention is to do exactly that; to

CULT FICTION

R. SUKUMAR

MAGIC (COMIC) REALISM

3

2, 21, 28, 41, 11, 33, 38, 47, 76.

Brás de Oliva Domingos, an obituary writer, dies nine times, at different ages (mentioned above) in Daytripper, a book that’s a bit about life and a lot about death (but not in a morbid way), written and illustrated

by Brazilian twins Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá.

Between his deaths, he manages to live, love, realize his lifelong ambition of emulating his father Benedito, a famous writer, and becomes a good friend/husband/father.

And as they steer Brás through the discontinuous linear function of a life they have scripted for him, Moon and Bá

ask and answer—neither is done overtly; it’s that kind of book—the big questions about life, love, work, and, most importantly, death, that all of us ask ourselves.

That should make Daytripper a very sad book and, in truth, parts of it are poignant. Yet, neither the tale nor the telling is maudlin. Despite the discontinuity introduced by the deaths, there is a certain element of continuity in the story; because it is a comic, you know at once that the woman Brás is married to is an older version of the same one he ran into at a bakery in an earlier life, shortly before a truck ran

On the run: Daytripper is the equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle that readers can piece together in their heads. into him—terminating that particular segment.

This columnist has been reading comics a long time, and has read some really good ones, but Daytripper is unique. It is possibly the finest

example of magic realism in this medium that I have seen.

The prose is perfect—and of far better quality than you encounter in even literary fiction. The illustrations are understated but beautifully

detailed, with a lot of attention paid to the facial expressions of the characters (again, this isn’t something you usually encounter in comics).

At its heart, though, Daytripper is simply that very

unravel the spell of the epic so that we may hear its meanings better when we return to it. The Iliad accommodates as many readings as we can invent for it.

A new book of poetry by Alice Oswald, for example, retells the poem from the perspective of the ordinary soldiers at Troy, rather than the heroes—proving that even a fundamentally hierarchical narrative about divine fate need not be resistant to democratisation, after all.

To say the Iliad glorifies war is like saying the average soap opera glorifies marriage. For the Homeric audience, war is a way of life, and poetry a way to live with it. Its lamentations make it plain that violence can make a human being a thing (to paraphrase Simone Weil). For all its weirdly flattening effects, The Song of Achilles is a sentimental act, of salvaging humanity from that violence. It’s both ironic and affecting that Miller saves a love that ravaged an empire.

IN SIX WORDS A romance straight out of legend

rare thing—a perfectly told story. It doesn’t have a word or panel out of place and there’s a charming symmetry to the life-altering circumstance Brás encounters before most deaths. Moon and Bá have cleverly jumbled the chronological order of Brás’ nine deaths (so, his first chronological death, at 11, comes in chapter 5)—one of those little things that makes Daytripper the equivalent of a simple jigsaw puzzle that readers can piece together in their heads.

The twins are young, as is Craig Thompson, the author of Blankets, who has written the introduction to Daytripper (and whose Habibi made the journey to my house in the same packet as Daytripper), which makes me exceedingly happy because it means the graphic novel genre is thriving.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

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Travel

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

CHRIS JOHNS/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Q&A | CHRIS JOHNS

Where the wild things are SATISH KAUSHIK/MINT

Intrepid: (above) San Bushmen in the Kalahari desert, Botswana, 1996; and (left) Chris Johns in conversation.

The editor of ‘National Geographic’ on travelling and photographing the untamed

constant eruptions, and one of the hottest places on earth. It’s like another landscape, like being on Mars. When you spend time with the Afar people, you see the incredible adaptability of human beings, the spirit of living in one of the harshest landscapes imaginable on Earth, and a life that in many ways had not changed for centuries. You also see that in the next 10 years, that life will change dramatically—possibly more than it has changed in the last 10,000 years, and this is true for many other indigenous peoples.

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

···························· hris Johns, 60, knows the African bush as intimately as he knows the tropical forests of Hawaii, or the mountains and coasts of the western US, or the icy wastelands of Alaska. For more than two decades, Johns has spent his time in remote forests, islands, volcanic rifts, and mountains, photographing wildlife, people, and landscapes, for the National Geographic magazine. In 2005, he became the first field photographer to take over as the editor-inchief of the magazine. In India for the first time, at the World Magazine Congress in Delhi earlier this month, Johns announced the launch of the first Indian edition of the magazine. He also spoke to Lounge about his incredible experiences on the field. Edited excerpts:

C

Pioneer: Johns was the first to capture images of this rare Hawaiian honeycreeper in 1993.

How did you start working for the magazine?

The first assignment I did for National Geographic (NG) magazine was a story I proposed. I grew up in south western Oregon and I had a lot of friends who were forest firefighters and they did regale me for years with their stories of forest firefighting for the US forest service—an inter-agency fire fighting crew that would go anywhere in the US where a forest fire was out of control and bring it under control. My sense of adventure was sparked by that. And I got permission to be the 21st member,

as a photographer, on a 20-person firefighting crew. So I spent four months, which is a relatively normal amount of time for a NG magazine assignment, doing an inside look at forest firefighting in the US. You slept through the day, fought fires at night, because that’s when you can put out fires with most efficiency. It was a grand adventure, and of course there was an element of risk and danger.

I had been a newspaper photographer for 10 years, so I had the basic photojournalistic skills down, but it was still quite a leap to go from being a newspaper photographer to a magazine photographer.

It’s your time in Africa that really established you as one of

the best photographers in the world. What was your first assignment there?

My first African assignment was a big one—on Africa’s rift valley. I came at wildlife probably from a different perspective than most wildlife photographers. Before this, I had covered everything from sports to “cook of the week”, fashion, hard news, and feature photography. When I started working as a magazine photographer, I approached it with a photojournalist’s perspective, even a street photographer perspective. I wanted to bring that great perspective that you see in the masters of photography like CartierBresson or W. Eugene Smith to wildlife photography. So I brought maybe a slightly different aesthetic

than other natural history photographers. The reason I was drawn to wildlife was actually for journalistic reasons—because what I could see, especially when I got to Africa, was hugely accelerated change, and with that, decreasing habitat for wildlife and a collision between the needs of wildlife and the needs of people.

One of the most exciting things that happened to me there was that I met my wife.

She was a diplomat in Ethiopia, and I wanted to go to some very unstable places in the (Great) Rift valley that were at war. She helped me get in to some of these places.

I went down to the Danakil Depression to see the Afar people.

It’s a very active volcanic area with

You’ve obviously had some remarkable experiences working with wildlife, tell us about one such adventure?

I went to Botswana to photograph African wild dogs—they are the most endangered large carnivores in Africa. Wild dogs are just extraordinary animals—but very little is generally known about them, and there are lots of misconceptions. When you are dealing with animals that are so endangered, you have to be very careful about your contact with them because one of the reasons they are endangered is because of human contact. What’s interesting is if you are patient and respectful and you come to know the animal and its habits, they generally come to you.

We had been following these dogs for months, so they had become comfortable with us. So one day, after a kill, they dragged the carcass next to our Land Rover and kept it there. They are such smart animals—they knew

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that the hyenas and other predators will keep clear of the car, so their kill would be safe. In a pack of wild dogs, generally only one or two animals do the majority of the killing. In our pack, there was this beautiful male dog called Zermont who had just made a kill and had brought it near our car. I wanted to crawl underneath the car from the other side and take photographs of the dogs at doglevel. So I am underneath the vehicle shooting with a medium telephoto lens, and Zermont, covered in blood, walked right up to me and started sniffing underneath the car. He started sniffing my lens, then started to crawl under and started sniffing my hand, my head, my ears, my neck. I just froze. I had seen what a highly proficient killer he was, and even though wild dogs attacking humans is very, very rare, my heart was pounding lying on the ground like that. I remained calm, and he seemed satisfied and he walked off and I started breathing again in relief.

And then the next thing I know he’s grabbed my pant leg on the other side of the vehicle, and he was shaking it gently, with his head down, and his rear end was up in the air, like he wanted to play. I just let my leg go limp, and he shook it all over in fun. It reinforced to me how incredibly important it is for people to know and try to understand the beauty of an animal like the wild dog and also understand the issues that could lead to their extinction in our own life time.

What about problematic encounters with animals? How often has that happened?

The times I’ve had problems are times I pushed too hard.

One time in Zimbabwe, I walked into a pride of lions in a heavy bush with a guide. The

lions were not happy about being surprised at first light, and they had cubs. There were three of us; one guide with a rifle, me, and a Zimbabwean assistant.

We had been tracking the pride for some days, and it was quite heavy bush so we didn’t realize how close we were. But we had seen them first, stopped and started to quietly back away when my assistant tripped over a log and fell down—and then the lions, who were feasting on a buffalo, saw us. The females quickly moved the cubs, and then mock charged us. When they calmed down, out of nowhere, two male lions came charging at us. I’ll never forget that—the big old boys running in and then stopping, the dust flying, their manes swinging to and fro in the wind, and the powerful roar! And that got the females unhappy again, and they actually started to stalk us. Obviously the last thing you do is run, so we were all frozen at our spots, and I had a big tripod and a big telephoto lens and I held it over my head and tried to make myself as big as possible and we started yelling LEAVE US ALONE, WE COME HERE IN PEACE! So they think this looks like a lot of trouble here to try to eat this guy, so that sort of stopped them. And then we slowly walked back to our car. It felt like a very long walk.

Wildlife photography is supposed to be all about patience, about camping out for days and months to get the right shot.

What state of mind do you go into when you have to do that?

There are these magnificent honeycreeper birds in the Hawaiian islands which had not been photographed before. I worked with some very good biologists there to try and make photographs of these birds. Every day for 10 days

we would climb 15-20 metres up these trees before sunrise, and stay on top till sundown. Often, it would rain heavily, or the sun would burn us. There was always a strong wind, and the trees would be swaying so much you could hardly get your camera to focus on the birds. You go into a very patient state of mind, but you also have to be very alert or you won’t get the picture. You have a strong sense of mission—it’s a huge motivation that you are going to show people something extraordinary, something never seen before. We made the first pictures of this bird, and it became a NG cover.

There have been animals I’ve waited for years, waiting for the right opportunity to finally get the right picture, and often there is a great deal of serendipity involved.

I’ve always loved lions for example, camped with lions in the Ngorongoro crater (Tanzania), lived with lions. Now one day in the Kalahari, I was supposed to meet a biologist to photograph meerkats, and the biologist didn’t show up. My assistant and I were driving past a watering hole on the way to visit this biologist, and we saw these two really beautiful, powerful male lions.

But there was no light, so we drove on. We could not find the biologist, and the day seemed pretty worthless as we were going back towards the camp. Suddenly, a big storm starts to come through, it was very late afternoon, the wind was howling, dust rose up everywhere. I said to my assistant, we got to find those two lions. I’ve spent enough time with lions to know in that situation where they would go, how they would react, so we started to look for them. It was just about dark when we found one of the lions, and I’m shooting and shooting and shooting and there’s no light, and I can’t even see the lion sometimes. The pictures aren’t working, it’s the worst of conditions, and then suddenly—one picture! That’s it, just one perfect picture. The shutter speed was somewhere between 125th and 60th of a second, with a 180mm lens. You could say you were lucky but that’s the thing about photography—like journalism, you need to be open and flexible.

You never know when something’s going to happen.

Do you have a favourite wildlife subject?

If I had to photograph just one

Eye for detail: (clockwise from left) An elephant in the Ngorongoro crater, Tanzania, 1988; women tend pea fields in the Great Rift Valley, Congo, 1990; a lion pushes through a storm in the Kalahari, 1995; and Johns in the Great Rift Valley, Congo, 1989.

would flip my car off the deck, by the smokestacks, and into the second deepest lake in the world.

I could not help thinking that my wife and I would land up under the lake with a big vehicle on top of us, which I think would have been quite a dodgy situation.

But that was an incredible trip, and we made quite good pictures.

animal for the rest of my life it would be elephants. They have such a complex social structure, so much family dynamics, and are so intelligent— absolutely magnificent. I worked with orphan elephants in Zambia. I befriended one and used to go on walks with her along the shores of the Zambezi river. It was one of the most delightful experiences in my life. She’d come running to me and demand that we go for walks. The way elephant families behave, you could easily project that on humans. The deep bond that the children share with mothers, the way youngsters learn how to deal with solving problems, how to move and think and express themselves. It’s a real tragedy what’s happening with elephants in Africa. There is an uptake in poaching, in the trade of ivory, because of its demand in China, and there are more roads making their way into elephant areas.

What are the bare essentials you need while travelling?

To me the essentials is a state of mind, and the state of mind is one of insatiable curiosity. You want to know more, you want to connect more, you are open to experiences. No matter what happens, you roll with it, be patient with it, be open—that’s the most important part of travelling. The more I travel, the less I need. I don’t even want to be encumbered by a lot of cameras, or a bunch of suitcases. I worked on a story on the bushmen of South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana for five years. They are one of the oldest cultures in the world, and when you work with them, you get to see the incredible survival skills they have, and how little they need to keep surviving. Some of my best travels have happened through incredible inconveniences, great problems. Out of that comes a great story that you remember the rest of your life.

Is your family as passionate about travelling as you are?

My wife, my son, my two daughters who are in college, we all love to travel. We love the experience of going to new places.

We love wild, open spaces, or Italy or Spain, or Alaska. We continually go to Africa, go to the bush with good friends, see the sons and daughters of animals I’ve photographed.

You have lived and travelled in so many areas where the environment and ecology is critically threatened. How has that affected you personally?

It has affected me dramatically.

And it has affected the way I edit the NG magazine. I have seen human behaviour at its very best in many ways, and some that is absolutely appalling—I mean in our relationship to our environment. And I think it’s made me realize that there’s a sense of urgency to our work at the magazine. These are complex issues with many nuances and it’s going to take time to solve them, but there’s an urgency to get them solved. It has had a profound impact on my career, and as a father of three children. Some of the extraordinary things that I’ve seen in my life, I want my children to see too. And the reality is that if we as humans don’t change and evolve and learn from past mistakes then it’s gonna be a very different world, and not necessarily a better world. By the same token, I’ve seen people do incredible things, make incredible sacrifices to make the world a better place to live. A very close friend of mine, who passed away recently, (Kenyan environmentalist) Wangari Maathai, she proved that an African woman who was strong and believed that the world can be a better place can have a profound impact on policy, in her case with the simple act of planting a tree. We need to live a life that is more sustainable, more in tune with agriculture. There is a celebratory message, a hopeful message that I try to convey through my photography, and the way I edit NG magazine—it’s important for people to understand what an incredibly beautiful world we have.

What’s the most bizarre travel experience you’ve had?

See, for me bizarre is good!

Shortly after I got married in Kenya, we took a ferry boat down Lake Tanganiyka. They used a crane to put our Land Rover on top of the ferry, the SS Liemba, in Mpulungu, Zambia. Now this ferry was quite old, it had been sunk once during, believe it or not, World War I, and had been revived. We had a room which had a lot of excess water from the men’s latrine, so it wasn’t ideal. So we put the rooftop tent on my Land Rover, and for the next three days we went down the lake like that. Every few hours, the ferry would stop and people would paddle out and trade all kinds of goods—everything from deodorant to hairspray to chickens and cows. The ferry was a lifeline of trade for many of these remote parts of the lake. I got arrested for not having enough permits to take pictures, but, you know, I never have enough permits. So we gave them some atlases and had some beers, and I wasn’t arrested any more, which was good. Now on one of those nights when we were sleeping in the rooftop tent, a big storm came up. The lake is really an inland sea, and I could see that the ship was rolling and pitching to such a degree that it

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Transported in 20 minutes Israeli photographer Sephi Bergerson’s ‘Fatafat’ project looks at young India through a 150­year­old lens B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· ill you be a part of the Fatafat project?” he asks within minutes of our meeting at the Delhi Photo Festival. He is running as he talks. In New Delhi to attend the first ever photography festival of its kind in India last week, Sephi Bergerson is a terribly busy man. A visit to Delhi—from Goa, where he now lives—is to attend as many exhibitions as he can, meet publishers, catch up with photographer friends, but most importantly, it is to look for subjects for his latest body of work: the Fatafat project.

Over the last year, Bergerson, a photographer from Israel who moved to India in 2002, has been working with an old camera bought off a street photographer to shoot portraits of young, urban India. The camera was made in 1949, and it uses a technology that goes back at least 150 years. This contradiction lies at the heart of the project: an old camera which chronicles the new.

Bergerson’s subjects are those he meets in person. The portraits he’s made so far—21 in all—include writers, photographers, fashion stylists and human rights lawyers. “When I looked out of my Connaught Place hotel room when I first moved here 10 years ago, I only saw Ambassador

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and Maruti cars on the road below. That’s not what I see now,” he says. “And that’s only a small example. I would like each portrait to show a fraction of that change that Delhi has gone through over the last decade.”

He is interested in young people who have ventured into professions alien to their parents, those who dress differently, have outrageous hairstyles, or an interesting life story to share. So there’s Reshil Charles, 30, a music documentary maker whom Bergerson met at a party in Delhi, with both, an unconventional profession and unconventional locks; Vibha Kumar, 27, an editor with Maxim; and Ranjunee Chakma, an 31-year-old fashion stylist whom Bergerson came across in the course of his work—she hails from Mizoram and had come to Delhi in 1997 to work.

Getting hold of this camera wasn’t quite fatafat (a colloquialism for “snappy”). About a year after Bergerson moved to Delhi, he had a portrait of him, his wife and their two-year-old daughter shot by a street photographer near Birla Mandir in New Delhi.

The photographer used a large, wooden box camera to make vintage-looking black and white portraits that cost `30 for three copies. “I knew this couldn’t be the end of it,” says Bergerson, who had made inquiries to buy the camera then.

When he went back several

SHEFI CARMI BERGERSON

years later, the photographer had tucked away this bulky contraption for a digital camera. “He told me no one wanted those pictures any more. After some pleading, he sold me the camera along with 60 of his own pictures. He wanted `5,000.”

The camera, Bergerson explains, is an indigenous modification of the calotype—an early photographic process using paper coated with silver iodide— which was introduced in 1841 by the British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot. The calotype is the precursor to most photographic processes of the 19th

How the ‘Fatafat’ project camera works

Blast: Mahajan with the camera.

The camera remains at a fixed distance from the object (about 6ft). The photographer loads the camera with negative paper. Since there’s no shut­ ter, the paper is exposed by taking off the lens cap. The subject must sit still: about 2­3 seconds in daylight and 20 seconds in subdued light. Prints are developed at the back of the camera which functions as a kind of dark­ room (a tray inside contains home­made developing fluid). The photogra­ pher re­photographs the negative to get positives.

Alec McHoul, an ethnomethodologist and professor emeritus of Murdoch Uni­ versity in Perth, Australia, writes that in the standard manuals of photography, there are no details of this incredibly economical process. “It appears that the early Indian street photographers managed to hybridize two 19th century technol­ ogies: the calotype camera and the portable darkroom into a single apparatus,” he says. These were being used in India before 1853, within a decade of Fox Talbot’s announcement of the process—one of the earliest photographic processes known.

and 20th centuries. It does away with film or plates (see How the Fatafat project camera works) and is a 20-minute process from start to finish.

In 2010, Bergerson started the Fatafat project by putting together a daylight studio on his terrace. He went to look for the man who’d sold him the camera but was told he’d packed up and disappeared. He called upon the expertise of Bharat Bhushan Mahajan, another street photographer who operates near Birla Mandir (Mahajan had also swapped his old camera for a digital one because it’s quicker: “more photographs, more money”).

“As I started shooting,” says Bergerson, “I realized that I don’t need to look for people with horns. It doesn’t matter who’s standing in front of the camera, the pictures are always so full of character.”

What lends to this “character” is that the Fatafat project pictures look antiquated and hipster both at once. Some are overexposed; some have chemical irregularities but Bergerson doesn’t throw these away. “The imperfections are what make these pictures perfect,” he says.

Black and white: (clockwise from left) Bergerson; Fatafat portraits of mag­ azine editor Vibha Kumar, music documen­ tary film­maker Reshil Charles and fashion styl­ ist Ranjunee Chakma.

Because of the way the camera works, every print is an original.

To complete his series, Bergerson intends to set up studios in the city’s hot spots such as Palika Bazaar and Nehru Place, frequented by the city’s young crowd for pirated DVDs and electronic spare parts. He plans to shoot 40 in all. It’s a good number to tell a large story, he believes. It is also Kabbalistic.

Bergerson, who is 46 himself, and evidently spiritual (his guru is Shrii Shrii Anandamurti), says that in the study of the Jewish mystical path of Kabbalah, you’re not supposed to open the book The Zohar till you’re 40.

“It’s the age, or number, when

NANDINI RAMNATH

SUPERHEROES SANS SPANDEX hah Rukh Khan returned to the screen this fortnight after what seems to be a century by retooling a very American idea. In Ra.One, he plays a superhero named G.One who seems to have been assembled out of parts that originally belonged to the Iron Man and The Terminator. Khan’s costumes in Ra.One, however, are far more sophisticated than the baggy pants that Puneet Issar wore in the 1987 movie Superman (cotton should never ever be used in place of spandex).

In keeping with Indian conventions, Khan’s bionic man sings, dances and even indulges in a bit of romance alongside saving the earth from the evil Ra.One. Superman faced many challenges in his lifetime, but shaking a leg to Chammak Challo was never among them.

The Issar film, which also starred Dharmendra in a

Jor-El-inspired part, was an early attempt at importing the American superhero genre to India. It is kindly described these days as cult (usually a synonym for massive flop). There haven’t been too many attempts since to create local avatars. Shekhar Kapur’s Mr India had a truly extraordinary arch-villain but a fairly ordinary hero whose only trick was that he possessed a bracelet that made him invisible.

Krrish, directed by Rakesh Roshan and starring Hrithik Roshan, was another brave attempt to Indianize the genre, but Naseeruddin Shah’s evil megalomaniac who builds a machine that can predict the future was an odd idea for a country that has its share of astrologers and clairvoyants.

The superhero comic and the movie are deeply linked to American history and the

country’s mythology about its place in the world. Besides, why on earth do we need Hollywood superheroes when we have Bollywood superstars? Hindi film heroes have mostly been all-rounders at the very least, if not endowed with near-divine powers. They have never needed shiny capes or sparkling gadgets to activate their extraordinary powers. The Hindi film hero has had the supernatural ability to woo the woman of his choice (the exceptions depend on whether the story has a tragic or a happy ending), sing (in different voices) and dance (in different styles without practice). Our heroes can unite warring factions, win wars and save the nation from dastardly enemies. They triumph in all the fights they get into, regardless of the physical strength of their opponents.

Some of our heroes have been

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getting a bit more realistic of late.

They actually run in the opposite direction from toughies and weep when their hearts break. It’s not surprising that disgusted audiences are embracing the antics of bare-bodied heroes. The pretence of putting up a defence against the likes of Salman Khan and Ajay Devgn has been all but abandoned. Salman Khan’s “Robinhood Pandey” in Dabangg and Devgn’s Bajirao Singham in Singham are men of extraordinary talents who don’t need to prove it by wearing shiny underwear on top of tights.

Stripped of its self-importance, the superhero film is really a hyperbolic action movie. Indian heroes seem to manage just fine without implants or extraterrestrial powers. A police uniform can be just as empowering as a superhero suit.

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you start seeing things with a certain perspective.”

Bergerson’s publishing plans for the series are a small, 4x6-inch photography book. His first book, Street Food of India, published in India by Roli in 2009, won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award in 2010. He envisions this book as having two parts. The first will have photos by the camera’s original owner and an essay on the history of the camera; and the second will have his portraits with a few lines on the subject and an essay on the change that the Fatafat project aspires to comment on.

It would be a requiem for a camera that is phasing out—a vintage apparatus that told us about the future.

Ra.One released in theatres on 26 October.

Dressed for the part: In Ra.One, Khan plays the superhero G.One.

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

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

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Opera around the corner

Revival mode: The cherubs atop the Royal Opera House façade; (below) the elaborate interiors of the Opera House; and a detail of the Opera House façade, under scaffolding.

We revisit the Royal Opera House under restoration, and its neighbour­ hood. Can it again become a usable cultural space in the city?

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’ve heard it might open up again,” says one businessman after another in Opera House, referring to the grimy behemoth which gives their neighbourhood its name.

“It’s been shut for ages.” “It was in very bad shape.” “They say it used to host drama originally.”

“My father remembers; my grandfather used to go.”

But they also say they remember it well. Mr Dinshaw at the 75-year-old Café de la Paix around the corner has seen too many movies here to recall, as have the grey-moustached businessmen who stop by at his Irani café for tea and Jim Jam biscuits.

Shrenik Vora at the 80-year-old Vora Brothers automotive company has seen Purab aur Pachhim (1970) and Silsila (1981) there; an elder Mr Vora remembers watching plays here between 1948 and 1952.

Shahrukh Dubash, visiting his old neighbourhood, says he remembers when Navrang (1959) ran to a triumphant silver jubilee here.

“We’ve watched so many movies here,” they all say, and then pause for emphasis before adding, “we will definitely go again if it reopens. Definitely.”

The grime has been clearing away in slow instalments. For some time now, the fat cherubs atop the creamy stone façade of the Royal Opera House have been gleaming in the sunlight again. Passers-by craning their necks may find them gambolling just above the elaborate stone reliefs of women playing viols and harps, as sharp today as they must

have seemed in 1910, when the theatre first opened its doors to the public.

Yet, for 18 years, the Royal Opera House, at the junction of Jagannath Sunkersett Road, Mama Parmanand Road and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Road, has done little more than block out the sunlight over Pandit Paluskar Chowk. The old names of the roads have been consigned to fading memory; but to bus conductors, taxi drivers, and the hundreds of small businesses which spill out on to the streets from elegant stone mansions and squat post-Independence constructions which surround it, the area is still best known by its informal name.

Its Baroque-style façade, facing Mama Parmanand Road,

has been locked behind scaffolding and hospital-green drapery for some months now: conservation architect Abha Narain Lambah began working on its long-term restoration in 2008, funded for an undisclosed amount by the site’s current owner, the Maharaja of Gondal.

By early October, when the World Monuments Fund (WMF) announced that the Opera House was going to be a “watch site” on its 2012 list of global monuments at risk, Lambah and her team had already ensured the structural stability of the building.

“I think the WMF looked at a lot of monuments not monumental in nature,” Lambah says. “The idea was to highlight things that make up the iconic images of cities and

nations—and those need not always be a Taj Mahal or a Red Fort.”

Given sponsorship and renewed public awareness, Lambah says the Gondal family will be thinking of how to make the Opera House usable again.

“There should be things for people to do,” Lambah says.

“So along with a theatre, perhaps we can have an art gallery, a café or a restaurant.

The Maharaja of Gondal would like it to be a cultural space for the city again.”

The Opera House was, in fact, a living monument for the city, although its imperial formality—and the “Royal” prefix, appended in time for the same Georgian visit for which the Gateway of India was amassed—suggests otherwise.

It was created not by colonial fiat, but the sort of hybrid enterprise which marked so much of the development of 20th century Mumbai. It was the joint effort of an English impresario from Kolkata, Maurice Bandmann, and Jehangir Framji Karaka, a coal baron, who spared no expense erecting its gilded interiors, laying down exquisite Minton flooring, and rolling out the red carpets. For the portraits of famous European poets, dramatists and musicians painted on its dome, says film historian Amrit Gangar, they brought down artists from London.

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changes that divide the present from that inauguration, the theatre proved itself to be more than a snooty setting for opera-loving collaborationists.

It hosted Gujarati and Parsi drama, and the earliest performances of legendary stage actor Bal Gandharva.

Scholar Kaushik Bhaumik writes that it hosted “almost all the significant travelling theatre and vaudeville companies on their way from the West to the Pacific Rim”.

It soon became susceptible to a revolutionary new art.

Watson’s Hotel—incidentally, one of WMF’s watch sites in a previous year—had already hosted the Lumière Brothers and their brilliant invention, the Cinematographe, in 1896. It wasn’t long before the movies had made their way into the Opera House hall.

By 1924, legendary French film distributors Pathé Frères had taken it over, advertising their “splendid theatre…the

finest in the East.” India’s earliest demonstration of “Phonofilm”, one of several new techniques which attempted to synchronize sound with film, happened here in 1927. In 1936, an innovation almost equally vital to movie-going was pioneered here, too: For the first time in India, patrons could reserve seats in advance.

Architect Kaiwan Mehta, author of Alice in Bhuleshwar, explains that theatre culture was one way for the city to acquire a public culture of its own. “In a modern city, it became the site for a modern imagination.” The area around the Opera House was brand new in the early 1900s, part of a fresh stage of development in a new city. In the wake of the plague that had attacked the city in the 1890s, major roads were constructed eastwards from the sea to let fresh air into the low-slung, crowded “Native Town” north of Kalbadevi. In 1915, when construction on the Opera House was finally completed,

many surrounding roads were still under construction.

Today, it is still a district packed with mansions of mixed architectural styles and ambitions, wadis in which new migrants came to stay with others of their community, shopfronts where business routinely spills out on to the footpaths, and eating houses selling sandwiches and bhelpuri, fafda and bread pakoda, in every other cranny.

As Mehta says of the old town, “It is not always easy to tell where the building ends and the neighbourhood begins.” It is old-fashioned—you can still walk down Jagannath Sunkersett Road during peak hours and be the only woman in sight—but far from static.

The new Opera House stood apart, in more ways than one.

Here was a theatre which may have typified the last word in “modern” when it first came up. And yet, it retained a certain fluidity. Its patrons may all have been rich, but they were not all Europeans. Despite

Past continuous: (top) Around the corner on Jag­ annath Sunkersett Road, the 75­year­old Café de la Paix; and inside the Opera House compound, a former canteen. what Bhaumik calls “the march of the talkies” sweeping all but the most tenacious of the performing arts before it, the Opera House never quite achieved the character of a cinema the way the grand movie houses springing up around the Grant Road belt did. Like its developing environs, its purpose could not be singularly defined.

“Pathé were not tied to any one film company,” Gangar points out. Unlike the glittering Roxy down the road, associated with Bombay Talkies, there were no Devika Rani premieres which would bring the public charging down New Queen’s Road (Roxy, now a square block of concrete and fibreglass, is still open for business. This week ,

it is running five shows of Ra.One).

Around the 1930s, the advertisements in Gangar’s collection conspicuously dropped the word “Royal” from the theatre’s name—a consequence of growing nationalism, Gangar speculates.

“Gandhi spoke at several meetings in cinema houses in Bombay,” he says. “He did so in Opera House, too, when he addressed a women’s conference in 1934.”

Through all this, and after Independence, the nature of the audience depended on who could pay for the tickets—and who was interested in, say, a gala opening of Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957), or Himalay ki God Mein (1965), or Hariyaali aur Raasta (1962).

Only gradually do the records show the theatre losing a certain vitality, as evidence of drama and musical programmes decreases after Independence, and the heyday of black and white Bollywood passes. In the 1970s, it became an occasional venue for great parallel cinema, rented out by the Film Finance Corporation, forerunners of the National Film Development Corporation; Gangar remembers watching several of their films there.

“Without air-conditioning or any of the conveniences that audiences came to expect, it became very difficult for it to attract people,” Lambah says.

“Of course,” says a businessman passing the theatre today, stopping to buy channa. “I watched Mughal-e-Azam here 35 years ago. It was a special show.” It must have been, in 1976; Mughal-e-Azam was released in 1960.

Like grass growing in the cracks of a ruin, the small shops huddling under two of its massive doors continue to do business through the dust and din of the restoration work. One is a hardware business; the other is a furniture shop.

(Minder Mannalal Saini says: “Yes, I remember watching Devtaa here.”)

Inside, the building’s walls are bleached white and swept clean. The faded boards of the

canteen in the yards hint at soda fountains and Italian delectables (“Trust Mama…”) on which patrons must once have dined.

“It’s been shut since before I came here,” says the channa vendor in its shade. He set up business 15 years ago; in 1993, Sangita Kathiwada held the last public event the Opera House was to host before closure, a fashion show. The Voras now watch movies at Inox, in Nariman Point. Across the road at Opera House Mattresses and Pillows Works, Mohammed Irshad’s father gave the shop its name; he doesn’t know much about its past himself. In a place where humanity overwhelms and augments brick-and-mortar infrastructure, memory is never at a standstill.

In such a place, the darkened hall of the Opera House cannot be said to have survived development; until Lambah began her restoration, it simply had the distinction, unusual in Mumbai, of being allowed to decay at its own pace. What it will become is, at this moment, an unanswered question.

“To me, change is not the problem,” says Mehta. “The speed at which it occurs, and how drastically, should be discussed.” To him, the “ethics of space”, or how urbanity interacts with its human elements, including its history, are a puzzle which will take immense architectural rigour and creativity to resolve. In the case of the Opera House, Lambah says, the quest should be to realize that it exists in a city with a rapidly changing demography. “We should make it more democratic, more usable.”

And if it opens again, they will go, they promise: the auto traders and the courier service runners, the restaurant owners and the furniture-sellers whose shops light up the streets along Opera House long into the evening, well past the time for a late show.

Above them, a freshly painted cherub patiently reaches out towards the sea, still trying to catch the setting sun. supriya.n@livemint.com