Lounge by HT Media

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

www.livemint.com

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Vol. 3 No. 28

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH BRITANNIA’S VINITA BALI >Page 8

HOW MUCH SHARING IS TOO MUCH?

Men hide their feelings and women talk too much about them; both could learn a lot from each other >Page 9

CHENNAI’S FAN MALES

THE HOUSE OF FOOD The ‘Samaithu Par’ books, meant for those exiled from their homes, are a testament to the spirit of their creator >Page 14

Nearly every Tamil star has a fan club that celebrates and deifies him. We met three such devotees to know how the ‘rasigar mandram’ phenomenon thrives in Chennai’s moviedom >Page 10 REPLY TO ALL

AAKAR PATEL

WHY PARSIS LOVE CLASSICAL MUSIC

o understand a culture we must examine its classical roots. No real understanding of Europe or Europeans is possible without understanding Western classical music. In his autobiographical novel Youth, Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee writes of his first encounter with Hindustani music. It comes as he watches Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy on successive nights in London. “Hitherto he has found in Western music, in Bach above all, everything he needs,” writes Coetzee... >Page 4

THE GOOD LIFE

SHOBA NARAYAN

ARE YOU A GOOD NEGOTIATOR?

hat’s the best negotiating strategy you can use in a job? Ability, credibility and the willingness to walk away. Not my words. Strategic HR adviser Hema Ravichandar’s. Last Sunday, I called Ravichandar, who cut her teeth as HR head at Infosys Technologies, to get tips on negotiation. During our interview, I observed that E. Sreedharan, who I admire unabashedly, must be a master negotiator. He reads the Gita for 45 minutes every morning... >Page 4

OUR DAILY BREAD

SAMAR HALARNKAR

FISH CURRY, MADE IN A REAL HURRY

hen I was a kid, my grandmother always tried to make me eat palak (spinach) by promising that her fantastic fish curry would follow. Maka naka!, I don’t want it, was always my angry response. Usually, it didn’t work. My grandmother—a simple, wonderful woman who was never educated but tried to teach herself to read, painstakingly trying to figure out letter by letter—had not raised 10 children by giving in to tantrums. >Page 18

PEOPLE LIKE US Sunil Gupta’s portraits of selfassertion in the face of prejudice hold up a mirror to us in more ways than one >Page 17

DON’T MISS

For today’s business news > Question of Answers— the quiz with a difference > Markets Watch

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

FICTION, NONFICTION, AND THE INDIAS IN BETWEEN

inbox

A NEW LEASE

FIRST CUT

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (MANAGING EDITOR)

ournalist Pinki Virani is pissed off with modern India. In her previous books, we’ve seen what angers the author-activist about this country. Aruna’s Story was the real-life tale of the rape of a nurse that left her in a coma; Bitter Chocolate was about child sexual abuse; and Once Was Bombay? Don’t get me started on my favourite topic. The title is self-explanatory. But these days publishers want more bang for their book. How does one convert serious issues such as caste, religion, rape, genocide, foeticide, sati, cultural wars and every other socio-political disaster that’s slammed us in the face in the last seven years or so into a fast, saleable read? Why, READ through celebrities of course. So Virani’s latest book, a novel titled Deaf Heaven, which “examines the crisis that underlies the façade of progressive modernity”, also features a Bollywood family where father and son share the same initials. It’s a family where the manglik daughter-in-law marries a peepul tree and an ex-fiancée ends up with a poloplaying Delhi businessman. Sound familiar? By the time I was less than halfway into the book, I had already identified more than a handful of characters, including the information technology czar who gets cozy with a wine correspondent whose husband

Thinly veiled: And too thin. is a political chamcha, and the princess who “would have married a playboy had he not in a drug-alcohol fuelled surge of hate shot down his parents at dinner”. As one character tells another in the book albeit in a different context: “Completely fucking weird. Who would believe it if we wrote about it, it’s Kafkaesque.” Everyone knows that in India, reality is always stranger than fiction. Creative people often claim that reality as their own. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra did it this year in Dilli-6—a chunk of the idea came from actual events (see the Wiki-

pedia entry on the Monkey-Man of Delhi). There’s no harm in using reality to tell a story—director Spike Lee explores the reality of race relations all the time. But if you call it fiction, you have to take it to another level—there’s no point changing names, rehashing gossip that every journalist has heard and rearranging events and people in an attempt to create a racy, preachy narrative. And if reality is your true muse, well then there’s another category they call non-fiction. The jacket describes the book as “fiction that dares to subvert form, structure and expectations to hold up a mirror to a nation at tipping point”. I’d say it’s more accurate to call it a novel with an identity crisis. Reliance Communications has already announced that Deaf Heaven will be India’s first cell novel—the plan is to convert the book into a pack of SMSs available through subscription. I think I can already guess which parts Anil Ambani’s company will cut when it is condensing the book. PS: Those of you who wonder how books are really written should buy Sankar’s recently released The Middleman. At the end of the book, the author (reluctantly) shares how he went from idea to manuscript. Write to lounge@livemint.com

LOUNGE REVIEW | CELEBRITY TWITTER

ho are the shining stars of the Indian celebrity Twitter firmament? Lounge trawled through dozens of Twitter accounts before picking a few for perusal. As far as we know, they look authentic and they are updated often enough. After all, what good is eavesdropping if it ain’t the real stuff?

Mallika Sherawat URL: twitter.com/mallikala Stats*: 757 updates, 7,588 followers What’s it about? Extension of the carefully crafted Mallika Sherawat persona. Her tweets are fun and she interacts extensively with her tweeple. But Sherawat being Sherawat, she can never refrain from the occasional sexually-overloaded quip. When user @ahmeds027 asked: “how does one identify a beautiful vampire from a benign beauty?” Sherawat said: “only 1 will suck you dry”. Nice. Follow-worthy? Totally.

Sherawat updates often and will reply if you amuse her enough.

twitterdom. And no unnecessary diva airs or movie plugging.

Priyanka Chopra

Barkha Dutt

URL: twitter.com/priyankachopra Stats: 118 updates, 6,635 followers What’s it about? Entirely about life of a movie star. Expect plenty of plugs for her movies. Follow-worthy? Only if you can handle the frequent references to Kaminey release dates and What’s Your Raashee? shoot session. But then one day Priyanka Chopra just might reply to your tweet.

URL: twitter.com/bdutt Stats: 251 updates, 2,261 followers What’s it about? The life of a high-profile journalist, occasional gossip on people and places, and plenty of interaction. But Barkha Dutt’s account is devoid of revelations. Follow-worthy? Only for die-hard fans and news junkies. And for anyone who likes to interact. Most of Dutt’s recent posts have been responses to fans.

Gul Panag URL: twitter.com/gulpanag Stats: 4,706 updates, 8,867 followers What’s it about? Gul Panag tweets aplenty about news, social causes and even technology. And expect plenty of pictures of film locations, her dog and co-stars. Follow-worthy? It is her frequency of updates and quality of content that has made Panag the unlikley queen of the Indian

Shashi Tharoor URL: twitter.com/shashitharoor Stats: 527 updates, 16,529 followers What’s it about? Opinion on sports and news interspersed with thoughts on the grind of being a minister of state and member of Parliament. Shashi Tharoor, somehow, has time to respond to fans.

Follow-worthy? Highly recommended for the rare, unfiltered insight into life in the highest strata of the political system. Tharoor does not mince words when he is upset by the media misreporting and tweets as much. And, if you’re lucky, he might respond as well.

Notable mentions: Rahul Gandhi’s alleged account (@rgamethi) has, as of now, vanished. The last update was on 28 April and, last we checked, it had 2,220 followers. Pritish Nandy (@pritishnandy) updates frequently about movies, books and media, and is quite interactive with followers. For a daily report on the most popular Twitter users in India, hottest topics and most popular links, go to www.90di.com/twitter * All stats as of 5pm on 16 July. Sidin Vadukut

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com Shashi Tharoor’s entry into politics and taking up a ministerial post has infused new life into the Indian politics and polity (‘The diplomat’s new clothes’, 11 July). He has the capability to occupy this position and the humility to understand the pain of the ‘aam aadmi’ in a remote village. SULOCHANAN

GO GOLDEN GIRL ‘Lounge’ has done a service to society by carrying the feature ‘The Payyoli to London express’, 11 July. This story will make a difference to the world of sports in India and to the “golden girl”. Unlike other sports in India, athletics is the only sport dominated by girls. If potential winners are treated the way they are supposed to be treated, they’ll definitely win medals. We regularly see on TV and read about the pathetic condition of medalwinning sportspersons in this country and it is about time something was done to rectify this. In a country where great sportspersons are few, Rs34 crore spent on the training of some of them isn’t a big amount. These contributions are not donations but a sign of devotion. Kudos to those who’ve been generous. SUNITA SINHA NEW DELHI

SUPPORT FOR SPORTS It was great to read about P.T. Usha and her efforts in training a new generation of Olympic hopefuls in the hills of Kerala in ‘The Payyoli to London express’, 11 July. Our education system should encourage such activities by way of schools and colleges providing finances, and giving admission to athletes. Politicians and bureaucrats should be banned from heading sports bodies and only sportspersons should head such organizations. DEENDAYAL LULLA

MAKING A MARK P.T. Usha is one of the few sportspersons (Milkha Singh is another one) who is worried about the lack of athletic achievements of this country (‘The Payyoli to London express’, 11 July). One must praise Usha for her efforts and commitment. It was great to find out that Sudha Murthy and Mohandas Pai of Infosys are funding this project. Had this been funded, with even a small token amount, by the Union government, there would be a lot of interference from the Indian Olympic Association. Thank God they stayed out of it. I am sure at least one of the girls from the Usha School of Athletics will bring in a gold medal from London since there is so much commitment to the cause and determination to win. It will be great if the trainees of this school make a mark at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi next year. G. VASANTHY MUMBAI ON THE COVER: PHOTO IMAGING: DEVAJIT BORA/MINT CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In ‘Pitch perfect’, 4 July, ‘The Snowball’ is a biography of Warren Buffett by Alice Schroeder. In ‘The young hero’s senior banner’, 11 July, the song ‘Abhi na jao chod kar’ is from the film ‘Hum Dono’. In ‘Voices in verse’, 11 July, the correct spellings are ‘Kuttrala Kuravanci’, Gopalakrishna Bharati and Subramania Bharati.

L4 COLUMNS SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Why Parsis love Western classical music

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Prize winner J.M. Coetzee writes of his first encounter with Hindustani music. It comes as he watches Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy on successive nights in London. “Hitherto he has found in Western music, in Bach above all, everything he needs,” writes Coetzee, “Now he encounters something that is not in Bach.” And what is this that he discovers in Hindustani music? “A joyous yielding of the reasoning, comprehending mind.” He buys a record by Vilayat Khan and it is consistent with the film’s music. He finds the same “hovering exploration of tone sequences, the quivering emotion, the ecstatic rushes... A new continent...” Coetzee has access to a new culture through this music. It communicates what Western music does not. The question is: How? Hindustani music is unique in two ways. One: It operates without one of the three elements of music, harmony. It is rich in melody and rhythm but does not harmonize two separate melodies. Because of this, Hindustani music is always a monologue. The singer, or sitar player, as in Pather Panchali, offers an individual’s expression. This makes Hindustani music introverted, giving it the qualities Coetzee discovers. The reasoning mind is set aside because one man does not reason with himself. If not reason, what does Hindustani

communicate to its audience? The answer is: Emotion. And it does this especially efficiently for those of us who respond to the culture. One of the few times I feel religious is when I listen to the 36-year-old Jasraj’s muscular ode to Hanuman in Hamsadhwani, on his first LP from 1966. Two: The primary theme of Hindustani music is melancholy, and loss. There is no optimism in it, and no army ever marched to dhrupad or khayal. Wagner moved Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, and Carl Orff’s O Fortuna makes me want to do the same. Hindustani makes us retreat within ourselves. But it is a melancholy that we are comforted by. The music I go to after having a few is always Hindustani: Aamir Khan (the other one) moving magisterially through Anandi Kalyan, or Rashid Khan, at a higher pitch, more pleading, in Bageshri. Europe’s classical music is trying for us to listen to, and very few Indians like it. In May 1957, Nehru wrote this to his minister for information and broadcasting, B.V. Keskar, enclosing a letter: “I have been rather worried at the progressive disappearance of Western music from India. Bombay is practically the only centre left, where this is encouraged. I think Indian music will profit by contacts with Western music. I

Hub of harmony: Symphony Orchestra of India performing at NCPA, Mumbai. know nothing about the person who has written this letter. But, as there appear to be few Indians who have studied Western music, I feel a little interested in him.” The content of that letter is unknown, but its writer was Adi J. Desai, a Parsi. Nehru’s worry was justified, though he was optimistic in assuming that Western classical would survive the exit of the English. Fifty years later, it is dead everywhere in India except South Bombay. And here it is dying as one community depopulates. In the men’s room of the Tata-built National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) midway through a concert a couple of years ago, I stood between two Parsi men. Remarking on the enthusiastic sawing of a string quartet’s cellist, one said to the other: “Brahms ketlu majha nu utu, ne! (What a delight the Brahms was!)” Nowhere else in India would you hear that other than at the NCPA, where the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) is

based. Its patron will observe two things about the SOI: Its audience is Parsi, and its exponent is Catholic. For an annual fee of Rs10,000, one may become a Friend of the SOI. Friends get two free tickets to only one concert in the year, but they get to talk to the performers after each show. And they get to attend music appreciation talks through the year. There are 151 Friends of the SOI (www.soimumbai.in), and 94 of them are Parsi. At Western classical concerts, half the audience is Parsi. There are only 16 Indians (most of the remaining 74 are Kazakh) good enough to play for the SOI, and 11 of them are Catholic. Hindus and Muslims are put off by Western classical music. Why? Because it does not have the repetitive choruses we respond to. But mainly because its essence is actually to be found not in melody but in harmony. Since that is missing from our music, and from our culture, it is difficult for us to “get”

Western classical. To know what Hindustani sounds like with harmony added, listen to the work of Calcutta’s V. Balsara (Parsi), especially his composition in Bilawal. Parsis have been immersed in Western classical music for a long time. Zubin Mehta’s father Mehli formed the Bombay Symphony Orchestra in 1935 when Anna Pavlova toured India. The question is: What attracts Parsis and Catholics to Western classical music? They understand harmony, and have internalized it, truly. This becomes clear when we observe the geography of these two communities, South Bombay and Bandra, the two most civilized parts of India. They are able to keep the anarchy of India out of their neighbourhoods without being policed. Unfortunately, because they are very small communities, their influence is eroding and soon they will be run over. At NCPA concerts, the disappearing Parsi can be discerned every year from the rising number of people who clap between movements thinking that the “song” is over. The only reason Bandra is becoming like the rest of India slower than it would is a rule that prevents non-Catholics from buying property in its heart. One last question needs answering: Why are Parsis and Catholics attracted to harmony where the rest of us aren’t? Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media. Write to Aakar at replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakarpatel

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Karma yoga and the need to negotiate

MANISH SWARUP/AP

hat’s the best negotiating strategy you can use in a job? Ability, credibility and the willingness to walk away. Not my words. Strategic HR adviser Hema Ravichandar’s.

Last Sunday, I called Ravichandar, who cut her teeth as HR head at Infosys Technologies, to get tips on negotiation. During our interview, I observed that E. Sreedharan, whom I admire unabashedly, must be a master negotiator. He reads the Gita for 45 minutes every morning, and has managed to keep the government at arm’s length as he builds a world-class Metro on his terms. How does he do it? “He has credibility and is willing to walk away from the job,” Ravichandar replied. A few hours later, as if to prove her words, she called back. “Turn the TV on. There has been a collapse in the construction of the Delhi Metro and Sreedharan just resigned.” In an age when head honchos of all stripes cling to their jobs and positions, it is heartening to find a few public figures willing to give it all up. Nandan Nilekani recently gave up his perch atop spaceship Infosys. But he was heading into another role. Sreedharan, on the other hand, resigned—with no other job or option in hand—because he took “moral responsibility” for the terrible mishap that claimed six lives. Cynics will say that Sreedharan played his cards well; that he quit knowing full well that it wouldn’t be accepted; that it was a good negotiating strategy that

served only to strengthen his position. I don’t think so. I think Sreedharan followed his conscience; that the only negotiating strategy he used was the simple question: Can I live with myself if I don’t do this? Is Sreedharan a good negotiator? I don’t know. I’ve never met the man. Negotiation is a necessary evil in today’s business world and the fact that I am saying it this way betrays who I am. I hate negotiation because it involves confrontation. When I negotiate, mostly I want to air grievances. I am willing to cede all demands just for the privilege of being heard and understood. This is in stark contrast to others who are able to go point-by-point and make sure their demands are met. I call this the emotional type versus engineer type difference, but it could well be a man vs woman thing. According to Ravichandar, there is a lot of research to suggest that women sell themselves short. “Women will negotiate for everybody else—for the team, for the children—except themselves,” she says. “In fact, for many women, negotiation is just like a root canal.” In journalism, negotiation happens over column space and visibility. Having a cover story, a lede, having your piece appear on page one of the paper. That’s

Strategy or scruples? Sreedharan offered to resign after an accident at a Metro site. what reporters fight for and if you are Indian, it is one of the hardest things to wrap your mind around. As a nation, we are poor negotiators. For better or worse, Indian culture takes a dim view of the “I, me, myself” world view, which is key to negotiation. In order to ask, nay, demand something from superiors, you have to feel that you deserve it. To many Indians, that seems horribly egotistical. Hinduism has a very evolved and nuanced view about the ego that mostly has to do with shedding it. Sreedharan supposedly has a quotation in his office that says, “Work I do. Not that ‘I’ do it.” This notion of karma yoga; of removing the self from the job; of

working without expectation of reward as the Gita calls it, can take you to a higher spiritual plane, but does very little to help you climb the corporate ladder. Let me explain. Say you’ve been at the same job for three years and things are getting a bit stale. Small things bother you and part of you wants to dismiss it all. Your card says product manager and yet the guy who was hired after you is projected at marketing events. They don’t “promote” you at client gatherings. Worst of all, your job is getting undercut. You stay up all night to come up with a presentation and your boss chops it in half for valid but still frustratingreasons.“The client wants us to close before lunch. Can you shorten your presentation?” she says. Good reason, but why not ask Smarty Pants with the slick smile to cut his presentation? Why yours? This never used to happen and now, it has happened three times in the last three months. What do you do? Three things, says Ravichandar. “Articulate your position clearly; don’t be diffident. Do your own homework thoroughly and make hard data the bedrock of your discussions. And finally, try not to fall into the trap of direct comparisons with peers. Smart negotiators will restrict the discussion to themselves.” Fair enough, but what if “hard data” is not what’s at stake? Negotiating for a higher compensation, for instance, is a numbers game. You and your employer have to come up with a figure that both of you can live with. It is the fuzzier things that are harder: the corner office, the company car, flying first class instead of coach. Negotiating for perks and intangibles like visibility is hard. How do you ask for these things without

appearing vain? How do you tell the movie producer that your name should appear above that genius hotshot cinematographer because…well, you are older? How do you tell your lab adviser that your name should appear above your peers on the research paper because you feel you deserve it? If you are Indian, the mere fact that you are accentuating these things will make you feel horribly egoistic. Lots of older Indians I know, including—I would wager—Manmohan Singh, Sreedharan and my in-laws, never asked for salary raises, perks, promotions, nothing. They believed that these were crass accoutrements that had nothing to do with a job well done. In contrast, our generation is comfortable with asking for perks and job-related increases. It is very tricky to find the balance between karma and ambition that Sreedharan has; to walk that ineffable line between ego and self. To demand a gas-guzzling Mercedes in your company contract to ride on choked Indian roads is arguably ego. To buy and drive a Ferrari in private in your summer beach retreat just because you enjoy it is self. Or as Ravichandar says, “There are two types of people in the world: the ones who talk about quitting and the ones who quit. The two have to be handled very differently.” I wonder which one I am. Shoba Narayan is working up the nerve to invite E. Sreedharan to dinner. But she has to meet him first. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shobanarayan

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009

Parenting FIRST PERSON

Hurrah for the old school ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Why the New Era School’s old ethos should survive in its new avatar

B Y S ALIL T RIPATHI ····························· he students protesting against the new management of the New Era School in Mumbai did so by holding placards, their parents handing out petitions. They turned to the courts, winning the argument as the Supreme Court told the new owners, the Aditya Birla Group, that the decision to move the school to a new location would rest with the state. The management wants to move the school to a new location, around 5km away, ostensibly to refurbish the old building. The school needs better bricks and mortar, certainly; but it needs reaffirmation of the ideals which made it unique. When the Aditya Birla Group took over the school, the expectation among the school’s alumni was that the ne w o wn er s w o ul d n ot onl y invest in the school, but also guard its traditions. What made the school special was not its location, nor the number of laptops per student, nor indeed the gym facilities, but the quality of its teachers, and its ethos, and the values it imbibed in its students. It is not a cram school that produces top-rankers at competitive examinations; nor is it a finishing school for children whose eyes are firmly set on moving abroad, never to return. This 79-year-old institution at Kemp’s Corner is special: It has witnessed the city’s political and cultural history and stood firm, like the moral conscience of a once-tranquil area now teeming with traffic, in what is now a real estate developer’s dream. The Vyas family that started the school built the school’s ethos on the soft power they drew from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. It is the ethos of nationalism with a small “n”, the kind Tagore emphasized, of pride in one’s culture without disrespecting others’ cultures; where several teachers and students chose to wear khadi (homespun) clothes; where the old uniform of khaki shorts and skirts and white shirts was not debased by the divisive propaganda of strident nationalism; where the school’s anthem,

Old times: After the court ruling, the school may reopen next week. composed by Pinakin Trivedi, himself a student at Santiniketan at one time, resonated with Tagorean cadence; and a school whose face to the world was a gigantic mural—now sadly and inexplicable torn down by the new management—created by the art teacher, Dinesh Shah, commemorating Gandhi’s life. That spirit of fearlessness is drawn from its past: During the Quit India Movement of 1942, Gandhians Usha Mehta and others ran a clandestine radio station from the school, mocking the authorities. “There is history here, which must be preserved,” says Paula Mariwala, an alumnus who later went to Stanford and now runs a venture fund in Mumbai. Indeed, during the Emergency of 1975-77, some of us, with the full knowledge of our teachers, made copies of pro-democracy material that was distributed quietly at homes in Napean Sea Road, Warden Road, Peddar Road, Laburnum Road and beyond, the catchment of the school, comprising middle- and upper-middle-class Gujarati families who wanted their children rooted in Indianness, but able to deal with the world with confidence. Chaula

Bhimani, an engineer who lives in Mumbai, says: “Today when I see people streaking their hair and wearing tattoos, I feel proud of my firm identity, about my Indianness, which is all thanks to New Era.” It was not uncommon to talk about Satyajit Ray and Ravi Shankar in our classes. Kartick Kumar and Zakir Hussain played at our assembly. Vijay Merchant and alumnus Anandji Dosa told us stories about cricket. Umashanker Joshi and Niranjan Bhagat read us poetry. Morarji Desai spoke about Gandhi, Father Wallace about spirituality. It was a Gujarati medium school, but never disregarded English. You could study French or Sanskrit, until state regulations made it impossible. We could take optional classes on weekends for Bengali, which I did for two years. Many of us felt drawn to the school even during vacations. Alumnus Darshana Shilpi Rouget, an art director now based in London, says: “I loved going to school so much that I used to pretend to be well when I would be sick so that I wouldn’t miss school.” The school trusted its students

in return. My classmate and chartered accountant Nandita Parekh reminds me how we did not have invigilators for the preliminary examinations in 1977, because we asked the school to trust us, and the school did. The teachers, as at other schools, left a deep imprint on our minds— from the hair-raising stories of Khandubhai at Montessori, to the music of Narayan Jogalekar, the precise teaching of Jer Gheyara, and the lively classes of Dinesh Buch and Ramesh Joshi. Why tinker with it? Bert Lance, an official in the Jimmy Carter administration, once said: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Our school has been a bit like that. But then this is shining India, with investment not only in bricks and mortar, but also in overhauling the curriculum to International Baccalaureate and the General Certificate of Secondary Education. But if I reflect back on the school’s alumni, we didn’t do too badly without those frills: Alumni, I recall, include the scholar on erotic art, Devangana Desai; corporate lawyer Bijesh Thakker; banker Falguni Nayar; mountaineering pioneer Harish Kapadia; stockbroker Hemendra Kothari; figurative painter Ila Pal; musician Vanraj Bhatia; Bollywood and Guja ra ti s ta ge actor s Satish Shah, Deepak Gheewala, Siddharth Randeria and Shammi Kapoor; cricket commentator Anand Setalvad and broadcasters Amin Sayani and Hamid Sayani; and scores of diamond-trading Shahs, Mehtas and Bhansalis. There are many more. Gandhi once said: “I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.” The New Era School taught us how to be proud as Indians, and yet be world citizens. Ami Kantawala, an alumnus who teaches art in New York, says: “Those principles and philosophies of Gandhi and Tagore need to be kept vibrant and reframed in the present context of education without losing the history of the institution.” It is still not too late for the Aditya Birla Group to discover the roots of the magnificent institution they have acquired. Salil Tripathi started Montessori at the New Era School in 1964, and obtained his Secondary School Certificate in 1977. He writes the fortnightly column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint, and the travel column Detours for Lounge. Write to lounge@livemint.com

UNDER 15 | M VENKATESH

A dragon drama Three Viking adventurers dodge dragons, a murderous tribe and a ferocious librarian

f you are a dragon lover, this is a blast right up your street. Nearly 200 pages of adventure and 50 pages of dragon profiles and the Dragonese dictionary at the end provide non-stop, rollicking entertainment. Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III (to give Hiccup his full name), heir to the Hairy Hooligan Tribe, is a Viking. Next in line to the throne of his father Stoick the Vast, Hiccup is spending the year pirate training (the Vikings, as everyone knows, are fierce sea warriors). The story starts with Hiccup celebrating his 12th birth- A Hero’s Guide to day in a strange manner—hang- Deadly Dragons: ing on to a windy, narrow win- By Cressida Cowell, dow ledge 300ft in the air. Hodder Children’s Books, Giving him company are his 250 pages; Rs195. best buddies—Fishlegs, a fellow-Hooligan, and Camicazi, daughter of Big-Boobied Bertha, the chief of the Bog Burglar Tribe. Rewind to the day when the three return from the Annual Burglary Competition to find that Hiccup’s pet dragon, Toothless, has eaten three-quarters of a leg of King Stoick the Vast’s magnificent wooden throne (dragons love eating wood). Predictably, Stoick takes a tumble when he sits on it. To make matters worse, the furious King had discovered earlier that morning that Hiccup has written a book, A Hero’s Guide to Deadly Dragons. In a kingdom where reading or writing is banned, this is sacrilege. All books in the land, except one, had been locked up in the Meathead Public Library, which was guarded by the terrible Hairy Scaly Librarian and his bloodthirsty band of Meathead Warriors and Driller Dragons (they do what their names suggest). The only book the Hooligans worship is How to Train a Dragon—unfortunately, in his greed, Toothless has eaten this up along with the throne’s leg. The punishment for this is banishment from the kingdom. Camicazi, Hiccup and Fishlegs think up the only plan that can save them: steal the second copy of How to Train a Dragon from the towering Meathead Public Library. They enlist the services of the Stealth Dragon (it can become invisible and, like a chameleon, change colours to merge into the background it flies in), which has been stolen from Madguts the Murderous, king of the Murderous Tribe. Stormfly, Camicazi’s pet dragon, helps them find their way around the labyrinth of the library. The three adventurers land up in the library, which is infested with more dangerous dragons. Complicating matters is the fact that Madguts and his murderous colleagues are on their trail. And just when they are about to sneak out with the booty, Hairy Scaly Librarian appears with his two swords to finish them off. Trapped and cornered, Camicazi, Hiccup and Fishlegs try to think of a way out. Do they have a chance? The first book in the extremely popular Hiccup series, How to Train Your Dragon, has sold around 100,000 copies and has been published in some 30 languages. A film on it is set to release next year. The writer is the editor of Heek, a children’s magazine. Write to lounge@livemint.com

AFP

LEARNING CURVE

GOURI DANGE

NO SEX IN FRONT OF THE BABY

am the mother of a 17-month child. As we do not have a separate cot or room for him, he sleeps with us in the same bed. My husband and I generally make love after he has slept but there are times when he wakes up and stares at us strangely. Please advise if it is appropriate for us to continue like this. I am always in a dilemma and it is affecting my relationship with my husband. I am not as comfortable making love any more as I fear that this might negatively impact my child’s psychology. Well, many parents confidently state

about this issue: “They don’t understand anything till they are older”. I beg to differ. I wouldn’t assume that—it seems only a convenient assumption that “babies don’t register such things”. And, particularly, if the child is staring right at you, I think you definitely need to take the action elsewhere. First, it needs to be something that both you and your husband should address together. Too many men are impatient with their wife’s hesitation on this front, and take it as a personal slight and rejection. Time for your husband to grow up, now that he is a

Under covers: Keep your child away from the bed, and get her a cot. father. How your having sex in the same room affects the baby is his problem too, isn’t it? And make no mistake, it does affect babies. Many Western parenting experts and websites state that having sex with a

baby in the room is not an issue at all. “Don’t worry about having sex while the baby is in the same room. She won’t have a clue what’s going on,” many of them say confidently. However, psychiatrist and counsellor clinics are overflowing with people who, as babies and toddlers, simply could not process what they witnessed. It has usually led to a deep-rooted fear/anger/disgust with one or the other parent. An important point here is, if you are planning to be open and easy about your body, nudity, talk about sex, physical display of affection between husband and wife, etc., in your future life with your child, there is some (vague) justification for your having sex in the room just now. However, most Indian families are so very puritanical and unwilling to be easy about any of those things that a child then finds it even more difficult to process what he or she has seen in the bedroom between the parents during his or her

early years. Of course, in our overpopulated country, with frequently cramped living conditions, many children perforce witness the sexual act in some form at some time. However, since you wrote in and are aware that this could be a problem, and are also increasingly uncomfortable with it, you need to stop. The child being in the same bed as you is a real no-no. If possible, get him a cot. And you and your husband could think of other places in the house to use. Think of going away on a weekend together, leaving your baby with one of your parents or any willing family member, so that you can be fully available physically and emotionally to each other for a while, outside of your home situation and certainly away from your baby. Gouri Dang is the author of The ABCs of Parenting. Send in your queries to Gouri at learningcurve@livemint.com

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009

Insider PICKS

Flower arrangement Floral designs and patterns can lift the mood like little else B Y M ELISSA A . B ELL melissa.b@livemint.com

····························

u Lemon chiffon tray: By

Tracy Porter at Good Earth, Khan Market, and Select Citywalk mall, New Delhi; and Raghuvanshi Mills compound, Mumbai, Rs3,500. p Viviana cake plate: At Good

Earth, Khan Market, and Select Citywalk mall, New Delhi; and Raghuvanshi Mills compound, Mumbai, Rs4,800. u Steel

q Rickshaw seat:

At Lola’s World, Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi, Rs50,000.

u Curtain fabric:

handpainted jars: At Moon River, Defence Colony, New Delhi, Rs9,095 (small), Rs19,265 (large).

‘Bunches’ curtain fabric, at Atmosphere stores in Bangalore, Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Gurgaon, Rs2,400 a metre.

p Upholstery: u Coffee table: At

PHOTOGRAPHS

Address Home, Raghuvanshi Mills compound, Mumbai; and Hauz Khas Village, New Delhi, Rs45,000.

HARIKRISHNA KATRAGADDA AND R AJ K UMAR/M INT

Paradise blooms A Swedish architect makes Quranic designs blossom in two new gardens B Y G OVIND D HAR ···························· rchitects in West Asia usually make headlines when their skyscrapers of glass and steel alter the dusty Arabian skyline. Not so with Lucie Touma, a Swedish architect and landscape artist, who is bucking the trend by designing two educational Quranic gardens based on the principles of Islamic design and teachings, and flora conservation. “The aim of these gardens is to link cultural heritage with biodiversity,” she says. In 2006, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco) announced its intention to help preserve the indigenous plant species of the Arab region by launching an Interdisciplinary Quranic Botanic Gardens Project, which would “facilitate cultures inspired by the Holy Book of Islam, to protect the environment and encourage biological diversity in the Per-

sian Gulf and Arab countries”. Unesco selected Touma for this project when she put forward her concepts for a Quranic garden, backed by the research of Benno Boer, a German botanist who works with Unesco. Listening to her speak of Arabic culture, one wonders how the Swede developed such a passion for it. “I grew up in Stockholm, but I have Lebanese blood,” she says. And Touma’s childhood was filled with tales from the Arabian Nights, of travelling Bedouin and mysteries of other worlds nestled among dunes and date palms. “The Arabic language, and the Quran itself, is written with such poetry and majesty, it is a perfect example of the beauty in Arab tradition and culture.” Touma’s gardens for Sharjah and Doha (work on this project started in March) are both linked by aspects of botanical conservation and Arabian heritage, but are based on separate facets of the Quran. “The Sharjah design is based on the Islamic concept of heaven or paradise and the Doha project is based on symbolism, geometric form, numbers and their significance in the Holy Quran,” she explains. The conceptual designs

‘Basil’ upholstery fabric, at Atmosphere stores in Bangalore, Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, and Gurgaon, Rs2,980 a metre.

between the UAE and London doing projects for private clients. “Architecture for me has always been about people, nature and art all together, so I moved to Dubai in 2005 and set up my practice.” Touma believes that there’s no sense in designing anything that just looks nice without a deeper meaning to its construction. “The medicine house will allow people to learn about natural flora Full circle: An illustration of the proposed Quranic Botanic Gardens in Sharjah. that pr ovide home remedies for common present a cornucopia of botani- walkway bridge and dotting the ailments. The poetry corner will cal attractions and recreational vast stretch of spaces are a cafe- let people express themselves features that are couched in teria, a conservatory, a library, a using texts or their own poetry. sprawling flora. In the Sharjah photo gallery and a medicine We are also trying to revive the garden, light and airy archways house. “I wanted everyone to be old tradition of storytelling where lead on to lush green lawns and able to take something away performers will be invited to tell sandstone pathways. The encir- from the gardens—from young tales with lessons or insights into cling wall and interior structures people to old and that too from life and the Quran.” are designed in the classical any religion,” explains Touma. The gardens use natural or Islamic style with Quranic verses “The garden in Sharjah is circu- recyclable materials where possiand the 99 names of Allah undu- lar with eight axes and four ble—walls made from reinforced lating in relief works. entrances. A 15m-high spiral timber, seats and benches made Running water is a prominent tower in the centre (with a sign of mud, rock and wood, reed and f e a t u r e o f t h e g a r d e n w i t h on top which will indicate) the straw mats on the café floors and springs issuing from walls and direction of Mecca, and will renewable energy. “The gardens weaving through the complex in allow people to get aerial views will aim to feature all 52 plant ordered streams that finally of the entire garden, as well as a species mentioned in the Quran burst into fountains at the cen- hedge maze designed like a and the Hadith,” Touma says. tre. An amphitheatre and open- verse from the Quran.” air poetry café lie just beyond a In the 1990s, Touma travelled Write to lounge@livemint.com

YOUR ISLAMIC GARDEN u Think symmetry: Historically,

Islamic gardens and their features are symmetrical in their layout, with designs based on nature and cosmology such as the stars, the moon, plant life and animals. u Water is a must: Water

features are important to Islamic gardens, usually included as rectangular bodies of water in the main area of a garden, and as fountains and springs. Often, four rivulets meet in a central space. The rivulets symbolize the rivers of paradise, which represent water, milk, honey and wine. u Classic motifs: Builtup

structures in such gardens are for the provision of shade and usually bear intricate, complex and fine relief work, such as calligraphic verses from the Quran, arabesque designs and stylized classical motifs based on flowers, trees, birds and stars. u Incorporate perfume: The

importance of scent in Islamic gardens is substantial, with fragrant plants, trees and bushes included in the landscape.

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009

Style K

TREND TRACKER

Uniformed civilians

Michael Jackson and his insigniacovered jackets inspired the military fashion movement of the 1980s. With epaulettes, badges, camouflage prints and berets, designers salute the military look

C E RA

Kunal Rawal: Militarystyle beret, Rs1,800, and brown military jacket for men with epaulettes and a badge embellishment, Rs17,900, at Dstress Retail Bungalow, No. 125 Gulmohar Road, Juhu, Mumbai. t

B Y R ACHANA N AKRA rachana.n@livemint.com

s.Oliver: Watch with camouflage print strap, at Ambience Mall, Gurgaon; Mega Mall, Mumbai; and Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi, approx. Rs2,999. t

························

ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP

P.U.N.K.: Steel police helmet with foam lining, Rs3,999, and camouflage belt, Rs399, at Select Citywalk mall, Saket, New Delhi. pq

D&G: Milan Fashion Week, Fall/Winter 2009. t

Chanel: ParisMoscou PreFall 2009. u

Trendsetter: Michael Jackson embraced the military look in the 1980s.

MP A R E Prashant Verma: Wills Lifestyle Fashion Week, Fall/Winter 2009. t

Chanel: ‘Romanov’ bag, in wool and felt leather with metal brooches, at The Imperial, New Delhi, Rs2.69 lakh. KARL LAGERFELD

Louis Vuitton: Keepall from the Monogramouflage collection, available on request at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Mumbai; UB City mall, Bangalore; and The Oberoi, New Delhi, Rs1.08 lakh. u

Little Shilpa: Lakme Fashion Week, Fall/Winter 2009. t

Clock in

With so many celebrities endorsing brands, can you recognize the wrist that wears the watch? B Y R ACHANA N AKRA rachana.n@livemint.com

····························

1. ABHISHEK BACHCHAN

A. TAG HEUER

2. KARAN JOHAR

B. TITAN

3. SHAH RUKH KHAN

C. LONGINES

4. AISHWARYA RAI BACHCHAN

D. MORELLATO

5. AAMIR KHAN

E. TISSOT

6. NEIL NITIN MUKESH AND PREITY ZINTA

F. OMEGA

7. DEEPIKA PADUKONE

G. TIMOND

ANSWERS 1F, 2G, 3A, 4C, 5B, 6D, 7E

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009

Business Lounge VINITA BALI

Return of the native Family pressures and the challenge of resuscitating a classic Indian brand finally drew turnaround expert Bali back to India B Y V ENKATESHA B ABU venkatesha.b@livemint.com

···························· ritannia Industries Ltd’s large, old-style verdant campus, spread over 5 acres, is a prime piece of real estate and sits on one of Bangalore’s key arterial roads. Unlike the city’s cramped, new glassand-chrome technology company offices, Britannia’s lowslung, roomy old buildings are a relief to the eye. With the airport shifting away to the outskirts at Devanahalli, the traffic flow on this important road is much smoother. This is what Vinita Bali has done at Britannia too—unclogged the arteries of the company by getting growth back and exiting joint ventures that proved to be a drag on its potential. After a torrid growth phase in the late 1990s, Britannia, led by former honcho Sunil Alagh, was bogged down in a quagmire. Much of the turmoil could be traced back to Alagh’s style of functioning and the company’s bitter spats with various partners. Alagh ran the company as a fiefdom and eventually left Britannia under a hail of allegations after differences cropped up with the owners, including industrialist Nusli Wadia. Britannia is the crown jewel in Wadia’s empire, and for close to 18 months after Alagh’s departure, it drifted without proper leadership. National and regional players were eating into Britannia’s market share. When Bali joined the company in January 2005, Britannia was well and truly on the ropes. The cookie had all but crumbled. Wadia’s choice of Bali to run

Britannia was a surprise, largely because in the past, she had run multi-billion-dollar divisions for The Coca-Cola Co., was marketing chief for its key brand Coke, and had stayed away from India for 16 years despite numerous lucrative offers. However, Wadia convinced Bali to take up the challenge of turning Britannia’s fortunes around. I meet Bali for lunch on the beautiful Britannia campus, in order to accommodate her schedule. Bali walks in with her disarming smile and we move to a large dining room where a vegetarian meal awaits us. Naturally, dessert is cakes produced by the company. Bali says she hails from a “typical educated middle-class family” with a well-read mother whose family had moved to India after Partition. “My father was the director at Air Headquarters at the ministry of defence and a very cerebral guy. He wouldn’t talk much about his job, and dinner conversations would revolve around the latest book we had read.” She, however, credits her mother for her

Sometimes quick decisions need to be taken and one has to rely on gut too and not just on numbers

CURRICULUM VITAE

VINITA BALI BORN

11 November 1955

EDUCATION

Bachelor’s degree in economics from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University. MBA from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS), Bombay University. Postgraduate degree in business and economics from Michigan State University

CURRENT DESIGNATION

Managing director, Britannia Industries Ltd

WORK PROFILE

Started her career as a management trainee at Voltas Ltd. Looked after Cadbury’s operations in Nigeria and South Africa. Was worldwide marketing director of CocaCola responsible for Coke’s global strategy. Jointly ran an international consultancy before returning to India to turn Britannia’s fortunes around

ONE ACT

Ace movie director Mani Ratnam was a classmate at JBIMS. Bali starred in a play, ‘Mixed Doubles’, directed by Ratnam at IIT Bombay’s college festival Mood Indigo. The play won the best play, best director and the best actor award

lifelong interest in music, theatre and dance. “Both of them complemented my right and left brain development.” And despite a strong focus on education, Bali found time to train for 13 years in Kathak—“though I don’t dance now”. The frail-looking Bali says she was a good hockey player (centre forward) and played other games such as badminton, basketball and, till very recently, tennis. She recounts being an ardent sympathizer of Communist ideology: “That is, till I joined Jamnalal Bajaj and moved to Bombay,” she laughs, referring to the prominent business school. During campus placements in 1977, she decided to join Voltas, a Tata group company. “Women then weren’t recruited into marketing roles and some companies actually told me as much,” says Bali. One reason was that it was difficult for women marketers on travel assignment to small towns to find reliable accommodation. “In my sales and marketing job, when I visited places like Lucknow or Kanpur, I would stay with friends or relatives.” Voltas was then setting up a consumer products group and a programme to nurture and market products of small Indian companies. One of the first brands to be launched was Rasna, a soft-drink concentrate created by entrepreneur Piruz Khambatta. “O&M (Ogilvy and Mather) was the agency for us then. As brand manager for Rasna I worked with the likes of Usha Bhandarkar who did the campaign for us, Roda Mehta was the media person, Mani Ayer and other such legends. I got an insight into branding, advertising and creativity, which helped me so much later in my career.” Rasna went on to become a roaring success. This attracted the attention of Cadbury, which offered her a job as brand manager for its confectionary business. Along with Deepak Shourie, the marketing manager of the company, Bali says they managed to triple the company’s sales in three years. In 1983, when a “fully paid” one-year scholarship to Michigan State University was offered to Bali, she grabbed it (she even harboured an ambition to do a PhD and become a professor and teach). What helped the decision was Cadbury’s willingness to give her a year’s sabbatical with a promise to hire her back after the course. Later, Bali was posted at Bournville, at the Cadbury headquarters in England. Here she was involved in the successful launch of Wispa, an aerated chocolate. “More than anything, I loved the location as Bournville is 22km from Stratford-uponAvon, where I watched every possible Shakespeare play. I gave full vent to my theatre interests.” After a two-year stint, she returned to India. In 1991, Bali says she got an opportunity to work with Cadbury in Nigeria, where her mandate was to turn the company around. So she says she took what seemed like a heretical decision and advised the company to pull out of chocolates and just focus on the sugar confectionary business—Bournvita, cocoa and drinking chocolate. “The Nigerian stint taught me how sometimes quick decisions need to be taken and one has to rely on gut too and not just on

It’s still got crunch: Bali’s challenge is to take Britannia back to its historic market leader position.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

numbers,” she says. In spite of the setbacks, Cadbury that year managed to register volume, value and market share growth in Nigeria. Bali acquired the reputation of a “turnaround expert”. Cadbury promptly sent her to turn around the South Africa operation. In 1994, she was recruited as the worldwide marketing director for Coke by chief marketing

officer Sergio Zyman, who eventually became a close friend and mentor. “I remember when the call came and Sergio made me this offer, the phone fell from my hand,” reminisces Bali. Bali quickly rose through the ranks and became vice-president of marketing for Latin America and “could order the corporate Gulfstream jet to fly on business anywhere”. In 1999,

Bali relocated to Chile as president of the Andean division, which had sales in excess of $1 billion (around Rs5,000 crore now). By 2001, she was reporting directly to the chairman. By then, Bali says, Coke had evolved. “The Coke I joined was a company which could do no wrong and by the time I left, it could do nothing right.” She, however, says that the opportunities and learning the company gave her were immense. Also, her mentor Zyman had floated his own consultancy and requested her to join him, which she did as a managing principal and head of business strategy practice. So what made her come back to India? “It was family. My mother was debilitated by a stroke in 2005. She had sacrificed so much for me. While I was continually visiting India, I wanted to be close to her. So after rejecting several calls for positions in India, finally I decided to accept the Britannia one.” Bali believes it was serendipity. “I have never seriously planned anything. Most things happen to me by chance and happenstance.”

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009

Love GENDER

How much sharing is too much? ILLUSTRATION

ALISON SEIFFER/WSJ

Men hide their feelings and women talk too much about them; both have a lot to learn from each other

B Y E LIZABETH B ERNSTEIN ···························· few weeks ago, Jane Wilcox and her live-in boyfriend had a blowout argument over a kitchen sponge that was left in the sink. There was ranting and accusations of shoddy housekeeping. He packed a bag and prepared to spend the night in a second home on their property. She called one of her boyfriend’s buddies and asked him to come over and calm him down. When the pal arrived, the two men took beers out to the porch. “They sat huddled together like they were planning a Nato conference,” says Wilcox, 52, who lives in the mountains outside of Phoenix, Arizona. “I would watch and see them both nod, as if they understood each other. One would lean back and take a heavy sigh, the other would follow suit. Then they’d huddle into each other again.” The topic of their big discussion? Motorcycle oil. It’s no big secret that men don’t share their emotions easily. Numerous research studies—and millions of baffled women—can attest to that. But is it really so harmful if men want to keep their feelings hidden? And don’t women share too much, yammering on about their husbands to friends, co-workers and sometimes, even strangers? The answer to both questions is an emphatic yes. Men and women could learn a thing or two from each other about when to talk about problems in their marriages or romantic relationships. It might help for men to reveal more to others outside the relationship—and for women to zip it a bit more. There are deep-rooted reasons why we share the way we do. Men don’t want to appear vulnerable (why else won’t they ask for directions when they’re lost?). They are raised to be strong, after all, not to appear sad, scared or needy. Women, by contrast, are taught it’s okay to be emotional. “Women can go to their friends and talk and ask, ‘Does he love me? What do you think?’,” says Charles T. Hill, a professor of psychology at Whittier College in California. “If men went to their friends and said, ‘Do you think she loves me?’ they would say to get a grip.” Men also may clam up to protect their wives or significant others, worrying that their buddies might be insensitive, gossip or think less of their partners. They also may not want to get themselves wound up because it’s hard for them to wind down. Or, as a male friend of mine puts it: “Men don’t talk about their feelings with themselves, let alone other men. They usually have something to feel guilty about, even if it’s just a bad thought or flirtation, so why look too closely?” Biology plays a part, too. Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, have shown women respond to stress by releasing oxytocin, a feel-good hormone that produces a calming effect and helps them bond with children and others. Oestrogen enhances its effects (men, too, release oxytocin in response to stress, but male hormones minimize its effects).

It might help for men to reveal more to others outside the relationship— and for women to zip it a bit more

Women don’t need a study to confirm that they feel better from talking over their problems. Sure, they may get an oxytocin boost. But they know they will also receive empathy, possible solutions and maybe even a reality check. Sometimes in the middle of an argument with her husband of 26 years, Marina Kamen, 50, who lives in New York, will go online and chat with a friend on Facebook, or even with a stranger on a website for working moms. She believes that this prevents the quarrel from escalating, and that it can help her put her life in perspective. “Many single women will tell me, ‘It’s hard out here. Do you think you will find someone better?’,” says Kamen, who, with her husband, owns a business that produces motivational fitness recordings and music. “Then we will get in a dialogue about what my husband is like and all his good qualities.” Her husband, Roy, 56, says he tends not to discuss his marriage with his friends. “It’s a guy thing,” he says.

He’s not alone. In many cases, men wait until it’s too late to ask for support or advice from their friends about serious relationship issues. “Men will talk when there’s nothing left to lose,” says Susan Pease Gadoua, a therapist in San Rafael, California. By not opening up earlier, she says, they miss out on a chance to garner support—or even just a little reassurance that others have been there, too. Julius Nagy, a 48-year-old father of five who is going through a divorce, says he rarely talked to friends about financial troubles in his 16-year marriage, both to appear strong and to avoid conflict. Because he had no emotional outlet, he often ended up in yelling matches with his wife, which only exacerbated their problems, he says. “The big reason it didn’t work in the end is that I kept bottling this up,” says Nagy, a former product developer in the bedding industry who lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His wife couldn’t be reached for comment. Tony Dye’s 24-year marriage had problems for years, but only

recently—now that he’s getting a divorce—has he started to tell his friends what’s really going on: He’s been having an affair. “I think that exposing what’s been going on in my life and getting some feedback earlier would have helped,” says Dye, 54, an information technology consultant in Atlanta, Georgia. “I’ve had guys in the last year very lovingly beat me up over this relationship, saying, ‘Tony, you can’t have anything to do with her. You need to be working on things with your wife.’” His wife couldn’t be reached for comment. You should be judicious about where you turn for help, if you seek it outside of your relationship. Talk too much, and your words may come back to haunt you. Just ask Kimberly, a 42-yearold mom in the Midwest who asked that her last name not be used. When her marriage hit a rough patch last year, she complained to everyone she could find: her mom, friends, co-workers, housekeeper, husband’s best friend and two radio stations.

She says the attention was a relief—at the time. But now that she and her husband have patched up their problems, they have a new one: Some of the people she carped to have ostracized her husband. “It’s an awkward situation,” Kimberly says. “To this day, he’s not comfortable around my family.” Wilcox, of the sponge spat, wonders if she shouldn’t talk less, too. While her boyfriend and his buddy debated the virtues of synthetic versus natural bike oils, she called a girlfriend and analysed every detail of the fight she had had with him. “What they had accomplished in 20 minutes took us 2 hours,” says Wilcox, whose boyfriend could not be reached for comment. The next morning, her boyfriend met her in the kitchen and offered her a cup of coffee. “End of subject. End of tantrum. No apology. No talk. It’s as if the entire incident had not happened,” she says. “But he did change the oil in his bike to synthetic. It runs much smoother now.” Write to wsj@livemint.com

L10 COVER

COVER L11

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHS

Nearly every Tamil star has a fan club that celebrates and deifies him. We met three such devotees to know how the ‘rasigar mandram’ phenomenon thrives in Chennai’s moviedom B Y S AMANTH S UBRAMANIAN samanth.s@livemint.com

······························ ust how raucously the release of a new Tamil film has been celebrated can often be gauged by the size of the puddle of milk at the entrance of a theatre. The bigger that puddle on opening day, the more the milk that has been expended in the ritual shower of the hero’s giant cardboard cut-out, glorification verging on deification. In the film’s release, the distinctive stamp of the rasigar mandrams—literally, “associations of fans”, a uniquely Tamil phenomenon—is everywhere. The young man pouring the milk is a card-carrying member; so are the young men holding his ladder steady, and those setting off firecrackers, and those filling the theatres for the first few days, dancing and whistling and throwing money at their hero on the screen. Beneath all that devotion to chaotic merrymaking, though, the rasigar mandrams are surprisingly wellorganized marketing strategy bodies (who, after all, simply happens to have a few kilolitres of milk on his person at a film premiere). They volunteer their time to manufacture posters and high expectations; less often, they volunteer their energy to

engage in fisticuffs with rival mandrams. And invariably, the large mandrams are entirely male affairs, often fuelled by the very masculine activities of communal drinking and the hero-worship of machismo. Funded as they are by the actors they deify, mandrams exist for nearly every star; even a first-time actor, an industry insider grumbles, “will have an All India Rasigar Mandram present at the premiere”. “When I wrote my first song in 1977, four people came up to me and said: ‘Give us Rs25 apiece, and we’ll go to the theatre for your film, spread out, and when your name comes on the screen, we’ll cheer and whistle’,” says Randor Guy, a popular film historian and writer of screenplays. “I had to tell them that I didn’t really want a Randor Guy Rasigar Mandram.” But the rasigar mandrams are more than just hype machines with a weakness for buying dairy products in bulk. “When mandrams first began coming up in the 1960s, they were a part of the political scenery,” Guy says, mentioning in particular the mandram of M.G. Ramachandran, the dashing film idol who ascended to the chief ministership of Tamil Nadu. “Some mandrams claim to be social welfare units, although how much social welfare

they do, I don’t know.” Today’s mandrams are still political animals by nature, waiting only to hear the word from the star of choice before they leap with a roar into the fray. When “Captain” Vijayakanth launched a political party in 2005, the cadre of the All India Vijayakanth Fans Welfare Association turned into a mouthwateringly captive base of voters. By what seemed like the most natural extension of duties, the association’s general secretary, S. Ramu Vasanthan, became the general secretary of the party. The most muscular of these creatures is the All India Rajinikanth Fans Association, a constellation of roughly 100,000 fan clubs that waits breathlessly to be told by Rajinikanth how to vote and waits even more anaerobically for the day when he will enter politics. (This year, in expansive, laissezfaire spirit, Rajinikanth asked fans to vote as they liked, but he has indicated nothing about his own electoral ambitions.) The mandrams, moreover, are politicized as well as political. Last year, when Sathya Narayana resigned from his position as the president of Rajinikanth’s association, the news was reported with the barely restrained glee of film jour-

nalists who know the whole story but cannot tell. One website claimed that Narayana had been “rested”, the quotation marks vehemently inserted and quite at odds with Narayana’s plaintive statement that he was suffering from kidney failure. Perhaps because of that controversy, Narayana’s replacement, a former classmate of Rajinikanth’s named V.M. Sudhakar, refused politely to talk to Lounge. “I am only here temporarily, and really, the head of our association is now Rajini sir himself,” he said. “You should just speak directly to him.” In the vast universe of feats that are easier said than done, “just” speaking directly to Rajinikanth is at the uppermost end of the scale, and Sudhakar knows that as well as anyone. In a way, the nominal presidents of these associations enjoy a rare, heady brand of power: On the one hand, they have unparalleled access to the star, and on the other, they command the allegiance of the millions of fans under their purview. In another way, though, this power is severely circumscribed: Most presidents won’t make even the simplest move without first having it sanctioned by their hero. The hand that rocks the box office rules their world.

SHARP IMAGE

KOVAI R THANGAVELU

HEAD, KAMAL HASSAN NARPANI IYAKKAM

n 1979, when Thangavelu and some of his college friends wanted to start an official Kamal Hassan rasigar mandram, they approached the actor for permission. “Kamal sir said that he didn’t want a mandram, but he suggested the idea of a service or welfare organization,” Thangavelu remembers. So that same week, the group went to a slum in Coimbatore, where they lived, to clear ditches and pick up garbage. “We took photos of the entire process, and we showed them to Kamal sir,” Thangavelu says. “Only after that did he give us the permission to start the organization.” Thangavelu still lives in Coimbatore, but once a month—“on the 28th, wherever in the world Kamal sir is at the time”—he comes to Chennai to set up a videoconference between the star and the iyakkam’s (organization’s) district-level presidents and secretaries. In south India, Thangavelu estimates, there are 15,000 fan clubs, with a total membership of 800,000. “And our president is Kamal sir,” Thangavelu insists. “I am just nominally in charge.” Thangavelu slipped into this

“nominal” position in 1989. Every day, he puts in 2 hours of work for the iyakkam, responding to emails or coordinating blood donation drives or whatever else the day demands. But his full-time career involves running a cable television network as well as a jewellery wholesale business in Coimbatore. “Kamal sir always tells us to take care of our own work first before attending to the fan affairs,” he says. The blood donation drive is the iyakkam’s signature activity, so much so that, in Coimbatore’s hospitals, patients needing blood are first directed to the iyakkam’s blood banks. So far, its members have donated nearly 400,000 litres of blood. “Kamal sir was the first to donate, way back in 1985, and of course, at that time, we just followed him,” Thangavelu says. “If he’d shaved his head bald, we’d have shaved our heads bald. He gave blood, so we gave blood. We only realized the utility of it much, much later.” From a cabinet, R. Satyanarayan, an earnest volunteer, pulls out stacks of little books that list the iyakkam’s blood donors across Tamil Nadu, classified by blood group and, in many cases, with printed mobile phone numbers.

Satyanarayan saw his first Kamal Hassan film when he was nine years old, and he finally saw the star in person at the premiere of the cult comedy classic Michael Madana Kamarajan. “By which time, I had already set up a chapter of the iyakkam in my hometown of Rasipuram,” Satyanarayan says. Satyanarayan reserves nearly as much respect for Thangavelu as he does for Hassan. “I met Thangavelu sir when I was 12 years old, when we’d gone from Rasipuram to Coimbatore to see if we could set up our own chapter,” he says. “Kamal sir consults him on so many things. They talk virtually every day.” At which Thangavelu smiles bashfully, murmurs self-deprecating things, and deftly turns the conversation back to the actor. “Kamal sir could have turned this into a political organization so easily if he’d wanted to, but he preferred to keep it a social welfare organization,” he says. Then the official mask slips, and for a moment Thangavelu channels the pure awe of the true fan: “He’s so talented. He can do anything in cinema—he can sing, he can dance, he can direct. He really does things with a difference.”

SA CHANDRASEKHAR

HONORARY PRESIDENT, ILAYA THALAPATHI VIJAY NARPANI IYAKKAM

f all the members of the 37,000 fan clubs belonging to the Ilaya Thalapathi Vijay Narpani Iyakkam, Chandrasekhar can accurately claim to have known Vijay the longest: right from the moment of Vijay’s birth, at a government hospital in Chennai. “That was all I could afford at the time,” Chandrasekhar says. If it is an odd feeling to head your own son’s fan association, Chandrasekhar does not betray it. He insists, in fact, on calling them “followers” rather than “fans”, an emphasis that hints vaguely at the political. “In the last five years, since I have been in this post, this is how I have tried to mould the association,” he says. “I want them to think beyond cinema. They have to be useful to society even on the days of the year when no film is releasing. There’s more to life than just whistling or pouring milk on cut-outs.” Before Vijay became a superstar, Chandrasekhar was a film director: “I was directing or producing four movies a year.” His cinema had the stamp of a pedant, and he admits as much. “My films could sometimes be dry, but that was only to make people think,” he says. “I wanted to spread a certain social awareness, because in Tamil Nadu, what people see in the movies, they translate into real life.” In the last six or seven years,

Chandrasekhar has occupied himself so thoroughly with his son’s fandom that he has managed to direct only three movies. “I travel a lot. I’m off to Erode this weekend to donate four computers to a government school, for instance,” he says. “When I go on these projects, I always notice that Vijay’s fans call me appa (Tamil for father) too. Even in the letters he gets, people write in asking: ‘How is our father?’ Not ‘your father,’ but ‘our father’.” Unlike other heads of rasigar mandrams who shun all political talk for fear that it might be mistaken for the views of their leaders, Chandrasekhar returns repeatedly to the subject. The impression that, over the longer term, he is girding his son’s loins for a political career is inescapable, particularly when people familiar with the filial dynamic say that Vijay does nothing without first consulting his father (“That’s a good thing,” Chandrasekhar says. “It is a sign that you defer to your parents and elders”). “You know, when Vijay was first applying to kindergarten in various schools, one school asked on the form for his religion, his caste, and so on. For every one of those categories, I simply wrote ‘Indian’,” Chandrasekhar says. “There are parties now for every caste and every religion in India. And that is not a good thing.”

M ‘SURI’ SURYANARAYANAN

PRESIDENT, ALL INDIA CHIYAN VIKRAM FANS WELFARE ASSOCIATION

he first Vikram movie that Suryanarayanan saw was also the first Vikram movie ever. Back in 1990, when En Kadhal Kanmani released, Suryanarayanan and Vikram were simply friends who had met through their wives, who had studied social work at the same institute. “In his struggling years, he was doing bit roles, and he had a major accident also,” Suryanarayanan says. “Those were tough years.” At the time, Suryanarayanan worked as an office manager for the Minerals and Metals Trading Corp., or MMTC. When Vikram finally attained box-office fame, at the turn of the century, MMTC seemed to be edging towards privatization, and Suryanarayanan was fretting about his job and about the dismal prospect of moving out of Chennai. “At that time, in 2002, Vikram asked me if I would head up his fan association,” he says. “So I took voluntary retirement and jumped right in.” Out of an office papered with posters and photographs of Vikram, Suryanarayanan manages 16,000 fan clubs in the four southern states, each club with a membership of at least 25. In Chennai alone, there are 4,500 Vikram fan clubs. “There’s no regular fees, just a nominal Rs10 to join,” he says. “Then, when a club does any charity work, or

when it puts up banners and posters for a movie release, it does so at its own expense.” The charity work, in the case of Vikram’s mandram, has included sponsoring nearly 50 heart surgeries for children. Although he insists that his position is voluntary, Suryanarayanan works nominally on Vikram’s personal payroll; one member of the club says that Vikram provides Suryanarayanan with a car and pays for his mobile phone bills. For a couple of hours every day, Suryanarayanan comes into the office and potters around. “A lot of letters come in, asking for photos, so I respond to those,” he says. “Sometimes, fans from towns like Trichy or Kanyakumari land up, not even knowing if Vikram is in town, just taking a chance to meet him. So I have to make them happy somehow.” With the air of one narrating a parable, Suryanarayanan tells the story of a fan who recently visited Chennai from Tirupur with a single intent. “He came just to show his support to Vikram by painting the outer compound walls of the office,” he says. The vivid murals, still glowing from the freshness of their paint, depict Vikram in assorted cinematic poses, and Suryanarayanan gazes upon them with undisguised, almost paternal pride. “Aren’t they terrific?”

L12

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009

Travel PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHEN CUNLIFFE

TONS

Rough and tumble In the Himalayan white waters of the Tons valley, a single command marks the fine line between safety and danger on the rapids B Y S TEPHEN C UNLIFFE ···························· his is a very rocky one, so I need everyone to keep paddling through the rapid. Speed is essential for us to steer and to avoid all the rocks; if it looks bad, then I’ll give you the ‘get down’ command, so just be ready for anything,” yells Rana in an attempt to be heard above the roaring river. Sanjay Singh Rana, our highly capable Aquaterra river guide, is preparing us for what we might expect in the upcoming rapid, Sticky Sarla, as our raft bears down on the noisy white water ahead. Although the rapid is shallow

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

and steep, our enthusiastic team of paddlers is overconfident and dismissive of what appears to be a relatively benign stretch of white water. One minute our raft is zipping through the white water, the next moment it catches on a rock just below the surface and grinds to an abrupt halt. “Brace yourselves,” yells Rana. But it’s too late; our raft’s rapid forward momentum and the sudden unexpected stop cruelly combine to eject one of our hapless bow paddlers over the front of the raft and into the angry white cauldron. There is little margin for error on the Tons, and slow reactions are the difference between the relatively dry safety of the raft and the dangers of an ultra-refreshing, rocky river. Rana reacts quickly, shouting, “Grab the line.” Rajat ‘RookieCookie’ Mathur is already airborne and heading towards the angry river. Luckily, he has the presence of mind to heed Rana’s timely advice and grabs hold of the bowline before disappearing overboard. Rookie is immersed in the icy water but he remains connected to the all-important raft. Fellow bow paddler Arvind Vermani moves across the raft and quickly executes a textbook rescue of the “short swimmer”. After much backslapping and a good deal of high-fiving, we set off again, eager to see what the Tons might throw up around the next corner. Aside from Sticky Sarla (named after the village upstream), we successfully negotiate the remainder of the rapids on the Upper Tons. With Give Me Mori (after Mori village), Sharp Horn (one of the rapids on a long section called the “Horns of the Tons”) and Looking Up Sandhra (so called as it’s below the bridge at Sandhra) all under our belts, confidence returns to our crew. We will need all this self-belief and our newfound experience as we progress to the big rapids of the 35km Middle Tons section of our rafting expedition in the days ahead. The Tons valley cuts through

the Jaunsar Bawar region of Garhwal where the river marks the boundary between Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. The Tons feeds into the Yamuna before ultimately emptying into the Ganga. A glacial-melt river with its frozen source in the 20,720ft Bandarpunch peak, the Tons is a smallmedium volume class IV river with fast-flowing water that could be politely described as bracingly cold. Camp Lunagad, our rafting base camp, is situated barely 100km from the Tibetan border. Although we are repeatedly told that the water levels are particularly low this year, Vaibhav Kala, head guide and owner of Aquaterra, confides in me that the last few seasons have seen decreased precipitation, possibly as a result of global warming or abnormal El Niño conditions. The result is an incredibly bony river that requires well-honed technical skills and teamwork to negotiate. Aside from being shallow and rocky, the river boasts a multitude of obstructions and challenges, such as half-submerged tree trunks and whirlpools in the midst of the churning white water. These obstacles add to the challenge and thrill of the rafting experience. Extremely low water levels have transformed the Tons into what is possibly the most technical river that I have ever run. Kala concurs, “This is arguably the most technical raft trip in the Himalayas and on a shallow, rocky river, there is no substitute for training, technique, timing and teamwork.” Rafting crews need to practise and fine-tune their skills before venturing into the continuous white water trains that dominate long sections of the Middle Tons. This doesn’t mean that you need to be a seasoned rafting junkie to

visit the Tons. The guides spend the first few days drilling everyone—newbies and old hands alike—on the use of safety equipment, the different paddle techniques, and the various paddle commands that they will be using. By the end of this intensive but fun training regime, everyone feels more confident and ready to tackle the river that rafting legend Jack Morison rated as “one of the Top 10 world-class rivers on the planet”. With some big rapids lying in store for us at Khunigad, as well as the infamous Five Minus Rana (honouring an intrepid rafter whose absence nearly went unnoticed) near Tiuni Bazaar, our superstitious guides decide that paying a respectful visit to the local Hanol temple dedicated to Mahasu devta is a prerequisite for our safe passage downstream. Offerings are made to appease the river gods, a goat is slaughtered and tikas applied. We depart Camp Lunagad in bright sunshine ready to tackle the mighty Middle Tons. Our sunny day vanishes within minutes. Gale-force winds come howling up the valley, sending heavy rain clouds racing across the sky. The Tons valley is prone to sudden weather changes, and the occasional storm adds yet another dimension of excitement to the rafting experience. The strong winds neutralize the river current and, at times, it even appears as if the river has reversed its course and decided to flow upstream!

Breaking the waves: (top) Rafts negotiate the Tons rapids; a campsite by the river. The rafts become tough to control and it’s a real challenge manoeuvring them through the rock-strewn river. The roar of the wind drowns Rana’s urgent commands to paddle and we flounder in the midst of the rapids. Within a matter of minutes, though, the storm moves off, the sun reappears and we return unscathed to the tranquil Tons valley. The friendly, smiling faces of inquisitive villagers greet our procession of rafts as we paddle past small villages. When we stop to camp on the riverbank for the night, a large crowd of children gather on the fringe of our camp. They sit quietly and observe the strange goings-on until Rana gets everyone singing and dancing to break the ice. Earlier in the day, the Tons entertained and terrified us in equal measure. Now I’m happy to see we have become a novel source of entertainment to our new found friends. Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILDFRIENDLY RATING

If your child is above 12 and possesses a sense of adventure, rafting would be a great way to spend a holiday.

TRAVEL L13

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

GREEN GETAWAYS

Are you a real nature lover? PHOTOGRAPHS

RAMKI SREENIVASAN

Ecotourism is much more than sexy soft sell. Now, save the world and enjoy your holiday

B Y R AMKI S REENIVASAN ···························· s soon as we stepped into our luxury safari tents, the bellboy switched on a couple of air conditioners. Outside, a strong breeze was blowing from the adjoining forested valley, but the tent was not constructed to exploit it for cooling. The air conditioners were sucking on the electricity grid (powered by coal-burning, inefficient, polluting and greenhouse-gas-emitting machinery), with massive diesel generators as back-up. We had just checked into a premium “ecolodge” in the heart of Bandipur National Park in the Nilgiris. Around 800 million to one billion tourists will travel around the world by the end of this decade— including you and me. They will demand enormous quantities of energy, water and other natural resources to support their holidays, leaving a gigantic footprint of waste, pollution, habitat destruction, carbon dioxide emissions and, frequently, displacement of local people and wildlife. But it doesn’t have to be so. Actually, as travellers and tourists, we can make wiser, more responsible choices of destination, resorts and activities, joining the small but growing band of travellers looking for tourism options with low environmental impact and high social and economic benefits. And no, it’s not just about forgoing clean towels in the interest of “environmental concerns” of hotels that continue to use tonnes of air conditioning. For evidence that sustainable tourism can be both comfortable and stylish, look no further than Our Native Village (www. ournativevillage.com) in Hesaraghatta, on the outskirts of Bangalore. This nature-focused resort has a swimming pool, like any fivestar hotel. But instead of using

Light step: (from above) The dining tent at ShaameSarhad; and the Periyar at Thekkady.

GREEN OR GREENWASH? 10 questions for your hotel u Do you have a written policy on

the environment and local people? u What is your single most important contribution to conservation? u How many people run your green programme? u How do you measure your green success? u What proportion of your employees is local? u What proportion of your managers is local? u What percentage of your produce and services do you source within 25km? u How do you heat/cool your building? u What do you do with your waste water? u What can guests do to help the hotel be more green? Source: www.responsibletravel.com chlorine, its pond-style pool has aquatic plants and carbon filters to clean the water (100% rain-harvested). Most of its electricity comes from solar panels, windmills and biogas, while guests can ride a bullock cart, milk a cow, fly

kites, or play gilli danda or marbles by way of “activities”. The larger focus of the truly green hotels and destinations is on preservation of the local habitat. At the Eaglenest, Arunachal Pradesh, one of Asia’s top biodiversity hot spots, the local Bugun tribal community-run ecotourism venture Vacations for Conservation (www.kaatitours.com) follows a strict leave-no-trace policy with its campsites. Since travellers come largely for the birds, locals have a direct stake in conservation. At Shaam-e-Sarhad (www.hodka.in), close to the Pakistan border in Kutch, Gujarat, the Hodka Village Tourism Committee offers accommodation in indigenous mud huts and tents and serves only vegetarian cuisine.

I’d also include Ecotourism Kerala (www.ecotourismkerala.org), an arm of the state tourism department, among the beacons in the fog: They did an environmental impact assessment, asked the Kerala Forest Research Institute to lay down sustainability parameters and developed ecologically sustainable destinations in Kovalam, Thenmala, Alleppey and Periyar. While I can count only these four sustainable hotels/operators in India, their fundamental principles are eminently replicable. Consider energy management. It’s very easy to supplement grid power with alternative sources such as solar, wind and bio. Water heating can be completely powered by solar energy. And some hotels can turn this into strategy: The ITC

FOOT NOTES | SUMANA MUKHERJEE

A wedding on the Serengeti &B EYOND

Fairytale castles or meteoritical craters—a perfect location that could make your most memorable day even more exciting

n a recent issue, this section noted that hotels were pulling out all the stops to ensure the most memorable honeymoons in the most romantic cities. Now, event managers and travel outfitters are laying out the red carpet at the most stunning locales for a wedding that’ll keep the guests talking till at least the first anniversary. First up: two castles and a luxury golf resort in the Shannon region of Ireland’s west coast. Adare Manor (www.adaremanor.com), The Lodge at Doonbeg (www. doonbeggolfclub.com), and Knappogue Castle are all sprawling properties, but the last is a 15th century construc-

Happily ever after: A wedding at the Ngorongoro Crater rim. tion that possesses all the magic and mysticism associated with the Celtic land. Dream Irish Weddings’ coordinator Michelle McDermott says: “All three (venues) are perfectly appointed and perfectly equipped to turn any occasion into the most memorable… From seamless airport transfers to check-out, absolute event management allows you to relax and take full advantage of the entire region and what the venues have to

offer, safe in the knowledge that an expert team is looking after everything.” The cost? Upwards of €12,000 (around Rs8 lakh) all inclusive for the day, for the bridal couple and very close family and friends. For full details, log on to www.dreamirishwedding.com or contact McDermott at info@dreamirishwedding.com; Tel.: +353-61-633636. From stunning man-made backdrops to ones crafted by nature, here’s another wedding

venue that will make you want to renew your vows (yes, they can organize that too). &Beyond, the high-end luxury adventure tourism company, offers classic safari weddings in the open Bushveld (South Africa), sunset ceremonies overlooking the Great Fish River (South Africa), intimate blessing ceremonies on the Ngorongoro Crater rim (Tanzania)—or, closer home, uniquely tailored affairs at Pashan Garh, Panna, in the heart of Madhya Pradesh. Our vote goes to Ngorongoro: &Beyond’s lodge is perched on the edge of the crater at the eastern edge of the Serengeti, and the bridal party is escorted by Maasai warriors in full regalia (from $2,200, or around Rs1 lakh). After the ceremony, you could have an al fresco lunch served on the floor of the crater itself (from $75 per guest). Rates at the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge range from $655-1,450 (depending on the season) per person per night on a sharing basis. For more details, log on to www.andBeyond.com

Sonar Bangla in Kolkata has implemented energy conservation initiatives such as waste heat recovery, improved pumping systems and better efficiency in the air-conditioning system to become the first hotel in the world to obtain certified emission reductions, also known as carbon credits. Where lighting is concerned, green hotels use LEDs (lightemitting diodes), which are between two and three times more efficient than compact fluorescent lamps and 10 times more so than conventional incandescent bulbs. They not only last longer, but are also free of toxic mercury. Also, because they produce a “cool” light—traditional lighting produces more heat than light—they significantly reduce air-conditioning needs. Toiletries management can be a serious green strategy area for hotels. Already, a number of them have replaced small packaged toiletries—associated with massive costs of packaging, transportation and wastage—with refillable dispensers. Of course, the best green travellers carry their own soap! The construction of the hotel is another factor. As at Shaam-eSarhad, local architecture—nur-

10 ECOFRIENDLY STRATEGIES FOR TRAVELLERS u Fly wise: Plan your trip to

minimize air travel. Stay longer in a destination instead of making many short trips. u Travel light: Pack only what you cannot do without. The lighter your luggage, the lower the resultant greenhouse gas emissions. u Book responsibly: Do check whether your hotel, tour operator or other service providers have documented and reported environmental initiatives to save energy and minimize waste. u Before you leave: Turn off lights and unplug household appliances that can be left unplugged while you are away. u While you are there: Turn off all the lights and air conditioner/heater when you leave your room, and unplug unnecessary appliances. u Get around green: Use public transport. Walk or cycle. Try nonmotorized vehicles. u Eat local: Reduce your “food miles” by choosing restaurants that buy local produce. u Save water: Use minimum water for a shower. Don’t let it run while shaving, brushing or washing. Use the hotel’s linen reuse programme. u Charge your trip sustainably: Avoid appliances that need batteries. If you cannot, get rechargeable batteries. u Offset the unavoidable footprint: Contribute to a credible carbon offsetting programme to compensate for what you’ve depleted. Source: The International Ecoutourism Society tured by local climatic and seasonal conditions—translates into drastically reduced energy usage. Local and easily available building materials (versus imported ones) directly reduce transportation costs and save tonnes of emissions. Finally, consider how the hotel or resort cooks for its guests. All cooking fuel needs can actually be powered completely by biogas, made from the bio-waste from the hotel and its surroundings. Still think it’s impossible to be a green traveller? Ramki Sreenivasan is a Bangalore-based nature photographer and wildlife conservationist. Write to lounge@livemint.com

A steppe in time W

hat’s left to be done after you’ve scoured the depths of the Sharm el Sheikh and climbed Kilimanjaro? If your inner adventurer is yearning for wide open spaces, and glimpses into one of the most unique cultures of the world, join the queue for Mongolia, the newest addition to the destinations offered by Ibex Expeditions. Just back from a trip through the Eastern Gobi desert and the northern Khan Khentii steppes—said to be the birthplace of Gengiz Khan—Ibex founder-director Mandip Singh Soin says he has drawn up the itinerary with an eye to including the varied experiences on offer. Expect two-day treks through the Gobi, camel and horse riding on the steppes, encounters with nomads and a shot at climbing the Zorgol Hairhan rock formations. Besides, you also spend time in Ulaanbaator, the capital, a medieval city that’s seeking its 21st century identity. It costs between $2,900-$3,500 (around Rs1.4 lakh-1.7 lakh) per person. The trip can also include a 33-hour journey on the Trans-Mongolian train from Beijing to the outskirts of Ulaanbaator, which allows an opportunity to witness the changing of wheels just ahead of the international border. Too demanding? Ibex has three other trips lined up: to the IBEX EXPEDITIONS rhododendron forests of Bhutan, the high altitude lakes of Tibet and the rainforests of Borneo. For information, mail ibex@ibexexpeditions. com or call 011-26460244, 26460246. Write to Remote trek: Yak caravans at Khan Khentii. lounge@livemint.com

L14

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009

Books PHOTOGRAPHS

COOK BOOKS

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

Kitchen confidential: (from top) Priya Ramkumar, Meenakshi Ammal’s granddaughterinlaw, carries on the Samaithu Par tradition; Ammal’s home; the original, handwritten book.

The house of food The ‘Samaithu Par’ books, meant for those exiled from their homes, are a testament to the spirit of their creator Meenakshi Ammal

Handed down: In their 15th edition now, the books sell for Rs95 each. B Y S AMANTH S UBRAMANIAN samanth.s@livemint.com

···························· t was at the age of 18, when I started student life in the US, that I first turned to reading poetry regularly—or, to be more honest, what seemed to me like poetry. On Sundays, or in the long, cold evenings of Pennsylvania, far away from my home in Chennai, I’d curl up on a couch with the first volume of Samaithu Par and simply read. I quote a particularly moving excerpt below: “Beat the softly cooked dhal with a spoon, mixing well with water. Add to boiling rasam. Boil for a minute or two. Add either water or dhal-cooked water to make 4 cups of rasam. Wait till rasam bubbles up. Remove from fire. Season with mustard and chillies. Garnish with curry leaves and coriander leaves.” Like the best of poetry, Samaithu Par’s recipes are simple, direct and instantly evocative. On a couple of occasions, I have fallen asleep with the imagined smell of bubbling rasam in my nostrils. For close to 50 years now, the three volumes of Samaithu Par (Cook and See) have been manufacturing such phantom aromas in generations of south Indians exiled from their home kitchens—and then guiding them painlessly into manufacturing the actual dishes behind those aromas. Samaithu Par, which grandly bills itself as “A comprehensive treatise on traditional South Indian vegetarian cooking”, was written and published in Tamil in 1961, by a housewife called S. Meenakshi Ammal. Her ovoid, sepia photograph still adorns the books’ jackets, and four-and-a-half decades after she passed away, the books continue to be faithfully updated, improved and published (in six languages) by her family. S. Meenakshi Ammal Publications operates out of an antique house in Mylapore, a house that Ammal bought in the early 1960s for Rs10,000 with the proceeds from her books. “She exhausted all her funds in that one purchase,” says Priya Ramkumar. “Then she had to save more money to buy things like fans and lights, one by one.”

Like the best of poetry, Samaithu Par’s recipes are simple, direct and instantly evocative

Ramkumar is Ammal’s granddaughter-in-law—the wife of her grandson, Ramkumar Shankar. As the de facto manager of S. Meenakshi Ammal Publications, she is a repository of information on the doyenne of south Indian cooking. When the books’ old Tamil volume measurements such as azhakku and padi had to be brought into the modern met-

ric world, it was Ramkumar who sat in her kitchen to patiently work out the equivalents. In the godown at Samaithu Par House—holding “Rs5-6 lakh worth of b o o k s a t t h e moment”—Ramkumar narrates the story of Samaithu Par. When Ammal was 18—already a mother, having been married for four years—her husband died of an anaesthesia overdose during a routine tonsillitis surgery. She and her young son lived on in Madurai with her mother-inlaw and brother-in-law. “You’ll see that all her servings are for

four people—those were the four people,” Ramkumar says. “Only later, when her son had to come to Madras for college and then work, did she move to this city.” Ammal was always a skilled cook, and her mother-in-law rapidly became her fortunate guinea pig. “When her relatives got married and went off to Bombay or other places, they would write to her, asking whether to add this to sambar or that to vada,” Ramkumar says. “She would write back detailed inland letters, even including disaster management tips—what to do if a gravy was too watery, and so on.”

As these letters grew in volume, Ammal began to transcribe her recipes into a thick notebook, which Ramkumar still possesses. The notebook is now tattered and many of its pages are withering with age, but the impeccably lettered Tamil, in blue fountain-pen ink, is still perfectly legible. In the late 1950s, one of her uncles, a Chennai worthy named K.V. Krishnaswamy Iyer, suggested that Ammal compile her recipes into a book. This was met, at first, with understandable laughter: Why would anyone buy a cookbook of such routine, everyday fare? But when Iyer persevered, and when he convinced a publishing firm named Alliance Press of the idea, Ammal pawned all her jewels and paid for the book’s initial print run in 1961. “At first, booksellers refused to stock the book, and her son had to push Higginbotham’s—pretty much the only large bookstore in Madras at the time—to agree to stock it on a sale or return basis,” Ramkumar says. “Then, after the initial lukewarm reaction, it started to become popular by word of mouth.” In the 1960s, a new generation of south Indians was moving to other parts of India and even the world, and Samaithu Par rapidly became a standard part of their baggage. Like Isabella Beeton, the Victorian author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Ammal ended up writing a social handbook rather than a dry cookbook. The trilogy’s third volume, for example, contains detailed instructions on the conduct of Brahmin rituals and festivals. “If you were living outside south India and didn’t have your mother-in-law handy, you could refer to the books for this sort of detail,” Ramkumar says. The books are very weakly marketed, and Ramkumar admits that she doesn’t know how many copies of the books have been sold till date. It must number, though, in the hundreds of thousands. Every year, she simply issues instructions for a print run numbering between 5,000 and 10,000, to fill the orders she gets. The first edition of the English translation (published in 1968) sold for Rs2, Ramkumar says; the 15th edition, currently in bookshops, sells for Rs95. Ramkumar and her family continue to publish the book more as a labour of love than anything else—a fine testament to the spirit of Ammal. “I’ve heard stories of how, on Deepavali, people would start coming to her house at 5am, and she’d spend the entire day making special dishes like Kanjivaram idlis, special sweets and savouries, serving everybody herself,” Ramkumar says. “Her cooking was about just pure love and affection.”

BOOKS L15

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Q&A | SARAH ODEDINA

READING ROOM

‘Children have varied lives’

B Y H IMANSHU B HAGAT himanshu.b@livemint.com

Did J.K. Rowling approach Bloomsbury with Harry Potter? Her agent approached Bloomsbury, and the editor at that time of Bloomsbury Children’s Books acquired the right of the first Harry Potter title. The rumour is she was rejected by other publishing houses and Bloomsbury had the vision and understanding to realize what a spectacular book it was. How much of Harry Potter’s success is due to Rowling and how much because of Bloomsbury? I think the success is entirely due to her—her talent, skill and brilliance as an author. We, of course, brought our contribution to the process in terms of marketing and publicity, and so on and so forth, but you can’t sell a mediocre book at this level; it is just not possible. If they had a choice of either reading the books or seeing the Harry Potter films, what would you recommend to children? Being a book lover, and seeing

Kid stories: Odedina says there’s a demand for culturespecific books. the passion and pleasure that children get from reading the book, I would encourage children to read the book. A lot of children start from the film and go back to the book; a lot of children start from the book and go into the film. Any concerns that, over time, the emphasis on global publishing by multinational publishing firms will make children all over the world read the same few books? No, not all books will travel. There are certain authors that tell their story in such a way that children all over the world can enjoy them, like J.K. Rowling. Other authors’ books are very particular to a time and place. We publish marvellous authors who do very well in the UK but we don’t sell them abroad. I think as a philosophy for the publishing house, (we should) be aware that we need both styles of writing. Children in Scotland really love to read a woman called Cathy McPhail—a very good author, very accessible with great urban, contemporary gritty social stories. But her stories wouldn’t mean the same to a child in Mumbai or Melbourne. Children’s titles are now dominated by fantasy and sci-fi genres. What about those not interested in these genres? In the home market in the UK, we have authors like Jackie Wilson. She writes stories about issues and problems that children often have to deal with in their young lives. So there is

the fantastic story called The Illustrated Mum about a child who is brought up by a woman who has mental health problems. She is called “the illustrated mum” because she is heavily tattooed. That’d be aimed at what age group? Up to about 11, or 12. Sounds like a mature subject for a child. It’s the way Jackie handles it. Children have varied lives—they are not all being picked up from school and being given tea and being allowed to watch television. Some of them are dealing with terrible problems—looking after parents who aren’t well, either because of sickness or because of mental health issues; dealing with parents who are alcoholic; dealing with the break-up of their parents’ relationships. Jackie responds to that social reality. But she writes with a great deal of tact and concern for the age of her readers—so the way things are explained and explored aren’t shocking, they are practical. What are some of the other genres available for children? There is a lot available for kids in the UK, we publish thousands of titles a year. In fact, it is arguable that we publish far too many books. You can go into a book shop and you can get a book about a child’s perspective on immigration, Superman, talking pets, science fiction, vampires,

A dark, dreamlike Iranian novel that first came out in Mumbai in 1936 B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· n 1936, a strange and melancholy novel titled The Blind Owl appeared among the Zoroastrian and Iranian expatriate communities of Mumbai. It was written by a young man who had spent most of his working life in Iran, doing clerical jobs, and was living in Mumbai at the invitation of a friend after falling afoul of the censors at home. The name of the writer was Sadeq Hedayat, now considered the greatest Iranian writer of the 20th century, and The Blind Owl has now been newly reissued by Oneworld Classics. Dark, dreamlike and mildly trippy, The Blind Owl lives and moves with a mysterious logic of

The Blind Owl: Oneworld Classics, 110 pages, £7.99 (around Rs620).

Marxists defend God

An intelligent thriller

fantasy, magic, mythology. Three children’s books that you recommend for adults? I am going to be very partisan and recommend only Bloomsbury books—the first Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; Holes by Louis Sachar, which is a masterpiece; and No Matter What, a picture book by an artist called Debi Gliori, which is the most touching, wonderful, life-enhancing book about a relationship between a parent and a child and the reassurance they give one another.

THE BLIND OWL | SADEQ HEDAYAT

Rebirth of a classic

GODS AND DETECTIVES The one good thing about the rise of religious fundamentalism in recent decades has been a corresponding resurgence of atheistic writing, as in the work of people like Christopher Hitchens. But just as fundamentalism is a simplification of religious beliefs, much of the current writing of atheists is a simplification of the long and complex tradition of atheism and agnosticism. Atheism is derived from the Greek where “a” stood for “without” or “not”, and “theos” meant “god”. Hence, an atheist is someone without belief in god/s. But the sense in which atheism has cropped up in recent public debates is different. Currently, as espoused by Hitchens and Co., it has come to mean an active belief that god does not exist. But to believe that god does not exist is not the same as to be without belief in god. That may be the reason why almost all the recent attacks on god/religion are almost as boring as recent defences of god/religion. Both fail to reach the intellectual heights set by philosophers such as Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, who either believed or did not believe in god, but who engaged with the matter at a very complex level of thought. The most interesting book I have read on the current controversy is Terry Eagleton’s collection of essays, Reason, Faith and TWELVE/GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING/BLOOMBERG Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Slavoj Zizek, too, is supposed to have engaged creatively with the debate in a forthcoming book, which I am yet to read. It is ironic—and perhaps a sad commentary on mainstream thinking today—that the best examination of the issue seems to have come from two atheistic Marxists! In a sense, Eagleton’s book has a verso-recto relationship to Bertrand Russell’s atheistic Atheist: Christopher Hitchens. book from 1957, Why I am not a Christian. Eagleton is an atheist too, but he basically champions the revolutionary potential of religion. This is a pity because other religious traditions contain revolutionary (and reactionary) potential as well. To defend only the “radical” potential of Christianity might—despite the best intentions of Eagleton (or Zizek)—end up inadvertently complementing “clash of civilization” Western voices that attack the “reactionary” and “backward” aspects of other religions, such as Islam or Hinduism or Voodooism.

Bloomsbury director Sarah Odedina on the Rowling magic and global trends in children’s literature

···························· ne reason Sarah Odedina is happy to be in India is the food. “I have masala dosa for breakfast every morning here,” says the publishing director, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, who has worked with J.K. Rowling on all the Harry Potter titles. She traces her fondness for Indian food to growing up in Mumbai until she was six. Odedina is in New Delhi for Jumpstart, an initiative by the German Book Office that brings authors, illustrators and publishers of children’s books together for a series of workshops, She spoke with Lounge about Harry Potter and children’s publishing. Edited excerpts:

TABISH KHAIR

Listed three times for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, Liz Jensen is not afraid to take on big issues. On the face of it, her new novel, The Rapture, is a crime thriller set in the future—in a world where a major economic crisis has marked a resurgence of faith and fanaticism. The Rapture features a number of crimes, and a rather unusual “detective”. There is a disturbed teenaged girl, confined to a psychiatric hospital meant for dangerous children, who killed her own mother—but no one knows why. As the novel develops, there is the crime of parental brutality and the mysteries of warped relationships and political-economic duplicity. These are the usual crimes, so to say. However, behind them lurks a bigger crime—the crime of environmental depredation. In dealing with this crime, Jensen moves her novel a notch above the level of a gripping thriller. It is no wonder Warner Brothers are said to have snapped up the film rights.

In memorium I read of Kamala Das’ death a few days ago. I never met her. I wish I had. With Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes, Arun Kolatkar and a couple of others who are still around, thankfully, Das was one of the foundational voices of Indian poetry in English. Above all, she was a person who lived her own life and cared deeply for the world. She will be missed. Tabish Khair is the Denmark-based author of Filming. Write to him at readingroom@livemint.com BEHROUZ MEHRA/AFP

its own. Its narrator is a young, withdrawn, misanthropic young man who is disgusted by the naked hunger and cupidity of society—or “the rabble”, as he calls it. The protagonist, who makes his living by decorating pen covers, spends his days locked up within the four walls of his room, thinking, dreaming and hallucinating. Sometimes he seems to live in an eternal present without memory, so that he repeats a detail that we have come across only a few pages ago; at other times his memory seems to encompass that of all humanity, and he calls up moods and experiences to which he should logically have had no access. Every novel is also implicitly a theory of the novel, and in Hedayat’s book we see the working of a modernist impulse in a culture still committed to a traditionalist understanding of literature. “I am obliged to tell a story. Ugh!” complains the narrator at one point. Hedayat’s narration, with its portrait of “the shadow of the

Idolized: Hedayat is considered a great writer in Khomeini’s Iran. mind” and morbid symbolism, seeks to excavate a layer of the human personality much more remote than those found in “well-constructed plots”. In one scene, the narrator methodically cuts up the corpse of a woman and drifts through many worlds while burying it; in another, two men are shut up with a cobra in a dark room that will be opened only when one of them has fallen to the snake.

One of the most interesting elements in the book is the repeated referencing of India. The narrator himself is the son of an Iranian trader and an Indian templedancer, and is born in Varanasi. In a memorable paragraph, he imagines his mother, whom he has never seen, as she performs “the consecrated movements of the temple dance” and “unfolds like the petals of a flower”. Hedayat’s stint in India clearly left him

fascinated by Hindu religious life; by comparison, there are very few references to Persian rituals. Like many other modernist novels, The Blind Owl can also be read as a parable about artistic creation: about the sensitivity and suffering of the artist, his or her rejection of the values of bourgeois society, about the need to find a private language just as one must find a private life. Walking down the street, the narrator remarks of his fellow men that “Each and every one of them consisted only of a mouth and a wad of guts hanging from it, the whole terminating in a set of genitals.” This damaging indictment of man as hungry and materialistic is simultaneously a strength of the book and a weakness, since it foregrounds the narrator’s own inability to empathetically imagine the life of any person other than himself. Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf. Write to lounge@livemint.com

L16

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009

Culture ART

The other pottermania

Mud play: (clockwise from left) An untitled work by Gopinath; Harmonic Discord by Rahul Kumar; Kadak Chai by Rashi Jain.

A group show presents ceramic art from artists across India in a range of styles B Y H IMANSHU B HAGAT himanshu.b@livemint.com

···························· ust like potters, ceramic artists essentially work with clay, which is mixed with water, fashioned into a desired shape and then fired at high temperatures so that it hardens into that shape permanently. The firm association of ceramics with pottery—and more generally with objects of utility (such as tableware) or decoration (such as flower vases)—places the ceramic artist at a disadvantage. His or her work is viewed more as a “craft” than an “art”. One drawback is that while the base price for a painting by a new artist being shown at a gallery of some standing is usually Rs1 lakh and above, works by an established ceramic artist on average usually range from Rs5,000 to Rs20,000. There are other hurdles. Ceramic shows are not very common because the works lose out on two counts—the relatively low prices of the works mean lower margins for the gallery and the fragile nature of the pieces means that the logistics of shipping and installing them is a more involved and expensive process. Feats of Clay, the group show of ceramic artworks at Gallery Threshold featuring a varied collection of works by 12 artists, acts as a good introduction to ceramic art in India while making a case for it to be taken seriously, on a par with, say, painting or sculpture. The artists on display come from across the country and curator Ela Mukherji—a ceramic artist herself—points out that they reflect, in varying degrees, the differences in traditional techniques of making ceramic wares in different regions. Mukherji says she has also tried to include technically and formalistically varied pieces—there are typical wheel-

thrown works (made using the potter’s wheel), sculptured figures, and pit-fired (works baked in a pit dug into the ground) as well as high-fired stoneware (fired in an oven at temperatures of 1,200-1,280 degrees Celsius). The works also vary in the choice of clay, in the use of glazes and colours, and in the artists’ choice of themes. A sneak peek at some of the works to go on display underscored Mukherji’s emphasis on variety—they span the range from the abstract, to identifiable forms and figures, to variations on downright utilitarian objects, the last being a tea set by Manipuri artist Ashim Pearl, who is now based in Delhi. Despite the leaflike saucers and the angulated teapot—made from clay mixed with ground stone in a traditional pit fire—it could technically still be used to serve tea. Mukherji points out that the black blotches and streaks on the surface of the tea service have been caused by carbon deposits, the result of using the traditional mix of straw, twigs and sawdust for the fire. An example of sculptural work are the large human heads by the Kerala-based artist G. Reghu, with what can be described as distinctly African features exaggerated to convey a sense of innocence. The look and feel of the works, clearly derived from folk tradition, is complemented by the plain earthy texture of the nonglazed stoneware used to make them. This harmony of the medium and message, as it were, also comes through in the striking works by the Delhi-based artist Debashish Das—the smooth, shiny texture of the greyish-white surface is embellished by impish nude figurines lending a note of playful drama to the semi-abstract works. Mukherji’s own works on dis-

play—stupa-like red mounds of fired clay crowned by a tuft of blue polyps—derive much of their soothing effect from the primeval appeal of the pure form, and the colour and texture of the humble matka (pot). Alongside is a plain round hoop representing a tree, and perched on it is a golden bird-like form that provides a visual contrast, but fits with the mood of the pieces. There is also an element of the primeval in Abhay Pandit’s cratered and richly textured discs which could remind you of a planetary surface viewed from afar or the shell of a marine creature. And

while the shape and form of Rahul Kumar’s receptacles—they look vaguely like vases or bottles or flasks—definitely veer towards the primitive with a tumid and fleshy feel, their texture is shiny and in one case with a metallic gloss. These and other works then demonstrate amply the versatility of clay—when moulded in concert with water and fire, the only limit to what can be created with it is the artist’s imagination. Feats of Clay will show at the Gallery Threshold, F 213-A, Lado Sarai, New Delhi, from 18 July to 8 August

FILM REVIEW | HARRY POTTER AND THE HALFBLOOD PRINCE

WARNER BROS, JAAP BUITENDJIK/AP

Where is the magic? For all the action packed in it, the latest Potter saga feels like a filler B Y M ANOHLA D ARGIS ···························· re we there yet? Well, not quite. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the latest big-screen iteration of the global phenomenon, is merely the sixth chapter in a now eight-part series that, much like its young hero, played by Daniel Radcliffe, has begun to show signs of stress around the edges, a bit of fatigue, or maybe that’s just my gnawing impatience. Not that the director, David Yates, doesn’t keep things moving and flying and soaring, his cameras slashing through the gloom that has settled on to this epic

endeavour like a damp, enveloping fog and at times threatened to snuff out its joy as terminally as a soul-sucking Dementor. That any sense of play and pleasure remains amid all the doom and the dust, the poisonous potions and murderous sentiments, is partly a testament to the remarkable sturdiness of this movie franchise, which has transformed in subtle and obvious fashion, changing in tandem with the sprouting bodies and slowly evolving personalities of its young, now teenage characters. For at least one committed follower of the series, who closed the last chapter on Harry soon after The Deathly Hallows was published in 2007, the lag time between the final books and the movies has drained much of the urgency from this screen adaptation, which, far more than any of the previous films, comes across as an afterthought. Yates, who

directed the last movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, does a fine job of keeping Rowling’s multiple parts in balanced play, nimbly shifting between the action and the adolescent soap operatics. Yet even with a surer directorial touch, he can’t keep the whole thing from feeling like a filler. Although scriptwriter Steve Kloves has done an admirable job tailoring Rowling’s progressively longer and baggier books, he or, perhaps more accurately, the series’ producers have not made many concessions for the uninitiated. If you have kept pace, you will grasp why Dumbledore (the invaluable Michael Gambon), the headmaster of Hogwarts, has placed so much trust in Harry, a callow student with prodigious wizard gifts and little discernable personality. The chosen one, Harry has been commissioned to destroy the too-little-seen evildoer

Stale: (from left) Grint, Watson and Radcliffe in the movie. Voldemort, a sluglike ghoul usually played by Ralph Fiennes (alas, seen only briefly this time out) and here played, in his early embodied form as Tom Riddle, by the excellent young actors Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Frank Dillane. There must be a factory where the British mint their acting royalty: Hero, who plays the dark lord as a spectrally pale, creepy child of 11, is Fiennes’ nephew, and Frank is the son of the terrific actor Stephen Dillane (Thomas Jefferson in the HBO mini-series John

Adams). The younger Dillane, who plays Voldemort at 16, conveys the seductiveness of evil with small, silky smiles he bestows like dangerous gifts on Jim Broadbent’s Horace Slughorn, a professor whose trembling jowls suggest a deeper tremulousness. When Slughorn, the fear almost visibly leaking from his body, shares the secret of immortality with Voldemort, you feel, much as when Fiennes raged through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2005, that something vital is at stake.

If that sense of exigency rarely materializes in The Half-Blood Prince, it’s partly because the series finale is both too close and too far away and partly because Radcliffe and his co-stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, as Harry’s friends Hermione and Ron, have grown up into three prettily manicured bores. Unlike the veterans, notably the sensational Alan Rickman, who invests his character, Prof. Severus Snape, with much-needed ambiguity, drawing each word out with exquisite luxury, bringing to mind a buzzard lazily pulling at entrails, Radcliffe in particular proves incapable of the most crucial cinematic magic—namely, the alchemical transformation of dialogue into something that feels like passion, something that feels real and true and makes you as wild for Harry as for all those enticingly dark forces. ©2009/The New York Times Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince released on Thursday. Write to lounge@livemint.com

CULTURE L17

SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PHOTOGRAPHY

They are just like us PHOTOGRAPHS

MUSIC REVIEW | KAMINEY

SUNIL GUPTA

Let’s rock ’n’ roll: Shahid Kapoor in Kaminey.

Kiss kiss bang bang Vishal Bhardwaj is worth the wait even if it’s for just one recordquaking track B Y L ALITHA S UHASINI ························································ t’s as if Tarantino and Timbaland’s love child went into the studio to put this soundtrack together. The real credits read Vishal Bhardwaj and Gulzar, who may seem like the odd pair, but they’ve done it again—collaborated on a piece of music that will be bloody hard to beat this year. Only these two could have turned the most spoofed sound that was once considered vital to any nail-biting twist of plot into a hook. Dhan Te Nan, the first track of the soundtrack is all grit, typical of Bhardwaj’s work and yet so atypical. He is splicing up a dance-y electro glam beast which is nothing like Beedi (of Omkara) in form but everything like it in its effect. The rushing, shifting beats, churning strings, the distorted, now-twanging-now-grinding axe and two of the biggest gun throats of Bollywood (Vishal Dadlani and Sukhwinder Singh) take Dhan Te Nan on a menacing testosterone drive. Gulzar’s lines Aaja aaja dil nichodein/Raat mein matki todein/Koi good luck nikale/Aaj gullak to phodein turn the track around into a killer bad-boy number meant for mean street gangs. Gulzar brings the future with him in every dark twist of the lip: Koi chaal aisi chalo yaar ab ke/Samandar bhi pul pe chale. The remix, unlike most, pulls back the tempo and lays down some heavy beats fit for a floor full of bling. Sounds like? Dhan, boom, hiss, te nan, of course. After Dhan Te Nan everything else has to be an anti-climax. It’s as simple as the law of gravity. It’s impossible to bear Mohit Chauhan do the all too familiar sad song routine. Mellow’s all right for Pehli Baar Mohabbat, but melancholy? Chauhan does melancholy exceedingly well but it’s now inching closer to b-o-r-i-n-g. Like the rest of the songs, this one too isn’t short of glowing lines: Yaad hai peepal ke jiske ghane saayen the/Humne gilKaminey: hari ke jhoothe matar khaaye the. Composed by You’ll warm up to the track after a Vishal Bhardwaj, couple of listens but if it’s a BhardTSeries, Rs160. waj slow-burner you’re searching for, it’s got to be Laakad from Omkara with vocalist Rekha Bhardwaj at her best. She returns on Raat Ke Dhai Baje on Kaminey’s soundtrack. Here she’s purring like a teasing sex kitten. Sunidhi Chauhan, Kunal Ganjawala and Suresh Wadkar all pitch in to build Raat Ke Dhai Baje into a hottie, but don’t expect Beedi. Bhardwaj opens the track on a Maharashtrian folk beat only to surprise you with the shehnai and rap later. But 3 minutes into the track, and there’s Wadkar’s interlude which slows the track down and there’s a weirdo whispering a thank you speech. This is an experiment gone off track even if it’s just for a few seconds. It’s easy to lose interest in the track at this point but Bhardwaj fortunately has no more tacky surprises in store. The next track, Fatak, brings together Sukhwinder and Kailash Kher in a fantastic face-off of sorts. The track reminds you of Omkara’s title track in parts. But you’ve got to give it to Bhardwaj and Gulzar. These guys have a sense of humour. Chances are you’ll be laughing your head off to some cheeky sex advice that’s dished out in Fatak. The title track is a slow solo by Bhardwaj that stretches itself over a rain-drenched evening of gloom well. It’s not his best blues but it will do nicely. I expected another firebellied, lung-exploding number going by the title, but the swear word rolls off Bhardwaj’s tongue as an endearment. He is impressive with the blues and he’s had some of the finest artists at work with him—whether it’s Laakad, Paani Paani Re from Maachis, sung by Lata Mangeshkar, or even a brooding ballad like Rozaana from Nishabd, which set Bachchan’s vocals in a Springsteen-edged melody. Bhardwaj springs a surprise with his newfound hip-hop fangs and Gulzar goes on to shock again and again as he redefines Bollywood lingo with every new soundtrack. I was greedy for a lot more in Kaminey—maybe a stirring love song along the lines of Daler Mehndi’s Ru Ba Ru (Rang De Basanti) but then it’s good that I can’t get enough of Dhan Te Nan.

Sunil Gupta’s portraits of selfassertion in the face of prejudice hold up a mirror to viewers

Look at me: (clockwise from top) Anokhi from Mr Malhotra’s Party, photographer Sunil Gupta; Bikram and Raju from the series.

B Y H IMANSHU B HAGAT himanshu.b@livemint.com

···························· oung men and women— aged around 30 or under—have posed for a series of portraits taken in public places by the photographer Sunil Gupta. The series—part of the show Face Up organised by Tasveer in Bangalore—is titled Mr Malhotra’s Party, which sounds evocative but odd until Gupta explains why. Since homosexual acts are illegal in India—the recent Delhi high court ruling against Article 377, which criminalizes homosexual activity, could change this—when the well-off members of Delhi’s gay community want to organize a get-together, they often put up a sign outside the venue saying that it is a private party, say, “Mr Singh’s party” or “Mr Sharma’s party”. Gupta—who is gay, grew up in Delhi and after extended stints overseas now lives here again— attended one such gathering which had been billed as “Mr Malhotra’s party”. He found it quite apposite. “Malhotra is the typical post-Partition refugee who came from across the border and helped make Delhi what it is today,” he says. And hence, a typical Delhi name for this portrait series of young gay men and women who live in the Capital. Looking straight into the camera and at the viewer, these confident youngsters are making a statement—“I am gay and I don’t have a problem with that”—and, implicitly, asking a question, “Do you?” At his residence, Gupta pulls out another set of photographs of gay men in public places in Delhi that he took in the early

1980s—they either have their back to the camera or are looking away or their faces are in the shadows. “Earlier, I had to persuade people (to pose), now people are asking me (if they can pose),” says Gupta. Back then, he says, feminists wrote on feminist issues, and blacks wrote or drew art about blacks. So, as an adult gay man, he photographed other adult gay men. These 12 portraits, by contrast, are a picture of diversity—there are women who posed willingly, and, he points out, the subjects happen to be ethnically diverse, hailing from different parts of India. But do the photos “work” if we are not told that the subjects are gay? They do, because they are still studies of members belonging to a minority group—albeit a larger, privileged minority that

would also include the viewers of the photos. The subjects’ attire and even their names (Anokhi, Pavitr, Kaushiki, Akshara, Chapal) mark them out as members of the upper-middle class. (Gupta mentions the places in Delhi where he took the pictures: India Gate, Malviya Nagar, Savitri cinema in Greater Kailash II, Lodhi Garden, near the IIT crossing—south Delhi locales all.) We are looking at people like us—by their sexual orientation, they could be the Other; but socially they are us. Which is Gupta’s point: “The idea is to reinforce the ordinariness of it,” he says. “I am trying to say that these are normal people.” And they know that they are posing for their social peers. We can appreciate the wide-legged trousers, the right cut of their jeans and the Fabindia kurtas;

and we know that they are gay—but not the aam aadmi milling about at the public places where they are posing. Gupta mentions that one of the 12 subjects is of a working-class origin. As it happens, he is the only one looking away from the camera. This conversation among the subject, the photographer and the viewer is a conversation among the privileged—like all art hung in galleries and museums, perhaps—and there is an exclusive, clubby feel to it. This awareness, besides the fact that the subjects are gay, lends an additional dimension to the photos. Along with Gupta’s photos, there are three series of portraits by the British photographer Anna Fox, who studied photography with Gupta and now, along with him, is helping set up a postgraduate photography course for the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. The best known, perhaps, is the Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) series of portraits of white Dutch women and children, with their faces blackened as part of a traditional celebration. Racism is very much a live issue in the West, but there is hardly anything unsettling about these placid faces— which itself could be seen as an inadequate and therefore an unsettling response. Face Up by Tasveer will be showing at Sua House, Bangalore, till 10 August

Lalitha Suhasini is a freelance music journalist. Write to lounge@livemint.com

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, JULY 18, 2009 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Q&A | PAUL NORONHA, SHERATON CHOLA, CHENNAI

Exports from the sunshine state PHOTOGRAPHS

How one chef is trying to expand the repertoire of Goan cuisine to make vegetarians feel at home

B Y P ARIZAAD K HAN parizaad.k@livemint.com

···························· aul Noronha, the executive chef of Sheraton Chola, Chennai, stopped by the ITC Grand Central Mumbai, to showcase the cuisine of his home state, Goa. Over a meal which included aad maas—mutton on the bone in a rich, thick, tomato gravy studded with crunchy coriander seeds—he discussed sorpotel, feni and Goan sausages with Lounge. Edited excerpts:

What are your earliest memories of food? I come from Goa. My maternal grandmother used to be a great cook. Whenever we used to have these large gatherings at home she would cook the food herself, as well as oversee the preparation. She was the matriarch of the house who ensured everyone was taken care of in terms of food. I used to wander around the house with her, and that’s how the fondness for cooking grew within me. She would tell me

the nuances of how each dish is actually prepared. I have collected her recipes and built a database. What do you remember as your grandmother’s best dishes? I still reminisce about her cooking. But the truth is my mother was a fabulous cook as well—if they had a competition, I really wonder who would win. Their best dish was the sorpotel. It was fantastic. It was generally prepared for a special occasion and made one day before the feast, with sannas—toddyleavened breads. It is very difficult to replicate sorpotel the way they used to make it. Does such a thing as Goan vegetarian food exist? The Goan repertoire is not very elaborate and our strong point is non-vegetarian food; there’s not too much in the veg selection. But there are dishes such as foogath, which is tempered with coconut and green chillies. Traditionally, we only had two foogaths, a bean and a cabbage, but I make one with beetroot. I have also attempted to create vegetarian dishes using the base of the non-vegetarian gravies. It doesn’t necessarily need to be very creative, but more of a blend. Vindaloos or xacutis normally have non-vegetarian associations. But you can have vegetarian option and it tastes as good. For example, I make a mushroom xacuti; it’s flavourful and people enjoy it. We can try similar experiments with a caldeen or an amotik, which is a hot and sour preparation.

STAYING DRY IN THE MONSOON

eena Almeida’s family moved to Mumbai from Goa years ago, but the administrative assistant has stayed in touch with her culinary heritage by picking up tricks from her mother. Almeida explains that fish-loving Goans survive the monsoon by stocking up on dried fish such as Bombay Duck and salted mackerel. She buys dried fish from Mumbai’s Sewri or Marol markets, or any area where the Koliwada

Can you give us an example of the Portuguese influence in Goan food? There is a definite Portuguese influence in Goan food. The most obvious example is the predominance of vinegar in Goan food. When you had traders coming in from the high seas, they had to preserve food. The best way of doing that was using vinegar—it’s a great preservative. Take for example Goan string sausages that are preserved in vinegar; you don’t have to refrigerate them, they will not get spoilt. So the predominance of vinegar in Goan cuisine comes from that. What’s your favourite way to cook Goan sausages? Just boil it and it’s ready to eat, it’s a very convenient food. Goan sausages have all the ingredients in them. Even a lay

Prawn/Bombay duck balchao

10-12 dry red chillies 1 tbsp cumin seeds 1 tsp mustard seeds 2-inch stick of cinnamon 8-10 cloves 2 tbsp sugar ½ cup vinegar Salt to taste

Ingredients 1kg small to medium-sized prawns (cleaned and deveined) or 20 dry Bombay Ducks (cut into ½-inch bits) 4 tbsp cooking oil 2 large onions, finely chopped 3 large tomatoes, finely chopped 2 tbsp garlic paste 1 tbsp ginger paste

Method If using prawns, put them in a large bowl and sprinkle salt on them. Keep aside. Roast the dry red chillies, cumin seeds, mustard seeds, cloves and cinnamon till they begin to release their aroma. Take off the fire and cool. Grind the ginger,

community lives. She shares her recipe for fish balchao.

person will be able to easily eat them. If you want, you could add some potatoes and some green peas. We’re not a very complicated people, you see. How has people’s focus on eating healthy impacted Goan cuisine? People are weaning off pork, even though it’s a mainstay in garlic and roasted spices into a smooth paste using the vinegar. Heat the oil on a medium flame in a pan. Add the prawns and stir-fry till opaque. Remove from the pan and keep aside. If using dry Bombay Duck, fry them till crisp, and remove from the pan. In the same pan, fry the onions till light brown. Add the tomato and fry till soft. Add the spice-vinegar paste, sugar and salt and fry till the oil begins to separate from the masala. Add the prawns or crisp Bombay Duck to this masala, mix well and cook till done. It can be kept in the fridge or eaten fresh.

surprise. I’ve always got my stock from Mumbai. Even after all these years of cooking fish, I am always anxious because fish is like no other meat. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse said in the 6th century BC, ruling a large kingdom is like cooking a small fish. Meaning: Handle gently and never overdo it.

SAMAR HALARNKAR

CURRY IN A HURRY Goan fish curries can get quite intricate, with lots of grinding and pounding of spices, onions and vinegars. But I don’t know many people who have the time and patience to run through these complexities. When I have more time, I’ll run you through some of the more difficult curries. For now, let me just say that your guests will find it hard to tell that the quick curry has been made in 10 minutes, with coconut milk from a can. However, you will need some vital ingredients. My family—like every other I know from the Konkan coast of Maharashtra and Goa—cannot conceive of a fish curry without kokum. Ah, kokum. I have never run a kitchen without a stock of kokum, even when I lived in the US for two years back in the 1990s. For those of you who don’t know

Goan cuisine, not because they don’t like it any more, but because of health reasons. So they might not eat pork four times a week, but twice. I see people eating less red meat and more white meats such as chicken and fish. As for oil, that depends on the person making it. You just have to ensure that there’s less oil. Goans do not advocate oily food. Tell us a bit about Goan breads. The famous ones are sannas and poie. Talking of health food, poie is a health bread. It’s akin to pita bread, but it’s made of atta (unrefined flour) and there’s bran on top. It has a lot of roughage. Then there’s the kankan, which is a hard bread made in the shape of a bangle. And of course, there’s pau. Bread and rice are the two staples. Do you cook with feni? Feni is actually used in making sorpotel. After adding the feni, you are supposed to let the meat mature. The thing about Goan cooking is it is generally

Goan fish curry (cooking time: 10 minutes) Serves 2 Must have: Be it Goan fish curries or drinks, kokum is a staple ingredient. what that is, let me tell you that it is sublime: tangy, robust and extremely good for digestion. Kokum is a fruit, found almost exclusively along the west coast. The part we actually use in fish curries is the dark purple, dried, tangy rind of the kokum fruit (scientific name: Garcinia indica). I am always happy to spring out of my bed and make an early trip to my fishwallah at INA market in Delhi. I feel like a child in a candy store. I may not buy everything, but I love

not eaten the day it’s made. It’s let to sit for a day or two, because the vinegar also needs time to mature. A good sorpotel ripens after two days. There’s a hell of a lot of difference between the day you make it and two days later. So whenever there’s an occasion, the matriarch of the house will get busy two days before that. Do recipes for sorpotel still include blood? No, not really. People are more health focused. But there are people who do still use it. Now what is blood? It’s nothing but a natural thickening agent. But not many people actually still do it. Then again, liver is also an ingredient, but some people don’t like liver either. What are the most popular Goan dishes with non-Goans? Most popular by and large is the Goan fish curry or the prawn curry. A guy who’s a bit adventurous and has been to Goa will ask for a vindaloo. A guy who has stayed there for a while will ask for a cafreal.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT; COURTESY GOA PORTUGESA

OUR DAILY BREAD

hen I was a kid, my grandmother always tried to make me eat palak (spinach) by promising that her fantastic fish curry would follow. Maka naka! I don’t want it, was always my angry response. Usually, it didn’t work. My grandmother—a simple, wonderful woman who was never educated but tried to teach herself to read, painstakingly trying to figure out letter by letter—had not raised 10 children by giving in to tantrums. I wish I could tell her that palak is today the only vegetable I don’t mind eating (not by itself, of course, but reasonably leavened with keema or chicken). I digress. My grandmother’s curries were tremendously more complex than the blink-and-it’s-done curry that I’m going to tell you about.

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Mixed platter: (clockwise from above) Chef Noronha wants vegetarians to experience the food of his state; Caldinhode galhina, a traditional chicken dish; and fish curry with rice.

PHOTOGRAPHS

looking at all the fresh fish, peering at new arrivals and generally watching who buys what. My fishwallah stocks a variety of seafood for his astonishingly diverse clientele: karimeen for Malayalis, ilish for Bengalis, calamari for Italians… Our separate lives come together every weekend in that slushy, smelly little corner of paradise. I was particularly delighted when I saw a lone packet of fresh kokum at an INA spice shop a couple of months ago. I bought it, of course. That was a

Ingredients Kkg fish At least 15 pods of garlic K tsp turmeric 3 tsps red chilli powder 1 can of coconut milk Handful of kokum Salt to taste Method Drop the crushed garlic in oil that’s hot but not smoking. Stir in medium heat. When the garlic begins to brown, throw in

the red chilli powder and turmeric. Stir for a minute. Reduce heat and empty a can of coconut milk (freely available at any major grocery store, or use coconut powder. If you have the time, squeeze it fresh from grated coconut). Stir so that coconut milk takes on the colour of the spices. When the curry starts to heat, add in a handful of kokum (available at INA market in Delhi and every market in Mumbai). Ensure the heat is low. Add half a kg of fresh fish (no need to marinate). Add salt. Shake the vessel to move the fish pieces around. Don’t poke around with a spoon. It should be ready to eat in 6-7 minutes. This is a column on easy, inventive cooking from a male perspective. Samar Halarnkar writes a blog, Our Daily Bread, at Htblogs.com. He is the managing editor of the Hindustan Times. Write to Samar at ourdailybread@livemint.com

www.livemint.com Every Monday, catch Cooking With Lounge, a video show with recipes from wellknown chefs, at www.livemint.com/cookingwithlounge