Lounge for 31 Dec 2011

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

www.livemint.com

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 53

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

THE NEW

RETIREMENT Philanthropic trips around the world, a smart sabbatical or a new home

by Costa Rica’s Gulf of Nicoya >Pages 10­12

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH VOLKSWAGEN’S JOHN CHACKO >Page 9

THE LONG AND THE SHOT OF IT

India’s first agave­based beverage, the Goan DesmondJi, hopes to revive drinking options >Page 6

CRACKING THE GOA DRESS CODE

Resort­wear diva Malini Ramani on how to go short and loose, and the must­have accessories >Page 7

A volunteer for ski patrol in California, US. Earthwatch.org organizes ski patrol trips to help measure the depth and temperature of snow. The activities include dog­sledding and igloo­building.

THE VOICE OF THE MIND

Celebrated Nigerian­American novelist Teju Cole on art, race, and the politics of his acclaimed novel ‘Open City’ >Page 14

GAME THEORY

THE GOOD LIFE

PIECE OF CAKE

BHARATANATYAM DIVAS

THREE­CHEESE FOR THE NEW YEAR

ROHIT BRIJNATH

MEET THE RUNNING MAN

A

ny story on Somdev Devvarman should start with his shoes. Not what he wears.

But how many he wears down. Because essentially this is a running man with a racket. You don’t see how much he runs, of course. You don’t count his kilometres. You see him in the tournament, he wins, he loses, you flick the channel, you move on. We all do. But he keeps moving, he has to, he has to run down balls, run down his future before he, already 26, runs out of time. It’s nearly Christmas and... >Page 4

SHOBA NARAYAN

I

am going to let you in on a little secret. I don’t know if it is the same in north India, but here in Chennai, where I grew up, everyone has this fixation that revolves around Bharatanatyam dancers. If you have a daughter, you want her to learn this ancient art form that originated with the sage Bharata and his text, the Natya Shastra. If you have a son, you want him to marry a Bharatanatyam dancer: she with the big, expressive eyes; slender fingers like okra (okay, it sounds better in Tamil... >Page 5

PAMELA TIMMS

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

S

o the 2011 gorging season draws to a close—Diwali, Thanksgiving, Eid, Christmas, Hanukkah, not to mention all the endless weddings—whatever we celebrate, we’ve probably all been eating way too much.

Certainly for me, tonight marks the last of the big winter celebrations before I reacquaint myself with salad and the gym tomorrow. Growing up in a Scottish household, New Year’s Eve (or Hogmanay) was always a more important festival than Christmas. Even though... >Page 6

PHOTO ESSAY

ONE TRUE RELIGION

MINT MEDIA MARKETING INITIATIVE

e

e en presents

Chocolate has been a part of our lives for many

And so has been the iconic Glenlivet.

Theof T Toast i time

centuries now. Be it Christopher Columbus who was given his first drink of chocolate in 1502, or you and me devouring a bar of chocolate for indulgence, it has been around.

1822

1822 John Cadbury, who tried to convince people that drinking chocolate was much healthier than alcohol, opens a tea and coffee shop in Birmingham, England.

1828

1828

From it being something King George IV longed for or something that you enjoy with old friends, The Glenlivet - the single malt that started it all, is a legend that lives on.

1822 King George IV makes a state visit to Scotland in a gesture of reconciliations between the two countries. At the welcoming ceremony the king requests for a glass of the illegal Glenlivet whisky.

1824

1847

Coenraad Van Houten, a Dutch chocolate maker, invents a hydraulic press used to make cocoa powder.

1875 1847

1908 Theodore Tobler develops the unique triangular nougat filled chocolate candy bar called Toblerone.The Hershey Chocolate Company makes the first milk chocolate bar with almonds.

The first manufacturer of chocolate in England creates chocolate bars.

Their shop is called J.S. Fry & Sons. Not many people liked it because of its bitter taste.

1875 Daniel Peter figures out how to combine milk and cocoa power to create milk chocolate.

Frank Mars makes the first Snickers candy bar.

1947

1980 An employee of the Schare-Tobler tries to sell secret chocolate recipes to Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia. Luckily he was unsuccessful.

1875

A year later John Gordon Smith, George Smith’s son, applies the name ‘Glenlivet’ as their trademark.

1947

1970 2010

1930

Study published in the European Heart Journal reports that Chocolate consumption appears to lower CVD risk, in part through reducing BP.

Prohibitions and the consequences of WWI forced many of the single malt distilleries in Scotland to close down. By the early 1930s only two pot still distilleries remain in operation, one of which is The Glenlivet.

1980

2010

George Smith Grant, born to Capt William grant and Margaret (daughter of George Smith) celebrates his second birthday. His parents had married in 1845.

1908 George Smith Grant gives evidence at the Royal Commission on Whisky.

Customers pay 24 shillings for a gallon of The Glenlivet.

Peter Paul makes the first Almond Joy.

1970 The Tobler company merges with Suchard to become the largest chocolate company.

1908

1930

1930

1847

George Smith travels to Elgin to acquire a distiller’s licence legitimising The Glenlivet Distillery at Upper Drumin where the richness and smoothness of the renowned illicit whisky of the area are captured. The distillery has a single still. Two years later in 1826, Glenlivet was producing up to 100 gallons of whisky per week.

1947 USA Pullman company sends a telegram asking The Glenlivet miniatures to re-supply their trains after WWII. New markets open in the USA due to this exposure of The Glenlivet.

1970 The Glenlivet Distillers Ltd company is formed.

1980 A year later casks of The Glenlivet filled in 1956 are bottled as Royal Wedding Reserve.

2010 Official opening of the distillery extension is celebrated on 4th June 2010.

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEW | BAREFOOT RUNNING SHOES

P

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

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

roponents of barefoot running claim highly cushioned shoes weaken the muscles, tendons and ligaments in a runner’s feet. But imagine running outdoors in bare feet. Soles punctured by broken glass and sharp stones are a possibility.

The perfect compromise for followers of this school of thought, gaining popularity worldwide, is barefoot running shoes, the most famous being the Vibram FiveFingers. Vibrams look like the feet of a huge ape, but enthusiasts swear by them. The other more famous brand is Vivo Barefoot, which entered India in November. Vivo’s shoes, like the new Evo II, actually look like shoes, but without heel cushioning or arch support. Meanwhile, Adidas has just jumped into the fray as well, with adiPure, barefoot shoes for the gym.

According to Delhi-based physiotherapist Hitesh Khurana, there are some downsides to barefoot running, but his patients have found benefits in using them. He explains: “The new trend for thin-soled shoes, with little support, puts much more strain on your feet, and this has many positive effects. It encourages good posture and helps your sense of balance. But people, who are not used to this, will find it uncomfortable, and taking on too much sudden stress can even damage these muscles.” He adds: “In India, we usually

wear thin-soled sandals, slippers or go barefoot for long periods. This helps strengthen the muscles and so barefoot shoes are not as difficult to get used to. Even so, the right way to do this is to build up, take short runs first and slowly extend the amount of exercise you do in such footwear.”

The good stuff Both the Evo II and adiPure Trainer are extremely light and flexible. The Evo II weighs 218g and the Adidas adiPure Trainer weighs 164g; the same as most smartphones. The thin sole on the Evo II gives you a great sense of the ground while you’re running, helps with balance and is superbly flexible. Though you get slightly less grip than most shoes, that’s the point—you take shorter strides and put more force on to the front of your foot, promoting better posture and exercising the muscles fully. This pair is remarkably flexible, and you can crumple it into a ball in your hand. This means that when you’re actually running, your feet don’t feel even slightly constrained.

The adiPure Trainer slips on to your feet like a glove—and is designed like Vibrams, as a slip-on shoe with five toes. It’s even slimmer and lighter, but because of the low profile, this is meant for smooth surfaces and working out, not running on the track. Playing

table tennis with these was a treat, with quick comfortable movements and good grip.

inbox

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com

The not­so­good The Evo II has an upper body made of a transparent mesh to make it more flexible, and this runs to the back of the shoe. Wearing them in the winter is uncomfortable, leaving you shivering in the cold. Heel strikes are hard and you can feel every stone you step on, though it won’t puncture the sole. This takes a lot of getting used to and is painful for the first day or two. The idea is to make you adapt to a healthier running style though.

The adiPure Trainer is only useful in a limited space, though it does its job well. The shoe, which looks like a colourful second skin, is surprisingly comfortable, but looks bizarre. If you’re planning on wearing this before you get to the gym, be prepared for curious looks.

Talk plastic The Evo IIs cost `6,850 and are available at SportXS outlets in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, and can be ordered online from www.highline.in. The adiPure Trainers cost `4,999 and are available at all Adidas outlets.

Gopal Sathe

Free running: (below) The adiPure Trainer; and Evo II.

YEAR­END TREAT My “slowed down”, heartfelt greetings to the ‘Lounge’ team for bringing us consistently great magazine journalism through the year. The special issue (“Slow down: Make 2012 last longer”, 24 December) is just the icing on the cake after your great stories on poets, coffee and jazz over the last few months. This might be too much to ask for, but each of those 50 points could be a story in itself.

S.M. DUTTA

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

www.livemint.com

Vol. 5 No. 52

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

SLOW DOWN MAKE 2012

LAST LONGER

BUILD A CLASSIC WARDROBE >Page 17

Get off the fast track.

Clean up, refresh, embark on a journey or a project.

Create a memory.

Pick from our 50 ways to stretch time.

MAKE A SCENT

Perfume­making stands at the crossroads of art and apothecary.

Learn how to create your signature perfume >Page 14

GET SOME ROCK

Rock climbing is a pensive and personal sport. The ground is our comfort zone, to take the first step up a wall is to walk past fear >Page 18

FIND YOUR WAY BACK HOME

The Eastern and Orien­ tal Express runs from Singapore to Bangkok, allowing a stunning view of the Kwai river from its observation deck.

A first­hand account of personal journeys, including one in which the writer traces his grandmother’s roots to her village in Bangladesh >Page 21

THE GOOD LIFE

LUXURY CULT

SHOBA NARAYAN

TIME­BOUND

Saturday, December 24, 2011

WHEN YOUR FOOD SINGS TO YOU

A

s we are introduced, Paul Pontallier, the legend ar y w in ema ker of Châ teau Margaux, takes my hand, bends down…and kisses it—exactly like Elaine Sciolino describes in her book, La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life. I walk in prickly (more about that later) but by the time Pontallier releases my hand, I am charmed. We are at The Leela Palace Bangalore to enjoy an evening of exceptional food and wine. Chef Alain Passard, who shocked... >Page 6

REPLY TO ALL

RADHA CHADHA

THE SHARED FAMILY WISH LIST

L

ose 5kg. Get to the gym at least four times a week. Definitely join a yoga class. We were tossing around the same old New Year resolutions that we did every year, a harmless enough last-week-of-the-year activity, until our daughter, who was then 6, piped up and said we should have a “family resolution”. We paused, wondering how to explain to her the unspoken script surrounding New Year resolutions: Make promises with gusto, forget them a week later. >Page 6

AAKAR PATEL

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

CULTIVATE A PASSION, LEARN TO LIVE

I

know of three men who lived in the manner of their choosing. First was Socrates, who spent his days on the streets of Athens ambushing passers-by with seemingly simple questions. Like Ghalib, he loved argument. This was not to score a victory over another, it wasn’t a debate in that sense, but to try and bring understanding, to learn.

Importantly, he also wanted to spread his spirit of inquiry. The aristocrats and upper-class youth loved him (it was a middle-class Athenian jury that put him to death). >Page 8

It was such a pleasure to read Anindita Ghose’s note on the concept of the passage of time (“The art of happiness”, 24 December). It’s true that in these times, time is the greatest luxury we can—or cannot—afford. The note really got me into thinking mode. “What did you do this year with all the time you saved not doing the things you wanted to do?” That could be an urban catchline now.

R. SHETTAR FILM REVIEW

DON 2

ON THE GO “If Mint’s readership surveys are right, we have you pinned down as an uber successful professional or entrepreneur who has, or will, travel the world.

You’re on your second set of wheels already and paying back an ambitious house loan. You stop for nothing.” Anindita Ghose’s edit note (“The art of happiness”, 24 December) described me to a “T”. I toured all around India this year, part book tour of a novel I had published in India, but mostly adventure.

So what a nice introduction to you and your incredibly insightful and extremely well­written word!

MARK STEPHEN LEVY

COUNTING CALORIES “How to get a bikini body”, 17 December, had some good tips for diet and exercise. I’m glad to see that it focused on diet and exercise as a coordinated effort. To add to the article, it would also be beneficial to determine how many calories your body burns and how many calories you should have per day. Then you would have some accuracy in adjusting your diet for weight gain or loss. I have found an online calculator that will tell you how many calories your body is burning and how many calories you should have per day. This could help you know how to adjust your diet to either gain, or lose, weight.

JOHNNY ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPHER: KARIN LAU/THINKSTOCK

LOUNGE REVIEW | TOIT BREWPUB, BANGALORE

T

hree school friends, Sibi Venkataraju, Arun George and Mukesh Tolani, believed Bangalore deserved a brewery.

They quit their day jobs and got together with Glen Williams, who runs The Sweet Chariot chain of bakeries in Bangalore, to start Toit, the brew pub on 100 Feet Road in Indiranagar. The pub and restaurant opened in March, but it took them eight months to finally get the brew plant going.

Toit served its first brew over the Christmas weekend. We went along with Mohit Nischol, manager at Tulleeho, the beverage training company, for a tasting.

The good Four out of the seven listed on the menu were available, and we tried all four. Tintin Toit, a Belgian beer brewed with coriander and orange peel, is a crisp beer—a perfect afternoon drink. Nischol thought the flavour of coriander was stronger than the orange, and another rush of orange would have perfected it. Toit has paired all their beers with food on the menu, and suggest batter-fried prawns, the seafood pizza or the blue cheese fettuccine to go with the Tintin Toit. “It’s a light beer that will pair well with heavy or fried food,” says Nischol, giving the pairing a thumbs-up.

“We don’t want to be beer

snobs by providing food pairings, but are merely making suggestions,” says Venkataraju, stressing on the pub being a casual space, not fine dining. This is well reflected in their tag line, Sending it since 2010.

The Toit Red is an amber ale brewed with fruits such as pine, grape, raisins and grapefruit.

Nischol found the fruity aroma was not so significant but the beer has a smooth bitterness that stays in the mouth. “Ales should ideally be bitter, but since Indians are not used to the bitter taste, this will serve well for those who are feeling a bit adventurous,” he says.

But the beer that reflects Toit’s high standards of brewing is the Colonial Toit, English pale ale with caramel-infused malt. Bitter, the way an ale is meant to be, it makes for the perfect winter beer—dark with an aroma of roasted grains.

The pub also has a number of cocktails, wine, bottled beers and hard liquor. They even serve Long Island Iced Tea and Cosmopolitans by the pitcher. Also, they have a wood-fired oven and live counter for pizzas, proving they’re serious about their food.

The not­so­good The most disappointing beer of the four is the Toit Weiss. Nischol found it a bit watered-down and

lacking in body. Meant to be akin to German wheat beer with undertones of spices and fruits, the beer tastes and smells more significantly of the wheat than anything else. Despite the long brew menu, not all the brews are available. The management promises that all options will flow in soon enough. The staff is not yet trained to understand the brews, a limitation the owners admit to. “It’s a matter of time before they understand the brews,” says Venkataraju. If you are curious about how the brew was made, it’s between you and the menu, or you can ask to meet the brew master, Phillip Keln.

Talk plastic 500ml of brewed beer is priced at `200, which is reasonable, compared to other brew clubs in the city, and cheaper by at least `100 than any imported bottled ales.

They offer tasters of all four brews and `150 will bring you four 90ml tasters. Basic finger food like a plate of nachos topped with cheese is priced at `125, while a pizza is priced at `290 for a 12-inch margherita, and goes up to `500 for a seafood pizza.

For reservations, call 080-25201460.

Pavitra Jayaraman

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ROHIT BRIJNATH GAME THEORY ADAM PRETTY/GETTY IMAGES

The running man

On the rise: Somdev Devvarman will play in the Aircel Chennai Open from 2 January.

A

ny story on Somdev Devvarman should start with his shoes. Not what he wears. But how many he wears down. Because essentially this is a running man with a racket. You don’t see how much he runs,

of course. You don’t count his kilometres.

You see him in the tournament, he wins, he loses, you flick the channel, you move on. We all do. But he keeps moving, he has to, he has to run down balls, run down his future before he, already 26, runs out of time.

It’s nearly Christmas and he’s in Austin, Texas, on his off season, and he’s on the phone and even down the line you can hear his exhilarating exhaustion.

“It’s been a tough day,” he laughs. No, it’s been a tough week of short sprints, long sprints, shuttle runs, agility runs. Breaking his body down, building it up. Then, after this running, he practises tennis. Two hours. Exhales. Sucks down water. Then 2 more hours. Just in case you were thinking differently, he’ll tell you, this two-footed whippet whose body is like cables glued together and whose intensity hovers around him like a force field: “I take my work seriously”. No kidding.

I had my first long conversation with him only in Shanghai this October after watching him practise for 2 hours. Shot, run, shot, turn, run, like some wind-up toy. I like him because he never got sucked into that greying soap opera that

has become Leander-Mahesh. Never done anything but love this struggle to find his best self. Never made excuses for not being some muscular European who dines on horse-rump steak and makes a racket look like a light cane. Never done anything but work.

And he, not quite tennis-tall at 5ft 11 inches or wearer of Nadal-ish biceps, will tell you straight up, because he is straight up, that this small, unmuscular, disadvantaged Indian thing, well, that’s crap. He’ll point to skinny Novak Djokovic, he’ll point to the 5ft 10 inches Kei Nishikori who’s risen to No. 25. He’ll say, “You are what you are, you play the hand you’re dealt.” He’ll tell you he’d rather not train in India because “I can’t stand the excuses”. All that official talk of no coaches, no infrastructure, no sponsors, no good players—and it’s not all untrue, of course—but he, this boy from Tripura, really wants to tell them, dude, you won’t find all this in a room but on a court with the right work ethic.

I think he means running.

Devvarman is the world No. 84—with a highest of No. 62—and this may appear an average number. Till

you turn back time and remember no Indian has been ranked better than 62 since Ramesh Krishnan hit his No. 23 about 26 years ago.

Till you go to any court, practice court, Challenger court, Futures court, qualifying court, and listen to the whup, whup, whup of everyone’s forehands, which have the repetitive sound of a helicopter rotor, and understand the sheer quality of talent out there.

Till you see the quantity of dreamers and the ambition written into their movements, and if they’re over 1,900 players ranked just on the ATP Tour, you have to imagine the thousands in 200-plus countries whom you never see.

It’s all a trifle frightening because there is so much sameness, talent with such a thin separation point, where the divide between No. 80 and No. 70 and No. 50 is infinitesimal, a shot here in the first set, a break point there in the third set. But it’s uncommonly hard to grasp these moments, these chances, again and again, today, tomorrow, next week, so you have to build yourself into some relentless machine, a sort of warrior whose warpaint is only sweat.

Devvarman wants to be this No. 50, this No. 40, he wants to be all this desperately. It’s why he runs, why he works. He does it because of a lesson he learnt as a child when he and his father cycled to the courts. In football, he wouldn’t get picked sometimes; in tennis, he understood there is no favouritism, it’s a collision of individuals, if you’re good enough, you just have to get picked.

He does it because tennis is not

drudgery for him, its charm—an ever-changing game of wind, calm, quick courts, slow ones—infects him, its subtleties intrigue him. He likes its testing loneliness, a man surrounded in a stadium yet isolated and exposed and vulnerable, an athlete with no caddie, or coach, or second to talk to him, reassure him, drive him. “You don’t talk to anyone, you figure it out yourself. I have great appreciation of the top guys, how they do it day in, day out, people watching every single move and yet they hold it together. It’s incredibly tough to do.”

As much as he runs, he thinks, a student (a word he uses for himself) in sneakers who sees matches as “problem solving” exercises for, as he says, “you don’t have to hit it bigger, a lot of it is tactical, you can make a match very physical, very mental”. So he experiments with different styles, figuring out which player doesn’t like the low, firm slice, which one is uncomfortable with a change of pace. And he’ll say, with a sort of apostle’s zeal: “I like the challenge, and figuring stuff out, paying attention, being emotionally there. One of the beautiful things is that whenever you’re out there, you forget about the rest of what’s going on in your life.”

He’s still talking on the phone, it’s almost an hour, and his sentences go on without punctuation, and as you might figure he doesn’t run out of breath. He has something becoming about him. And it is faith, I figure.

He tells me a story about Alex Bogomolov Jr. The Russian was world

No. 250 in September 2010 and now he’s No. 34. Devvarman knows him, he watches him playing, he knows Bogomolov hasn’t deeply changed his game, he’s still 5ft 10 inches, still runs hard, still hits his forehand—like a semi-carbon copy of the Indian—and so he asks the Russian: What happened? As in how did you do this?

And the Russian tells him, well, it “just clicked”.

But it clicked, it came together, for a reason. Or as Devvarman says, and knows, “Bogomolov did it by showing up every day and giving himself the best opportunity.” So now he’s preparing for his “click”. He knows he’s beaten guys in the top 20, 30, 40, 50, “so it’s not just a fluke, it’s just a case of doing it more often”, but to “click” in 2012, to take that opportunity, he has to be ready.

Which is why he was running in Austin.

Which is why he will be running in Chennai this coming week.

Which also brings us back to his shoes and how many he wears down a year.

He thinks.

“About 35-40 pairs.”

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

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

THINKSTOCK

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU, KID

S

tand at the door. Look at me.”

Three-year-old Naseem’s instructions to me as she is sitting on the pot in the bathroom.

Making faces as she pushes.

Doing her job.

I stand on the stone threshold, my shoulder resting on the door frame. I’m holding my morning cup of tea, sipping.

If Naseem says look at me, then I must look at her.

I have just returned after a three-day work trip. A few days away from the family and already this feels like a privilege. Following precise orders delivered by a little woman on a pot as I nurse a cup of tea in my hand.

“Tell me the story of a monkey and a snake,” she says.

“Which monkey?” I ask.

The baby monkey who fell from a tree.

“Which snake?” I ask.

“The big fat snake who was

there,” she says. She uses her hands to show how fat, then quickly grabs the seat again.

“Then what happened?”

“The snake makes a phone call to the monkey’s father in his office,” she says.

“Was the monkey crying?”

“Yes, it was bawling, Mamma, Mamma. Oooh ooh!”

“How did the snake hold the phone?” I ask. “It doesn’t have hands.”

It will be a long time before I remember to ask Naseem if she has accomplished her purpose on the pot.

But wait. Oh my God. Isn’t it the 31st of December today?

Happy New Year, dear reader!

It is amazing how long a day can be sometimes, yet the months whiz by like a rollicking train. And the years, the years are just on the run, man.

Today I have some super-accurate New Year

predictions for you.

In 2012, you will finally get that pedicure you have been meaning to get for a while now.

You will slow down.

Eat a lot more cake.

Without the icing.

Take things less personally.

Misunderstand less.

You will make friends with your body. Start now. Say, hello body, you are New year predictions: You will listen more. quite nice to hold.

From here and from here. Body loves attention like “These are my working that. It will glow. And want to do hours, sweetheart,” I say. “I more things with you. have to work.”

Little Naseem, my colleague in “This is also your work,” she our work-from-home set-up, has says, showing me her box of caught up with me again. jigsaw puzzles.

“Mamma, come play with me,” “Oh yes, Naseem, you are she says. right.”

In the new year, you will listen more. Listen better.

Do the same work in less time.

You will begin to become the boss. That is what you are born to do.

Many years ago, my wise friend Dawn and I were walking around Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi. She asked me about my love life.

“Is this the guy for you?” she asked about my boyfriend.

“Yes, I think so,” I said.

“How do you know?” she said.

“You know, Dawn, I feel very happy and secure when I am with him. And I am really miserable without him.”

We kept walking. I looked around for the best angles to take photographs.

“That doesn’t sound right, Natasha,” said Dawn. “Your relationship isn’t supposed to carry that load. You need to be happy and secure on your own.”

She made no sense to me then. I was in love and she didn’t understand.

I did store that conversation for future reference, though. It must be 12 years later today. I’m still in love in the same way, but what Dawn said makes perfect sense now. Urgent sense.

A lot more of this will happen in 2012. Old stories will come back, along with their simple lessons. You will pick them out of thin air and wear them like a cloak. Or a halo. Smile a wicked smile.

You will start writing your book. Singing your song. Walking your own path. You will choose your own bench.

You will learn to tell stories by letting your listener tell you her own story. You will have happy listeners.

Keep going. Even your mistakes have their purpose. Cross over into the new year, whistling your tune, leaving regrets behind.

Everyone you love will find you again.

Happy New Year. It will happen for you. And for me.

Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker, media trainer and mother of three.

Write to Natasha at mydaughtersmum@livemint.com www.livemint.com To read Natasha’s previous columns, visit www.livemint.com/natasha­badhwar

COLUMNS L5

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Chennai’s muse: the Bharatanatyam diva

I

SHARP IMAGE

am going to let you in on a little secret. I don’t know if it is the same in north India, but here in Chennai, where I grew up, everyone has this fixation that revolves around Bharatanatyam dancers. If you have a daughter, you want her to learn this ancient art

form that originated with the sage Bharata and his text, the Natya Shastra.

If you have a son, you want him to marry a Bharatanatyam dancer: she with the big, expressive eyes; slender fingers like okra (okay, it sounds better in Tamil, and perhaps that is why this particular vegetable is called lady finger); and a curvaceous figure that looks like it has sprung out of the Thanjavur temples. It is—if you’ll permit the expression—a collective Chennai wet dream, and it centres around one art form: Bharatanatyam.

Chennai is in the throes of the “season”, and even for jaded me, the atmosphere is electric. Everywhere you go, there is music and dance—on television, radio and over loudspeakers.

Tradition still holds sway over this coastal city that is now home to scorching Thai food and trendy tapas bars. Scratch the surface, and Chennai’s cultural heart still throbs.

Like all Chennai girls, I learnt Bharatanatyam as a child, thanks mostly to a family feud. My aunt is the legendary Bharatanatyam dancer, Padma Bhushan Kamala, who made her name as a child prodigy called “Kumari Kamala”. Her videos are still available on YouTube, uploaded by worshipful fans.

Kamala mami, as I called her, lived in Poes Garden, a stone’s throw away from chief minister J. Jayalalithaa’s home in Chennai, and performed at The Music Academy, while my cousins and I ran amok through her green room. My mother, naturally, wanted me to learn dance from her famous sister-in-law, but Kamala mami told my Mom that I wasn’t ready for dance. I was too young, she said. Too tomboyish was the unstated implication.

Outraged by the rejection, my mom

immediately enrolled me with the Dhananjayans, a dancing couple who taught near our house. They would go on to win fame and awards, including the Padma Bhushan. I mostly remember walking to their home in nearby Shastri Nagar, and slinking to the back of a group of girls who danced on their rooftop terrace. Six months later, I told my parents that I could not keep up with the squatting aramandi posture that is the cornerstone of Bharatanatyam. I quit.

My best friend’s sisters, meanwhile, were learning from my aunt. They were beautiful twin girls, Ramaa and Uma, who later married and moved to the US. Ramaa Bharadvaj returned to India last year and is the dance director of the Chinmaya Naada Bindu academy in Pune. Watch her Jwala-Flame dance on YouTube. She performs it with her daughter, Swetha, and it is, in my mind, an amazing if non-traditional interpretation of Bharatanatyam.

At Women’s Christian College, Chennai, I spent three years with Urmila Sathyanarayanan, who would become one of the top Bharatanatyam dancers in the country. She was learning dance when we were in college, but had not become the sensation she is now. Urmila was riveting, even as a psychology student clad in simple cotton salwar-kameezes, playing truant from Mrs Koshy’s classes and getting roundly scolded for it. Her abhinaya, or expression, was in evidence then as it is now. Urmila has a mobile expressive face that grabs your eyeballs and doesn’t let go.

Although I have watched all the big dancers of today—Padma Subrahmanyam, Alarmel Valli, Malavika Sarukkai, Shobana, Anita

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

‘BEING THERE’ IN A WISE, ENABLING WAY We have retired recently and have a problem with our 29-year-old daughter. She has a high-profile job and has had a child recently. Any help that we give her is not enough.

Recently, she even expressed anger that my husband and I are planning a three-week trek. We have been doing her finances and taxes, as also those of her husband’s. We were there for her through her pregnancy, and supported her through higher education.

We are being forced to treat her as our primary responsibility even now. Can we not enjoy our existing good health and retirement in ways that we want?

“Once you are a parent, you are one till your dying day.” This is a sentiment many have expressed over the ages. No doubt, one’s concern and involvement as a parent never ends. However, surely the nature of that concern and involvement does and must change as parents age and children become grown people?

Since you so clearly resent this “never-ending-story”, you would be doing yourself and your daughter a favour by spelling

out, without being apologetic, what you are happy to do and what you are being forced to do.

Many parents today continue to micromanage their children’s lives, even when these children are 25, 35 or more. Some children resent it and want to get away from this degree of interference (which hides under the name of “I love you and worry for you”). However, some find it convenient and become incapable of functioning without the parents’ daily support. So we find parents of grown children being their accountant, manager, babysitter, nurse, chauffeur, secretary, counsellor, bill payer, tax consultant, all rolled into one!

Most parents cannot or will not say anything as they are “supposed” to be there for their children. But it often comes out in front of a counsellor or a concerned friend: “I am an unpaid maid”; “Our retirement years were not meant to be so stressful”; “What to do, they have to chase money, and we have to help them.” These are some of the common statements that come from overworked, ageing parents. While some complain, others feel their existence is

made better by being “needed and indispensable”, even at the cost of their own health.

Where does the root of this parenting-forever phenomenon lie? It starts from the infamous “board exam” days. The child is “not to be troubled or burdened” with any family responsibilities— be it a sick grandparent, or a wedding to attend, or helping around the house, or being social with the extended family.

This goes on with the class XII boards, where the “competition” stakes are higher, so the child is further “protected” from everyday concerns. So it goes on when the young adult is pursuing higher qualifications, at a new job, etc. The pursuit of “excellence” (and, therefore, money) becomes primary and the development of any other socially and personally useful behaviour is simply not expected of the child. When adult life demands that they engage in more than just their careers, the parents step in and provide all the “essential services”.

Frankly, this is a way of crippling our children and ensuring we never can or will step out of the equation in a more detached and yet loving way as older parents of grown children. “Being there” for our children in a wise but enabling way, so that they become well-rounded adults, is hard mental and emotional work, but it must be done. The key seems to be in remaining interested in your children and not anxiously spreading yourself thin for them.

SCOTT ELLIS

Ratnam and even abhinaya queen Guru Kalanidhi Narayanan, who can emote the navarasas like none other—I haven’t yet been able to watch Priyadarsini Govind perform, something that I will rectify soon by attending her performance at The Music Academy on 3 January.

Govind is a dancer at the pinnacle of her prowess. Her adavus, or steps, are precise and symmetrical. Her abhinaya, or expressions, are perfectly adequate, if dispassionate. They don’t sweep you off your feet like Ms Narayanan’s did (it is hard for me to follow Mint’s journalistic code of “last names only, no titles”, when talking about these dancers whom I revere). As a girl, my mother took me to Ms Narayanan too.

Why hasn’t Bharatanatyam flourished as much as Carnatic music?

There are more musicians than dancers; and more weeks dedicated to music than dance during the December season. It doesn’t make sense because dance combines music and performance. It gives you more bang for the buck, to put it in crude

Our 32-year-old son and his wife recently moved abroad to pursue higher studies and jobs.

While they were in the same city as us in the first few years of their marriage, my wife expected daily calls, meals together on weekends, and other such things. She was also eager to give them household advice. They interpreted this as interference, but did not say anything directly. After she accused them of abandoning us by going abroad, we got an email from our son saying he was fed up of her being too overbearing and that “she should get a life”. My wife, angry, replied, saying the daughter-in-law was instigating him. I tried to explain to her

Keeping time: (above) Students practise Bharatanatyam at the Kalakshetra centre in Chennai; and Ramaa Bharadvaj interprets the traditional art in a modern way. economic terms. Yet dancers occupy a smaller space than musicians in the cultural landscape, even in Chennai.

Why? Is it because dancers are mostly women and they quit to raise children?

Then again, most of the top Carnatic music singers are women too—Sudha Ragunathan, Ranjani-Gayatri, S. Sowmya, Bombay Jayashri and Aruna Sairam. They’ve managed to stay on top even after they become mothers and grandmothers. Is it because dance is more expensive and therefore does not attract more students, what with the spending on costumes and accompanying singers? I don’t know.

Shoba Narayan is a failed Bharatanatyam dancer. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

that we must listen to what he is saying, to no avail. He visited recently, but stayed with us for exactly 72 hours. I don’t know how to put a stop to this deterioration in relationship.

All of you need time away and outside of your established lines of communication to take stock and really soul-search about how to reconfigure your relationship with your grown son and his wife. Your son has raised an alarm with his clear statement; however hurtful it is, it has come with a lesson and some truths. It would be advisable for both you and your wife to pay heed. Perhaps your wife needs to see a counsellor or a wise family friend who will bring a fresh perspective. She THINKSTOCK

needs also to be encouraged to commit to a mind-body health programme such as yoga or similar pursuits.

You yourself seem to be under severe stress and it would be advisable for you to simply shut down any more conversations with your wife on this subject.

Stay out of it firmly, asking that the subject not be discussed any more for, perhaps, the next month. This would be much better than discussing it threadbare in highly emotionally charged circumstances between yourselves and with your son.

If you want to keep up a healthy line of communication with your son, send him weekly emails talking about pleasant things, asking after his own well-being and staying firmly out of the politics between your wife and him. Do not expect instant “normalization” between you and him, but continue to put out a clear signal that your relationship goes above and beyond recriminations and guilt trips.

Both you and your wife need to find pursuits other than your son and his family. You will find that your relationship will improve considerably once he feels you are not constantly watching him or expecting them to behave in ways dictated by the mother.

Gouri Dange is the author of ABCs of Parenting.

Life lessons: Stop cushioning your child from everyday concerns.

Write to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2011

Eat/Drink

LOUNGE

SPIRITS

The long and the shot of it India’s first agave­based beverage, the Goan DesmondJi, hopes to revive drinking options B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN arun.j@livemint.com

···························· hen summoned by friends to whip up one of his signature cocktails, Desmond Nazareth went shopping for alcohol. It was on his way back, practically empty-handed, that Nazareth wondered why he was unable to easily get the right ingredients (tequila mixed with orangeflavoured liqueur and lime or lemon juice) for margaritas in Mumbai and what he could do about that. This was in 2000.

Having returned after 18 years in the US as a software developer, semi-retired and restless, Nazareth was looking for his next project. It was not money that drove him— he was well covered on that front—but the “learning curve”.

Constantly curious, his career had been built on a series of projects, exciting as long as he was learning from them and left to others once he was done educating himself.

On the walk back that evening in 2000, the mechanical engineer turned software developer cum trained film-maker’s head was not clouded with solutions to the cocktails but “an idea that lay wriggling in

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my head like a worm”.

More than a decade later, in April, Nazareth brought out India’s first agave-based liquor, DesmondJi. Agave spirits are typically double-distilled spirits made from a few species of the agave plant native mainly to Central America.

Some popular products of this plant include the Mexican Tequila, Mezcal and Bacanora. The agave spirit is a clear liquid, identified with the lime-and-salt routine that follows a shot of the spirit, stereotyped in films with the immediate collapse of the consumer.

Nazareth, 54, clarifies quickly: “What’s consumed in Mexico is 100% agave, which is actually sipped gently like single malt. It’s typically the 51% agave (the rest of the 49% is made up of cane or corn sugar), which is used in cocktails and as shots, that gets exported to other countries.”

DesmondJi (51%) does not have the sharp sting of the typical Tequila brand that’s imported into India, which means it need not be accompanied by the salt-lime combination to numb the taste. The shots can be surprisingly refreshing. It does not have an overwhelming odour or a bitter taste, making the 100% particularly pleasant to sip, if so desired. Malleable and versatile, it allows for experi-

mentation in cocktails.

Sold initially only in Goa, where the nomadic Nazareth is currently based, DesmondJi is soon going nationwide. Since October, its distribution has been taken over by Nashik Vintners Pvt. Ltd, the company that owns Sula Vineyards.

The idea that wormed its way into Nazareth’s imagination led him through a maze of research— books, papers, the Internet—and finally, to the Deccan plateau. Nazareth realized that the latitudinal lines in Mexico, where the plant grows, matched those of the Deccan, apart from similarities in soil and climate. He went on an expedition looking for the plant that grows in the wild and is typically used in fencing, its thick, blade-like thorns a deterrent to encroachers. He convinced some farmers to give him a few samples, which he took back to test. The process of refining the spirit took him many years. “Some people have had the idea before me,” he says, “but maybe they did not have

the tenacity to see it through.”

By 2003, Nazareth had moved to Goa, and by 2006, he was convinced his ambition was realistic.

It would still require enough land under cultivation and investors who would be willing to wait over eight years for the plantation to mature. By 2007, land had been identified in the Chittoor district in Andhra Pradesh, bordering Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and financiers had been collated, many of them Nazareth’s contacts from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where he studied in the late 1970s. The bottling and pack-

aging facility was set up in Goa. The first bottle, from Agave Industries India Ltd, came out in April from the micro-distillery that now hires about 15 people and 20 casual labourers.

Eight months and about 3,000 cases (12 bottles each) later, Nazareth says he is yet to meet someone who has complained of a hangover after a night of pure DesmondJi-bingeing. Some consumers have claimed it’s given them second wind, particularly after the first yawn of a late evening, he adds.

Neville Desouza, a freelance advertising professional, moved to Goa, three years ago after spending over two decades in California. The limited supply of Tequila he managed to bring in disappeared soon. Unable to pay either a “bomb” for imported stuff or to digest the rebottled version of bulk imports available locally, Desouza now keeps a tonne of DesmondJi at home. “It is clean and robust enough to cut through the salt and lime, which is great in margaritas,” says Desouza, who ran a restaurant, Bistro California, for a while with his wife and is setting up a café now near Margao.

Nazareth believes there is still some distance to go for the remaining rough edges of his drink to be smoothened. “I want it to belong to the narrow band of the top 10 percentile of this kind of spirit,” he says.

That top 10 percentile Nazareth speaks of came to India in October. The

Patrón Spirits Company, makers of premium Tequila, launched five of their varieties through Indian distributor Aspri Spirits Pvt. Ltd. Sumedh Singh Mandla, CEO, core brands, Aspri, says white spirits like Tequila have been selling more because of their availability in B-towns through imports. He says their sales have grown at a rate of 20% in the last three years since they started importing Don Angel, another brand of Tequila. Don sells over 5,000 cases (12 bottles each) a year in India.

Where Nazareth hopes he will score is the price point, though Maharashtra, with its high taxes, worries him. A 750ml bottle of 51% agave from DesmondJi costs `495, while the 100% comes for `750 in Goa. A 375ml bottle of Patrón starts from `5,215 in Mumbai.

Over the next year or two, as the learning curve starts plateauing, the serial entrepreneur will slowly get others to run the business. He already has other ideas.

Even though his spirit is produced in a 44-acre facility in Andhra Pradesh—Agave India also produces margarita, blue margarita blends, an orange liqueur and blue curaçao—Nazareth says he is based in Goa because it’s “cool”, allows him to think about weighty issues like eradicating the world’s mosquito problem, and because interesting people of many nationalities are investing in Goa. “I love Goa,” he says, smiling, “specially because I am not there all the time.”

GOING TO

GOA

RAKESH MUNDYE/MINT

Spirited start: DesmondJi creator Desmond Nazareth with bottles of his margarita, 100% agave and 51% agave.

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

THREE­CHEESE FOR THE NEW YEAR

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o the 2011 gorging season draws to a close—Diwali, Thanksgiving, Eid, Christmas, Hanukkah, not to mention all the endless weddings—whatever we celebrate, we’ve probably all been eating way too much. Certainly for me, tonight marks the last of the big winter celebrations before I reacquaint myself with salad and the gym tomorrow.

Growing up in a Scottish household, New Year’s Eve (or Hogmanay) was always a more important festival than Christmas.

Even though we lived in England, my parents carried their traditions with them. Some, like “first footing”, were, frankly, bizarre.

Scots believe the first person (the “first foot”) to visit you after midnight on 31 December will set the tone for the year ahead. It has to be a tall dark man bearing whisky to represent cheer and a

lump of coal to wish warmth. My father was usually dispatched to do the rounds of bemused neighbours, returning, very cheery, in the wee hours.

My mother would bake herself to a standstill and throw open the house to all comers, and it is more in the spirit of my mother’s New Year than my father’s that I bring you today’s recipe. Although the recipe is not my mother’s, she would, I think, have approved—simple yet rich and welcoming; three types of cheese melting into cream and held in sublime unison by rich, buttery pastry. I’ve made five batches of these pies already this festive season and they always disappear in a flash.

Needless to say, as the star ingredient, the cheese is all-important. Even though it’s expensive, there is no substitute

for imported Gruyère and Emmental, nothing else will give the same melting rich flavour (believe me, I’ve tried). I will allow Flanders Mozzarella, but I don’t want to hear of anyone substituting tinned Amul processed for France’s finest.

Happy New Year!

Three­Cheese Pies Makes about 20 canapé-size pies Ingredients For the pastry 200g flour (maida) K tsp salt 75g cold butter, cut into cubes 5-6 tbsp cold water For the cheese filling 200g Gruyère cheese, grated 50g Emmental cheese, grated (no substitute)

Star ingredient: There’s no substitute for Gruyère and Emmental cheese.

50g Mozzarella cheese, grated (no substitute) 200ml cream (Amul is fine!)

200ml milk 2 eggs N tsp salt Pepper A few sprigs of parsley (for decoration, optional) Method First make the pastry. Sift the flour and salt into a large bowl, then add the butter. Quickly rub the butter into the flour until it resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the cold water, adding a little bit

more if necessary to bind the mixture together. Lightly knead the dough into a ball, cover with cling film and put in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the pastry to fit a 22cm baking tin.

Gently fit the pastry into the tin and trim the edges.

In a measuring jug, mix the cream, milk, eggs, salt and pepper. Sprinkle the grated cheeses over the pastry base, then pour over the liquid.

Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes until the filling is set but still fairly pale in colour.

If you want to serve the pie as a main course, slice while still warm. For small pies, leave to cool down completely, then refrigerate, preferably overnight.

Then, with a small pastry cutter, cut the pie into rounds. When you want to serve them, place the rounds on a baking tray and reheat gently at about 150 degrees Celsius. Serve warm, perhaps decorated with parsley.

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

www.livemint.com For a slide show on how to bake Three­Cheese Pies, visit www.livemint.com/cheesepies.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2011

Style

LOUNGE Q&A | MALINI RAMANI

Cracking the Goa dress code ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

The resort­wear diva on how to go short and loose, and the must­have accessories

B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

···························· he is among the first Indian designers to showcase resort-wear collections every year at fashion weeks across the country. Yet she could not participate in the first Resort Fashion Week held recently in Goa. Her newest passion kept her busy. In January, Malini Ramani is all set to open an interior design store in Goa, and says she is better at collecting and designing artefacts than clothes. We asked Ramani, a true Goaphile, what she would wear to an all-day-long party at the beach or a yacht this season.

Edited excerpts from the interview:

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jumpsuits, and tend to wear them at least three times a week when I am in Goa. The ones that I like are made from jersey. Even for an evening out, I like jumpsuits but these are usually made from a different fabric, like lycra, and maybe have a more flowing style, like harem pants.

I always carry at least two pashmina shawls with me. I carry either a pashmina or a jacket when I am out at night.

Shorts are great for Goa. I hate the Bermuda length of shorts for girls; they are unflattering. I love little denim shorts. If you are the kind who likes to wear shorts for night dos too, then get ones with sequins or some gold work.

Stick to loose silhouettes for the day because it is often sticky and muggy. Definitely no stilettos for Goa. If you are a heels person and like wearing them, then buy wedge heels. I wear my chappals just about anywhere, all the time. Walk confidently and you won’t look like a rag in them.

Avoid closed shoes or pumps.

Which colours work and what should be left out?

White for the day is my favourite, but I also wear bright colours.

Indians are lucky that they look good in colours anyway. In the evening, people love wearing black but in Goa you never know which way your night is going to go. For different set-ups—restaurants, yacht parties, on the beach—how does your style vary?

You can wear anything for restaurants because people walk in from the beaches. Nobody goes back all the way to their homes or hotels to change. If you are invited to a party to someone’s villa, then maybe you should carry a dressy jacket to throw over your jumpsuit or shirt dress. I don’t bother changing or

dressing for even house parties.

But if I know I have to be out all day and then at night too, I tend to wear a jumpsuit. I will carry a jacket, mostly in jersey material, because the weather suddenly turns in Goa, so it makes sense to carry something with you always.

If you are just lounging around in your hotel, then go for a kaftan. If you are likely to spend the day shopping and not really around the beach, then wear pyjamas with a T-shirt.

What about handbags?

I always carry sling bags or a leather bag with a long strap. Do not carry a clutch around because it definitely does not go with Goa and it’s easy to lose.

If you are going to a fancy party, like if you have an invite for Vijay Mallya’s party or have to go to Nilaya, then dress up. Wear what you are comfortable in—anything from gypsy skirts to kaftans. Even a sari might work; it depends on your personal style.

How do you dress up a bikini when you are not on the beach?

Wraps are great. I do something called the “magic wrap” which can be worn in six different ways.

You can wear these on the beach, at a restaurant, anywhere, with a bikini underneath.

What other accessories are a must for beach destinations?

I always take my straw hats.

During the day they work best.

The scarf is for the night, but don’t use it to cover your hair.

You get good hats at Accessorize. I don’t like bandanas because they don’t suit me. As for jewellery, I like to wear cuffs mostly, and bangles.

It’s fun to wear a neck piece, but only if it’s not too heavy or metallic. The neck piece must not make one feel hot and sticky. I like flowers in my hair, mostly hibiscus. Big sunglasses and aviators are on my list too.

GOING TO

GOA

Under wraps: (clockwise) Ramani says she wears jumpsuits to a day­and­night do; the newly launched wedge heels by Ramani at Bata, `999; the Bombabe dress is a best­seller at her Goa store; and a kaftan dress.

What should one pack to take along to Goa at this time of the year?

It’s really hot during the day in Goa, so definitely take thin cotton clothes. Jeans is a no-no. Just easy-breezy things—linen pyjamas, shorts, skirts and shirt dresses…those are some of my favourites, and shirt dresses. Outfits in jersey are great too.

Avoid any nylon-polyester stuff. I love

Sea fairies Update your beachwear wardrobe with ideas from the recently concluded India Resort Fashion Week 2011 in Goa B Y S EEMA C HOWDHRY seema.c@livemint.com

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4. Pria Kataria Puri: Stay in the flow with the kaftan—best for a day of lounging around.

5. Shivan and Narresh: Linen pyjamas, bikini top in ebony and ivory—for the classic look on a night about town.

6. Ken Ferns: White and dressy, it’s perfect for an afternoon on a yacht or “by invitation only” get­togethers.

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2011

Play

LOUNGE

FITNESS

Gadgets to get set go Can a new wave of healthcare devices help gadget geeks turn into fitness freaks?

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

···························· echnology is becoming an integral part of everyday life, and getting away from gadgets is just not an option.

There are a number of new gadgets now that can help plan a fitness routine, measure heartbeat, track sleep, and more.

Some are specialized gadgets that are dedicated to these functions, while others are accessories that are less accurate but a whole lot cheaper.

The number of stand-alone options in India is still limited, but thanks to eBay and Amazon, it’s not hard to buy these devices online. Here are some options:

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Jawbone UP

Price: $100 (around `5,300), plus shipping Jawbone is famous for its Bluetooth headsets, and the UP is its first fitness device, launched in early November. It’s a small wristband that has a small LED light and motor inside for vibrations to give you feedback.

There’s no screen to read— instead, the UP comes with a free a p p t h a t iPhone/iPod Touch users can install, and when you plug the wristband into the phone, it uploads all the data into the easy-to-use app.

The UP is waterproof and has a battery life of 10 days, so you’re not going to be particularly aware of it most of the time. Its exercise tracking is pretty thorough, but the killer feature is the silent alarm.

After just a fortnight of use, it’s easy to say that the UP is a superb alarm—it monitors when you’re in deep sleep or light sleep, and wakes you up by vibrating whenever your sleep is least restful, within a half-hour window around your desired wake-up time. The big

benefit is that you wake up easily and not groggily, and are actually able to get out of bed instead of hitting the snooze button.

When you plug the UP into your phone, you are greeted by a simple graph of the day, with three bars on it showing how long you’ve slept, how much you exercised and what you ate. If you meet your goals on any, there are visual cues to praise you for that bar, and if you tap the bar you can get details about that field.

So, for example, the sleep bar will expand to show details of deep sleep versus restless sleep, how long you took to sleep, how

Fitbit Ultra

Price: $100 (around `5,300), plus shipping The Fitbit Ultra is a small plastic clip that looks like a Bluetooth headset. The device is light and unobtrusive, and comes with an accelerometer built in that counts every step you take. An altimeter tells it how high you are, so it can also measure how many flights of stairs you’ve climbed. There’s a small LED notifier on the device to show how many steps you’ve taken, and how many calories you’ve burnt. The display also shows a clock and can function as a stopwatch.

The way it works is simple— switch it on, clip it to your clothes, and that’s about it. You also need to maintain a food diary, which you can enter into long you slept, and this data can be compared across days as well, making you feel particularly virtuous about a good night’s shut-eye.

The entire interface is simple to use, and the UP never scolds you. Instead, there is subtle positive reinforcement for meeting goals.

It tracks how far you’ve walked every day, and there are charts for other activities like exercising in the gym. The system takes all this into account and tracks how many calories this helped you burn. The app also requires you to take a photo of every meal.

It doesn’t make a graph against a database to display calories though—instead it asks you to rate the food on whether it makes you sleepy, tired, sheepish, energized, etc., and then again, gives encouraging responses when you eat the foods that make you feel healthier.

This gentle encouragement, coupled with the accurate exercise tracking, is a good reason to buy the UP. The alarm function is a killer, making the device well worth the price.

the Fitbit website. Data pertaining to your walking can be submitted to the website by plugging your Fitbit into the computer. The site then analyses your dietary entries and your walk data and gives you a detailed breakdown of how this is affecting your overall health.

One problem that users have been encountering, though, is that the food listings do not account for Indian cuisine— they cater specifically to Americans. Indians will have to make do without the calorie input and output analysis from the website, limiting one of the features.

Another feature of the Fitbit is sleep analysis. You need to press a button when you go to bed, and another when you get up, and the device will then be able

to tell you how often you woke up during the night, and how restfully you were sleeping. It’s a nice touch, though it can’t really tell if you’re asleep, or just lying fairly still. Another downside to Fitbit is that it can’t track exercise outside of walking/running. The session you put in at the gym doesn’t reflect in the tracking charts, unless you enter it manually.

Despite these drawbacks, as a pedometer and sleep monitor it

Philips Vital Signs Camera Price: 99 cents (around `50)

This recently developed app is currently only for the iPad 2, but Android versions are on their way.

It uses the iPad camera to measure colour changes in your face and movements in your chest, and uses this to measure heart and breathing rates.

This information is not 100% accurate, but most of the time it is pretty effective, and can be set up to share on Facebook, or email. It probably isn’t a good idea to mail your doctor the reading, though.

Nike+ app

Price: $1.99 (around `105) The Nike+ app lets you listen to music, record run times and map out routes, with distances, elevations and average speeds.

It offers a huge amount of data, but it is only available for users with iPhones/iPods. It shows the data of your fastest and slowest kilometre, and using the GPS on your phone, will track the route you’ve taken, show laps, and measure runs over time to indicate progress.

The app also uses the

iPhone’s altimeter to measure elevation—to track climbing stairs, for example.

As a motivational tool, it’s great. There’s a social layer so you can see where you stand against friends, and it tracks all the relevant

Inside the ‘chakra’ Spiritualist Deepak Chopra has a video game that claims to help you tune out stress B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· he Xbox 360 Kinect launched to a lot of hype last year, but even though the games offered more sophisticated versions of Wii-style party games, there have been few titles released that make owning a Kinect worthwhile.

Deepak Chopra’s Leela, which launched early December for the Xbox 360 Kinect, is not going to change that, because it doesn’t even attempt to be a game. Instead, the title, released by publisher THQ, aims to offer a meditative experience that encourages people to relax and refresh themselves. By making them move their heads slowly while breathing deeply and looking at psychedelic images on the screen.

Chopra is famous as a propo-

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Deepak Chopra’s Leela: Available on the Xbox 360 Kinect, `1,999.

nent of alternative medicine, and has attracted a lot of criticism for his work, with many dismissing him outright. He has a large following and has been a successful author, so it’s easy to see why THQ would green-light the project, hoping for quick and easy sales.

Playing Leela requires you to stand in front of the Kinect—the game measures the movement of your chest to track your breathing, and there are different game modes, each connected to a different kind of “chakra”. While some game modes help you tune the said chakra, others help you meditate and relax.

This is done in a number of ways, all very trippy. Looking at the visuals, it’s hard to take the game seriously—one mode, for example, has you fly through a tunnel by leaning from side to side to match the twists and turns on screen. You do this quite slowly—there’s no challenge to it. The idea is that the user will find it restful, though

functions fairly well, is durable, and has a battery that will last over a week, so you don’t need to keep charging it every day.

The Web interface is easy to use and understand, but you need to be prepared to enter a lot of information manually.

For people who already have a fitness routine and want a little help tracking the details, the Fitbit is an excellent option.

Just remember, it’s not a complete solution.

Strange: Trippy visuals and vague gameplay define Leela. the combination of this, and the bright neon flowers blossoming on the screen with every little move, would likely stress out people who don’t already buy into Chopra’s philosophy.

There are levels that play out like a slow version of the BrickBreaker game—where you blow up comets with cosmic energy, by waving your hands gently. Or you could try the guided meditation, where the game projects

your silhouette on screen, complete with lit-up chakra centres.

In a wonderful display of the Kinect camera’s sensitivity, it measures the movement of the different parts of your chest cavity to track your breathing techniques. It is actually mostly accurate, and does feel a little restful, but then, for most of us, so does sitting in a chair with a good game running.

In essence, Leela is a powerful

data. Just don’t forget to charge the phone after using this, because when the app is running with the GPS going, it takes a lot out of the battery.

biofeedback tool built around the notion of surrender—of relaxing and going with the flow.

Jumping around to zap an asteroid won’t work, but a gentle sweep will. Coupled with an electronic soundtrack, Leela feels strange.

There is a sense of a strong parody of actual gaming happening here—a slowed down caricature of the kind of controls we see in motion-controlled gaming today. If it were deliberate, then it would be brilliant. By slowing things down and forcing the user to consider the movements as they make them, the game highlights the absurdist controls that dominate the Kinect experience, and the trippy visuals show how divorced all this is from what you are really doing. Unfortunately, Leela doesn’t seem to be in on the joke.

At the end of the day, this is no game. This is an interactive Deepak Chopra experience. Most games have an intrinsic reward built into their actions, to motivate you to keep playing. Here, that reward is to be a better, more relaxed and less stressed out person—but only in the vaguest and most undefined manner possible.

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2011

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Business Lounge

LOUNGE JOHN CHACKO

Going big with the small The chief rep of Volkswagen on adjusting to Indian ways, new cars, and pining for home

B Y S HALLY S ETH M OHILE shally.s@livemint.com

···························· e stands 6ft 2 inches tall, is precise in what he says, loves efficiency, is a workaholic and dislikes slackers.

John Chacko is, for all practical purposes, a German with an Indian name.

Occasionally, the south Indian Malayali in him peeks through—when he discloses his love for spicy food and the fact that he studied engineering, for instance. But those passing glimpses are rare. The fact that Chacko works in an automobile company merely completes the German package.

It doesn’t surprise me that the chief representative, Volkswagen (VW) Group, in India and president and managing director, Volkswagen Group Sales India Pvt. Ltd, pines for home—and that does not mean Kerala. “We are going back (to Germany) after my stint here. I must admit, this is not home for me any more.”

Chacko’s parentage—Keralite father, German mother—and

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more than three-and-a-half decades in the European country where he has spent the major part of his work life, explain why he is yearning to return. Also, German, not Malayalam, is his language of choice and that’s why, after five years in India, he is still getting used to the Indian way of working—a style he says doesn’t suit his no-nonsense, direct approach.

The VW group, which sells the Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda and Porsche brands in India, has injected a surge of energy into its flagship brand since last year.

Volkswagen, which adopted the top-down strategy for entering the Indian market, got into the competitive small car segment with the Polo in February 2010, followed by the mid-size Vento in October 2010.

Eight months after the Vento’s launch, older rivals such as Honda Siel Cars India Ltd, which had been at the No. 2 position in the mid-size segment for several years, ceded ground to it. The Vento’s competitive price forced the Japanese car maker to cut its City model’s price in August, helping it regain some ground in the months from April-November. The Japanese carmaker sold 23,831 units of the City, against Vento’s 23,405 units, in this period.

Dressed formally in a crisp white shirt, red tie and black suit, 59-year-old Chacko meets me in a small, minimalist, second-floor meeting room in Volkswagen’s factory, which overlooks other automobile factories on stretches of vast lands

IN PARENTHESIS It’s not often that one comes across four members of a family working for the same firm. But for John Chacko and three of his five children, it happened by default. Daughter Marion, 29, who heads the sports marketing division at Audi AG in Germany, and sons Jan, 31, and Peter, 31, who work as engineers, share an umbilical relationship with the German firm.

“There was a time when my daughter and I were together on the payrolls of Audi and there were two Chackos in the telephone book. There are three of them now,” says the father. Chacko does not rule out the possibility of his other two sons—Fabian, 30, and Adrian, 27, both studying information technology, ending up in the VW group.

in Chakan, near Pune.

In 2006, when VW was preparing a blueprint to enter the Indian market, Chacko’s Indian roots ensured he was given charge of the project. He did the requisite groundwork and helped the Wolfsburg, Germanybased auto-maker which was aggressively scouting for new markets to enhance its global footprint, firm up its India plans.

In March 2008, he signed a contract with VW Group Sales India Pvt. Ltd and has been in India since. Chacko has been associated with the VW group for 33 years in roles that have straddled logistics, production planning, and manufacturing engineering in SEAT, VW’s Spanish car line, Audi and now, heading all the Volkswagen group firms in India as the chief representative.

Much against the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to chase a conventional academic stream, Chacko, the second of five siblings, chose to study aeronautics. The Delhi-born, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras alumnus went to the UK to pursue a master’s degree and then to Germany to get a doctorate. “Like most Indian families, there was a lot of pressure to become a medical doctor or engineer, but I managed to avoid that,” he says.

He switched to cars when he realized recognition in this industry would come faster.

Getting back to India was not easy; Chacko found it challenging to come to terms with the pace at which things move here.

He found it tough to meet the timelines, which was important for VW. It was especially difficult given the state of infrastructure in Chakan; Chacko says it was, and is, an issue. “The amount of energy I have to put into my job here is much more to get the same effect,” he says.

A self-confessed “difficult person to work with” who has fixed ideas, Chacko is easily put off by indirect or evasive replies. He is still getting used to the way some managers, with a hierarchical approach to work, function. “I have now developed a sort of an antenna—when someone is saying he has a challenge, it means he is not doing it. If he uses words like could and should and so on, I know he is not doing it.

You have to be so alert because they are not being direct.”

Unlike his stint in SEAT, Spain, his task was different here—not just to build physical infrastructure, but work towards a new work culture.

In November last year, when his three-year contract as the technical managing director here was coming to an end, Chacko was preparing to go back to Ger-

many—the country he was yearning to return to. But that was not to be.

The VW management entrusted him with a bigger responsibility. The firm found in him a natural successor to Joerg Mueller to head the India operation.

Well aware of the advantages early movers have in the market, Chacko is now bracing VW for the long winding journey to the pole position in the car market.

“It’s a terribly competitive market and we are late. Most of our competitors, who we take seriously, have been here for 10-15 years. We are not even present in the segment where the volume game is played,” he says, adding that any step into the future will be in the direction of strengthening the firm’s presence in the small car market.

Volkswagen Group’s market share in the passenger car segment increased to 4.8% in the months from January-November against 2.5% over the entire year in 2010. The company plans to launch at least two new small cars—the VW Up! and another small car that will be positioned below Skoda’s Fabia—some time next year.

These challenges have ensured that since his appointment as the chief representative of India operations, Chacko has been living out of his travel bag and when he’s not travelling, he’s recovering from it. One of the reasons why he pauses when asked about his interests and hobbies.

“Can’t say I have a hobby—will have to look for one,” he says, smiling.

The German-style commitment to work doesn’t give him much time for leisure travel either. Chacko prefers quick, short vacations over none. “I would rather go to a place for two days than not go at all. I always have this argument with my wife. I can’t afford a week but only two days. It’s better than nothing.”

A typical day for him begins at 7.30am and ends at 8.30pm with a quiet dinner with his wife, Irmgard, at their house in Koregaon Park in Pune. Years in Germany, Spain and other parts of Western Europe have had a great influence on Chacko but somewhere, the Malayali in him remains intact. “I love south Indian food.

I like the spices,” he says.

Ask him what he intends to do after hanging up his boots and the workaholic chuckles. “I keep getting this question from my wife but I haven’t thought about it. It’s about time I do but I avoid thinking about it. I have a number of years to go and if I start thinking about it, I may go off-track.”

A challenge: A self­confessed ‘difficult person to work with’, with fixed ideas, Chacko is easily put off by indirect or evasive replies.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

TRAVEL

THE NEW RETIREMENT

THINKSTOCK

unoccupied ocean-front duplexes built by the Coast Guard.

The Sierra Club sponsors an annual eight-day trip to the lighthouse, whose grounds are a breeding spot for the once-endangered elephant seal. From your bedroom, “you can hear them snoring”, says Dave Garcia, a former state ranger and the trip’s leader.

As many as 10 volunteers work from 9am-3pm uprooting vegetation known as the “ice plant”—a species native to South Africa that various agencies planted in the area, in part to prevent erosion.

Now, though, it’s crowding out native plants. The volunteers, who work on the grounds of the lighthouse and the nearby Fiscalini Ranch Preserve, replace the ice plant with native grasses, wild flowers and perennials. They also work on nature trails and paint and restore buildings.

On two free days, the group explores the light station and the coast, home to the sea lion, California condor and humpback whales. Other attractions include Cone Peak and its albino redwood trees, Hearst Castle and wine tasting. A cook prepares meals, but guests should expect to help in the kitchen.

Dates: 6-13 October Fee: $595, plus a $15 Sierra Club membership Information: www.sierraclub.org

Philanthropic trips around the world, a smart sabbatical or a new home by Costa Rica’s Gulf of Nicoya

ATLANTIDE PHOTOTRAVEL/CORBIS

A different kind of bay watch

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Save the world, one vacation at a time With the best in volunteer travel in 2012, you can help protect Namibian leopards and restore buildings in southern France

On her travels to Manitoba, organized by Earthwatch, Nancy Hoecker worked side by side with scientists studying the effects of climate change on the Arctic’s fragile ecosystem.

The goal: to contribute to research that “has found substantial evidence” of warming in the permafrost—a frozen layer of tundra that’s expected to release “vast carbon stores” as it thaws, according to an Earthwatch report.

In the summer, up to a dozen volunteers gather water and tree samples and spend their free time whale-watching on Hudson Bay, river kayaking, and touring the Eskimo Museum or historic Prince of Wales Fort. In winter, participants—who stay in dorm-style rooms and eat in a cafeteria—help measure the depth and temperature of the snow. Activities in February include dog sledding, igloo building and viewing the Northern Lights. Expect to see wildlife, including caribou, moose, and polar and grizzly bears.

Dates: June, August, September and February Fee: $2,995-3,495 Information: www.earthwatch.org

Now playing in Namibia: Cats

B Y A NNE T ERGESEN ···························· ike most people, Nancy Hoecker, a 62-year-old pharmacist from Coos Bay, Oregon, US, has strong feelings about what makes for a good vacation. In her case, it’s spending at least part of the time nurturing the planet.

Twice in recent years, she has travelled to Churchill, Manitoba, a tiny outpost on Hudson Bay, Canada, to help scientists there measure the effects of climate change.

The work went on from 9am-5pm.

In February, Hoecker says, “I don’t like to sit on the beach drinking margaritas.”

Countless varieties of “voluntourism” trips have sprung up in recent years, combining travel with volunteer work. Baby boomers appear to be fuelling much of the interest, says Doug Cutchins, coauthor of Volunteer Vacations: Short-Term Adventures that Will Benefit You and Others. Boomers “have the time, the financial resources and the perspective to understand the moral reasons for using their skills to help others,” Cutchins says.

Volunteering provides a way to

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gain deeper insight into a culture or habitat, says Michele Gran, cofounder of Global Volunteers, a St Paul, Minnesota, US, non-profit that arranges such trips.

Volunteer vacations run the gamut from affordable jaunts to $30,000 (around `16 lakh) luxury trips overseas. To get you started, we’ve identified 10 opportunities.

Prices include food and accommodation, but not airfare.

Here’s your chance to do something unique in 2012—and make a difference in some small part of the world.

Pack your trunk While on vacation in July, Ken and Barbara Dowell unearthed the vertebrae and rib of a 26,000-yearold mammoth.

With about a dozen other volunteers, the retired couple from Yucaipa, California, joined palaeontologists excavating the Mammoth Site—a sinkhole 98x174ft in Hot Springs, South Dakota. The site is known in palaeontological circles as North America’s largest graveyard for Columbian mammoths.

“We made a real contribution,” says Ken, 68, whose two

weeks of volunteering was arranged by the Earthwatch Institute, a non-profit specializing in environmental research.

After a training session, the volunteers—who stayed at a local motel—dug daily from 8am-4.30pm in an area enclosed by an air-conditioned museum.

“You never have to worry about wind, rain or extreme temperatures,” says Ken. The Dowells spent evenings attending lectures on mammoths and palaeontology. Volunteers can also explore the Black Hills, home to Mount Rushmore, bison, elk and bighorn sheep.

Dates: 1-15 July; 15-29 July Fee: $3,095, including meals and motel, based on double occupancy; expect a turn on kitchen duty Information: www.earthwatch.org

Some light weeding The Piedras Blancas Light Station, on California’s rugged Big Sur coast, has been closed to the public for virtually its entire 136-year history. But in return for some hard work, you can stay in one of two

Outside the parks and preserves that cover more than 15% of Namibia, leopards, cheetahs and smaller cats can fall prey to ranchers seeking to protect their livestock.

On a private game farm an hour from the capital city of Windhoek, scientists and as many as a dozen volunteers with the international non-profit Biosphere Expeditions are testing an idea that may offer

Charity on a holiday: (clockwise) Research whales in the Cook Islands; live the Provencal life in France; take a break to excavate for fossils in Hot Springs in California; spot elephant seals on California’s Big Sur coast; and count leopards in Namibia.

some protection to both camps.

“The hypothesis is that if there is a good supply of low-value natural prey, such as warthog or duikers, the big cats aren’t really interested in livestock,” says Alan Hoffberg, 71, a Longwood, Florida, resident and Biosphere’s US spokesperson.

Using binoculars, GPS and camera traps, the volunteers—who are trained to identify the cats’ prints and scat— track the elusive animals, documenting their predatory habits in order to help plan ways to better protect cats and livestock.

Staff and volunteers temporarily trap and tranquilize the cats to attach collars that transmit radio or GPS signals.

Hoffberg—who has been to Namibia three times—says “most groups manage to trap at least one cat”. Scientists are scheduled to publish the first report in 2012.

A cook prepares meals in a compound consisting of safari tents, equipped with beds and hot showers.

Dates: 29 July-10 August; 12-24 August; 2-14 September; 16-18 September; 30 September-12 October; 21 October-2 November Fee: $2,590 Information: www.biosphere-expeditions.org

Moving to Costa Rica How two friends made a dream about early retirement come true by moving to Central America THINKSTOCK

Nature walk: walk: A garden in Costa Rica. Low hous­ ing prices and adequate healthcare make Costa Rica a good retirement destination.

B Y V ICKI B ERRONG The Wall Street Journal

Salut, village people In 1969, Henri and Simone Gignoux founded La Sabranenque, a non-profit dedicated to restoring the medieval buildings in St Victor La Coste, a village in the Provence region of southern France.

From May through October, the association hosts groups of as many as 16 volunteers in restored homes within the walled medieval village.

Volunteers typically restore buildings and walls in the mornings, using traditional construction techniques. Recently, crews built “dry” stone walls, made without mortar or concrete.

No skills are required. “Part of our goal is to make the techniques accessible,” says programme coordinator Sarah Grant.

In the afternoons, volunteers are free to explore sites, including Avignon, Arles, Nîmes, and the wineries and Roman ruins that dot the mountainous countryside.

Jeff Nelson, 60, of Minneapolis, says he even enjoyed his turn on kitchen duty. The chef, says the four-time La Sabranenque veteran, is full of tips on French cooking, and “the food is fantastic”.

Dates: May-October Fee: $710-900 (one week); $850 (two weeks) Information: www.sabranenque.com

Cook Island helpers With their white sand beaches and turquoise lagoons, the Cook Islands are among the most remote in the South Pacific.

Since 1998, Global Volunteers has offered one- to three-week programmes for up to 20 volunteers in Rarotonga, the most populous of the nation’s volcanic islands. There are a variety of jobs, including serving as a reading tutor to children, doing carpentry or repairs on schools and organizing activities at a senior centre. Administrative tasks include filing or computer programming for local non-profits.

One popular choice: working on trails and counting birds in the Takitumu Conservation Area, a sanctuary for the endangered kakerori bird. From July-October, there are jobs at the Cook Islands Whale Research and Education Centre, too.

In their time off, volunteers can snorkel, fish, hike or rest at their ocean-side hotel. “The pace of life is so slow in the Cook Islands,” says Gran.

Dates: Throughout the year Fee: $2,495 (one week); $2,695 (two weeks); $2,895 (three weeks); TURN TO PAGE L12®

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········································ he first thing I see each morning when I step out on the porch of my home in Costa Rica is the ever-changing Gulf of Nicoya.

As I write this (in September), it’s the rainy season, which means there are a hundred hues of green in the trees between my side of the mountain and the grey-blue glassy sea. On this particular morning, I can see two small fishing boats on the water between the local ferry port and several forested islands in the distance. It’s not yet 7am, and I can already tell that the temperature will reach the mid-80s by noon.

I’m 60 years old and retired from a 35-year career as a legal secretary. How I came to live on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica is a story about early retirement, tight budgets and lots of planning.

My best friend, Carol, and I began thinking seriously about retirement roughly 12 years ago. We knew we wanted to retire early, but we recognized that our small nest eggs (and the fact that Medicare doesn’t kick in until age 65) could make that difficult. Eventually, we concluded that living outside the US would allow us to stretch our dollars and retire on (our) schedule. Thus was born a 10-year plan: Five years to pay down as much debt as possible, and five years to find a home overseas.

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Perfect 10 We agreed on 10 criteria in our search for a retirement destination: warm weather; a country with a stable democracy; a 4-hour plane ride or less from the US; adequate and affordable healthcare; American-friendly; located near or by an ocean; clean and abundant freshwater; affordable housing; a cost of living at least 50% lower than in the US—and good coffee.

We pored over maps, read guidebooks, evaluated countries we had visited and subscribed to every publication we could find on the subject of international living. Our research kept pointing us in the direction of Costa Rica.

After a total of seven trips to this small country (about the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined, with a population of about 4.6 million), we found “home”: a two-storey house (with, as noted earlier, stunning water views) in the rural village of Playa Naranjo. Carol retired and moved here in early 2010, and I followed a year later.

Costa Rica makes it fairly easy for expats to settle here—save for one peculiarity. Non-residents (like me) qualify for a 90-day visa but have to leave the county for 36 hours at the end of the 90 days. Then, you turn around and obtain a new 90-day visa (an easy solution: holidaying in neighbouring Panama or Nicaragua, or even Colombia for a couple of days). Retirees may apply for residency with proof that they receive a monthly income of at least $1,000 (around `52,000) from a permanent pension source or retirement fund. I may apply when I turn 62 and start collecting Social Security.

At the moment, I don’t have a job here, although at some point (once my Spanish improves) I would like to work as a tour guide.

Besides doing normal household chores, my days are spent taking long walks, going to the beach (a 10-minute stroll), swimming in one of two local pools, napping, reading and corresponding with family and friends. We’re blessed with wonderful neighbours, a mix of native Costa Ricans (called Ticos) and expats from Canada, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Italy, Singapore and the US. Especially during the dry season (November through March), parties (“fiestas”) are plentiful.

Costly fuel Friday is market day. We drive to Jicaral, a thriving

farming community about 8 miles (around 12.8km) from our house, where local farmers set up colourful displays of fresh fruits and vegetables near the town square. With gasoline costing about $14 (around `730) a gallon (around 3.78 litres), we do our best to share rides with neighbours. And that pretty much sums up the cost of goods in Costa Rica: What is grown here is cheap; what is imported is not.

We spend about $50 a week on food (for two people). Native fare is rice and beans (about $2 for 2 pounds, or around 0.9kg), potatoes, yucca, onions, red peppers and carrots (about 25 cents each). For $1, you can buy three cantaloupes, or two avocados, or four mangoes, or three oranges (in season), a watermelon, or a whole pineapple and enough fish to feed two. Two pounds of ground beef (86% lean) or boneless chicken cost about $4. On occasion, I’ll splurge, paying about $6 for a bag of Cheetos or miniature chocolates.

Affordable housing Housing prices are off their highs of two or three years ago. You can buy a nice two-bedroom home on about an acre of land for between $100,000 and $300,000. My utility bill is $50-150 a month, depending on how much I use the air conditioning. My property tax last year was under $100.

Healthcare, meanwhile, has turned out to be exactly what we were looking for: affordable and more than adequate. There are two health insurance systems: a public sector plan (similar to health maintenance organizations in the US) and a more comprehensive private plan (about $1,500 annually). Both cover doctor visits, prescription drugs and hospital care.

No, the country isn’t perfect. Cultural differences are sometimes frustrating and always humbling. Ticos are some of the most friendly and non-confrontational people in the world. Sometimes, that’s a problem for goal-oriented gringos.

For example, you ask when the big bags of dog food are arriving at the feed store—and the proprietor, with a smile, will answer, “Martes”. Translation: “Señora, I don’t know when the truck is coming in, but you Americans always want to know a date or time, so I’m saying Tuesday.”

In short, patience is not a virtue here; it’s a necessity. There may be five customers in front of you at the bank to see an account representative.

Bring a book. Most likely you will overhear the bank rep inquire about the well-being of all 22 of his customer’s relatives. Of course, when it’s your turn, your transactions will not be rushed, and you will be asked about your family as well.

Parting pains Looking back on our planning and experiences, I’ve learned that dismantling your life and moving to another country is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it’s one of the hardest things I’ve done. You will not have room for everything you want to take with you; you will not have time to say goodbye to everyone; and you can’t complete all the tasks you think you have to accomplish (of course, I miss my friends and my two grown children, Shane and Michele.

That said, we Skype, email frequently and keep up on Facebook. I see them on my periodic trips to the States, and they plan to visit Costa Rica).

Am I committed to Costa Rica long term? It’s too early to say (there’s always a chance we could move back to the States when we qualify for Medicare).

That said, my new adventure, to this point, has lived up to—and exceeded—my expectations. As I sit on my porch watching the several shades of pink and red float across the sky as the sun sets across the gulf, I feel like I’m at home.

There’s a phrase locals use, a greeting and an expression, that sums up the feeling nicely.

“Pura vida,” they say. Life is good.

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TRAVEL

THE NEW RETIREMENT

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unoccupied ocean-front duplexes built by the Coast Guard.

The Sierra Club sponsors an annual eight-day trip to the lighthouse, whose grounds are a breeding spot for the once-endangered elephant seal. From your bedroom, “you can hear them snoring”, says Dave Garcia, a former state ranger and the trip’s leader.

As many as 10 volunteers work from 9am-3pm uprooting vegetation known as the “ice plant”—a species native to South Africa that various agencies planted in the area, in part to prevent erosion.

Now, though, it’s crowding out native plants. The volunteers, who work on the grounds of the lighthouse and the nearby Fiscalini Ranch Preserve, replace the ice plant with native grasses, wild flowers and perennials. They also work on nature trails and paint and restore buildings.

On two free days, the group explores the light station and the coast, home to the sea lion, California condor and humpback whales. Other attractions include Cone Peak and its albino redwood trees, Hearst Castle and wine tasting. A cook prepares meals, but guests should expect to help in the kitchen.

Dates: 6-13 October Fee: $595, plus a $15 Sierra Club membership Information: www.sierraclub.org

Philanthropic trips around the world, a smart sabbatical or a new home by Costa Rica’s Gulf of Nicoya

ATLANTIDE PHOTOTRAVEL/CORBIS

A different kind of bay watch

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Save the world, one vacation at a time With the best in volunteer travel in 2012, you can help protect Namibian leopards and restore buildings in southern France

On her travels to Manitoba, organized by Earthwatch, Nancy Hoecker worked side by side with scientists studying the effects of climate change on the Arctic’s fragile ecosystem.

The goal: to contribute to research that “has found substantial evidence” of warming in the permafrost—a frozen layer of tundra that’s expected to release “vast carbon stores” as it thaws, according to an Earthwatch report.

In the summer, up to a dozen volunteers gather water and tree samples and spend their free time whale-watching on Hudson Bay, river kayaking, and touring the Eskimo Museum or historic Prince of Wales Fort. In winter, participants—who stay in dorm-style rooms and eat in a cafeteria—help measure the depth and temperature of the snow. Activities in February include dog sledding, igloo building and viewing the Northern Lights. Expect to see wildlife, including caribou, moose, and polar and grizzly bears.

Dates: June, August, September and February Fee: $2,995-3,495 Information: www.earthwatch.org

Now playing in Namibia: Cats

B Y A NNE T ERGESEN ···························· ike most people, Nancy Hoecker, a 62-year-old pharmacist from Coos Bay, Oregon, US, has strong feelings about what makes for a good vacation. In her case, it’s spending at least part of the time nurturing the planet.

Twice in recent years, she has travelled to Churchill, Manitoba, a tiny outpost on Hudson Bay, Canada, to help scientists there measure the effects of climate change.

The work went on from 9am-5pm.

In February, Hoecker says, “I don’t like to sit on the beach drinking margaritas.”

Countless varieties of “voluntourism” trips have sprung up in recent years, combining travel with volunteer work. Baby boomers appear to be fuelling much of the interest, says Doug Cutchins, coauthor of Volunteer Vacations: Short-Term Adventures that Will Benefit You and Others. Boomers “have the time, the financial resources and the perspective to understand the moral reasons for using their skills to help others,” Cutchins says.

Volunteering provides a way to

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gain deeper insight into a culture or habitat, says Michele Gran, cofounder of Global Volunteers, a St Paul, Minnesota, US, non-profit that arranges such trips.

Volunteer vacations run the gamut from affordable jaunts to $30,000 (around `16 lakh) luxury trips overseas. To get you started, we’ve identified 10 opportunities.

Prices include food and accommodation, but not airfare.

Here’s your chance to do something unique in 2012—and make a difference in some small part of the world.

Pack your trunk While on vacation in July, Ken and Barbara Dowell unearthed the vertebrae and rib of a 26,000-yearold mammoth.

With about a dozen other volunteers, the retired couple from Yucaipa, California, joined palaeontologists excavating the Mammoth Site—a sinkhole 98x174ft in Hot Springs, South Dakota. The site is known in palaeontological circles as North America’s largest graveyard for Columbian mammoths.

“We made a real contribution,” says Ken, 68, whose two

weeks of volunteering was arranged by the Earthwatch Institute, a non-profit specializing in environmental research.

After a training session, the volunteers—who stayed at a local motel—dug daily from 8am-4.30pm in an area enclosed by an air-conditioned museum.

“You never have to worry about wind, rain or extreme temperatures,” says Ken. The Dowells spent evenings attending lectures on mammoths and palaeontology. Volunteers can also explore the Black Hills, home to Mount Rushmore, bison, elk and bighorn sheep.

Dates: 1-15 July; 15-29 July Fee: $3,095, including meals and motel, based on double occupancy; expect a turn on kitchen duty Information: www.earthwatch.org

Some light weeding The Piedras Blancas Light Station, on California’s rugged Big Sur coast, has been closed to the public for virtually its entire 136-year history. But in return for some hard work, you can stay in one of two

Outside the parks and preserves that cover more than 15% of Namibia, leopards, cheetahs and smaller cats can fall prey to ranchers seeking to protect their livestock.

On a private game farm an hour from the capital city of Windhoek, scientists and as many as a dozen volunteers with the international non-profit Biosphere Expeditions are testing an idea that may offer

Charity on a holiday: (clockwise) Research whales in the Cook Islands; live the Provencal life in France; take a break to excavate for fossils in Hot Springs in California; spot elephant seals on California’s Big Sur coast; and count leopards in Namibia.

some protection to both camps.

“The hypothesis is that if there is a good supply of low-value natural prey, such as warthog or duikers, the big cats aren’t really interested in livestock,” says Alan Hoffberg, 71, a Longwood, Florida, resident and Biosphere’s US spokesperson.

Using binoculars, GPS and camera traps, the volunteers—who are trained to identify the cats’ prints and scat— track the elusive animals, documenting their predatory habits in order to help plan ways to better protect cats and livestock.

Staff and volunteers temporarily trap and tranquilize the cats to attach collars that transmit radio or GPS signals.

Hoffberg—who has been to Namibia three times—says “most groups manage to trap at least one cat”. Scientists are scheduled to publish the first report in 2012.

A cook prepares meals in a compound consisting of safari tents, equipped with beds and hot showers.

Dates: 29 July-10 August; 12-24 August; 2-14 September; 16-18 September; 30 September-12 October; 21 October-2 November Fee: $2,590 Information: www.biosphere-expeditions.org

Moving to Costa Rica How two friends made a dream about early retirement come true by moving to Central America THINKSTOCK

Nature walk: walk: A garden in Costa Rica. Low hous­ ing prices and adequate healthcare make Costa Rica a good retirement destination.

B Y V ICKI B ERRONG The Wall Street Journal

Salut, village people In 1969, Henri and Simone Gignoux founded La Sabranenque, a non-profit dedicated to restoring the medieval buildings in St Victor La Coste, a village in the Provence region of southern France.

From May through October, the association hosts groups of as many as 16 volunteers in restored homes within the walled medieval village.

Volunteers typically restore buildings and walls in the mornings, using traditional construction techniques. Recently, crews built “dry” stone walls, made without mortar or concrete.

No skills are required. “Part of our goal is to make the techniques accessible,” says programme coordinator Sarah Grant.

In the afternoons, volunteers are free to explore sites, including Avignon, Arles, Nîmes, and the wineries and Roman ruins that dot the mountainous countryside.

Jeff Nelson, 60, of Minneapolis, says he even enjoyed his turn on kitchen duty. The chef, says the four-time La Sabranenque veteran, is full of tips on French cooking, and “the food is fantastic”.

Dates: May-October Fee: $710-900 (one week); $850 (two weeks) Information: www.sabranenque.com

Cook Island helpers With their white sand beaches and turquoise lagoons, the Cook Islands are among the most remote in the South Pacific.

Since 1998, Global Volunteers has offered one- to three-week programmes for up to 20 volunteers in Rarotonga, the most populous of the nation’s volcanic islands. There are a variety of jobs, including serving as a reading tutor to children, doing carpentry or repairs on schools and organizing activities at a senior centre. Administrative tasks include filing or computer programming for local non-profits.

One popular choice: working on trails and counting birds in the Takitumu Conservation Area, a sanctuary for the endangered kakerori bird. From July-October, there are jobs at the Cook Islands Whale Research and Education Centre, too.

In their time off, volunteers can snorkel, fish, hike or rest at their ocean-side hotel. “The pace of life is so slow in the Cook Islands,” says Gran.

Dates: Throughout the year Fee: $2,495 (one week); $2,695 (two weeks); $2,895 (three weeks); TURN TO PAGE L12®

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········································ he first thing I see each morning when I step out on the porch of my home in Costa Rica is the ever-changing Gulf of Nicoya.

As I write this (in September), it’s the rainy season, which means there are a hundred hues of green in the trees between my side of the mountain and the grey-blue glassy sea. On this particular morning, I can see two small fishing boats on the water between the local ferry port and several forested islands in the distance. It’s not yet 7am, and I can already tell that the temperature will reach the mid-80s by noon.

I’m 60 years old and retired from a 35-year career as a legal secretary. How I came to live on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica is a story about early retirement, tight budgets and lots of planning.

My best friend, Carol, and I began thinking seriously about retirement roughly 12 years ago. We knew we wanted to retire early, but we recognized that our small nest eggs (and the fact that Medicare doesn’t kick in until age 65) could make that difficult. Eventually, we concluded that living outside the US would allow us to stretch our dollars and retire on (our) schedule. Thus was born a 10-year plan: Five years to pay down as much debt as possible, and five years to find a home overseas.

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Perfect 10 We agreed on 10 criteria in our search for a retirement destination: warm weather; a country with a stable democracy; a 4-hour plane ride or less from the US; adequate and affordable healthcare; American-friendly; located near or by an ocean; clean and abundant freshwater; affordable housing; a cost of living at least 50% lower than in the US—and good coffee.

We pored over maps, read guidebooks, evaluated countries we had visited and subscribed to every publication we could find on the subject of international living. Our research kept pointing us in the direction of Costa Rica.

After a total of seven trips to this small country (about the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined, with a population of about 4.6 million), we found “home”: a two-storey house (with, as noted earlier, stunning water views) in the rural village of Playa Naranjo. Carol retired and moved here in early 2010, and I followed a year later.

Costa Rica makes it fairly easy for expats to settle here—save for one peculiarity. Non-residents (like me) qualify for a 90-day visa but have to leave the county for 36 hours at the end of the 90 days. Then, you turn around and obtain a new 90-day visa (an easy solution: holidaying in neighbouring Panama or Nicaragua, or even Colombia for a couple of days). Retirees may apply for residency with proof that they receive a monthly income of at least $1,000 (around `52,000) from a permanent pension source or retirement fund. I may apply when I turn 62 and start collecting Social Security.

At the moment, I don’t have a job here, although at some point (once my Spanish improves) I would like to work as a tour guide.

Besides doing normal household chores, my days are spent taking long walks, going to the beach (a 10-minute stroll), swimming in one of two local pools, napping, reading and corresponding with family and friends. We’re blessed with wonderful neighbours, a mix of native Costa Ricans (called Ticos) and expats from Canada, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain, Italy, Singapore and the US. Especially during the dry season (November through March), parties (“fiestas”) are plentiful.

Costly fuel Friday is market day. We drive to Jicaral, a thriving

farming community about 8 miles (around 12.8km) from our house, where local farmers set up colourful displays of fresh fruits and vegetables near the town square. With gasoline costing about $14 (around `730) a gallon (around 3.78 litres), we do our best to share rides with neighbours. And that pretty much sums up the cost of goods in Costa Rica: What is grown here is cheap; what is imported is not.

We spend about $50 a week on food (for two people). Native fare is rice and beans (about $2 for 2 pounds, or around 0.9kg), potatoes, yucca, onions, red peppers and carrots (about 25 cents each). For $1, you can buy three cantaloupes, or two avocados, or four mangoes, or three oranges (in season), a watermelon, or a whole pineapple and enough fish to feed two. Two pounds of ground beef (86% lean) or boneless chicken cost about $4. On occasion, I’ll splurge, paying about $6 for a bag of Cheetos or miniature chocolates.

Affordable housing Housing prices are off their highs of two or three years ago. You can buy a nice two-bedroom home on about an acre of land for between $100,000 and $300,000. My utility bill is $50-150 a month, depending on how much I use the air conditioning. My property tax last year was under $100.

Healthcare, meanwhile, has turned out to be exactly what we were looking for: affordable and more than adequate. There are two health insurance systems: a public sector plan (similar to health maintenance organizations in the US) and a more comprehensive private plan (about $1,500 annually). Both cover doctor visits, prescription drugs and hospital care.

No, the country isn’t perfect. Cultural differences are sometimes frustrating and always humbling. Ticos are some of the most friendly and non-confrontational people in the world. Sometimes, that’s a problem for goal-oriented gringos.

For example, you ask when the big bags of dog food are arriving at the feed store—and the proprietor, with a smile, will answer, “Martes”. Translation: “Señora, I don’t know when the truck is coming in, but you Americans always want to know a date or time, so I’m saying Tuesday.”

In short, patience is not a virtue here; it’s a necessity. There may be five customers in front of you at the bank to see an account representative.

Bring a book. Most likely you will overhear the bank rep inquire about the well-being of all 22 of his customer’s relatives. Of course, when it’s your turn, your transactions will not be rushed, and you will be asked about your family as well.

Parting pains Looking back on our planning and experiences, I’ve learned that dismantling your life and moving to another country is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it’s one of the hardest things I’ve done. You will not have room for everything you want to take with you; you will not have time to say goodbye to everyone; and you can’t complete all the tasks you think you have to accomplish (of course, I miss my friends and my two grown children, Shane and Michele.

That said, we Skype, email frequently and keep up on Facebook. I see them on my periodic trips to the States, and they plan to visit Costa Rica).

Am I committed to Costa Rica long term? It’s too early to say (there’s always a chance we could move back to the States when we qualify for Medicare).

That said, my new adventure, to this point, has lived up to—and exceeded—my expectations. As I sit on my porch watching the several shades of pink and red float across the sky as the sun sets across the gulf, I feel like I’m at home.

There’s a phrase locals use, a greeting and an expression, that sums up the feeling nicely.

“Pura vida,” they say. Life is good.

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prices include the hotel, based on double occupancy, and meals; many meals are prepared by a cook or restaurant Information: www.globalvolunteers.org

In the historic forest service Over the past 17 years, Stephen Waylett, 65, has participated in more than 90 projects with the US Forest Service’s Passport In Time programme, dedicated to preserving historic artefacts on public lands.

“It is a wonderful way to see a bygone America,” says the Moscow, Idaho, resident.

Waylett recently travelled to rural Mississippi to excavate the ruins of an Indian site that’s about 9,000 years old. After a training session, the volunteers unearthed artefacts that included tools and spear points, he says.

The retired naval officer has also helped clear vegetation from a bridge that was once part of the Yellowstone Trail, a road developed before World War I. And in August, he excavated a site in Idaho where a B-17 bomber crashed in 1943. The plane “was like a time capsule”, says Waylett, whose team collected and photographed artefacts, including navigation tools, signal lights and oxygen bottles. He has also helped restore a historic cabin in Montana and helped prepare an oral history of former forest service employees.

Each project, Waylett says, pro-

vides “a snapshot of everyday life in a specific era”. Because many take place in the woods, it is also “incredibly peaceful”.

An average of 8-10 volunteers camp or stay at a local hotel at their own expense. The accommodation and number of volunteers vary by project.

Dates: Throughout the year Fee: No programme fee, but with a few exceptions, volunteers are responsible for their own food and camping equipment Information: www.passportintime.com

See Hawaii from the Missouri While on vacation last year, Joseph Gould, 59, of Saugus, Massachusetts, painted turrets on the USS Missouri, the battleship on which Japan formally surrendered during World War II. During the past decade, Road Scholar, formerly known as Elderhostel, has sponsored as many as four trips a year for up to 30 volunteers willing to join the crew of the decommissioned battleship, now a museum in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Gould’s group, composed of General Electric Co. employees who volunteer together, also polished brass, rewired lights, patched teak decks and painted signs.

Volunteers have set up exhibits, such as one in the ship’s dentist’s office, and organized maps and other documents in its archives, says group leader Rose Marie Meece, 78.

The programme offers opportu-

KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

Retrace history: Join the US Forest Service’s Passport in Time programme; or (right) help restore the USS Missouri, on which Japan formally surrendered at the end of World War II. nities normally off-limits to the public, including an overnight stay in the crew’s quarters and access to the engine room and captain’s quarters. Volunteers, whose hotel and meals are included, attend lectures and can visit sites including Waikiki Beach, the Waikiki Aquarium and the USS Arizona Memorial.

Dates: 29 January-5 February; 4-11 December; the latter trip includes the ceremony marking Pearl Harbor Day, 7 December Fee: $1,398 Information: www.roadscholar.org

Attacking poverty in Peru Some parts of Villa El Salvador, a 380,000-person shanty town on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, lack running water, and most lack paved roads.

Volunteers with non-profit Cross-Cultural Solutions spend their mornings at tasks like teaching English, serving food and organizing games and art projects for orphans or seniors. Some assist professionals at medical centres or facilities for the disabled.

In the afternoons, volunteers—whose numbers can range from one to 35—explore Lima or attend programme-sponsored Spanish classes and lectures about

Peru. Many travel on weekends or extend their stays to visit the Amazon, Machu Picchu or Lake Titicaca. Volunteers stay in a house owned by the non-profit and eat meals prepared by a cook. On some trips, those who are 50 and older can request a private room for an extra $75 per week.

Dates: Throughout the year Fee: Between $2,988 (for two weeks) and $7,262 (12 weeks) Information: www.crossculturalsolutions.org

Life on a Madagascar reef Blue Ventures, a British non-profit, sponsors eight trips a year to a remote fishing village on Madagascar’s south-west coast. The goal: to monitor and protect the marine life that inhabits the mas-

sive Grand Récif de Tuléar reef.

Sessions last 3-30 weeks. Most of the up to 20 volunteers spend the first several days in intensive scuba-diving classes and lectures on coral reefs and the local environment. Scientists also teach them how to identify species of fish.

The volunteers then dive once or twice a day to survey and chart the reef in order to assess—and head off—potential threats to its sea anemones, corals and fish. By preserving the reef, the project also aims to protect the fishing industry that has dominated the local economy for generations, says Richard Nimmo, Blue Ventures’ Londonbased managing director.

Non-divers teach English, work in clinics, conduct surveys of

tech support, driving someone’s car across the country—there are multiple ways to pay for it.

Cathy Allen, one of our co-authors, wanted to travel in Asia. So she wrote to the US government. She was an assistant professor at American University’s Kogod Business School and taught international marketing and her husband was in the Senate Commerce Committee. She and her husband became lecturers for the US government, travelling through Asia.

Yes, you. And these authors explain why your employer might actually like the idea The Wall Street Journal

·································· hen people hear the word “sabbatical”, they invariably think, “Sounds great—but there’s no way I can do that.”

Rita Foley and Jaye Smith beg to differ.

The two women (with two other friends) are co-founders of Reboot Partners Llc in Sag Harbor, New York, US. The consulting business holds retreats that help people figure out how to take effective sabbaticals. Earlier this year, the four women, who collectively have taken a dozen sabbaticals, published a book about their experiences and thinking: Reboot Your Life: Energize Your Career and Life by Taking a Break.

We sat down recently in New York with Foley, a corporate director and retired senior vice-president and division president of MeadWestvaco Corp., and Smith, co-founder of Partners in Human Resources International, a Manhattan consulting firm, and president of Breakwater Consulting. Edited excerpts from the conversation:

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Prepping the boss How do people go about asking for a sabbatical at a time when jobs are scarce?

Smith: They have to go in prepared with who is going to replace them, how their work is going to be covered during this period of time. Really lay it out as a plan.

How long they’d like to take the time off, and what might be some of the benefits back to the company.

It’s a benefit for the person stepping up into the (replacement) role. It gives that person exposure, or visibility, in a way they might not have had before. And it stretches them. It also gives the organization an opportunity to try some new things while that person (on sabbatical) has stepped away.

We’re seeing that allowing sabbaticals impacts retention numbers for companies, loyalty, and creativity and innovation. People come back better able to contribute.

Foley: For the company, the teamwork involved is enormous. Believe it or not, colleagues are not resentful. They’re happy for their colleague, most of the time. They do step in, and you get to know someone else’s job. You empathize with what they need to do. It makes the organization much more resilient.

Why do employers agree to sabbaticals?

Smith: Of Fortune’s best 100 companies to work for in America, 21 of them have paid-for, formal sabbatical programmes.

It’s a competitive advantage with regard to recruiting talent.

Two of the trends that corporations are focusing on right now are customer experience and innovation. You have to be creative about how you enable your team to be more innovative. And if you’re burned out, you’re going to take it out on your customers.

Sabbaticals also increase loyalty.

We’re always quoting Intel as having given thousands and thousands of sabbaticals over time. They have a

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HOLLIS RAFKIN­SAX

A sabbatical? Me? B Y K ELLY G REENE

endangered marine turtles and gather data on fish catches from more remote villages.

In 2005, Madagascar’s fisheries department cited Blue Ventures’ research when it decided to ban octopus fishing for four weeks a year to prevent overfishing, says Nimmo.

Leisure pursuits include snorkelling, birdwatching, hiking, camping, fishing, sailing and relaxing in a beachfront cabin. A cook prepares meals.

Dates: Throughout the year Fee: $2,400-5,800, depending on factors including length of stay and exchange rates Information: www.blueventures.org

What to do?

Rebooted: (from left) Jaye Smith, Cathy Allen, Nancy Bearg and Rita Foley. two-month sabbatical, plus you can add a one-month vacation.

Back into it How do you plan for a sabbatical, and how much does it cost?

Smith: The first step is to have a vision and a goal. Be clear about why you want to take a break and what you want to achieve while you’re doing it. Then take it step by step. If you want to take it in January, what do I need to do in December, November? Back into it.

It may require renting your house out or doing a swap in a place you want to go to, which then would mean you have to prepare your house and sign up with an agency. There are lots of little steps towards making plans, whatever they are: registering for a class, or travel arrangements, or researching volunteer organizations around the world. Doing your

research and putting a plan in place to prepare yourself.

We talk about starting to cut your expenses as a way to prepare and start saving money for your sabbatical fund.

If you get a bonus, sock that away. You could take a second job. Or you could earn money on your sabbatical doing something totally different. You could live in Japan and teach English. Some people have done little consulting assignments along the way to take a year or two off.

Foley: A couple we know were riding their bikes across the US and needed someone to drive their van. This woman they found was phenomenal. They paid for her hotel rooms and she got a $500 (around `26,000) stipend for six weeks.

She got to sightsee and ride her bike, and it was all paid for. Being a lecturer in a foreign country or on a boat, being

Do you see many pre-retirees taking sabbaticals? How are they using them?

Smith: They are using them to explore, to test concepts, to live in a place they’re thinking about retiring to, taking classes in some area that might lead to an encore career, learning technology, learning a new language. They are also doing it to start to extricate themselves from their careers. Most people have worked 30 years, and the transition to what’s next takes a while.

Foley: Baby boomers in particular were brought up that we did nothing but work.

So many people said there was a rude awakening at first. Not having 24 hours scheduled, not having constant emails, not having the constant calls actually was a little uncomfortable. A couple of people talked about “detoxing” the first week.

They slept a lot. Here they were, they’d been planning for this, they were dreaming of this, and they were surprised they couldn’t get out of bed the first week.

Almost everybody got back to some form of better eating and exercise, and they keep that up. And they say, “I didn’t realize what stress I was under. Now I can go back for my next five years with some balance as I continue to plan and try things out for when I do retire.”

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Books

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ANOOP NEGI

State of the arts: Goan literature reflects a culture keeping pace with change.

PUBLISHING

Stories of the village Goa’s recent arts and literary festival offers a glimpse of how change is managed and reflected in a region’s literature B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· usk had fallen by the time the inaugural ceremonies of the Goa Arts and Literary Festival began on the lawns of the International Centre Goa in Dona Paula, Panaji, when the acclaimed Konkani writer Damodar Mauzo stood to deliver his remarks on behalf of the Goa Writers Group. “To my respected audience, welcome,” Mauzo began in formal Konkani.

In the back row, there was a brief buzz. “Is that Marathi?” someone whispered.

In a state with a painful and well-recollected history of linguistic and political conflict, it was a remarkable mistake. But Mauzo, was all optimism in his remarks.

“I’m happy that writers of such stature choose to live and work here,” he said. “I’m happy with the way Goan literature is going.”

For Goan writers, in Konkani as well as English, locals as well as diasporic Goans, the festival, which took place over the 50th anniversary commemorations of

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Goa’s liberation from colonial rule, was a place to meet and converse among themselves and with visitors. Goa is far from the centres of global publishing buzz, but its literary imagination is alive and well, and not just because writers of international fame holiday here.

Festival curator and writer Vivek Menezes wanted Goans to think about that when he put together this year’s festival, the second edition of an event begun last year.

“This year’s historical context—19 December 1961—was paramount in our thinking about this festival,” he says.

Goa’s liberation on that date would eventually lead to Konkani becoming India’s youngest national language, as ratified by the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. Repressed ruthlessly through the length of Portugal’s staggering 450-year-long rule, it faced a fresh set of challenges after 1961. “First, Goans were told we were merely temporarily disoriented Maharashtrians—it took a vast agitation and a historic opinion poll to disabuse the rest of the

country of that notion,” Menezes wrote in a recent essay on Goa’s jubilee in The Caravan magazine.

“Then, we were informed that Konkani (provably older than Marathi) was just a creolized dialect, and again it took vast agitation, even violence, for Delhi to recognize its legitimacy and rightfully enshrine our mother tongue as Goa’s official language.”

Goa’s mother tongue is a central talking point for the “reading, writing, thinking Goa”, which the International Centre’s director Nandini Sahai said was the focus of the festival.

Yet, perhaps uniquely in a situation like this, Konkani writers, from the venerable Mauzo—a warrior for his language—to young diasporic poets from Karnataka, spoke to their audiences largely in English, a language with fewer historical burdens for Goans than other Indians.

In the rest of India, there may be a tendency to think of Goa as a retreat for writers, but it is also the place from which writing comes— and a lot of it. Publisher Frederick Noronha estimates that every year 200-300 books each are produced in Konkani, English and Marathi.

“It isn’t like the big publishing hubs in India, which produce a few major best-sellers every year to cover for the business,” he explains. “These are often small productions, with print runs of about 500, and problems with distribution and publicity. But that is a big number for Goa.” Noronha sees a clear divide in the kind of work produced in each language. “Konkani and Marathi are the languages in which creative writing is produced, among other reasons because the government supports the arts in these languages financially.”

Hypothetically, “It’s not hard for you to get a grant of about `25,000-30,000, which should cover about a third of your printing costs. English publishing is more market-dependent, so you tend to see more non-fiction there.”

It is not a market that produces excesses of money or fame, Noronha says. But “you know how Goans are about their villages,” he laughs. “This pride in small things means that you write a book about one village and everyone there will read it.” A case

GOING TO

GOA

in point this year was Themistocles D’Silva’s Beyond the Beach: The Village of Arossim, Goa, in Historical Perspective, put out by Noronha’s publishing house Goa, 1556. “Arossim is so small, you could start walking through it and within 5 minutes have crossed out,” Noronha says.

A look at the Goa, 1556 titles is a glimpse into the variety in Goa’s English-language publishing: From works of history like D’Silva’s, to Bernardo Elvino De Sousa’s The Last Prabhu: A Hunt for Roots—DNA, Ancient Documents and Migration in Goa, to Kornelia Santoro’s spleet-new cookbook, Goa’s second or third language is holding its own.

In Konkani, the great fiction writers still hold sway. Consider its news-makers: In the month before the festival, the Vimala V. Pai Vishwa Konkani Sahitya Puraskar prize, with an award amount of `1 lakh, went to the 67-year-old Mauzo for his novel Tsunami Simon. In the week of the festival, another Konkani stalwart, Pundalik Naik, made news by returning a lifetime achievement award from the Goa Konkani Akademi. Naik, said to have written the first major postcolonial Konkani novel, Acchev (The Upheaval, 1977), was protesting the state government’s

decision to grant English-language schools funding equal to Konkani schools.

Both Naik and Mauzo are Sahitya Akademi awardees, but the length of their careers can obscure the relative newness of their style of fiction in Konkani.

After a difficult history under the Portuguese, as poet Manohar Shetty writes in the introduction to Ferry Crossing: Short Stories from Goa, “the politics of language further divided and sidetracked many Konkani and Marathi writers of the region…the literatures can be said to have progressed only during the past decades.”

“This has happened over the last few years,” Noronha says.

“It’s partly economic, and partly because there’s a pent-up need for it to happen.” Technology has helped too: Now the small printing press in Bandra, Mumbai, or local assistance with desktop publishing, is not as far out of reach as it might have been even a decade ago.

The name of Noronha’s imprint, Goa, 1556, commemorates the date the first printing press in Asia arrived, via the Portuguese, in Goa. In that long and difficult history lie the roots of Goa’s relationship with writing, its resilience and hybridity. If, as Menezes says, Goa is a symbol of change in a changing India, Konkani, a language that is written in at least four different scripts (Devanagari, Roman, Kannada and Malayalam), lends itself to some reflection on how that change can be managed, and how it is still being negotiated.

Back at the opening session, Mauzo’s own optimism was carried forth—in English—by one of Goa’s more famous migrants, Amitav Ghosh. “Every so often friends will send me news reports about violence and drug running on the beaches, or about prostitution and the Russian mafia and so on. These reports are not of course without foundation. I know that there is crime and violence on the beaches of Goa,” he said, and added, “...I go to the beach (and) see young urban Indians who look as though they’ve been freed of their fetters for the first time. I see vendors from Karnataka and Maharashtra.

I come across workers and waiters from Bengal, Jharkhand, Orissa, and the North-East… I listen to coconut sellers from Siolim bargaining in the language of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev.

“All of this is new. I am not afraid of it. If there is one thing I would like to say to you, it is (to) let this be a day to celebrate the newness of Goa.”

REAMDE | NEAL STEPHENSON

The thrill pill A nerd hero science­fiction writer takes up a different genre

B Y A ADISHT K HANNA ···························· ince 1992, Neal Stephenson has been writing sprawling science-fiction novels. One got the idea that detail was a weakness of his. His books have included asides on the correct way to eat Captain Crunch breakfast cereal, the economics and technology of pizza delivery, and horticultural re-enactments of famous battles. These asides were lovingly detailed and fastpaced, but this style of writing made the typical Stephenson novel four-fifths detailed build-up and one-fifth furiously paced climax.

For many readers, the sudden switch in pace was disconcerting.

These readers will have no such problem with Reamde. As if to respond to his critics, Stephenson has written a book which is uniformly fast-paced and has

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almost no asides (of the ones that were left in, my favourite is one on using video games for airport security). It also has no sciencefictional or supernatural elements. Stephenson claimed in publicity interviews that he was fond of thrillers, and so wrote a book that was an out-and-out thriller. This is the most accessible Stephenson book ever, and it is an excellent thriller.

Unfortunately, it’s also a letdown for Stephenson’s existing fans. While Reamde contains many plot elements that were used in earlier Stephenson novels—the creation and management of currencies or money, being stuck on a boat on the high seas, a fascination with both Tolkienian races and real life ones—it misses something important, which his sciencefiction work has usually contained: an exploration of big and audacious ideas.

And while Reamde does touch upon such ideas, it doesn’t go anywhere with them. The really good ideas are to do with a multi-

player Internet game called T’Rain, and the practice of gold farming (or playing games as a business), by playing all the boring parts to collect in-game money, virtual weapons, or other artefacts, and then selling these for real money to other players.

In the book, T’Rain has been designed to make gold farming easier, on the grounds that this will pull in a customer base of Chinese gold farmers and that T’Rain can make its money on the commissions. Handled with more depth, this could have led to a fascinating fictionalization of the processes of money laundering. Unfortunately, the whole premise of money laundering and cybercrime is used only to kickstart the book’s main plot, which involves chasing down a black Welsh jihadist and his hostage.

Simultaneously, the game’s players are in revolt. They have decided that the game writers’ arbitrary—and actually meaningless—classification of their characters as Good or Evil is

Reamde: William Morrow, 1,056 pages, $35 (around `1,820). senseless, and are realigning themselves into different blocs, based on the colour of their in-game costumes.

It’s exasperating that this particular subplot was made subservient to the main plot line, because so much could have been done with it. It could be tongue-in-cheek commentary on the tendency of people to group themselves into opposing camps

on the flimsiest of pretexts (Team Jacob and Team Edward today, Mods and Rockers in the 1950s). It also offers a chance to explore the philosophical question of how good and evil should be defined at all, a question quite relevant, considering Reamde’s “good guys” end up killing the “bad guys” without expressing remorse, or even thinking about the magnitude of what they have done. Reamde’s “real life” violence is as amoral as the violence going on in T’Rain, where, when a character is killed, it is only sent to “Limbo”.

It’s true that thrillers usually dispense with the ethics of violence, but Stephenson’s earlier books used to engage with it in eager, comprehensive detail.

That, perhaps, explains my disappointment with this book.

Excellent thriller though it is, Stephenson is capable of so much better. To this devoted fan, Reamde was a waste of his considerable talent.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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Q&A | TEJU COLE

The voice of the mind TEJU COLE

TEJU COLE

The celebrated Nigerian­American novelist on art, race, and the politics of his acclaimed novel ‘Open City’ B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· eju Cole’s Open City has been widely praised as one of 2011’s best novels, and deservedly so. It is a reflection on the experimental modernism of the early 20th century as well as a sharply political and contemporary novel. Cole’s erudition and intellectual curiosity are characteristic of all his writing, whether in the long-form Open City or the short, absurd “Small Fates” snippets from Nigerian life he posts regularly to his Twitter account (@tejucole).

Cole was born in Lagos and is a resident of Brooklyn, New York, where he teaches at Bard College and works as an art historian and photographer. He was at the Goa Arts and Literary Festival last week to talk about several of his wide-ranging and closely followed interests in art, urbanism, music and literature.

Edited excerpts from his conversation with Lounge:

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When did you start to think about writing and literature?

I haven’t always been a writer of fiction. I think sometime in my mid-20s, I realized that my desire to put experience into words was best matched by a specific approach, which was trying to find the most layered and complicated thoughts and put them in the clearest language I could manage. Earlier on, my concept had been to be pyrotechnic, like Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie: to “make it new” by making it noisy and furious. Clearly there are people who can do that well. In my mid-20s I realized that I needed to go back to (George) Orwell, (Ernest) Hemingway, (V.S.) Naipaul; to Virginia Woolf, who’s a wonderful writer of the English sentence. A little bit of Henry James, not in the length of the sentence but in the effort that they make to be complex; by being complicated without being needlessly loud. Once that discovery was made, I started to write. I did quite a bit of writing online, blogs, essays, writing to friends, writing for friends. I started to write better and better sentences.

Tell us about your first book.

About six years ago, I went to Nigeria and when I came back, I wrote a fictionalized memoir of my experiences of going back after a long time, which was published as Every Day Is for

the Thief. And so it started. It was never, “I have to be a writer.” Never that. I had a stark and pragmatic attitude to literary success.

We’re talking about success after publishing.

That’s right, not about success on the page. I suspected that would be within my reach or it was worth fighting for. It was the way the industry is set up: I’m an African, I’m in America, I’m supposed to write a multigenerational family epic. But I wanted to write about resolutely contemporary experience.

Do you enjoy reading that sort of novel, which you would never write yourself?

I need work that focuses on mind rather than on narrative, if you can make that distinction. I am interested in high modernism, and in exploration of consciousness. The exceptions are astonishing. Think of Halldor Laxness, the Icelandic novelist.

I’m happy to read him because he’s just so good at this. Garcia Marquez is so masterful that even inside the historical multigenerational epic, the mind is in every sentence. Narrative does interest me, but these days I’m drawn to short forms, short narratives. Short novels. I love Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels. I love Alice Munro’s short stories. I love microfiction, which is narrative-driven. Taking something like the story of a wife (who) bursts in on her husband and his mistress and shoots them both: There’s clearly something over there on the three-sentences level that, when expanded to 500 pages, would not interest me quite as much.

Do you also like high modernism in art?

When I think about the visual arts I think of films, usually from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, not American, that influence me.

(Federico) Fellini was important.

I privately think to myself of Open City as a response to 8K, which is weird. But it is episodic, it is concerned with structures of consciousness and I think it is immaculately curated. That is what I was going for: the curation of incident that to a careless observer seems like randomness. So also La Dolce Vita, which is a man’s journey through various episodes of his life—a callow and somewhat callous man: an essentially conscientious hedonist.

Classical music plays a big role in ‘Open City’. Did composers

Reading the city: Novelist, art historian and photographer Teju Cole; and (top) New York street scenes shot by Cole. like Gustav Mahler influence its writing too?

Mahler is important to Julius (the protagonist) because Mahler is melancholy and grandiose and epic in the shape of Julius’ mourning. But for me, (Jean) Sibelius was more important because he’s structurally more subtle. He had this habit of doing intricately worked symphonies that in the last movement would get kind of loud, and then that final minute would be unaccountably soft.

There was also the idea of having a theme on the piccolos and then the same theme on the flutes and then the same theme at half-speed on the tubas and double basses. Building that up was exactly what I was trying to do in this book, where in one section someone is talking

...I’m supposed to write a multi­ generational epic. But I wanted to write about resolutely contemporary experience.

about terrorists and in another someone is talking about bedbugs.

It sounds like a book which was read out loud as it was being written.

It’s a voiced book. For some other people, the way to slow things down is to write long-hand. I write on the computer. But I’ve developed a sense of cadence in my head, so not everything has to be read out loud. I know when something’s getting too unvoiceable and change it.

The September 2001 attacks are obliquely at the centre of the book. Were you in New York at the time?

I was. The book was for me a response to those attacks because I felt that 11 September needed to be written about in an indirect way. Open City is a kind of shell-shocked response to the enormity of the event.

You’ve said that you felt people moved on too fast from the disaster.

I don’t know how people recover from disaster and I don’t know how they’re supposed to. I think there’s an appropriate space for stunned silence. I think there’s an appropriate space for academic work. I think there’s an appropriate space for tangential responses such as Open City or (Joseph O’Neill’s novel) Netherland, or the works of (W.G.) Sebald. There’s also a space for irony and

tragicomedy. In the context of New York, yes, because it wasn’t just a disaster but a pretext for war and heroism.

You think heroism was co-opted into the political narrative?

There was real, amazing heroism. We used that then to go and kill a few hundred thousand people in Iraq, which was disgusting. It was the absolute opposite of what mourning should be. Mourning should be about becoming aware that others have suffered. I think the shock of it was so great that it made Americans callous.

How would you respond to the criticism that a narrative like ‘Open City’, with its determinedly solitary narrator, makes solipsism seem heroic?

I think it might be harsh on Julius to call him solipsistic. I don’t think it’s quite so simple, because there is Julius’ own positionality as a black man living in the United States. I don’t believe you can be black in the US and evade politics. You embody politics. The moment you walk into a room as a person of colour, your accent, your place of origin, politics will be imposed on you. So to say that he’s entirely solipsistic is not fair. But like many people I know, Julius’ politics are layered and complicated.

Open City arguably has several projects. One of them is that Julius is not your Everyman

narrator. He is not only involved, not only implicated, but also among the oppressed. It might seem weird to say it because he’s highly educated and in control of his mind and his faculties, but even the President of the US right now is oppressed. Because there will always be someone who can get up in Congress and treat you as if you are a slave that has not been released yet.

Tell us a little about your connection with Goa, and India.

I come here often because I’m married to a woman from Goa, who grew up in Goa. I’ve been to Mumbai, Delhi, Cochin (Kochi), the Kerala backwaters.

Being a Nigerian in the States, young Indians were kind of like a natural ally for a foreign Anglophone student trying to find a place in American society because there were many more Indians than Nigerians—I don’t think there were any Nigerians at my school. Indians had the kind of parents who thought like my parents. And there was this seriousness about learning, this negotiation that says, here we are, fully immersed in Western culture, we have to make it fully our own but it’s not our own, we’re outsiders but we’re not outsiders. www.livemint.com To read the extended version of the inter­ view, visit www.livemint.com/tejucole.htm

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SUBHAMOY BHATTACHARJEE

QUICK LIT | CORDELIA JENKINS

Crimes pastoral A mystery­writing legend writes Austen fan­fiction, but not very well

I SWARNALATA | TILOTTOMA MISRA

The marriage plot A celebrated Assamese novel, now in its first English translation, is a triumph of social realism

B Y A RUNAVA S INHA ···························· t one point in Tilottoma Misra’s Swarnalata, the parents of the eponymous heroine attempt to make a match for her with Rabindranath Tagore.

The youthful poet, who has seen the attractive young girl from Assam—now in Calcutta to study—after a performance of his musical Balmiki Protibha, seems willing. But his father, the formidable Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, nixes the alliance.

Of course, history would have changed had Tagore Senior not taken this step. But Misra cleverly weaves the central skein of her novel into this one attentiongrabbing incident. Swarnalata’s Brahmo parents, Gunabhiram and Bishnupriya Barua, are almost heartbroken at the rejection, which is explained to them in the novel by another real-life Brahmo elder, Sivanath Sastri, with these words: “There could be only one reason for this. Devendranath Tagore has never been able to fully accept the idea of widow re-marriage. You must be aware that though he appears to be a liberal in his outlook, his attachment to some of the

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rites and beliefs of Hindu society seems to be growing with every passing day. It is quite possible, however, that the younger generation of Tagores may not be with him in this. But no one at Jorasanko would really dare to go against Devendranath’s wishes.”

The rejection, surmise the Baruas of Nagaon, a small town in Assam, stems from Gunabhiram’s decision to flout the conventions of Hindu Assamese society and marry Bishnupriya, a widow with two children. Gunabhiram’s act is congruent with the values of the Brahmo Samaj, which broke away from Hinduism to speak up and act for liberal thinking, for equality between the genders, and for Western-style education. But it still does not earn him the right to metaphorically sup at the table of the orthodoxy. In this contradiction are sublimated all the other conflicts that Misra depicts in her unhurried, sprawling and socially realistic novel named after the young woman whose life it traces from childhood to motherhood and beyond against

Swarnalata: Zubaan, 293 pages, `295.

the backdrop of change in late 19th century Assam.

Change is indeed palpable in the placid, hill-encircled land of Assam as nationalist sentiments emerge among a handful of revolutionary young men willing to defy the deep-rooted Brahmin servility to authority in general and to the British in particular. Meanwhile, Christian missionaries spread the gospel and offer the opportunity of education to people systematically deprived of it, in the process gaining converts. Then there are the Brahmos like Barua, intent on asserting equal rights for women and widows.

Misra brings each of these narratives of tension to a boil on a slow fire, charting the stories of representative characters. Here’s Swarnalata—daughter of privileged, enlightened parents, but still subject to the same biases as other women, which she must overcome in her own way. And here are her friends—Lakhi, a child-widow and daughter of a conflicted father caught between tradition and progress, and Tora, converted to Christianity and with a mind of her own.

Of these, Lakhi’s journey is the hardest. She gets a taste of new ideas from her childhood friendship with Swarna, but is soon wedged into the marriage-at-nine ritual. Her husband dies before she can join him after puberty, and she faces the prospect of several decades of widowhood and all its attendant shackles. Her defiant progress in the face of these obstacles makes for the most absorbing of the three women’s stories.

Circling these women—each pushed by personal circumstances that are symbols of the larger societal truth—are a handful of enlightened men who are eager to

Wonder years: Misra examines childhood and youth in 19th century Assam. break laws that they identify as stultifying and demeaning. Chief among them is Dharmakanta, fiery of mind and spirit and contemptuous of convention. His determination to change the status quo is both inspiring and heartbreaking in its intensity.

Misra does not peer deeply within the minds of her characters.

Instead, her concerns are with the battles waged between the individual spirit and societal suppression, where every person is powered by dreams and desires that constitute a reaction to the world they inhabit. Like the Brahmaputra flooding its banks, curving around obstacles and pushing on slowly but relentlessly, this novel too meanders, but always with the intent of reaching its end.

Although old-fashioned in its technique and lacking dramatic highs and punctuated cadences, the story shines out through a translation ranging between the competent and the ill-at-ease. In capturing the collective aspiration of a people from a part of India whose literature is unjustly under-circulated, Swarnalata becomes a rich panel in the patchwork quilt that is contemporary Indian fiction.

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

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Three women in search of freedom

owe an apology to the shade of Jane Austen for involving her beloved Elizabeth in the trauma of a murder investigation,” writes P.D. James in an author’s note at the beginning of her latest work of crime fiction, luridly titled Death Comes to Pemberley.

Only half of that statement is right. James does owe Austen a debt of apology, but not for the reason she suggests. While she creates a compelling enough murder mystery, packed with evocative detail, James is just, well, not funny. Above all, Austen was a wonderful writer of comedy; she used her gift for humour to enrich what might otherwise have been provincial domestic romances into something much, much finer.

It is a bold and risk-ridden endeavour to continue the story of Elizabeth Bennet, whose mischievous wit could be turned to any subject from the newfangled notion of the picturesque to the tribulations of country dancing. One wonders why a writer would take it on at all were she not assured of her success in capturing at least something of the spirit of her original.

Surprisingly, James puts the matter of reviving Elizabeth to one side and instead expends most of her efforts in a laboured, 50-page exercise in scene-setting. It is the day of Lady Anne’s ball at Pemberley and a litany of domestic detail about “white soup” and cut flowers eases us into life in the great house before the crisis occurs: Our heroine’s wayward sister, Lydia, stumbles out of her carriage in the dead of night screaming murder.

Elizabeth, we are repeatedly told, is blissfully happy as chatelaine of Pemberley. She’s the perfect wife and mother: She’s kind to the servants, she has adorned the nursery with two strapping boys, she’s charmed the pants off the formidable Lady Catherine de Bourgh and she is totally and unexpectedly in thrall of her husband and his house. As she tells her sister Jane, “I suspect that with Mr Darcy, Pemberley comes first. I remember when I first visited... my obvious

THE YELLOW EMPEROR’S CURE | KUNAL BASU

War and pox A disappointing story of a Portuguese doctor looking for a syphilis cure in 1900s China B Y D AVID S HAFTEL david.s@livemint.com

···························· n the opening scene of The Yellow Emperor’s Cure, Kunal Basu’s fourth novel, the reader meets the surgeon Antonio Maria, “the most eligible bachelor” in fin de siècle Lisbon. He is preparing for the feast of St Anthony, during which he has every intention of quenching his thirst for wine, women and song.

The festa is shortly revealed to be a bummer, however, when Antonio learns that his similarly rakish father is in the advanced stages of syphilis—“French Disease, Spanish Itch, German Rash or Polish Pox”.

The diagnosis is something of an end of an era for the louche Marias, who were “both blessed with the same dashing looks and

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the air of sweet insolence”. The city is ruined for Antonio. “Wherever he went, Lisbon stank of rotting genitals,” Basu writes.

Unable to cope with his father’s decline and death, Antonio is at a loose end, until he hears that though syphilis is a “disease of sailors”, no Chinese sailors are afflicted by it.

On the basis of this flimsy lead, Antonio decides to travel to China to learn the cure for syphilis, said to be contained in the “Yellow Emperor’s Canon”, fully expecting to be back in Lisbon, “treating patients and fathering babies with a new wife”, by next year’s festa.

Things get complicated in Peking, though, where Antonio is installed at the Empress Dowager Cixi’s Summer Palace, some 40 years after it was sacked by the

British after the second Opium War. Antonio is frustrated by his enigmatic teacher, Dr Xu, who isn’t forthcoming with the syphilis cure and is generally an absconder who leaves Antonio in the hands of his beautiful, but predictably mysterious, assistant Fumi (Dr Xu is also a “eunuch maker”, naturally unsettling to a Lothario like Antonio).

Adding to the urgency for Antonio, who just wants to learn the syphilis cure and be on his way, is the fact that the Boxer Rebellion—during which some Chinese rebelled against foreign commercial and religious influence—is on. Inevitably, against the backdrop of impending violence, Antonio falls hard for Fumi, who has been laboriously teaching him the principles of Nei Ching, or traditional Chinese medicine. “In just a few seasons he had lost the fire that had made him the most successful doctor in Lisbon, turning him into a lovesick wretch,” writes Basu.

Though he remains petulant and impatient with the progress of his medical training, learning the syphilis cure eventually becomes secondary for Antonio,

Death Comes to Pemberley:

By P.D. James, Faber & Faber, 320 pages, `499. delight in it pleased him. If I had been less than genuinely enthusiastic I don’t think he would have married me.”

Early on, we are given the hopeful signal that “Georgiana (Darcy’s young sister) had been surprised, almost shocked, to hear her brother being teased by his wife, and how often he teased in return and they laughed together.”

Sadly, Elizabeth and Darcy are exhaustingly and dutifully polite to each other here.

Darcy is still a rather gnomic figure, but, devoid of his sarcasm, has become pompous.

About halfway through the novel, it’s hard to avoid the unhappy conclusion that the romantic leads have become what Helen Fielding would call “smug-marrieds”.

It’s an understandable fault, and perhaps the reason that James tries to focus on minor characters from the village as the mystery unfolds.

Elizabeth’s voice was an echo of Austen’s own, a voice so distinctive and with an idiom so inimitable that any attempt to recreate it seems doomed to failure.

As a murder mystery, Death Comes to Pemberley works fine.

But fans of Austen, and particularly of Elizabeth, are bound to be disappointed if not a little depressed by the guileless and pedestrian version of Austen’s heroine that James has painted. cordelia.j@livemint.com

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

The Yellow Emperor’s Cure: Picador India, 325 pages, `499. who becomes preoccupied with getting to the bottom of the mysterious death of Fumi’s previous foreign lover, Jacob de Graff, a Dutch printer of Bibles.

Naturally, Antonio wants to take Fumi back to Lisbon, but Fumi is, we learn, bent on avenging de Graff’s killers, to accomplish which she must align herself with the shadowy Boxers. As the novel lurches to its denouement, Antonio finds himself trapped between his commitment to his Chinese patients and a motley crew of foreigners

Chinese whisper: Basu’s hero sails the world in search of a syphilis cure. living at the international legation, the siege of which by the Boxers is imminent.

Basu’s novel owes a great deal to J.G. Farrell’s empire trilogy, historical novels about the folly of colonialism in which disparate groups of Westerners deal with shifting sands abroad, be it the siege of a residency during the first Indian War of Independence or the fall of Singapore to the Japanese during World War II. But where Farrell succeeds in creating sympathy for all actors and finding humour in dire situa-

tions, Basu’s characters are onedimensional, the plot is turgid and the language feels canned.

While the book has value as enhancing the historical record in English on China during the Boxer Rebellion, it has less in common with Farrell—or with Amitav Ghosh, to whom Basu is compared on the book’s jacket—than with Night in Bombay, Louis Bromfield’s recently re-released novel of Bombay in the 1930s: another book of historical import that doesn’t succeed simply as a novel.

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Culture

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LEGACY

What Satyadev Dubey leaves behind HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

The late maverick schooled his ‘gharana’ in provocative and linguistically diverse theatre.

We met his three protégés ‘S ATYADEV

DUBEY: A FIFTY­YEAR JOURNEY THROUGH THEATRE’

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

···························· (Exit: Stage right.) It is the evening after maverick theatre guru Satyadev Dubey’s passing.

At Prithvi Theatre, Juhu, Christmas lights hang from the trees above his usual seat at the buzzing cafeteria. A small photo printed on A3-size paper is pinned on a board at the theatre entrance: “R.I.P.”, it says. Three generations of Dubeyists—Sunil Shanbag, Hidayat Sami and Trishla Patel, his closest protégés—file past all of this, turn the corner and sink into the last bench of the café’s extension.

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anjna Kapoor tells Lounge via email: “Dubey’s legacy remains—in the work of many, many chelas (followers), all of whom he managed to plague with the indomitable ‘theatre ka keeda’.” Playwright and political scientist G.P. Deshpande, who once famously called Dubey “the most loved and most hated man in Indian theatre”, is bedridden, too ill to talk, in Pune. Mohit Takalkar, who last worked with Dubey, is in Varanasi. The late Chetan Datar’s spirit hangs quietly over this dispersed crowd. It is among this motley crew, the custodians of his legacy, that the shared void of Dubey’s loss is deepest.

Shanbag came to work with Dubey in 1974, Sami in 1991 and Patel, after a role in Feroz Khan’s play Mahatma vs Gandhi, in 1997.

All three dominate the experimental and professional theatre space at Prithvi, at different levels.

Shanbag, Dubey’s direct theatrical descendant, is a founding member of the theatre troupe Arpana, and is best known for directing Vijay Tendulkar’s The Cyclewallah, Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Pratibimb and Ramu Ramanathan’s Cotton 56, Polyester 84. He won the National Film Award for Maihar Raag in 1994. Shanbag is currently working on adapting Shakespeare into a musical set in Saurashtra, to be staged at the Shakespeare Globe Theatre, London, in May. Both he and Dubey were mentors to Sami, who made his debut in Julius Caesar with Naseeruddin Shah in 1989. Dubey and Shanbag conducted workshops for the allwoman cast of Sami’s directorial debut All About Women, interpreted from a Miro Gavran script, in 2008. Sami inducted Patel, who was already acting in various productions, into the Dubey fold.

Patel now runs TPot productions.

Together, the triad represent three distinct phases of Dubey’s work and life.

They continue to work across languages, without allowing a mishmash tongue to creep in—an imperative of Dubey’s legacy.

BY

SHANTA GOKHALE/NIYOGI BOOKS

Theirs is the obsessive need to “make their plays better than them”—a philosophy that has seen Antigone and No Exit interpreted in Urdu and Hindi.

Dubey’s primary triumph was the position he won for regional language theatre.

The 1970s were a time when Dubey was anti-English. “Don’t forget Dubey was an MA in English Literature. He was very well-read,” Shanbag says. It was not the language Dubey was against, but what it represented: a pseudo-colonization. “The whole attitude was, ‘we are introducing Bombay to Shakespeare.’

When I first worked with him, Dubey, my God, was bitterly anti-English,” he adds.

In this context came Dubey’s linguistic rebellion. Ramanathan, former editor of PT Notes (Prithvi Theatre’s in-house magazine) and writer of plays such as Cotton 56, Polyester 84, directed by Shanbag (a play Dubey didn’t like), and Kashmir Kashmir, which resonated with Dubey’s voice, has since quit theatre. “He was the first of the bourgeois revolutionaries,” Ramanathan says.

Dubey’s interpretation of Dharamvir Bharati’s radio play Andha Yug was staged by Ebrahim Alkazi at Purana Qila, Delhi, in 1962.

Dubey later wrote: “Andha Yug was the proof one needed and the verdict was in favour of Hindi, and ultimately all Indian languages” (excerpted from Enact, 1972 in Shanta Gokhale’s book Satyadev Dubey: A Fifty-year Journey through Theatre).

By the time Sami did his first play with Dubey, it was the translated-into-English play Striptease. “He would say, ‘Now English is even a North-Eastern state’s official language, so ye to hamara hi hai (it is ours now)’,” Sami says. Patel, who didn’t speak Hindi till she met Dubey, works primarily in Hindi to this day. In The Cyclewallah, Shanbag’s play, Patel had only two lines. “But those two lines... (laughs)...it was tough to perfect, because Sunil is as tough as Dubeyji was.”

Sami, Patel and Shanbag have all cut their teeth on rigour in language, while adapting to changing context. Each had to put in a year and a half of backstage work before landing small roles.

Dubey never did a “Hinglish” play. He’d pick a Billy Russell. “He went to great lengths to make sure you got the correct syntax. By this time Dabholkar and Co. and Rahul daCunha and his lot had started realizing there was a large audience interested in Indian English, and had begun adapting their language. At this time, this guy starts doing pristine English stuff,” Shanbag says. Sami explains the pages and pages of rules Dubey established for actors.

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FAMILY

Stamp of a genius: (clockwise from left) Dubey (on the floor) directing Amrish Puri and Jyotsana Karyekar in Aadhe Adhure, 1969; Dubey; and (from left) Shanbag, Patel and Sami at Prithvi.

They continue to work across languages, without allowing a mishmash tongue to creep in, an imperative of Dubey’s legacy His rigorous workshops had an Urdu text, a Hindi text and an English text, almost always a piece by (George Bernard) Shaw. “It was about respecting a language and the culture of a language. It was important for him,” Sami says.

Such prowess gave Dubey creative mobility. It earned him the collaboration of Shreeram Lagoo and Girish Karnad in Kannada, Bharati and Badal Sircar in Hindi; and Amol Palekar, Elkunchwar and Tendulkar in Marathi. In an interview to the Gujarati theatre magazine Natak in 2000, Dubey said: “The NCPA (National Centre for the Performing Arts) was inaugurated. We forced them to do the

Marathi play Vallabhpurchi Danthakatha.” (excerpted in Satyadev Dubey). His instinct for the rhythms of language, where he lacked a command over the languages themselves, allowed him to change meter in the poetry of Marathi poets Kusumagraj or Shirwadkar, or adapt Elkunchwar’s work, which also earned him the ire of some playwrights, as Gokhale documents.

In this ability to cross-link, the theatre world deeply misses Dubey’s protégé, the late Datar.

Kaushal Inamdar, the Marathi music director best known for the film Balgandharva, was once, as he describes himself, “Datar’s stenographer”. Inamdar says: “Chetan was the last missing link.

When he died, he was in the process of taking plays to Assam and Hyderabad. People like Dubeyji and Chetan were those portals through which theatre, poetry and music travelled from mainstream to experimental, from Marathi to English to Kannada to Hindi, and from stage to film.” Today, Inamdar points out, creative collaborations between these parallel communities are almost non-existent.

Dubey worked within the framework of a gharana. Patel feels the loss of this keenly: “I feel there is a sense of confusion in theatre today. Sometimes, confu-

sion can also lead to something beautiful. But nobody has a focus.

Dubeyji was a focus for many groups and many actors.”

Dubey’s style was to mentor rigorously and then, abruptly, cut an actor/director loose. Shanbag was among the first. It was a time when walking away from a mentor meant no coming back.

Dubey, above all, was extremely particular about it.

The method had its disadvantages: It was limiting for actors, and it gave directors a limited pool of talent to cast from. It was said of Dubey that when you shut your eyes, all his actors sounded like him. Yet Shanbag, who has spent the morning at a rehearsal where six different actors were functioning in six different styles on one stage, says he now realizes how major a problem the theatre world faces today: “We all spoke in his style; with his technique. No Dubey actor would ever swallow the end of a line. Now, I spend the first two weeks of any play trying to get actors to work homogeneously, otherwise my production won’t hold.”

Dubey had his flaws. He could be crude and foul-mouthed. “But it was never personal,” Shanbag points out. Those who realized that it was necessary for learning, could get past it. As Kapoor puts it:

“Dubey was a provocateur more than anything else, a provocateur with the wonderful ability of seeing a person well, so he would always push the right buttons (even though they would feel wrong so many times!). Central to his tireless provocations was theatre. Nothing more!”

These methods shaped actors from Amol Palekar and Amrish Puri to Naseeruddin Shah; it is impossible to list completely the extent of Dubey’s influence. But Dubey’s methods are not those that can be wielded without the force of character he came with.

“It is not just the crisis of theatre,” Shanbag says, “but a crisis of the age.” This transition phase in theatre will throw up its own icons, his protégés hope. But that requires a man without an agenda, a personality, like Dubey, who was about the ideas.

For, Dubey’s legacy was the theatre of ideas. He took political stances, as Sami puts it, “very strongly”. He fought the censor board on freedom of speech. He was a political being: a card-carrying Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) man. Dubey never played it safe. “Today a lot of theatre is multiplex theatre,” Shanbag says.

“Pleasant to look at but eminently forgettable. Today theatre doesn’t ruin your dinner.”

Patel explains Dubey’s method: If you liked a film, Dubey would hate it. Then he would proceed to have a 2-hour discussion-turnedargument, often without reason, about it. “It was not that he was invested in a film. He was invested in making you think.” Dubey’s ultimate weapon was thought.

Patel’s lasting memory of Dubey is a rehearsal a few years ago during which Dubey was restless and stood up to exit. He pointed to his seat, saying, “Think that I am there and do.”

“Ever since then,” says Patel, “that is what I think when I rehearse. For me, that is where he will always be.”

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HINDUSTAN TIMES

THEATRE

The anti­Sartre

Ray of hope: (above) A file photo of director Sai Paran­ jpye, now 73; and (from left) Umesh Jagtap, Shrikant Dadarkar and Milind Shinde play three convicts.

Spicy wit marks Sai Paranjpye’s existential tale of three men in a prison cell—NCPA’s first production in 20 years B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· llbeeeel (All well)”, cries the police guard outside the prison cell shared by actors Umesh Jagtap, Milind Shinde and Shrikant Dadarkar, who play murder convicts. The very sound of it is evocative, poignant and laced with irony. It is just one of the many details of the Theatre of the Absurd captured with finesse by veteran film and stage director Sai Paranjpye, now a sprightly 73.

She blows her little red whistle, dances, breaks into song, makes a few sketches for stage design, circumambulates the open stage— and has the National Centre for Performing Arts’ (NCPA’s) Experimental Theatre’s staff and crew constantly on their toes.

“Tumhi Bappa (Dadarkar) tsa towel ghetla hota (You had taken Bappa’s towel),” she tells Jagtap, who had grabbed one of three identical towels from a prop wall

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in an emotionally fraught scene during rehearsals for the 2-hour play—so keen is her eye. The affectionate respect she merits, from everyone in her own cast to the NCPA’s canteen boy, is evident—they scurry frantically for light switches in the dark and change even the seating of the NCPA’s Experimental Theatre at one note of discontent.

It is the NCPA’s first production venture in 20 years, and who better to begin with? Paranjpye is the grand dame of the Marathi stage and she has repeatedly had the unique ability to assemble a motley cast of accomplished actors no one else saw working together. Of the actors, Jagtap, previously seen in Tim Supple’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a vivacious and versatile experimental artist, plays a man who killed his wife in a fit of rage when he discovered her with a lover.

Dadarkar, the renowned classical vocalist and a darling of the Marathi stage, plays the break-in-

to-song Bappa, who killed his blind daughter’s molester.

Shinde, the more commercial of the three and a well-known film actor who essayed the role of the father in the National Award-winning Baboo Band Baaja, plays the prowling, mood-swinging, imaginary-cricket-playing contract killer with brilliance.

“Laaga chunari mein daag” plays seductively as Shinde enacts one of his killings. It plays again, mournfully, as he is taken to death row. Paranjpye leans over, flicking her dupatta: “It is, in fact, a deeply spiritual song. It is a man going to meet his maker,

She interpolates a French angst into a Marathi straight­ forwardness—an impossible task for any other catalyst

knowing he has sinned. I hope the audience gets it,” she says.

Before rehearsal begins, Shinde, a National School of Drama (NSD) graduate riding the peak of his film career, explains why he is taking a break from shooting. “It is riyaaz for me.” He is gently reminded to get the length of his jailbird shorts cut by the tailor after the day’s rehearsal.

There is much an actor can learn from Paranjpye’s exactitude.

From the lights crew to Dadarkar, it is the coming together of a sensibility informed by the classics. It is a bid to rediscover the intellectual heft Marathi theatre was once known for. The executive producer of the play, Anant Panshikar, a gentle man who laughs quietly from row 10 as he watches Paranjpye take his crew to task, runs one of Marathi theatre’s oldest performance companies, the Natyasampada Tele Theatre, which completes 49 years next year. As is the custom with Marathi plays, this play too will travel—another first for an NCPA production.

His current play at Shivaji Mandir—that stronghold of Marathi theatre—is Pu La Deshpande’s Varya Varchi Varaat. Even when Tom Alter played in his Marathi

adaptation of Waiting for Godot, he explains, it did not play to a full house. Which is why Paranjpye’s direction of an NCPA production in Marathi is significant. It returns Marathi theatre to a space where it interacted creatively with the mainstream—a fluidity once championed by veterans such as Shreeram Lagoo, the late Satyadev Dubey, Vikram Gokhale, and the late Chetan Datar. With Aalbel, Paranjpye is proving to be the mentor who is stepping up to the need of the hour.

At the Experimental, the cast is aware it is facing a new crowd.

There is an obvious difference in the air. “It is the difference between (Sachin) Tendulkar at Brabourne Stadium and Tendulkar in Australia,” as Shinde puts it. Dadarkar is waiting for when the play goes “aapla gaavith (to our village)”—Dadar, the home ground.

Even the stage at the NCPA is unusually open on three sides, forcing last-minute carpentry adaptations to the set so the audience on the side is not cut off visually. They will laugh at the wrong spots, or maybe not laugh at all—it happens in these kinds of places, say the cast members.

The sets are bleak, Paranjpye

NANDINI RAMNATH

HITS AND MISSES ilm critics are an envied as well as a reviled bunch.

They’re envied both for the access they get to the movies before ordinary viewers and for the space they get to impose their views on others. They’re reviled precisely for the same reasons—and the added fact that they are usually deemed to be wildly off the mark on almost every new release. Yet film reviewing is mostly dreary business, especially when the pickings are slim.

2011 hasn’t been one of the best in recent years. We present the low points and the highlights of yet another year of reviewing Bollywood.

WTF moments at the movies Shah Rukh Khan as a nerdy Tamil Brahmin programmer who morphs into a crotch-clutching saviour of the universe. Kangna Ranaut’s desperate makeover as a purring sex kitten. Jackky

Bhagnani’s staggering ambition to be the next superstar. The recent and mysterious tendency of John Abraham’s eyeballs to move in opposite directions in Force and Desi Boyz. Sagar Ballary’s repeated attempts to prove his mettle as a director of comedy in Bheja Fry 2 and Hum Tum aur Shabana. Prateik as a wannabe priest with the potential to fire up future congregations in My Friend Pinto. Prashant Narayanan dressed as a tranny in the anything-goes Yeh Saali Zindagi.

An all-Indian cast playing leading lights of the Third Reich in Gandhi to Hitler.

Zero chemistry degree There’s a tie between R. Madhavan and Ranaut in Tanu Weds Manu and Shahid Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor in Mausam.

The dark horse prize Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Sahib Biwi aur Gangster: a wicked, sexy story

Aalbel plays on 31 December at the Yashwant Natya Mandir, Mumbai, at 8pm and on 1 January at Bal Gandharva Ranga Mandir, Pune, at 12.30pm. The play will travel to other venues too. For information, call 9322389700.

went from dowdy in January (in No One Killed Jessica) to voluptuous in December (The Dirty Picture). Giving her company on her amazing journey was character actor Rajesh Sharma, who appeared in both films in small but unforgettable parts.

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admits, and she has attempted to break them visually with the audio-visual element. It is an existentialism planted in her head during her NSD days, when she first read Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit—a condemnation of man to his personally contrived hell. “I thought why can men not make each other’s heaven?” Paranjpye says with a simple optimism.

The play is not an adaptation of Sartre’s tome. It is, in fact, the anti-Sartre. It is a concept, and a nod to the original the characters discuss at the start of the play.

“Kharokhar tar majhi swargachi kalpana thodi vegali hoti. Tumhi doghi mala Rambha ani Urvashi nahi disat (Truth be told, my idea of heaven was a bit different. Neither of you—nodding at his prison mates—look like Rambha or Urvashi to me),” Jagtap says with that wry humour integral to Paranjpye’s writing.

The script, which Paranjpye wrote in three months, is similarly incisive. She interpolates a very French angst into a Marathi straightforwardness—an impossible task for any other catalyst.

This finds beautiful expression in each of the actors’ piercing existential howls at the only glimpse of life outside their cell, the rays of the rising sun.

The Perry Mason award of the year No spark: (clockwise from above) Actor Shahid Kapoor in Mausam; Ranbir Kapoor in Rockstar; and Kalki Koechlin in Shaitan. about fading royalty and flaming passions that saw Jimmy Shergill and Randeep Hooda in top form.

The ‘I’m Not There’ citation Ranbir Kapoor, who put so much effort into making Rockstar work that you wonder if he actually thought he was in some other, worthier movie.

Woman of the year Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’s Zoya Akhtar, for recognizing that female movie-goers need eye candy as much as males.

And the bravery medal goes to…

Kalki Koechlin, for appearing as the princess of disturbia in Shaitan, a nagging fiancée in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, an exploited masseuse in search of her father in That Girl in Yellow Boots and a lost waif in My Friend Pinto. Phew!

Anurag Kashyap for defending Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar across social media, calling it the Pyaasa of our times, berating the dimwits and philistines who didn’t like the film, and generally plugging the movie more vigorously than he promoted his own That Girl in Yellow Boots.

‘You’ve Gotta Hand It To Him’ gong Also goes to Anurag Kashyap, for daring to make That Girl in Yellow Boots in a year when the word offbeat was as welcome as intelligent.

Scene stealers

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

Two actors bookended the year with unforgettable roles. One was the redoubtable Vidya Balan, who

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

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BANGALORE BHATH | PAVITRA JAYARAMAN

Gardening in the Garden City COURTESY MYSUNNYBALCONY

RAMESH HS/MINT

The IT city reclaims its original reputation by creating gardens on terraces and in balconies

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grew up climbing trees and running around gardens.

That is a Bangalore I have always known,” says 39-year-old Mamtha Rajesh. Two years ago, not satisfied with the few potted plants that decorated her apartment, Rajesh sought professional help.

With the help of Bangalore-based MySunnyBalcony, which helps set up gardens in homes and offices, she converted her balcony into a garden. “It gives me a place for my me-time,” says Rajesh. She says watering plants is akin to meditation. Rajesh’s 9x5ft garden is the best replacement she could find for her large childhood garden. “When we first got it, our family of four had several dinners here.”

Gardens are embedded in the biography of Bangalore. Long before it earned the title of Garden City after Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV ordered the planning of public gardens in 1927, it had lush greenery.

Some Bangaloreans believe the city owes it to the British.

Though Bangalore’s trophy garden, Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, was created during the time of Hyder Ali in 1760, the colonizers established the culture of gardening for pleasure. “Right from the day that the Lalbagh garden was formed, it was the centre of plant introduction, testing and trials and acclimatization of foreign species,” says S.V. Hittalmani, additional director, department of horticulture, government of Karnataka.

Given the city’s weather and soil conditions, residents took to gardening like fish to water. “I would say Bangalore owes its reputation as the Garden City not just to the public gardens that the city had, but to the fact that almost every house in the city had a garden,” says B. Narayan Vishwanath, an expert in organic terrace farming.

Vishwanath says that during the 1970s, the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) allotted plot sizes that could accommodate a villa and a garden. “But even if people had a small piece of land, say, a small independent house in a 30x40ft plot, they would have some pots,” he says.

It’s an inheritance that slipped from Bangaloreans around a decade ago, when the city burst at the seams with new construction. The pace of the city, once a retired person’s paradise, quickened once it became the IT capital. “From the year 2005, it was as if the city suddenly began to see reason to panic, suddenly people were registering for gardening classes,” says Vishwanath, who has been working to promote the idea of terrace gardening since 1995. But from toying with potted ornamental plants on terraces, people have begun to grow vegetables and greens on these.

The gardening carnival Oota from your Thota, which in Kannada means food from your garden, was organized twice in 2011 by the Garden City Farmers Trust (GCFT), Bangalore, spearheaded by Vishwanath. It helps potential gardeners with tools, seeds, soils and most importantly, information and encouragement to create more vegetable gardens.

Vishwanath, who has written a book titled A Handbook of Organic Terrace Gardening, has so far trained 6,000 people in various classes and workshops on urban gardening and also moderates a group on Facebook that allows people to post their gardening queries. “When the group started two years ago, I had to answer all the queries.

Now the members with experience share and provide answers that are perhaps more relevant than mine,” he says.

While independent houses with gardens still exist, the balcony and terrace garden is a

COURTESY MYSUNNYBALCONY

The secret corners: (from top) Mamtha Rajesh’s balcony garden is where she unwinds every morning; B.N. Vishwanath experi­ ments with various ways to farm on a terrace; and design elements in balcony gardens help make the space more attractive. relatively new phenomenon, says Vijaya Raman, who started My Terrace Garden three and a half years ago to help firms and individuals plan and set up gardens. “A lot of people who have had a few pots come asking for more elaborate gardens and want to understand their plants,” says Raman, who also offers maintenance solutions.

Reena Chengappa, who co-founded MySunnyBalcony with three others three years ago, says their timing was perfect.

“Had we started 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have survived. It is now that everybody is so keen on growing their organic vegetables, herbs and having their own personal patch of green,” says Chengappa. She says garden plans are being incorporated in the design blueprints of homes and apartments, for which many people ask for decorative plants mixed with

some herbs and small vegetable plants. Chengappa charges upwards of `10,000 to create a small space with potted plants, a water feature and a few wall accessories.

When planning the design of her new home, Thenmozhi Venugopal, a home-maker, thought of the garden even before she began to consult with an interior designer for the house plan. Having lived her first two years in Bangalore in an apartment that allowed space for a few pots, the prospect of having free space for a garden in the house was exciting. “At first, the idea was to have some space for plants in front of the house, but after consulting with MySunnyBalcony, we are now planning for some in the front, a strip of decorative plants near the kitchen in the back and also some on the terrace,” says Venugopal.

Both Raman and Chengappa, who have a passion for gardening and have impressive personal gardens, received part of their training from a horticulture training programme organized by the Association of People with Disability (APD).

The programmes are spearheaded by horticulturist Ganesh Hegde, who has so far trained more than 1,600 people in full-time, certified courses.

“We started mainly with the aim of providing a vocational training course for people with disabilities from the low-income strata. Gardening also proves to be therapeutic and helps our students focus and better their motor skills,” says Hegde.

Receiving requests from the general public for gardening classes, APD now holds classes in basic gardening, identification of plants and herbs, over weekends. “But it’s not just gardening, they want to grow their own vegetables and herbs, and in this class, people go back to the basics,” he says.

While those who are apprehensive about their gardening abilities opt for classes, more people just go to the nursery run by the organization to pick up ready potted plants. “Serious gardeners grow from the seed stage. We have at least 20-25 visitors every day who pick up plants from us,” says Hegde. The department of horticulture maintains that Bangalore currently has more than 500 active nurseries, and the number is growing.

The Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is organizing the second edition of the Green Landscape Summit, which works to help builders and those in the construction industry create greener buildings with more space allotted to landscapes, on 19 and 20 January in Bangalore.

Chandrashekar Hariharan, chairman of the summit and executive chairman, Bangalore-based BCIL Zed Habitats, which builds eco-friendly buildings, says few builders see green as a need—that has to change. “As a policy, we already set apart up to 30% of the space for landscaping, this apart from other open areas,” says N. Kishore, manager, landscape, Brigade Enterprises Ltd, a Bangalore-based builder, who will be participating in the summit.

While facilities like rainwater harvesting are a requirement of the state government, a leafy patch and the desire to reclaim the city’s original title is a Bangalorean’s demand. pavitra.j@livemint.com