Mint Lounge, 17 July 2010

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Saturday, July 17, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 28

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

If your new eating plan sounds too good to be true, it probably is. We got three nutritionists to weigh in on diets in vogue >Page 10

SPARK PEOPLE

BIPASHA BASU ON HOW SHE STAYS FIT >Page 9

SUGAR BUSTERS HOW TO GET YOUR GROOVE BACK

ZONE MORNING BANANA DIET

Despite the many mood­killers of modern life, couples can revive their sexual spark >Page 12

BLOOD TYPE ABS AND THE MAN

The pursuit of six­pack abs is most admirable, and best left to other people >Page 13

HOLIDAYS THAT HEAL

Whether you’re feeling off­colour or in the pink of health, here’s our list of five must­do destinations >Page 14

PUBLIC EYE

THE GOOD LIFE

SUNIL KHILNANI

SHOBA NARAYAN

THE POWER OF WEAVING A GANDHI’S AUSTERITY REVOLUTION

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n his book, Imagining India, Nandan Nilekani writes: “Wherever I go, I find that Indians know our growth numbers backward and forward, and there is a strong, common feeling among us that our country has finally come of age.” It’s something I’ve seen even in the slums of Mumbai: The statistics of India’s new growth economy grip the popular imagination. Children who scavenge trash for a living report confidently and accurately that India is the second-fastest growing economy in the world... >Pages 4­5

CULT FICTION

I

did something recently that gave me more satisfaction than a vacation. At the Sampoorn Handicrafts fair held at Chitrakala Parishad in Bangalore—similar to Dilli Haat and Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda festival—I spotted a beautiful khadi salwar kameez swaying in the wind. It was off-white, simple and beautifully cut. I had to have it.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have it in my size.

“All these are cut to Italian sizes, madam,” said the volunteer manning the stall. >Page 6

R. SUKUMAR

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

READING COMICS CAN BE AARDVARK

O

ne of the longest running serious graphic novel series—as opposed to those of the superhero variety, though some of those are serious too—was Dave Sim’s Cerebus, which ran between 1977 and 2004. The comics, collected in so-called phone book versions and independently published, are hard to come by—I have seen none in India and my copies were bought on Amazon many years ago—and while they are truly high-literature, the reason for their appearance... >Page 15

PHOTO ESSAY

INTO THE LIGHT

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN VENKATESHA BABU SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT (MANAGING EDITOR, LIVEMINT)

FOUNDING EDITOR RAJU NARISETTI ©2010 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

WHY I NOW SWEAR BY THE PUNJABI ‘KUDI’ DIET

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ast year around this time I yogurt too, but I knew the met a man who rocked my names of all non-dairy foods life. Turned it upside down. Or that contained calcium. inside out, whichever you preBut that life is over. fer. My husband had no objecNow I exercise at least four tions to my regular rendezvous. times a week. I eat a minimum Even my mother approved of three fruits a day and lots of although she hasn’t yet met almonds. In fact, I eat double him. In fact, knowing him the amount of food I used to in improved my relationship with my past life. I begin every day both of them. with 400g of yogurt. And end it No please, I’m not the Art of with a glass of milk. I eat panLiving sort. I would never be an eer three times a week. In the accessory to an orange robe. But last one year I’ve gained 6 let me start at the beginning. kilos. These days I often buy a Unlike most urban Indian girl size medium, not small. children today, I had an active I’m consuming so much childhood. My parents allowed dairy I’m going to turn into a me to pick athletics over dance. cow, I tell the man who My father was kind enough to changed my life. But how do wake up at you feel, he always replies.

Let’s see. My skin glows, my LIFE LESSON 5 . 3 0 a m e v e r y day to ferry me hair rarely feels like straw. I no to athletics training. I travelled for longer feel exhausted all the state and regional competitions. I time. My mother nags me drank raw eggs in milk, courtesy much less and my husband’s my hero Rocky. My runners’ legs happy with my new, more are a legacy of those days.

‘Doodh’ the needful: They’ve got it right in Punjab. active self. I walk straighter But after the athletics phase and I am definitely stronger. I wore off, exercise became more liner: No idea, I only exercise when am now firmly on the Punjabi side of about weight management than I’m having sex and when I’m balanc- the milk debate. I think every Indian endorphins or excellence. I went to ing above public loos to avoid con- woman who thinks staying thin is aerobics classes with women who tact with the toilet seat. staying healthy should listen carewere always obsessing about what I liked to think of myself as a con- fully to her protesting bones and they wore when they exercised and scious vegetarian. Soon I could tell make friends with an orthopaedic how little they ate before and after my amaranth from my ragi and surgeon like I did one year ago. It’s a they exercised. After a while I got believed seeds (sesame, flaxseed, relationship that’s guaranteed to bored of gyms and classes. I was methi) would keep me healthy. I change her life. active and I didn’t really gain weight. avoided white bread and ate minimal I didn’t need to exercise, I reasoned. sweets. And swore by nutritionists Write to lounge@livemint.com Besides, who had the time, I was too who asked you to stay away from busy in my hotshot career. cooked food before noon and who www.livemint.com When people asked me how I believed in the theory that grown m a n a g e d t o “ s t a y s o s l i m ” , I women didn’t need dairy. Yes, I hated Priya Ramani blogs at blogs.livemint.com/firstcut responded with a standard one- milk. Until last year, I had never eaten

LOUNGE LOVES | ANG LEE

The rainbow man The Taiwanese­American film­maker transcends genre and geography

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e moves effortlessly from treetops in 18th century China to ranches in Wyoming.

Taiwanese-American filmmaker Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) became the highest grossing foreign film in several countries at the time of its release. His childhood dream of making a Chinese wuxia (martial arts and chivalry) film earned him a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards.

Five years later, Lee won the Best Director at the Academy Awards for Brokeback Mountain, a heart-wrenching film that explores the relationship of two ranch hands. The film won 71 awards in all, including the Golden Globe, the Directors Guild and the Bafta.

But that’s not why we love Lee. He is a prolific multitasker— directing, writing, acting, editing, producing. He is also a genrehopping wonderman. He has

tried everything, from period dramas such as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1995)—which marked his entry into Hollywood—to American Civil War dramas such as Ride with the Devil (1999).

Next week, the first leg of a travelling Ang Lee retrospective will screen five films in Delhi: Fine Line (1984), Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Together, these films trace Lee’s journey, starting from his days at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

The Ang Lee retrospective will run from 23-25 July at Siri Fort Auditorium, New Delhi. Entry is free.

The festival will then travel to Pune and Kolkata. For details, log on to www.indianauteur.com Anindita Ghose

Mixed flavours: A still from Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman.

L4 COLUMNS SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PUBLIC EYE

SUNIL KHILNANI

THE SUPERPOWERS OF

GANDHIAN AUSTERITY

AS INDIA SHAKES OFF THE LAST VESTIGES OF GANDHIAN RESTRAINT, WE ARE HITTING LIMITS AT ONCE HUMAN AND NATURAL. STRUGGLES THAT ANIMATE INDIA’S MAOISTS AND NAXALITES ARE BATTLES OVER INDIA’S BASIC RESOURCES— WHOSE CONSERVATION GANDHI REITERATED ALL HIS LIFE DINODIA

Man of principle: Gandhi was fascinated by modern inventions but chose to lead a life of restraint.

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n his book, Imagining India, Nandan Nilekani writes: “Wherever I go, I find that Indians know our growth numbers backward and forward, and there is a strong, common feeling among us that our country has finally come of age.” It’s something I’ve seen even in the slums of Mumbai: The statistics of India’s new growth economy grip the popular imagination. Children who scavenge trash for a living report confidently and accurately that India is the second-fastest growing economy in the world, and see in the numbers a happier future for themselves.

Strikingly, this Indian trust in economic improvement as a means of greater happiness coincides with something of a countermovement among economists in the West. Some

of the best of them now argue that, beyond a certain point, economic growth doesn’t in fact result in national contentment. It’s an argument Mahatma Gandhi actually made one hundred years ago, though today’s economists have regression analysis to work with. The distinguished economist Richard Layard writes of the citizens of the Western countries he’s studied, “In the last 50 years...They have become much richer, they work much less, they have longer holidays, they travel more, they live longer, and they are healthier. But they are no happier.” Layard, along with Nobel laureates such as Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz as well as Partha Dasgupta have been trying to work out new, non-economic statistical measures to gauge national

well-being, including quality of life and ecological sustainability.

In the advanced industrial countries, governments too are seeking to build some of these apparently new ideas into their assessments of how their citizenry is doing. It was Nicolas Sarkozy who invited Sen, Stiglitz and the French economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi to prepare a report outlining a new, more differentiated gauge of economic prosperity and human well-being.

And in the US, President Obama has signed into law the creation of a new system of “key national indicators”, a “dashboard” of measures (developed by a NGO project called The State of the USA—also the name of the website at which the information is posted) which aim to give a picture

of national well-being that is fuller than the simplicities of GDP and growth statistics.

Gandhi would have been pleased to hear of such developments. “The rich are often unhappy, the poor happy,” he wrote in Hind Swaraj in 1909. He counted himself among the latter group, though I confess I’ve never thought of him as a good example of someone who knew how to be happy.

He was too obsessed by self-mortifying experiments, and his household was hardly a cheerful one, given his sometimes disdainful and ferocious treatment of his wife and his children.

The Gandhi family was not a Happy Family. But Gandhi was someone who thought a lot about well-being as a psychological condition, and understood that the link between

COLUMNS L5

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

BRIAN SOKOL/BLOOMBERG

INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

Contrast: (left) The DLF Emporio mall in New Delhi; Jnaneswari Express was derailed in May by Maoists who claim to be fighting against the exploitation of limited tribal resources. personal wealth and personal contentment was often—maybe even always—a weak one. Gandhi’s ideas about what it meant to live well and in a sustainable fashion are integral to his conception of Swaraj, or self-rule, and were worked out against the foil of what he came to call modern civilization—the subject of his swingeing critique in Hind Swaraj, a book the 40-year-old Gandhi wrote in a 10-day fit of “violent possession” while aboard a ship, and whose ideas he stood by until his death.

It’s a book I’ve recently been re-reading, and I’m struck by how his diagnosis of what he called “wretched modern civilization” continues to resonate with the discontents of the increasingly prosperous 21st century.

Gandhi’s critique of the modern leaned on the anti-industrial romanticism and anti-progressivism of Western writers, from Henry David Thoreau to Edward Carpenter and John Ruskin. Some of the alternatives Gandhi proposed were wildly nostalgic, and many were simply nonsensical. But what does remain powerful and valuable in Gandhi are his perceptions about the dynamic of modern industrial civilization—and its wider costs. He saw how its spread, once begun, was unstoppable.

Modern civilization, Gandhi believed, reduced an individual’s capacity to choose and act for himself. It weakened people, by turning them from active, imaginative beings into passive spectators and consumers. It anaesthetized fear instead of forcing an individual to face that fear down. And so it drained away our “real physical strength or courage”. Modern civilization—and not British rule—was the main obstacle to the freedom of Indians.

Gandhi hated dependency and had contempt for those who felt themselves to be victims, and among the appurtenances of modern civilization he saw as self-depleting were machinery, the railways, armaments, and the professions—lawyers and doctors, parliamentarians and politicians. To the machinations of any of these, he preferred an honest fight.

Above all, there is a psychological sharpness to his argument that modern civilization implants in all of us a restless dependency. It corrodes individual self-restraint and self-rule, and inundates the individual with distractions. Did he sense the Facebook and Internet addictions of the future when he wrote: “(M)ind is a restless bird: the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions, the more unbridled they become. Our ancestors, therefore, set a limit to our indulgences....(They) dissuaded us from luxuries and pleasures.”

Gandhi was himself fascinated by modern inventions—pens, watches, the wireless radio, gardening tools—and perhaps felt his own susceptibility to gadget addiction. He saw how difficult it was, once new technologies and tools were invented, to turn away from what they seem to offer. “It is no easy task to do away with a thing that is established,” Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj, “We,

therefore, say that the non-beginning of a thing is supreme wisdom.”

Modern civilization, Gandhi seems to be saying, sets in motion a psychological dynamic that is unsustainable, liable to career into a disastrous end—because it corrodes our capacity for perspective, balance and judgement. It undermines self-restraint. He gives an earthy example: “I over-eat, I have indigestion, I go to a doctor, he gives me medicine, I am cured, I over-eat again and take his pills again. Had I not taken the pills in the first instance, I would have suffered the punishment deserved by me, and I would not have over-eaten again.

The doctor intervened and helped me to indulge myself. My body certainly felt more at ease, but my mind became weakened.”

As much as I like to be able to scrounge an Anadin or Crocin after a night out, Gandhi is on to something here—about the destruction of self-restraint, weakness of will. Despite the poetess Sarojini Naidu’s old joke, about how expensive it was to keep Gandhi in poverty, in fact he was a very frugal man: reusing envelopes, writing notes on scraps of waste paper (an archivist’s conservation nightmare). He self-mockingly put these habits of his down to the penny-pinching mentality of his bania caste. But in fact his austerity was a precise choice, and he was able to stamp it on Indian public life in the middle decades of the 20th century.

Even well into the 1970s, Indian political and business elites were much more restrained and austere than they have now become in their public conduct—they were somewhat embarrassed about ostentatiously displaying the wealth they no doubt possessed. Today, as the country itself gains wealth, that ethic has entirely disappeared. The newspapers now write explanatory pieces on the term “retail therapy”, as shopping malls proliferate and supplant the cricket field and movie theatre as the centres of urban public life. We seem proud to have among us someone who is building what is supposed to be the most expensive private residence in the world, a clumsy pile rising on Mumbai’s Cumbala Hill that looks like a slightly squeezed steel and glass millefeuille—its compound walls alone are three storeys high.

And we have of course the branded glamour of Montblanc’s Gandhi Commemorative Pen—turned in white gold, it’s yours for just around Rs14 lakh. “Formerly, men were made slaves under physical compulsion,” the pen’s inspiration wrote, and “now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy.”

Seeking to make up for lost time, we’ve become as avidly consumerist, maybe even more so, than our counterparts in the West. Nothing remarkable in that. But as India shakes off the last vestiges of a Gandhian restraint, it is hitting limits at once human and natural. The struggles that animate India’s Maoists and Naxalites are battles over India’s basic resources—increasingly depleted as consumption rises. Today’s struggles are over land, over water, firewood,

over the mineral wealth buried in the hills and forests and over an atmosphere whose capacity to absorb our energy burn has been damaged.

In the cities, tuberculosis and lung disease are rampant and undercounted in official records, as slum dwellers, whose huts offer little protection against the environment, suffer the polluting effects of hectic construction and 3-hour traffic tie-ups.

“Real home rule is self-rule or self control,” Gandhi writes towards the

end of Hind Swaraj; in the Gujarati original, the sentence is “One’s rule over one’s own mind is real Swaraj.”

The dissolution of such self-rule, Gandhi foresaw, would lead to a world not unlike the one we now live in, riven as it is with egoism and inequality—and unsustainable consumption. But what he insisted on was in fact deeply hopeful and relevant: that our civilization’s improvement, or its further destruction, depended on the

choices we make as individuals. As I type his words into a new laptop, purchased before I really needed another one, I can’t help wondering if I would be better off—if India, if the planet, would not have been better off, in some small, barely traceable way—if I had exercised a bit of Gandhian self-control.

Sunil Khilnani is the author of The Idea of India. His radio essays on Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj will be broadcast

by BBC Radio 3 during the week of 19 July. Write to him at publiceye@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Sunil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/sunil­khilnani

L6 COLUMNS SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

Weaving a revolution, one piece at a time

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PHOTOGRAPHS

did something recently that gave me more

BY

SARA

satisfaction than a vacation. At the Sampoorn Handicrafts fair held at Chitrakala Parishad in Bangalore—similar to Dilli Haat and Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda festival—I spotted a beautiful

khadi salwar kameez swaying in the wind. It was off-white, simple and beautifully cut. I had to have it.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have it in my size. “All these are cut to Italian sizes, madam,” said the volunteer manning the stall.

“Why don’t you go next door and buy the fabric?”

This was how I discovered Malkha cotton, which brands itself as the “freedom fabric”. At Rs110 per metre, it was reasonable. I bought 8m, enough for two salwar kameezes; and found it to be eminently breathable; perfect for Bangalore’s varying weather.

Soon, I began wearing Malkha pretty much every day. I became obsessed with this simple handwoven cloth that made me feel—if not exactly Gandhian, at least like a Gandhian’s stunt double. A Gandhian wannabe.

Fashion as a political statement.

I went to the website (www.malkha.in) and read their blog (http://malkhaindia.blogspot.com).

All entries were put up by a lady called Uzramma, so I emailed and then called her. When we spoke, she was in Chirala village in Andhra Pradesh, where one of Malkha’s four units operates. Uzramma (“no last name”) is in her mid-60s, and has been working with handloom textiles since 1989. “The great strength of Indian handloom is the regional diversity,” she says.

Mass-produced yarn from spinning mills increases production but neutralizes the quirky variations of regional Indian textiles. In the past, cotton itself went by many names: bafta, nainsukh, dosuti, moree, jamdani, mulmul, chint, mashru, himroo and others. Now, they all have morphed into Westside or Big Bazaar cotton.

As Uzramma talked, I finally realized what Malkha was. Malkha (the word is a combination of mulmul and khadi) is a fabric, yes. But it is also a blueprint, a logistical exercise.

Fabric production today is a multi-step process that has become the opposite of sustainable.

First the cotton is picked and taken to a ginning mill to separate the lint from the seed. This fluffy, airy lint is actually the foundation of cotton fabric. Processing this lint into yarn requires severe mechanical intervention.

Here’s what happens: This lustrous lint is steam-pressed into bales, trucked hundreds of kilometres to the nearest spinning mill, where a conveyor belt with coarse, medium and fine-toothed combs separates and loosens up these tight bales of lint—akin to how we comb our hair.

The somewhat loosened bale is sent to a blow room where industrial-size fans blow hard to get the cotton bale back into its original fluffy state (like we blow-dry our hair and you know how damaging that is).

Malkha avoids all the above steps, thanks to what its blog calls a “revolutionary carding machine” that does all of the above steps on site.

The portable carding machine takes the cotton from the grower and separates the trash from the fibres right there. The fibres are fed into a draw frame where they become yarn.

The yarn is bought by the weaver in the neighbouring village who makes fabric out of it.

The Malkha Marketing Trust markets this fabric, which is created by a self-managed micro-enterprise with the wonderful name of Kranti

Wonder fabric: (clockwise from far left) The organic Malkha fabric; its texture is drawing designers’ attention; unlike khadi, Malkha is not hand­spun, but handwoven; from picking the cotton to weaving it, it’s all done locally.

Nulu Vastrautpathi Vikraya Kendram that roughly translates as Revolutionary Yarn and Fabric Production and Sale Centre.

The inventor of Malkha’s carding machine is a 42-year-old mechanical engineer from IIT Madras, and managing trustee of the Chennai-based Fractal Foundation named L. Kannan.

“Spinning inherently is a small-scale activity,” says Kannan. “Textile production was village-based, household-based. Nowadays, the whole thing is organized with no geographic proximity, creating inefficiencies, rejects, and pile-up of stocks, so that the individual artisan or weaver becomes a piece-rate worker. The substantial value that the industry generates is not passed down to the weaver.”

Fractal Foundation entered the game to address this gap. “We are trying to return textile production to the community—so that cotton yarn production, the dye house, the weaver and the garment-making unit are all localized. That’s why some call this carding machine a game changer,” says Kannan.

His last sentence would have sounded like a brag were it not for the flat tone in which he delivered it.

Uzramma’s response is more enthusiastic. “We are going to rule the world of cotton textiles,” she says.

“The way we make Malkha is energy-saving, eco-sensitive, socially responsible, and produces good clothes. What more do you need? We are going to change the world.”

The problem, of course, is the scale.

Malkha’s four units together produce 2,500m of cloth per month. In contrast, the daily fabric production of Delhi-based Modelama Exports is 10,000-15,000m.

“People are interested in Malkha because it has a story to tell,” says Sanjay Gulati, the managing director of Modelama Exports. “They are spending money and feeling good about helping a cause that percolates down to thousands of weavers.

Malkha combines modern technology with a traditional handcrafted method.

All of this has touched the hearts of our European customers.”

Is scaling the main problem with marketing Malkha? To my surprise, he disagrees. Scaling up is not the solution, he replied. “There are some products that we place on the top of the table as a symbol of our prestige and pride. I think if we market Malkha this way, it will attract customers that are the elite of the business world.

Mass market production will make it lose its charm.”

For all Indians, particularly Indians of the past generation, cotton is a fabric suffused with romance and identity—ranging from the sheer Dhaka and Bengal cotton to the bright Chettinad variety. They are all a part of our psyche. As Uzramma said, “Textiles have been the core industry of the subcontinent for 5,000 years—like silk is to China and baskets or bamboo weaving are to Africa.”

What Malkha is doing is not “revivalism”, she insists. Rather, it is using the “strength of the Indian textile production traditions in a contemporary context”.

A portion of Malkha fabric is exported to Italy, France, Norway, the UK and the US. A French buyer for Hermès wrote a letter, posted on Malkha’s blog, enthusing over its texture and subtlety. The fabric is also attracting the attention of local fashion designers, including Mayank Mansingh Kaul, whose designs for kurtas using Malkha fabric are put up on the Malkha blog.

I find Mayank on Facebook and email him. We talk. Kaul, 25, is a Delhi-based textile designer who founded a fashion collective called Afterhours. “Cotton is not just a fabric; it holds so many associations for us Indians,” Kaul says.

“Malkha takes an interesting position because they are about handwoven cotton, not hand-spun.

Hand-spinning is unsustainable. It costs Rs1,000 a metre and as a designer, it is hard for me to build that cost into my clothes. Malkha takes the best of both processes and creates a reasonably priced fabric that is getting rave reviews from international buyers but is also affordable for the local villagers who create it.”

Estimates vary, but India is among the world’s largest producers of organic cotton. The problem, according to fashion designer Peter D’Ascoli, is that there are only three Dutch agencies which certify organic cotton and most of the cotton farmers cannot afford this certification.

D’Ascoli worked in New York with Diane von Furstenberg for many years before relocating to Delhi. He is part of Kaul’s collective. “As a New York

designer, I am so attracted to Malkha because it addresses two huge fashion trends that we need to focus on,” he says. “The desire for sustainable production; and the whole notion of fair trade and nurturing ancient crafts and ways. Malkha addresses both these trends in an authentic way. Two weeks ago, in New York, I showed Malkha fabric to Diane (von Furstenberg) and she had the same reaction as I.” D’Ascoli, Kaul and two other designers in the Afterhours collective are planning a fashion road show using just the Malkha fabric. They will start in October with a show in Mumbai’s Melange and then take it to London, Milan and possibly New York. They should also try Serenity, an eco-friendly store at Jayamahal Extension in Bangalore and do a show here. I would buy. They should also consider designing Malkha shirts or kurtas for business people like my husband: socially conscious but not a tree-hugger.

Malkha might just possibly achieve this middle ground and be the fabric of choice for everyone from the young editors of Mint to the younger breed of politicians.

Shoba Narayan wonders if Malkha might be the midpoint in the continuum between a tree-hugger and a corporate titan. 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 17, 2010

L7

The Health Issue YOUR GUIDE TO LIVING

HEALTHY IT COULD BE A SUBTLE SHIFT TO A LOW­CHOLESTEROL OIL OR OBSESSIVE CRUNCHES TO SCULPT PERFECT ABS—HEALTH HAS CREPT INTO OUR NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS. IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUE, WE DECONSTRUCT FAD DIETS, EXAMINE THE FIXATION WITH ‘BODY BEAUTIFUL’ AND TELL YOU HOW TO REVIVE YOUR SEXUAL SPARK. WARM UP.

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

A CAKE FOR THE FLINTSTONES’

TEA PARTY

One for the Caveman: Eggs and nuts make Sephardic Jewish cakes rich but don’t compromise on the health quotient.

HEALTHY BAKING NEED NOT BE AN OXYMORON, NOR A RICH CAKE SYNONYMOUS WITH A BUTTERY MOUTHFUL. GO FRUITY FOR A HEALTHY DESSERT

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or some time now, I’ve been living with Fred Flintstone, although I’ve yet to be dragged back to the cave by my hair. Since my husband discovered The Caveman Diet, he’s been eating huge quantities of meat, developed an unnaturally close relationship with cashew nuts and looks at carbs as if, well, they hadn’t yet been invented.

The Caveman Diet is basically Atkins for he-men, its devotees part of a Stone Age subculture who believe carbs, as well as being for sissies, are at the root of most paunch-related problems. These latter-day hunter-gatherers eat only food that was available before the invention of agriculture—essentially anything you can catch or forage—so no pasta, rice, bread, chips, wheat, dairy and definitely no sugar.

You are also required to skip meals—it’s good to starve a little between hunts—and exercise furiously but sporadically as if being pursued by a woolly mammoth.

According to Caveman.com, this state of fight or flight “activates your animal instincts for hunting and gathering…. embrace it for what it is”. And if you end up with rickets or osteoporosis from lack of calcium or are eaten by a tiger, well, at least you’ll be seriously buff. Arthur de Vany, the Caveman founder, who is 72 but admittedly has a body Shah Rukh Khan would kill for, lives his life as though it is “a very long camping trip with no camp

stove or energy bars to get us through”. De Vany also believes the diet can have a beneficial effect on the modern blight of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. He’s not alone, the paleolithic regime has some high-profile devotees. It helped Liz Hurley sashay in her wedding sari and saw Peter Andre through the worst of being married to Katie Price.

Last week, my daughter, a once-staunch ally in the carb-rich lifestyle, announced she was joining Dad in the cave in a bid to shed the evidence of recent holiday fish suppers and deep-fried Mars bar excess before school starts again in August. A week in, though, Pebbles was cake-crazed and begging me for carb-free goodies. I’m normally intolerant of fad diets but I could feel her pain. So overcoming my natural aversion to “healthy” baking, I decided to rise to the challenge of baking a cake containing no flour or sugar.

These restrictions pointed to the great tradition of Sephardic Jewish cakes which rely for their richness on eggs and nuts, both of which were easily foraged by early man. I first encountered these cakes, made at Passover, in Claudia Roden’s 1968 A Book of Middle Eastern Food. This version, made with oranges, dates back to the 14th century when Jews fled from Spain and Portugal where these cakes, somewhere between a cake and a pudding, can still be found.

Don’t be fooled by the cake’s plain looks—it’s a blowout rich

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

enough to help any modern-day primitive man or woman live to hunt another day.

I was pretty pleased with this Caveman version, the almonds give a decadent richness and the eggs soothe away any concerns about the “sugar-free” component. One of the things I love most about this is the novelty of boiling, then blending, whole fruit—frugal cave-folk would surely have approved—which gives the finished cake a wonderful speckled orange effect. Fred and Pebbles were certainly delighted and the glazed and replete look on their faces reassured me they wouldn’t be chasing wild boar anytime soon. Wilma would definitely have won the Bedrock bake-off with this.

‘Caveman’ Cake Ingredients 2 oranges, about 375g (in season, mandarins, tangerines and clementines make a delicious variation) 6 eggs 200g almonds, blanched and finely ground 20g Natura or other sucralose-based sweetener, which is equivalent to 200g of caster sugar 2 tbsp orange flower water (optional) 1 tsp baking powder Method Carefully wash the oranges, place in a pan then cover with water and boil for about 2 hours. Take out the fruit and leave to cool. Remove all pips

then put the whole fruit, skin and all, into a food processor and blend to a pulp.

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius (you could try it on the campfire, but I can’t be held responsible for the outcome) and grease a 21cm loose-bottomed tin.

In a large bowl whisk the eggs, then beat in the almonds, sugar, baking powder, pulped orange and orange flower water. Beat well until everything is thoroughly mixed, then pour into the tin.

Bake for about 1 hour, or until a skewer comes out

clean and the top is golden brown. Leave the cake until cool and preferably for at least a day—it keeps well for a few days.

For non-cavemen, these cakes are sometimes served with an orange sugar syrup; we ate ours with fresh cream (malai) and raspberries.

Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at http://eatanddust.wordpress.com Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com

www.livemint.com For a slide show on how to bake Caveman cake, go to www.livemint.com/cavemancake.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

L8 LOVE LIFE SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

JUPITERIMAGES

Minefield: The possibilities for food to go bad in a relationship are endless.

WHAT’S FOR DINNER, SWEETIE?

HEARTBURN YOU SAY STEAK AND SHE SAYS ‘EW!’ SO HOW DO COUPLES COPE WHEN THEIR COOKING AND EATING STYLES CLASH?

B Y E LIZABETH B ERNSTEIN ···························· en Breeland slurps sauces, sucks on bones, smacks his lips and licks his fingers while eating. “You want to get the chipmunk effect,” says the 48-year-old software consultant, of stuffing his cheeks full of peanuts, his favourite food.

Eating this way is a pleasure for him: He grew up with five siblings on a farm in South Carolina, US, where mealtimes were chaotic affairs and the sound of loud eating was a sign of appreciation.

But how does his wife feel about it?

“I struggle to keep my nerves intact,” says Jocelyn Breeland, 49, a communications and marketing director for a trade association that supports people with disabilities.

“When he swallows, he makes a drain-flushing sound. And he can make grapes crunch.”

In the beginning of their 23-year marriage, Jocelyn tried to change her husband’s eating habits by nagging or kicking his leg under the table. Now she drinks wine to calm down, dines in another room or rushes through her own food so she can get away from his noises as quickly as possible. And she shoots him a look.

“It’s like a cartoon character, where her eyes bug out and her mouth turns down,” says Ben. “You feel like the worst person ever.”

Forget middle school. Spats over eating—where, when, how we do it—are just as likely to happen to grown-ups as children, especially

B

grown-ups in a relationship, who eat together a lot. In the adult world, the mess they leave tends to be emotional rather than physical.

Couples squabble over everything from how much mayo to put into the tuna salad to whether to order in or go out for dinner. Meat lovers vs vegetarians? Organic vs junk food? A spouse “gently” telling you to put down the Chunky Monkey Ben & Jerry’s? The possibilities for food to go bad in a relationship are endless.

Heather Hills likes to eat dinner early, around 5pm. Her husband, James, wants to eat later, around 9 or 10pm. Making matters worse, the two differ in their cooking styles: He loves to take his time creating beautiful entrées, with special sauces and carefully chosen side dishes. She throws ground meat, frozen vegetables and cream of mushroom soup into a casserole. “I will put it together and he will say, ‘it looks like poop,’” says Heather, 31, a social media specialist for a marketing firm who lives in Bartlett, Illinois.

The nadir of the Hills’ battles?

Chocolate-chip cookies. James prefers his flat and thin. His wife wants them cakey and thick.

“There is always an argument,” says James, 33, a travel blogger.

“It’s usually resolved by the person who made them enjoying them and the other being ticked off” (Heather has been known to get so mad after a flat batch comes out of the oven that she’s driven to the grocer to buy store-made cookies).

When I asked people about the food fights they’d had with spouses or romantic partners, stories poured in. There were disputes over shopping lists, how closely to follow directions on a recipe and exactly how brown a banana has to be before it becomes officially inedible.

One friend of mine told of her husband’s “garbage pail” dinners, which she described as concoctions straight out of a trash can.

“He opens the fridge and yanks whatever he can grab—beans, cheese, Indian or Mexican leftovers, pasta—puts it together in the microwave or a frying pan, and douses it with whatever kind of sauce is around, which is usually some kind of curry sauce or maybe ketchup,” she says. This “nastiness” has made her wonder at times about the essence of her relationship, she says. “How can you not want to make someone you love happy with food?”

Sharing a meal—especially with candlelight and a bottle of rosé— can be loving and intimate. At least in the beginning of a relationship, we’re typically on our best behaviour when we eat (Jocelyn has memories of her husband “cutting his food and taking dainty mouthfuls” when they were dating).

So why all the bickering? We shouldn’t need therapists to tell us that food cuts to a basic issue of identity.

It’s no coincidence that one of the earliest ways we demonstrate our independence is by asserting our food preferences. By demanding that others respect what we eat, we are demanding that they see us as individuals.

So maybe we should pay a bit more attention to people’s eating habits when we first meet them.

That’s what Kathy Schwartz did.

The Seattle resident once ended a relationship with a man because of the way he ate French onion soup.

He had ordered a bowl one day at a restaurant, but found the typically stringy, melted Gruyère cheese to be a challenge. “After several attempts trying to twiddle the cheese into submission, he grabbed his knife and, samurai style, sliced through it,” says Schwartz. “It dawned on me that this was his approach to dealing with life’s challenges—to attack and pummel rather than negotiate, compromise or find another less confrontational way.” She declined further dates.

Sara Walker, a 24-year-old interior decorator from Birmingham, Alabama, admits she grew up enjoying a limited palate: chicken fingers, mac and cheese, pizza, and peanut-butter crackers. “I never even ate a sandwich,” she says.

In college, she met her husband, Chris Walker, who hails from the Mississippi Delta and loves food: steak, tamales, catfish, game. He became the first person in her life to challenge her on her poor eating habits.

A few months into their relationship, as the couple became more serious, Chris came up with a possible solution: He sent her to a therapist to get over her food aversions.

The counsellor had Sara make a

list of the foods she refused to touch—her No. 1 offender lettuce, along with green beans, grapes and spaghetti sauce—and helped her introduce them into her diet.

How’d it go? Well, recently Sara ordered a salad to start. And then her entrée? Another salad.

She’s now a fan of green beans and asparagus. She has learnt to love steak.

There’s just one problem: She’s learnt that her husband isn’t really all that adventurous an eater after all. For example, he likes his quesadillas plain—she throws beans, corn, salsa and chicken into hers.

Now when it comes to eating habits, she says, “I am starting to pass him.”

Write to wsj@livemint.com

LISTEN TO THE LOUNGE PODCAST Lounge columnist Nandini Ramnath ponders Bollywood’s predilection for Kashmir over other conflict zones. We tell you about Sabyasachi’s new range of saris that come in vintage biscuit tins; and review the Cannes­returned Hindi film ‘Udaan’ and two newly translated gems from Russian fiction. www.livemint.com/loungepodcast

STYLE L9

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Q&A | BIPASHA BASU

EXERCISE, SLEEP, HYDRATE,

EAT RIGHT THE ACTOR ON GETTING FIT WITHOUT BEING SIZE ZERO, HER DVD AND HER FORTHCOMING GYMWEAR LINE

B Y U DITA J HUNJHUNWALA ···························· ollywood star Bipasha Basu is the latest poster girl for fitness and fashion. A scathing headline in 2004 about her weight motivated the actor to shed the excess baggage and silence her critics. She then took her personal experiences and created a workout DVD, Fit and Fabulous (launched earlier this year). Besides her movies (her latest film Lamhaa released on Friday), she is preparing for the launch of her fitness clothes label—BB Love Yourself. Edited excerpts from an interview:

B

You said the criticism about your weight years ago motivated you to focus on your health and fitness.

Yes, that is how I started off.

At that time, I was working on 13 films a year—eating unit food, not sleeping enough. It was quite bad. If you lead an unhealthy life, the pounds will pile on.

What are the three things you need to do to have a fit body?

Be active—no matter how old you are. People of all ages should be encouraged to do some form of exercise. Young people should play a sport. I am soft on younger people who are overweight, but I encourage them to start their romance

with health and fitness sooner, so their old age is easier. u Sleep and rest are important for the recovery of muscles. u Hydrate and eat right: to be fit and to keep you going.

What is your gymwear line for Reebok like and who have you designed it with?

I work with a group of Reebok designers on the patterns and they give me feedback on what will sell and what Indian women will find comfortable. I am not the prototype of the Indian woman and what I wear might not be suitable for all Indian women. Once I have their inputs, we work together to modify the designs. The winter collection will be out in August-September.

Tell us more about the collection.

In my fitness line, BB Love Yourself, fabrics are very important. We have used a lot of stretch cotton and Play Dry which does not show sweat patches. The fabrics are not clingy, but give a hold to the body while being comfortable.

The collection includes long tanks and Tees which cover problem areas and suit all body types, plus tights of all lengths and styles. The BB Love Yourself T-shirts can also be worn as lifestyle garments. We

have used red tones, pinks and blacks in this women’s only collection which is about 15-18 styles starting from Rs495. There will be three collections annually which will follow the seasonal colour palette.

How did you think of designing a fitness fashion line?

I was a model before becoming an actress. I love fashion, fitness and clothes. So this association with Reebok allows me to marry all my passions and is a good first step before I move into other fashion lines.

How do you handle the strain of too much exercise?

A massage is the best stress-buster. And 6-8 hours of sleep. If you are doing weights then go for a deep-tissue massage. Otherwise, a Thai or relaxation massage works well.

Who is your fitness DVD targeted at?

It is aimed towards a wide range of people: people like me who are independent working women always on the move; extremely busy

BE ACTIVE—NO MATTER HOW OLD YOU ARE. PEOPLE OF ALL AGES SHOULD DO SOME FORM OF EXERCISE.

UNDER THE

HOOD

housewives who may be conscious of the way they look; students who cannot afford a personal trainer or gym membership. People have misconceptions about the time needed to exercise and get daunted by the idea of committing 2 hours a day to the process of working out.

The idea behind the DVD is to pull people in slowly and encourage them to spend 25 minutes a day on themselves.

The best investment you make is in your health.

Is weight loss guaranteed if someone follows the video diligently?

This is a workout video and for weight loss it must be accompanied by diet control. If you follow my programme carefully, you will see weight loss and toning. But how much weight loss depends on the BMI (body mass index), age and diet of the individual. You cannot just eat everything.

Indian food is very heavy and what you eat is what you look like. Once your body and weight are in control, you can start making exceptions.

Does too much cardio and weights training tire the joints and knee?

I don’t recommend too much running on the treadmill. I don’t do it. Running on soft ground is much better. But impact on joints, knees, etc., depends on age and body structure, and whether you have weak joints to start with. The wrong shoes can also cause joint injuries. It is important to read and know about the right posture. And most importantly, remember to breathe right.

Breathing right and doing something like yoga helps you feel and look younger and makes your skin glow.

Body basics: Bipasha Basu says she loves fashion, fitness and clothes and her new fashion line will reflect that.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

Nike: Nylon and polyester water­resistant men’s hooded running jacket, at all Nike stores, Rs3,295.

Diesel: Black polyester jacket for men, at Diesel stores in Mumbai and New Delhi, Rs9,895.

INDOORS OR OUTDOORS, WEAR THESE COVER­UPS WHILE YOU WORK OUT TO BRAVE THE ELEMENTS—AND UP THE STYLE QUOTIENT B Y R ACHANA N AKRA rachana.n@livemint.com

····························

Adidas: Polyester jacket for men with a black and white print on shoulders and arms, at all Adidas stores, Rs1,899.

Puma: Pink chequered jacket for women, at all Puma stores, August onwards, price not yet finalized.

Calvin Klein: Nylon and polyester silver and grey hooded women’s jacket, at all Calvin Klein stores, Rs2,999.

PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

L10 COVER

COVER L11

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

The Facebook for dieters, SparkPeople is free and comes loaded with diet and exercise information. On joining, you are asked your weight and height to determine the correct body mass index (BMI) and only healthy goals are allowed. Calorie recommendations are set on whether you choose moderate or aggressive weight loss.

Progress is recorded via SparkPoints that are rewarded according to activities done to track your health goals. You can eat carbohydrates such as rye dinner rolls and reduced calorie bread. Dairy in the form of cottage and cheddar cheese is also allowed. A lot of importance is given to exercise, with various suggestions and a large directory of recipes you can select from on the website www.sparkpeople.com

WHAT’S GOOD The recipes and exercise tips are free. Krishnaswamy says, “It seems like a sensible calorie distribution, also encourages physical activity and water intake.” Dr Sharma says it works positively to sensitize people towards healthy eating and to “learn so much more”.

Fans of this popular diet include Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, Renee Zellweger, Robin Williams; in fact anyone who is even remotely a celebrity has, at some point, worshipped Atkins. For a diet that allows all the meat and fat you can eat, it’s surprising how many people fall off this diet. Says Khosla, “The diet involves cutting down drastically on carbohydrate intake and entering a state of ketosis, which happens when the body uses carbohydrate stores and starts burning fat for energy.” This, in turn, leads to a constant state of fatigue, which could be the prime reason behind B­town beauties (who are rumoured to be on zero­carb diets) fainting on sets.

Experts call Atkins nutritionally imbalanced—excess of animal protein, saturated fat and cholesterol increases the risk of cardiovascular and renal disease. An overdose of meat causes an acidic constitution, which adversely affects the liver and skin. Says Dr Sharma, “When meat is broken down in the body it produces hydrogen ions that make the body more acidic, which can lead to pimples, bad breath and dandruff, while a lack of carbs causes fatigue.”

When Robert Atkins died in 2003, he was bloated, weighing 258 pounds, to the extent that his own family had difficulty recognizing him.

The question that arose naturally was whether the famous doctor was done in by his own diet. A new study in 2009 from Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital (a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School) found that low­carb, high­protein diets similar to Atkins led to a significant increase in atherosclerosis (thickening of arteries due to fat deposits), an impaired ability to form new blood vessels in tissues deprived of blood flow, as might occur during a heart attack. In the case of Atkins, the medical examiner’s report noted he had a history of heart trouble, including congestive heart failure and high blood pressure. Food for thought?

BLOOD TYPE

FOOD PLAN

SPARK PEOPLE

THE ATKINS ALLURE

Peter D’Ádamo, the author of Eat Right 4 Your Type, suggests that a chemical reaction occurs between your blood and the food you eat, caused by a factor called lectins. These are proteins found in food that have agglutinating properties that affect blood. According to his theory, if food with incompatible lectins is consumed, they can target a body part and begin to agglutinate blood cells in that area. The blood type diet claims to be in rhythm with your genetic pattern, with food groups divided into three categories—highly beneficial, food allowed and food not allowed—according to your blood group. Common vegetables and fruits such as spinach and apples are allowed for all types.

WHAT’S NOT The main risk in this diet is of deficiencies. Says Khosla: “For example, the diet plan for O and A blood types limits dairy products.

WHAT’S GOOD Consequently, the diet becomes low in While most dieticians calcium and other nutrients.” It’s also are sceptical about the confusing for most people because lists concept, Dr Sharma says the of restricted and allowed foods make upside to this diet is that it forces it unsustainable. Also, it’s not one to think about one’s body and focused on weight loss. what works for it. “It matches with some ayurvedic theories.

Somewhere, this diet pattern has potential but it is premature to be effective.”

PRECAUTIONS Because there’s an obvious risk of nutritional deficiency, this diet should be followed under the supervision of a nutritionist.

THREE MONTHS,

5 FAD DIETS

BEYOND WHICH IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO CONTINUE WITHOUT THE PUSH OF A HEALTH PROFESSIONAL

IF YOUR NEW EATING PLAN SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, IT PROBABLY IS. WE GOT THREE NUTRITIONISTS TO WEIGH IN ON FIVE NEW DIETS

WHAT’S NOT Dr Sharma considers it a little too safe. She explains, “I tweak diets according to an individual’s personal constitution, sometimes with a mix of Western science and ayurveda.” Diets that are too generalized can be a bit too safe and, therefore, sometimes ineffective. Dr Sharma suggests that SparkPeople should be viewed more as an information portal for health than as a diet.

A NOT VERY CALORIE RESTRICTED VERSION

CAN BE FOLLOWED FOR ABOUT SIX MONTHS, AFTER WHICH ONE HAS TO START CONCENTRATING ON CHANGING OVERALL EATING HABITS

WHO IS IT FOR?

SINCE IT ENCOURAGES THE REMOVAL OF ALL TYPES OF SUGAR. DR SHARMA SUGGESTS THAT IF YOU’RE NOT DIABETIC YOU CAN TWEAK THE DIET

BY REMOVING MOST SUGAR EXCEPT THE NATURAL SOURCES

BY INCLUDING BANNED FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

According to this diet, all forms of sugar are toxic since it produces insulin that results in weight gain. The original book, published in 1995, has since attained a large number of followers. It particularly discourages refined sugars in food and also includes the removal of high glycemic food such as white breads and pasta, along with hidden sugars such as corn syrup, honey, dextrose, fructose and molasses, among others. Even certain fruits and vegetables such as potatoes, corn and carrots are banned. Along with weight loss, the diet also claims to lower cholesterol, increase energy and help treat diabetes. Like the Zone (see far right), this programme follows a set ratio but uses 30% protein, 30% carbohydrates and 40% fat. Only red wine is allowed in alcohol.

WHAT’S GOOD Most nutritionists are in agreement about the harmful effects of sugar on the body. Says Dr Sharma, “There’s absolutely no problem in giving up sugar forever; it causes inflammation, hormonal imbalances, acidity and obesity.” Krishnaswamy likes it because it encourages the removal of refined sugars without barring any particular food group.

She adds, “Excess sugar intake can lead to an increase in triglycerides and dental decay, it also leads to fluctuation in insulin levels which, in turn, increases cravings for more food.”

WHAT’S NOT Khosla isn’t a big fan of the diet because it also eliminates some valuable minerals and nutrients, isn’t suitable for vegetarians and restricts some fruits and vegetables which are essentially healthy. The complete removal of sugar makes the diet regimental, with no room for treats. While it is fairly effective for weight loss, the results could be on the basis of severely calorie-restricted meals, a maximum of 1,200 calories per day.

PRECAUTIONS Says Khosla: “The plan’s emphasis on monitoring precise proportions of fats, proteins and carbohydrates is inappropriate since it results in eating disorders.” The diet is also extremely low in carbohydrates; therefore, there is a risk of ketosis, and its related perils.

FOR HOW LONG?

THE ADDITION OF BANANAS TO BREAKFAST CAN BE A LIFELONG CHOICE ALONG WITH DRINKING ROOM TEMPERATURE WATER (WARM IS BETTER), SINCE COLD WATER IS BAD FOR DIGESTION

NOT MORE THAN

THREE MONTHS,

WHILE UNDER CONSULTATION WITH A NUTRITIONIST

WHO IS IT FOR? DR SHARMA CONSIDERS THIS DIET GOOD FOR

PEOPLE WITH ALLERGY PROBLEMS.

A huge craze in Japan, this diet, as the name suggests, is simply about eating bananas in the morning. You can eat as many bananas as you want for breakfast but not so many that you get a tight, full feeling in the stomach.

Eat the fruit with room temperature water, which is the beverage of choice in this diet. You can eat whatever you like for lunch, dinner and snacks, as long as you don’t eat after 8pm. Restrictions include no ice cream, dairy products, alcohol or dessert after dinner, although one sweet snack is allowed mid-afternoon. Another important aspect of the plan is the lack of emphasis on exercise. You can exercise if you want but only do the least strenuous workouts.

PEOPLE IN THEIR EARLY 20s

FOR HOW LONG?

I

MORNING BANANA DIET

SUGAR BUSTERS

WHO IS IT FOR?

TO 30s WHO DON’T HAVE ANY SERIOUS HEALTH COMPLICATIONS

FOR HOW LONG?

B Y V ASUDHA R AI ················································································ n a world full of concave abs, we are constantly bombarded with new miracle diets.

Shikha Sharma, doctor and wellness consultant, considers diets a great way to start a healthy routine. She says, “They help start a behavioural change, make you disciplined and focused, but it’s only a method to start that change and not a way of life.” Be it Jennifer Aniston’s baby food diet or Beyoncé Knowles’ cayenne pepper and water programme, diets are getting crazier by the minute. Our panel of experts—Dr Sharma, Sheela Krishnaswamy, managing partner and founder, Nutrition Information, Counselling and Health Education (NICHE), and Ishi Khosla, clinical nutritionist and director, Whole Foods India—spill the beans on five popular eating plans.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

PRECAUTIONS Khosla warns that this diet isn’t good for people with insulin imbalance. The recipes must be read carefully by diabetics to check for hidden sources of sugar.

Teenagers who have a tendency to go to extremes mustn’t be allowed on this diet.

MOSTLY DIABETICS

THE TRUTH BEHIND

FOR HOW LONG?

WHAT’S GOOD “Bananas are best had in the morning because they energize you,” says Dr Sharma.

“According to ayurveda, bananas are loaded with kapha, which is a cold and heavy energy; if eaten at dinner, they can mess up your metabolism.”

Krishnaswamy agrees about the myriad advantages of the fruit and believes that the discouragement of ice cream, alcohol and dessert after dinner could be the real reason for weight loss.

BY REMOVING CERTAIN FOODS, IT MAY BE EASIER TO FIND OUT THE EXACT ALLERGEN CAUSING A REACTION

A softer version of Atkins, the Zone diet was devised by US-based biochemist Barry Sears, and is a low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet. It advocates that food should be treated like prescription medicine—the right combination helps you enter “the zone”. So, 40% of your daily calories must come from carbohydrates, 30% from fat and 30% from protein. It also encourages you to eat unlimited amounts of fruits and vegetables. According to Sears, such a diet promotes optimum fat-burning conditions. Says Khosla, “The amount of food eaten is an important factor in this diet and clients are encouraged to monitor their food portions.”

The diet consists of three meals and two snacks which are scheduled for late afternoon and late evening. Another key feature of the diet, introduced in his later books, is an intake of a particular ratio of Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids, thereby popularizing the intake of fish WHAT’S NOT oil supplements.

Compared with other diets such as Atkins and GM, this results in slower weight loss. “This isn’t completely a bad thing since slower weight loss is also more sustainable over time,” says Dr Sharma.

WHAT’S GOOD Since there many calculations involved, this diet Dr Sharma considers the will only suit those who are committed. It’s tough Zone more nutritionally to follow for those who don’t want to spend too balanced than other diets, while much time thinking about their choices in food, Krishnaswamy appreciates making it time-consuming and expensive. the importance given to omega Krishnaswamy warns about the perils of all fatty acids. It also causes less low-carbohydrate diets—they can cause fatigue than Atkins since it renal failure and constipation. allows some amount of carbohydrate intake.

ZONE

WHAT’S NOT Khosla calls this diet nutritionally imbalanced and considers it bad since it discourages exercise. Krishnaswamy says, “There’s no definitive diet plan after breakfast, a free reign to eat what you want can be mistaken as permission to eat junk food. No substitute has been suggested after disallowing dairy.” Some people tend to put on weight with bananas, which can make the diet counterproductive.

PRECAUTIONS Not all dieticians recommend this diet but they do give a thumbs up to the addition of bananas at breakfast.

FOR HOW LONG?

WILL START SHOWING RESULTS IN A MONTH

WHO IS IT FOR?

WHO IS IT FOR?

WOULD DO WELL TO HAVE A COUPLE OF BANANAS IN THE MORNING

AND LEARN ABOUT BENEFICIAL FOOD COMBINATIONS AND PORTIONS

TEENAGERS WHO ARE TOO BUSY TO EAT BREAKFAST

ANYONE WHO IS LOOKING TO CHANGE THEIR LIFESTYLE

PRECAUTIONS Dieticians warn about the temptation of swinging between Atkins and Zone while following this diet. “People start by following this diet correctly but have the tendency to completely cut out carbs for short periods in between which spoils the balance that is so important,” says Dr Sharma. Diabetics must avoid this diet since they must weigh and measure according to their own personal blood sugar.

L12 SEX LIFE SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

HOW TO GET YOUR

GROOVE BACK B Y M ELINDA B ECK ···························· hen a US food and drug administration panel last month recommended against approving a proposed treatment for low libido in women from a German pharmaceutical company, it was billed as the latest setback for a “female Viagra”.

But contrary to popular belief, erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs such as Viagra don’t fix male libido problems either. By enhancing blood flow, ED medications may help create or maintain an erection, but they don’t provide the desire for one in the first place. They don’t deliver what Boston urologist Abraham Morgentaler calls “the hunger for sex—that grrrr”.

Libido technically means the urge, instinct or psychic energy to have sex, and everything from falling hormones and child rearing to rising responsibilities and job loss can dampen it. Experts are pondering the distinction, in both men and women, between “desire” and “arousal”.

“The relationship between what happens in the genitals and how people feel about it is more complex than we realized,” says Erick Janssen, research scientist at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University in Bloomington, US. “You can, in principle, feel desire without necessarily showing any signs of physical arousal, and you can have signs of physical arousal without feeling desire.” Yet proposed changes for the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a psychiatric handbook, would combine a lack of interest in sex in women (“hypoactive sexual desire disorder”) and difficulty being aroused into a single disorder. A similar change may be proposed for men.

As for sexual frequency, many people simply want to know: What’s normal? But that’s a trick question.

Studies have found that American married couples, on average, have sex about once a week, but there’s a vast range, depending, in part, on age. As many as 15% of married couples haven’t had sex in the past six months to a year, says Denise Donnelly, a sociologist at Georgia State University. Wide variation exists among same-sex couples too.

“There are all different kinds of normal—the key thing is,

W

NOT TONIGHT DEAR, I’VE GOT….

A long list of factors can (but don’t always) lower libido in men and women Medical issues ¿ Hormonal changes ¿ Arthritis or other chronic pain ¿ Heart, liver, kidney disease ¿ Cancer ¿ Obesity ¿ Incontinence ¿ Neurological issues ¿ Alcohol or drug abuse ¿ Pregnancy or breastfeeding Medication issues ¿ Antidepressants ¿ Antihistamines ¿ Cholesterol­lowering drugs ¿ Blood pressure drugs ¿ Cancer drugs ¿ Contraceptives Sexual issues ¿ Erectile dysfunction ¿ Lubrication difficulties ¿ Premature climaxing ¿ Painful intercourse Psychological issues ¿ Depression ¿ Anxiety ¿ Body image or self­esteem problems ¿ Unresolved sexual orientation issues

DESPITE THE MANY MOOD­KILLERS OF MODERN LIFE, COUPLES CAN REVIVE THEIR SEXUAL SPARK

what’s normal for you?” says Mary Jane Minkin, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Yale School of Medicine. “There’s really only a problem when there’s an asymmetry” between you and your partner, she contends. “If it’s peaceful coexistence, it’s fine.”

That’s a big “if”, though. An oftquoted University of Chicago study from 1992 found that some 15% of men, and 30% of women, nationally reported a lack of interest in sex for at least some part of the previous year. In a relationship, when one partner’s interest starts out higher or wanes faster than the other’s, hard feelings can ensue.

The first step—and often the hardest—is honest communication. “Low libido can be a proxy for all sorts of other things, from ‘I’m really angry at you and can’t tell you’ to ‘I took care of the kids all day and I’m exhausted’,” Donnelly says.

“If the woman says, ‘I love you, but I really don’t have any libido’, look for medical issues,” Minkin says. The same applies to men.

Heart disease, high blood pressure and other health problems

can put the kibosh on desire. Medications from antihistamines to beta blockers also can lower libido.

Reduced sex drive is a common side effect of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors such as Prozac.

Getting older can dampen sexual appetite. In men and women, hormone levels drop naturally with age, often taking desire with them. In menopausal and perimenopausal women, falling estrogen levels can lead to vaginal dryness and make intercourse painful, Minkin says. In such cases, she recommends a topical lubricant. If that doesn’t work, she may suggest estrogen or testosterone replacement or both.

Several studies have shown that replacing the small amount of testosterone that women’s ovaries make, and stop making at menopause, can lead to more satisfying sexual experiences. Since testosterone replacement isn’t approved for women in the US, some doctors prescribe small amounts of products for men, or order gels or pills. An estimated one in five US testosterone prescriptions are written for women.

Doctors used to think women needed estrogen replacement to see a libido boost from testosterone. A study of 800 post-menopausal women, sponsored by Procter & Gamble (P&G) and published in New England Journal of Medicine in 2008, found testosterone alone brought a “modest but meaningful improvement in sexual function”. “Have I seen testosterone transform women’s sex lives? Occasionally,” says Minkin.

“Does it always? Not at all.” Possible side effects—acne, unwanted hair growth, lowering of the voice—make it a difficult balancing act, though.

And many women aren’t aware that some birth control pills—especially those that help reduce acne by lowering testosterone levels—also can lower libido, Low libido in men is complicated too. Many men don’t separate the desire for a sex life in the abstract from the desire for sex.

“A man may say, ‘I want to have sex very much. I’ve got a beautiful wife. It’s important to me.’ That’s not what libido is,” says urologist Abraham Morgentaler, director of Men’s Health Boston, which specializes in sexual and reproductive problems. Low testosterone is the No. 1 killer of male libido, he maintains, and as many as a third of men aged 45 and older have testosterone levels low enough to diminish desire and interfere with erections.

In June, a New England Journal of Medicine study of 3,369 Euro-

pean men aged 40-79 found that unusually low testosterone, known as “hypogonadism”, is related to fewer morning erections, lower sex drive and erectile dysfunction—but only about 2% of men met the criteria, the study concluded. Many doctors worry that testosterone replacement could raise the risk of prostate cancer or fuel existing tumours, but evidence is mixed.

The real libido-killer may be the partners’ relationship. “Women sometimes assume they’re no longer attractive, or they’ve gained weight. But that’s usually not it,” says Morgentaler. “If there was one thing I could say to every female partner of the guys I see in my office, it’s this: ‘Let the man be the man in at least one area of the relationship, instead of always telling him what he’s doing wrong’.” He adds, “Men need to feel powerful to feel sexy.”

“Exactly the same thing happens with women whose husbands make every decision,” counters Donnelly. “They’re thinking, ‘Hmm, sex is the one thing I can withhold’.”

A sex therapist can sometimes help. Carole Goldberg, a certified New Haven, Connecticut, sex therapist, says the most common nonmedical problems she sees are stress, fatigue and lack of time. “I have couples who get out their day planners and say, ‘How about Saturday at 6 o’clock?’”

One partner may simply want sex more often than the other. The one who wants sex less usually has the upper hand, notes Donnelly. She has studied “involuntarily celibate” marriages and thinks they are more common than generally believed.

Many couples she studied said, “I love my partner.

This is a perfect relationship in every way except sex”.

But uneven sexual appetites often make for unstable relationships.

“One partner is always wondering what’s wrong with them, and that makes them very ripe for the picking,” she says.

But maybe the problem is just the cat or the lumpy mattress.

Conditions and partners need not be perfect, experts stress. “People can have absolutely nothing in life and still have a great sexual relationship,” Morgentaler says.

“The key is being really generous to your partner.”

Write to wsj@livemint.com

Relationship issues ¿ Lack of communication ¿ Unresolved disputes ¿ Imbalance of power ¿ Infidelity ¿ Loss of attraction Life issues ¿ Fatigue ¿ Lack of time ¿ Lack of privacy ¿ Stress from work, family or financial obligations ¿ Religious, cultural beliefs ¿ Different schedules ¿ Dog, cat or child in bed Source: WSJ reporting BERNARD MAISNER/WSJ

BODY BASICS L13

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ABS AND THE MAN B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT sidin.v@livemint.com

···························· omething happened in 1994. I do not know exactly what. But if my research is accurate, it was in that year that people started using the term “six-pack” in reference to the human anatomy. Before 1994, the term “six-pack”, with or without hyphen or intervening space, meant many things; most famously, it stood for a pack of six beer bottles or cans held together with a plastic webbing of rings, or a paper carrier.

But it did not mean that thing that Shah Rukh Khan, Suriya or any of the other abdo-men shamelessly flaunt these days.

Yet in a span of 16 years the six-pack abdomen has come to mean so much to so many men, and some adventurous women. It has become a visual certificate of physical fitness. A stamp of approval that says: “This individual has the time, determination and prosperity to artfully sculpt individual sets of muscles in his body. Imagine how his/her other muscles must operate.

There is no need to think. You must procreate with this individual as soon as possible. Perhaps right now.”

In the Indian context, the sixpack phenomenon really took off thanks to that hideous song, Dard-e-Disco, from the otherwise delightful movie Om Shanti Om. Till then, while physical fitness was displayed and appreciated in films, in the form of Dharmendra, Salman Khan, or Suniel Shetty in his pre-extra-e period, it was always done so in a vague, amorphous sense. Yes, the hero was topless and he looked mighty fine, but there was no need to go

S

The first pack: The six­pack phenomenon in India took off after Shah Rukh Khan’s Dard­e­Disco.

BODY OF

LIES

FOR THOSE CHASING A SHORT CUT TO A GLAMOROUS PHYSIQUE, HERE’S A WARNING: INJURIES LURK AT EVERY CORNER B Y A RUN J ANARDHAN arun.j@livemint.com

···························· t was while doing a 240kg squat that Praveen Mahadeo Sakpal, then 26, realized he was in trouble. The Central Railway clerk and competitive bodybuilder was used to pushing his impressive muscles for that extra edge which gets the judges’ approval. But that muscle tear in 2002 ended Sakpal’s bodybuilding career.

Today, Sakpal knows what went wrong. “I was training for 6 hours a day and my diet was not balanced. I was just winning every competition I entered and it was like nasha (intoxication),” says Sakpal, who now trains prospective bodybuilders at the Gurudas Gym in Dharavi, Mumbai.

Sakpal may have been a victim of a professional hazard, but he is also an example of the dangers

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lurking behind that extra benchpress every person aims for. Fitness experts say a combination of ignorance about training methods, over-exercise, improper diet and the need for quick results leads to injuries and health problems that people do not foresee.

While a majority of newly fitness-conscious urban Indians are chasing lower pulse rates, there is a minority that’s pursuing a physique rather than fitness. The consequence of the need to get that six-pack—an annoying and misleading modern synonym for a good body—is also forcing an impatient generation to search for instant results. More workouts, more protein shakes and steroids without the right amount of rest and adequate diet is resulting in hair loss, liver damage and digestive breakdowns, apart from injuries such as lower back disc compression, sacroiliac joint injuries

into specifics. His fitness was collectively complete rather than specifically perfect. Example: Dharmendra’s towel and testosterone scene in Pyar Hi Pyar.

Shah Rukh Khan and Farah Khan made the Dard-e-Disco song exclusively about the former’s rectus abdominis muscle.

And with that, they pushed the movie star over the fence. On this side of the fence were the vast majority of leading men: some pudgy, some thin, a few topless.

And on the other side of the fence were abdomens and sex.

For many men in this country, this was the final wholesale violation of the decades-old pact between male movie watcher and male movie star.

Till the early 1990s, especially in the Malayalam movie industry I was most exposed to, heroes came in two sizes. There were the extremely thin, scrawny men with shirts open at the chest (pathetic) and there were the pudgy, fullbellied stars with shirts open at the chest (traumatic).

Yet viewers appreciated both completely. Many Malayalis, in fact, developed convenient shorthand to describe heroes who they admired, despite clear issues with metabolism or body mass index: “personality”.

“Yes, yes, Sukumaran is looking very fat in this movie. But what personality he has!” (it is hard to describe what “personality” really stood for. Most likely, it was a combination of hairstyle, voice, cut of collar, style of walking and fullness of moustache).

Thankfully, even the women bought into the cult of “personality”. This had many appreciable bar-lowering effects on the wedding and college romance markets. Viewer

THE PURSUIT OF SIX­PACK ABS IS MOST ADMIRABLE, AND BEST LEFT TO OTHER PEOPLE and actor were happy.

And then this whole six-pack abs thing happened. I speak for many men when I say we are upset by this trend.

Not just because we can no longer fall back on humour and sensitivity, but also because six packs are ridiculously hard to sculpt.

I am yet to meet a single person who is between abdomens—that is, between a family pack and a six pack. Either they have six, eight or even 10 packs. Or they spend their entire lives in futility trying to get some.

The problem is that unlike CAT coaching classes or Vedic mathematics lessons, you can’t just focus on one aspect of the body.

You can’t let your butt and thighs go and focus all your workouts on your abs. The first step to a sixpack is to reduce fat everywhere.

The body, if you think about it, functions like the Sensex. You can’t boost it by just buying or selling one stock. You need to dabble in all of them. Similarly, you have to lose weight all over— butt, arms, thighs, double chins— before your abs will begin to adopt any shape.

And once you look like Dharmendra in Pyar Hi Pyar, then you start focusing on turning into Suriya or Shah Rukh Khan.

All this takes too long for anyone who has a job, a family or an iPhone with games on it, to achieve. I request all readers to focus, instead, on more achievable goals. Maybe an occasional run or swim would be good. Diet control is desirable.

But do all this not for your abs, but for your general wellbeing. Then one day, like M ohanl al and m e, you w il l achieve an excellent personality.

KEDAR BHAT/MINT

(to the side lower back), spondylitis, shin splits and joint aches.

Despite an increasing number of fitness centres and innovations in workouts, fitness experts say young people today are treading a path of aspiration—to build an image through physique, rather than necessarily getting fit.

Fuelled often by film stars and glamour, this clamour for the sixpack is backbreaking in more ways than one.

“Looking good is a major criterion now,” says Paul Britto, a trainer at Gold’s Gym in Bandra, Mumbai. “You can get fit jogging a mile, but looking good is difficult,” he says, adding that men typically seek bigger biceps and flatter abs, while women are mostly traumatized by their hips, thighs and, of course, waist.

Britto should know: The centre he works in is popular among Bandra-residing film actors such as John Abraham and Dino Morea. Actors and models, trainers say, are not the only people chasing that good-looking body, they are also driving dreams among young people.

“Whoever comes here has Salman Khan or Bipasha Basu as their idol,” says Rajesh Desai, managing director of Pro-Fit Functional Fitness Centre in Kandivali. “Everyone’s interested in lazy fitness.”

This body obsession is a double-edged sword: Sakpal says that if Khan drives a craze for fitness, it’s for the better, but there is a warning. “People see American

magazines and want to follow Arnold’s (Schwarzenegger) routine. But it just does not work that way. Movie stars get paid to look the way they do,” says Aijaz Ashai, head of department, advanced physiotherapy and sport rehabilitation, Saifee Hospital, Mumbai.

Actor Imran Khan agrees: “It’s an occupational hazard; we are paid for this.” Khan unbuttoned his shirt for photographs and his latest release I Hate Luv Storys, and had to cultivate a certain look that was felt to be necessary for the role. He says Bollywood merely represents a society that’s increasingly “looks conscious”. “If you are in the movie business, for better or worse, the audience expects you to be attractive. It’s not about vanity, it just Pump up: appears so in the Rajesh Desai, MD media,” says of Pro­Fit Khan, whose Functional Fitness fitness regime Centre in Mumbai, is “functional”. supervises a client’s He adds that he routine. might adjust his film Take Off. “You body to meet the can get rejected demands of his role but because of your looks,” he would “not advice others to”. says. Even if Touqeer and his The Bollywood formula can physio, Dr Ashai, say he has done lead to a skewed impression of it the right way, there are several what a good body is and why who do not. actors look the way they do. For Leena Mogre, a director at instance, Qazi Touqeer, winner of Leena Mogre’s Fitness, Mumbai, a singing reality competition five talks of this wannabe pressure years ago, was a “super thin” 50kg that drives people to supplethen; today, he poses in the man- ments, artificial energizers and datory tight T-shirts on tabloid overwork, a “vicious cycle” which covers ahead of the release of his results in kidney and liver dam-

age and sleep disorders. Mogre gives the examples of women who want to be models: “They become like sticks, thin, with flat stomachs, through dieting. But they are not fit.”

“People keep talking about this six-pack but it’s impossible to maintain through the year. Professional bodybuilders have a system for it, a routine; when offcompetition, they eat pizzas and ice cream to replenish the body with nutrients denied during competition. If you keep that sixpack routine for 12 months, it’s highly dangerous,” says Mogre.

She naturally does not support the short cut to a bigger body.

“You see so many of them with big biceps and broad shoulders but then they would not have a butt or the legs.”

Experts in the field advise caution—they say a person should go to competent specialists to get their complete workout and diet routines based on their age and fitness levels. Mogre even does a psychological analysis before giving someone a routine. “If you are under stress, we prescribe kickboxing,” she gives an example.

“When you are doing squats, you are adding a pressure that’s eight times your body weight,” says Dr Ashai. “If you use a 10kg weight, the stress is multiplied a hundred times. So you have to be sure your muscles are capable of handling this.”

There is unanimity on one point, though—if you get fit, you will naturally look good.

L14 TRAVEL

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

HOLIDAYS THAT

B Y S UMANA M UKHERJEE ······························· ctor Hrithik Roshan wasn’t quite on holiday in Sante Fe, New Mexico, when he found his busted knee healing itself miraculously. Apparently, it was the magnetic mountains surrounding Santa Fe, where Roshan was shooting Kites, that did the magic.

While the healing properties of certain geographical locations will always be open to dispute, what is not is that clean air, low (or controlled) industrial penetration, hot springs and mineral-rich water go to make healthful holiday destinations. Breathe deep.

A

HEAL

WHETHER YOU’RE FEELING OFF­COLOUR OR IN THE PINK OF HEALTH, HERE’S OUR LIST OF FIVE MUST­DO DESTINATIONS

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n its survey of the healthiest places in the world to live, Men’s Health magazine placed SURFING IN Australia right on top. Its SYDNEY consumption of red meat has something to do with it—a local study found that men who traded starch for steaks “reduced systolic blood pressure by four points in eight weeks”. That won’t help much, though, if you are taking your summer holiday there while the northern hemisphere is huddling under blankets. The key to Australia’s “healthiest” status lies in its sporty lifestyle. With acres of outback and thousands of square miles of sea surrounding the island-continent, only the seriously disadvantaged prefer to stick around at home after the workday or check email on weekends (Fess up: What did you think surfing meant?). Though Australia spoils you for choice, head to Sydney, which frequently makes it to the best-cities-in-the-world lists. Take a leaf out of the local jock book and go surfing on Manly Beach, or do the touristy thing and sign up for lessons on Bondi. For daily tips on sea conditions, wave heights, eight-day forecasts and similar exotica, log on to www.surfit.com. Work up that appetite or work off that meal in the Coral Sea and see the difference it makes.

MOROZOVA TATIANA SKETCHUP/WIKIMEDIA

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ated one of the most could imagine. Forty exciting places to ride minutes of biking burns in the world by the about 500 calories; it also non-profit International provides a complete lower Mountain Biking body workout, trims the Association, Scotland offers waist and gets that heart every kind of terrain for pumping—all of it, despite the two-wheeler: being a low-impact mountains, roads and dirt exercise that doesn’t injure trails. A bike tour, the joints or stress out the aficionados argue, is the organs. While you could best way to experience a bike anywhere in the country: It takes you to world, from Coorg to beautiful, way-out places, Colorado, Scotland is allows you to enjoy especially prized for its home-style hospitality, clean air and variety of tests your endurance, routes. Log on to survival skills www.cycling. and, best of all, visitscotland.com allows you the for a taste of healthiest the lows and BIKING IN holiday you the highs.

SCOTLAND

T

his lost city of the Inca minded tour groups, especially Empire is not just an on astronomically important architectural marvel, but a days. In addition, the nearby sacred site as well. It is city of Cusco offers many believed that the landscape is Shamanic treatments; it is also in harmony with key popular for ayahuasca, a astronomical events that were medicinal brew known for its important to Inca worship, psychedelic effects. If that thus making it exude sounds like so much significant spiritual energy that mumbo-jumbo, we suggest is apparently available to you go along just for the trek. tuned-in visitors even now.

Whether you see the “face” of Now, a year short of the the city or not, successfully centenary of its discovery negotiating the Inca

by American scientist Trail—rated one of Hiram Bingham, the best treks in Machu Picchu is the world—is a ANCIENT the destination for health certificate SCIENCES AT many spiritually like no other.

HEATING UP ICELAND

MACHU PICCHU

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f that sounds like too much work for health, head to a geothermal spring. Long before “anti-ageing” became a buzzword in the cosmetics industry, Europe’s elite was taking a break at the “waters”.

While the entire continent —from Turkey to England—is geologically active, we recommend the Blue Lagoon in Iceland (www.bluelagoon.com).

The sea water rises from 2,000m below the ground, heated by the earth’s natural forces to 240 degrees Celsius, and is cooled

on contact with mineral-rich magma. The water is consequently rich in silica and sulphur, especially useful for healing skin disorders such as psoriasis (for those merely seeking to soak in the water or indulge in a pampering treatment, there’s a separate clinic for the psoriasis-affected).

What’s more, given the current state of the Icelandic economy, you don’t have to spend big bucks either: A 60-minute, in-water massage costs ISK11.25, that’s around Rs4,200.

ICELIGHT/FLICKR

ADIEL LO/WIKIMEDIA

SPA­ING IN ISRAEL

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he Dead Sea is supposed to be evaporating at the rate of 3ft a year. More reason to book into one of the many spa hotels that border the sea on the Israel side. Though similar hotels have come up in Jordan as well, Israel is the centre of health tourism, focused largely on the region’s mineral-rich mud. The Dead Sea (which isn’t a sea really, but a lake), the lowest point on earth,

faces extremely high rates of evaporation, resulting in high concentrations of chloride salts of sodium, potassium and other minerals—all of which are said to be beneficial for a range of skin ailments, arthritis, asthma, et al. Expect plenty of salt-based treatments, mud packs, sea-water pools, sulphur spas, private beaches, solariums and kosher menus. All the major hotel chains can be found here. For an alternative,

we recommend the Carmel Forest Spa Resort, described

by Frommer’s as “the most beautiful spa hotel in Israel”, which backs into a vast protected forest and overlooks the Mediterranean. Once a retreat for Holocaust survivors, it now offers the regular spa menu of treatments and a host of activities, besides an ancient hamam (public bath) imported from Turkey.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010

L15

Books AFTERTASTE | NAMITA DEVIDAYAL

CULT FICTION

R. SUKUMAR

The taste of greed ANKIT AGRAWAL/MINT

A scathing portrayal of the trader class in 1960s’ Mumbai leaves the reader hungry for more

O

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

····························

Makhhi baithe shahad par Leene par liptaye Haath male sir kar dhune Laalach buri balaye (The fly sits greedily on honey, wrapping its body in it, drowning in its own pool of greed)

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n the world that this novel occupies, business slows between two and four in the afternoon, and even the flies go to sleep. But its covetous central characters don’t. They continue to scheme, revising their strategies for the kill: cold, hard cash.

Mumbai-based journalist Namita Devidayal’s second book —her first attempt at fiction—is a naked portrait of the baniya community in the Mumbai of the 1960s. The diasporic business class which possibly originated from the Marwar region in northwest India draws its name from Vaniji, Sanskrit for trader. They’re known for their formidable business acumen and in Devidayal’s words, “their boys (are) taught their multiplication tables in quarters”. Their pursuit of money is unabashed, and the usurping of each other’s properties and family jewels is common currency. Devidayal’s is not a diffused black and white rendition, it is a picture in full colour, with every wart and errant hair in focus.

Devidayal won the Vodafone Crossword Popular Book Award for her first book, The Music Room, in 2007. It was an intensely personal debut, drawn from her experiences with her music teacher Dhondutai Kulkarni—the last surviving student of virtuoso singers Kesarbai Kerkar and Alladiya Khan. With its part-biographical, part-historical structure, she strung together a sublime narrative of irony; a world where art is

READING COMICS CAN BE AARDVARK

Bittersweet: Devidayal’s characters obsess about their inheritance from the family’s mithai business. all-important, a world where pleasure is shunned. This first-hand insight was the book’s strength.

In her second coming, Devidayal doesn’t interject. There is room to believe that this is the portent of a maturing writer; one moving beyond the first person.

Even though Devidayal grew up in a baniya family, and even though the Todarmal family at the heart of the story are baniyas who settled in Punjab like her family, Aftertaste is fiercely impersonal. It is not particularly condescending even while the author delves into the intricacies of illegal havala arrangements or unseemly betelleaf addictions. But there are subtle hints of arrogance, like when Devidayal, who has an Ivy League education, writes about one of the

Aftertaste: Random House India, 296 pages, Rs399.

central characters being admitted to a “medium-grade” business school in upstate New York.

Aftertaste is about four siblings, each of whom has a different reason to be obsessed with the inheritance from the family’s thriving mithai (sweet) business. It is the matriarch, called Mummyji, who drives the action forward. Some of the human flies who eat their way through the story are distinguished by their sophistication, such as a predilection for Kabir’s couplets. But that notwithstanding, they’re all united by a strange brand of pecuniary lust. In a blog on her publisher Random House India’s website, Devidayal summarizes her thesis: No matter what they say, at the heart of any good Indian baniya family lies money, not love.

She uses an interesting narrative tool, opening her story close to its climactic realization, and moving back and forth, with the festival of Diwali—which is of extreme significance to the community—as a pinning point. If the structure fails anywhere, it is near the end, where the author seems compelled to bring things to closure: to lighten the grey tones with a sudden and excessive blob of white.

Through the text, Devidayal’s language gives way to excessive flourishes. These metaphors can be tedious: Such as “Mummyji kept (her family) together like a stick of Fevicol that was slowly drying up”. In another instance, the eldest of her four children,

who is called Rajan Papa, “started chewing on the cuticles of his nails, leaving bits of skin hanging off his fingers like laundry on a clothesline”. In a bid to capture linguistic specifics, the author evokes words such as the Hindi suniye, a popular term of address used by Indian wives for their husbands. This is translated literally to “listen” through the pages—which takes away from its sociolinguistic trappings.

There are things you will learn while reading the book, and here Devidayal betrays her journalistic roots. For those familiar with the award-winning American television series Mad Men, which documents the advertising community of New York City in the 1960s, Aftertaste gives a similar insideout account. The period nostalgia is all there too, from Binaca Geetmala to Vicco Vajradanti toothpaste. The author reveals several trade secrets of the Indian food business: Caterers place their most expensive dishes at the end of the buffet table—food fatigue and a lack of plate space ensure that guests consume less of these dishes. But it is in her description of mithais—from the khoya barfis garnished with almonds to the syrupy malpuas—that she excels, ensuring that either way, Aftertaste leaves you hungry.

IN SIX WORDS An inside­out take on ‘baniya’ life

ne of the longest running serious graphic novel series—as opposed to those of the superhero variety, though some of those are serious too—was Dave Sim’s Cerebus, which ran between 1977 and 2004.

The comics, collected in so-called phone book versions and independently published, are hard to come by—I have seen none in India and my copies were bought on Amazon many years ago—and while they are truly high-literature, the reason for their appearance in this column is a minor tale in itself.

I had originally planned to write this edition on the Hindi editions of Tintin—I have mixed feelings about these. One of the reasons I don’t particularly like the Hindi version of Tintin (disclaimer: I can read Hindi but it isn’t my favourite language and I have never ever read a work of fiction in Hindi unless you can count the Adventures of Prakash the Satrangi Peacock, a book I am currently reading out to my son so as to improve his Hindi) is because I think the effort to translate some of the things that I think untranslatable makes these comics look like parodies of themselves. Again, there are reasons I like the Tintin-in-Hindi books, but more on this in a later edition.

Now, there aren’t too many comics that can claim to be parodies, especially of themselves. The closest I can think of are the Cerebus books which aren’t really parodies of themselves but are pretty much parodies of everything else, including other comics. Cerebus, an aardvark who is often mistaken for a pig—the name means Earth Pig in Afrikaans but aardvarks are not related to the pig; along with the smaller rock hyraxes, they are related to the elephants—is based on a cross between Robert Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Howard the Duck.

The interesting thing about the Cerebus books, which require serious reading (of the kind required by a Murakami as opposed to a Lee Child, though I love both) is that the books are meta-comics.

Being self-published, Sim obviously had a lot of latitude to air his views, which range from insightful to provocative, in essays that appear as text pieces in the comics.

One of these attacks consumerism.

Another, the communists. And still Cerebral: Insightful essays in comic form. another, which created the most noise and actually turned several people off Sim, feminism.

I don’t agree with many of Sim’s theories and beliefs but (with a doff of the hat to Voltaire) I will, as any self-respecting editor would, defend his right to have a point of view and air it. The essays sometimes come across as laboured, but the comics are delightful. In rambling stories about political intrigue and power struggle, Sim gently pokes fun at politics, bureaucracy, fiscal policies, and pop culture. The result is an allusion-and metaphor-rich read.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE | SIGIZMUND KRZHIZHANOVSKY

The living box Stories by a leading Russian writer, full of deliciously surreal situations

B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· very person who has felt suffocated inside cramped living quarters—such as practically every resident of Mumbai— would be delighted to receive a visitor like the one who appears at Sutulin’s house, at the beginning of the Russian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s story Quadraturin. Sutulin lives in Moscow in a matchbox apartment, only 8x6 sq. ft in size. When the door is knocked, he need not get up; he only has to stretch out a leg to hook it open. The mysterious visitor offers Sutulin a small tube, which contains a promotional sample of a wonderful new product: “an agent for biggerizing rooms”. Then he is gone.

Intrigued, Sutulin opens the tube, enjoys “the bitterish gingery

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smell” of its contents and, moved by curiosity, begins to apply the biggerizer to the floor and walls of his room with a piece of cotton wool as instructed. But just as he is about to get to the ceiling, he slips and falls, and spills the remaining liquid. Exhausted, he falls off to sleep. When he wakes up, and reaches sleepily for his alarm clock, his hand closes on nothing but air. Rising, he sees that the table by his bedside has moved several feet away during the course of the night, and all the walls are further away—he has a much bigger room! Unfortunately, the ceiling remains the size that it was, giving his room an intensely distorted shape. “His living box,” Sutulin realizes, “was spreading only sideways, without rising even an inch upward.”

Sutulin’s grossly misshapen room, relentlessly expanding as if with a mind of its own, might serve as a metaphor for the storytelling methods of Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950). His stories

Memories of the Future: New York Review Books Classics, 228 pages, $15.95 (around Rs745). almost always begin with something quite normal and expand, under the pressure of a writer who wants to biggerize reality, into something surreal and fantastic. In one story, the Eiffel Tower is seduced by the call of communism, uproots itself, and

runs across Paris towards the east.

In another, a corpse surreptitiously leaves his coffin for one last glimpse of life, and ends up missing his own funeral.

Yet Krzhizhanovsky suffered the worst of all fates possible: that of being denied a readership during his lifetime. The Soviet regime under which he lived had a state policy not just for agriculture and industrial production, but also for literature. Krzhizhanovsky’s stories were thought too trivial and frivolous, with no concern for contemporary problems or ideological support to the Soviet experiment in politics. It was not until 1989, when the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse, that these stories found readers in the language they were written. Two decades later, Joanne Turnbull’s English translations have extended Krzhizhanovsky’s posthumous audience.

In The Branch Line, the protagonist, Quantin, gets on to a mysterious train in the middle of the

night, and is dropped off at an unknown station. Among the first things he sees is a mass of people bringing down clouds from the sky with nets. He realizes he has somehow entered “the kingdom of dreams”, where people sleep by day and wake by night.

Wandering around, Quantin discovers that a sinister conspiracy is brewing. The dream kingdom, which all through history has been subservient to man’s waking life, is now planning an assault that will once and for all vanquish reality. Among the beautiful things imagined by Krzhizhanovsky in this story are “dreamed-out pillows”, which must be replenished after years of transferring dreams into the brains of people sleeping on them. A robust assertion of literature’s freedom to imagine, Memories of the Future enshrines the work of a writer whose pillow was never dreamed out.

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L16

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SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010

Culture PHOTOGRAPHS

BY I NDRANIL

BHOUMIK/MINT

ART

The Kolkata frieze After a 20­year slack, the city’s art scene is finally showing some encouraging signs of activity

B Y D EEPANJANA P AL ···························· here are two “B”s in the Bengali alphabet. They look and so un d e xac t l y th e same. The alphabet also has one obsolete vowel and a curious accent called the “biswarga”. The biswarga, pronounced “bishorgo”, can be replaced by the exclamation mark, making it one of those elements of the Bengali alphabet that isn’t essential. Kolkata-based artist Jayanta Roy punned on biswarga when he titled his 2009 exhibition B-Swarga.

“We say many big things about how art can change the world, but it’s as useless as the biswarga because there are so few people who are actually interested in and affected by art,” says Roy. “If you look in Kolkata, they are only interested in nostalgia and pretty pictures, not contemporary art.”

While his art has received acclaim, not many share Roy’s dismissive attitude towards the city’s art lovers. After all, Kolkata’s enthusiastic viewing crowd remains one aspect of the city’s art scene that hasn’t suffered a decline.

Despite the fact that it has thrown up barely a handful of reputed contemporary artists in the past 20 years, Kolkata retains the reputation of being the most cultured of India’s metropolises.

“There’s such a strong cultural ethos in this city,” says Rakhi Sarkar, director and curator of The Centre of International Modern Art (Cima), Kolkata. Sarkar is also a managing trustee of the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art, which is expected to open in 2013.

“People ask me why Kolkata should be the place for a museum of modern art and I tell them, it’s the only city in India that can sustain a cultural institution of this magnitude,” she says. Sarkar does admit, however, that the city’s art scene has suffered over the past decades. “There were a combination of factors, like the reticence of artists and the fact that Bengal went through an economic low since the 1960s,” says Sarkar. “It wasn’t that there weren’t good artists but they weren’t nurtured

T

properly and there was little scope for them.”

Bengal art entered the spotlight in the early 20th century thanks to artists such as Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose of the Bengal School. By the 1920s, however, modernism was the new favourite. From the Calcutta Group of the 1940s to the pop modernism of Jamini Roy’s paintings and the communism-inspired idealism of Somnath Hore, Bengal Modernism spanned more than three decades and was a dynamic movement. The last of the golden years were in the 1960s. Artists such as Bikash Bhattacharya, Ganesh Pyne, Meera Mukherjee and K.G. Subramanyan had a lasting impact upon the next generation.

“The history of modernism in Bengal art is very strong,” says artist Paula Sengupta, who also teaches at Rabindra Bharati University and heads the Kolkata chapter of Khoj, the New-Delhi based collective that supports experimental art projects. “In fact, I’d say it was too strong.

That was such a dominant period that a whole generation of artists, from the 1970s onwards and particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, spent their time following in those footsteps. That’s the beginning of the bleak chapter in Bengal art.”

While the 1970s and 1980s saw artists elsewhere, such as Vivan Sundaram and Nalini Malani, experimenting with multidisciplinary practices, Bengal art, more so from the 1980s, curled into modernism and resolutely persevered with it, uncaring of becoming outdated.

With Indian art finding favour in the international market in the noughties, artists who had developed their styles in the couple of decades past rose to stratospheric heights. Established centres of art such as Mumbai and Vadodara attracted talent from all over the country and provided platforms for people with innovative practices such as Atul Dodiya, N.S. Harsha and Pushpamala N. Some emerged from places not known for modern art.

Subodh Gupta, for example, studied at Patna University. When he decided to make a move, he chose Delhi over Kolkata. In 1997, he became one of the founding members of Khoj and developed his now-famous style of sculpture.

Bengal, by contrast, suffered a creative drought in the last two decades. “There was a waning where Bengal art was caught in its own vibe,” says art historian Tap-

COURTESY EXPERIMENTER

Stirrings: (clockwise from top) The Cima art gallery; Prateek and Priyanka Raja at Experimenter; The Sisyphus Effect, an installation by Sanchayan Ghosh, at Experimenter; and the Harrington Street Arts Centre.

ati Guha Thakurta.

“The art world in Calcutta became more impoverished, both financially and in terms of creativity.

Bengal artists tended to fit into one of two moulds: that of Bikash Bhattacharya or Ganesh Pyne.”

Kolkata’s contribution in the past 20 years is limited to a handful of names, of which the most famous today are Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Jogen Chowdhury and Paresh Maity. None of Bengal’s younger artists have reached the international stature that the likes of Dodiya and Gupta have attained. Few have the reputation

of being consistently innovative. “The modernist period was so dominant in Kolkata that those who were doing more contemporary practices found it difficult to find a voice,” says Sengupta. “What happened as a result was that these practices didn’t see gallery spaces but went on in campuses and fostered an environment.” Artists such as Partha Pratim Deb, who found little support from commercial spaces for his art in the 1980s and 1990s, turned to teaching. As a professor in Rabindra Bharati University, Deb has been the mentor to some of the most exciting artists working in Bengal today, such as sculptor Adip Dutta and installation artist Sanchayan Ghosh.

The silver lining is that some of those who persevered in the silo of Kolkata’s art world have developed distinctive styles. While the rest of contemporary Indian art races towards new media, Bengal artists are more interested in reinventing and reinterpreting conventional artistic practices, such

as sculpture and painting. Dutta’s fascinating fibreglass and steel wool sculptures or Debnath Basu’s curious paintings exploring the mechanics of the human body and language are heartening examples of a contemporary Bengal school. However, these artists are far more low profile than their peers from other parts of India.

Ghosh, for example, believes he should be undercover and only his art should be in public.

“I’d like to say there are exciting times ahead,” says Sengupta. “I think there are more of this younger generation doing contemporary work than there were from my generation.”

The current art scene is encouraging. While Kolkata is yet to shake off its modernist fascination, there are a few determined initiatives to introduce a contemporary flavour to the city by galleries such as Akar Prakar, Gandhara and Aakriti, along with the recently opened Harrington Street Arts Centre and Experimenter.

Khoj’s Kolkata chapter was set up in 2005, and provided a platform for experimental works. In 2008, Cima began Studio 21, a noncommercial space for workshops

and multidisciplinary works.

“Things are changing,” says Noni Khullar. She and her husband Deepak opened the Harrington Street Arts Centre last year. “The visual register of Kolkata was quintessentially modern, but recently there has been an attempt to reconsider this visual register,” she says.

All the gallerists are buoyed by the enthusiastic responses they get from viewers who often return to see the same exhibitions. “I may not have a good quality printer here and most of our artists and curators may be from outside but the quality of interaction you get from the average Kolkata viewer is amazing,” says Priyanka Raja, who started Experimenter in 2009 with her husband Prateek.

The biggest challenge for gallerists, however, remains finding the talent. “From what we’ve seen, in Santiniketan, for example, they’re one generation behind,” says Raja.

“The works done by the young artists mostly don’t compare with works done by similar age groups in the rest of the country and internationally,” she says. “Even if the practice is technically strong, there just isn’t enough awareness of the ideas circulating in the world around them. I don’t think they’re thinking.”

The concerns in Kolkata’s art circles today are no different from those of contemporary Indian art in general: how to develop an Indian visual art tradition that is distinctive, current and not derivative. “A lot of contemporary art from India being shown abroad and here in commercial metros is art by Indians for the Western eye, the way the West wants to see India and in the visual language they understand,” says Pratiti Basu Sarkar, chief administrator of Cima. She doesn’t believe the current trend-makers in art will lead the way because they are too involved in a system dependent upon Western approval and market forces.

It could be that Kolkata’s artist community will provide contemporary Indian art with a definitive direction. Perhaps the city’s distance from international trends and commercial success will prove to be a blessing in disguise. Perhaps the enthusiastic viewing culture will goad artists.

“It’s been a late evolving for the later generations of Bengal artists,” says Guha Thakurta. “But the aesthetics are here. There are so many different registers of creativity in Kolkata. Everybody’s an artist here.”

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CULTURE L17

SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

ART

Look back, look ahead A retrospective and two group shows give an early start to the art season in the Capital

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

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Through the Patina Anjolie Ela Menon

An illustrated book on Anjolie Ela Menon and her work, titled Anjolie Ela Menon: Through the Patina, with text by Isana Murthy, will be released on the occasion of her 70th birthday.

Complementing the book will be a show featuring retrospective as well as recent works by the artist, with a focus on significant phases in a prolific career that spans six decades. Murthy says he is fascinated by how Menon addressed female nudes over the years and his book is divided into sections

Lyrical: Menon’s Mother and Child (left) and Clone I. such as nudes, portraits, landscapes, and even chairs. Apparent throughout is Menon’s push to boldly innovate—besides oils and paints, she has made glass sculptures and kitsch works with abandoned furniture, and tried

New media: (right) Decode I by Deepjyoti Kalita; and a work by Kartik Sood.

her hand at computer-aided art when the medium was still new in the mid-1990s. “Her female nudes are both haunting and sensual at the same time,” says Murthy. “The figures are sensual, yet able to convey pain and vul-

nerability.” Over the years, he adds, her works have become more complex even as themes and subjects are recurring.

Urban Testimonies

of the show and an MS Univer-

Works that reflect new-media practices by four artists who recently received their master’s degrees in art from MS University, Baroda, make up the first show of the new season for Latitude 28. These include junk jewellery, light boxes, programmed LED light, sensors, burnt blanket and video projection. There is nothing specifically city-oriented about the works, clarifies Bhavna Kakar, gallery proprietor, curator

“They reflect the shift we see now in (the materials used in making) the works.” She stresses that there is nothing faddish or merely “trendy” about the works, which include The Incompetence of Being Complete, a sculptural installation by Deepjyoti Kalita fashioned out of paper, acrylic, fibreglass and LED.

At Vadehra Art Gallery, on view till 14 August.

Deepjyoti Kalita, Kartik Sood, sity arts graduate herself. “The Nityananda Ojha and Siddhartha medium employed are part of Kararwal our urban living,” she says.

At Latitude 28, on view till 18 August.

Going, Going, Gone Group show

New media and some gadgetry also feature in another group show, mostly of artists in their mid-30s. “There is no concept, no theme,” says Gallery Espace’s Renu Modi about the show, for which she has donned the curator’s hat. “I chose the artists because I liked their works.” Abstract paintings, “photo-realist” prints, installations, paperwork and photographs—they are all there, and the only uniting theme is Modi’s desire to bring them to the viewing public. But the works sit

well together, imbuing the gallery space with a sense of quietude. She describes the works as fresh, which many of them are. Ajay Kanwal’s interactive work fashioned out of canvas, ghungroos (dancing bells) and infrared sensors, titled One Step=8,000 replies, as well as rocks that are floating in water, are diverting but also make you linger, as do most of the other works on display.

At Gallery Espace, on view till 6 August.

RAAGTIME

SAMANTH S

SHOW, DON’T TELL

S

ometime in May, the Carnatic vocalist Sanjay Subrahmanyan—always canny with new media—noticed several videos of his performances strewn across YouTube. He figured that he could simply create a channel for himself, and pulled those videos into his channel. He didn’t stop there; he dug into his own stash of VCDs of his concerts, edited them with iMovie, and uploaded those on YouTube as well.

Recently, therefore, when I wanted to listen to some new music on a slow afternoon, I headed without thinking to YouTube.com/SanjaySub. Which was when it struck me: While YouTube has rightly been lauded for providing us with unlimited

footage of yawning cats and burping babies, it is too often passed over, in favour of iTunes and Pandora, in discussions of how the Internet has changed the experience of music.

Most obviously, YouTube now functions as a free song-on-demand service. For better or for worse, thousands of pieces of music have eluded the gimlet eyes of copyright patrol and made it on to the site, some as music or concert videos, others playing over cheesy image montages or even a single still.

When, after watching the Wes Anderson short film Hotel Chevalier, I wanted to track down Peter Sarstedt’s haunting track Where Do You Go To (My Lovely), I didn’t search for freely

Cityscape: (right) Headline Today

by Kanta Kishore Moharana; and Effloresce by Vinita Khanna.

downloadable versions online, and I didn’t even think of springing 99 cents (around Rs45) for an iTunes download. Instead, I looped the song on YouTube until I grew predictably sick of it.

In the world of online music criticism, YouTube helps to show, not tell. Writing about music, it was once memorably said, is like dancing about architecture, so it improves matters no end when critics embed clips to illuminate their arguments.

YouTube has thus loosened up the best critics considerably, expanded their reach, and kept them relevant. On his blog, titled The Rest is Noise after his marvellous book, the music critic Alex Ross posts clips that follow the news faithfully; when the Italian opera singer Cesare Siepi died, Ross excavated an 8-minute snippet of Siepi singing Don Giovanni at Salzburg—in 1954! Terry Teachout, the author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, features a weekly series of videos on his blog, About Last Night (this 4 July, Teachout

STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

A GEOGRAPHY LESSON

I

ndia has no shortage of conflict zones. Almost every state in the North-East, especially Manipur, continues to challenge Delhi’s authority. Although Punjab has put the horrific 1980s behind it, members of the Babbar Khalsa militant outfit continue to emerge out of the state’s mustard fields at periodic intervals (perhaps their peace has been disturbed by the number of Bollywood crews that have descended on the place). The Maoists are here, there and everywhere. Yet Bollywood remains most worried about the fate of Jammu and Kashmir. Lamhaa is only the latest film to remind us that the Kashmir problem demands the attention of the film-going public.

The renewed surge of police firing and stone pelting in Kashmir has given Lamhaa the kind of publicity that cannot be bought.

However, film-makers don’t seem as exercised about Manipur, home to regular blockades, extra-judicial killings, and one of the most searing protests ever captured by cameras in the history of independent India. On 11 July 2004, 32-year-old Thangjam Manorama was gangraped, mutilated and killed, and the evidence pointed to an Assam Rifles unit. On 15 July, 12 women marched under the banner “Mothers of Manipur” and stood naked for hours outside the headquarters of the Assam Rifles in Kangla Fort screaming “Indian Army come rape us”. Few national newspapers and magazines had the guts to print the photographs. Not even the most imaginative screenplay writer could have come up with such fierce and tragic imagery.

The North-East has always been a foreign land whose inhabitants are racially and culturally removed from the rest of India. A favourite past-time during summer holidays used to be the “Guess the capital of the state” game. Even class-topping cousins would invariably confuse Aizawl for Kohima and Shillong for Gangtok. An entire chunk of the Indian map fell off from view so long ago that it requires serious political commitment to rediscover it.

Besides, the problems of states such as Nagaland and Manipur are so complex and involve so many parties and tribes that only historians and journalists can be relied upon to make sense of the situation. Shooting paradise: Sanjay Dutt in Lamhaa.

Kashmir, despite harbouring several Hurriyat Party members with similar appearances and long-winded names, is far easier to comprehend.

A few film-makers have dared to shift the gaze away from Kashmir. Kanika Verma’s Dansh (2005), based on Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, explored militancy and ceasefire efforts in Mizoram. However, Verma inexplicably got Kay Kay Menon, Aditya Srivastava and Sonali Kulkarni to play Mizos. Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se, about the Assam insurgency, at least had Manisha Koirala play a suicide bomber.

Assam has produced some fine actors on the stage and in the movies (Seema Biswas, Adil Hussain), but North-Eastern faces are still too exotic to be treated on a par with the rest of India.

Kashmir will always be deemed as the prickliest thorn in the side of the Indian state, especially because India has gone to war with Pakistan over Kashmir. Besides, nothing stirs the soul more than a paradise lost. Kashmir provides ready contrasts of beauty and brutality. A soldier’s protruding gun in the foreground, a gaggle of rosy-cheeked children in the background. Shimmering mountains sheltering Kalashnikov-wielding insurgents. The state’s sad journey from tourism to terrorism will never stop inspiring headlines, poems, documentaries and movies. If Kashmir ki Kali reminds us of what we once had unfettered access to, Roja warns us of what we have lost. If there is a shooting paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.

Lamhaa released in theatres on Friday.

Nandini Ramnath is a film critic with Time Out Mumbai (www.timeoutmumbai.net).

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

posted a clip of John Philip Sousa introducing his band’s rousing rendition of Stars and Stripes Forever).

The visceral appeal of YouTube—proving that music aficionados are more visual creatures than they’d like to CORBIS­BETTMANN/AFP

On tap: George C. Gershwin.

believe—lies in watching performers we have only heard or heard about. In theory, video shouldn’t be important, and the music should be everything—and yet watching M.D. Ramanathan sing in his thought-filled, deliberate way explains his style by putting a personality behind it.

My favourite such example featured recently on Teachout’s blog—a 1931 clip of George Gershwin playing I Got Rhythm for a furious minute and 14 seconds, “the only surviving sound film,” Teachout writes, “of Gershwin at the piano.”

Gershwin plays at blinding speed, his right hand pounding out the melody, his left bouncing artfully off the keys, the jauntiness of the song made clearly out of the jauntiness of the man. His very body, thrilled at making its music, seems to cry out the refrain: “Who could ask for anything more?”

Write to Samanth Subramanian at raagtime@livemint.com

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, JULY 17, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

DELHI’S BELLY | ANINDITA GHOSE

Baked in memory Afghan refugees in the Capital have introduced new flavours to the city’s palate

A

t 4 in the afternoon, in a small room taken up by flour dust, balls of finely kneaded dough are weighed on a scale. They’re wrapped in folds of soft cloth before being stretched and flattened. A wooden stamp is used to mark a pattern of concentric dots on each before they’re tossed into the fire pit. The flour, water, salt, baking soda and yeast that go into this preparation are all from India. The tandoor that the bread is baked in has been assembled in Bhogal in south Delhi. But the bread that finally emerges from this operation bears a foreign flavour. It is the traditional Afghani roti.

Ainuddin and Mohammad Sarwar, two friends from Afghanistan’s war-torn Takhar province, set up the Afghan nanwaee (bread shop) seven months ago on Bhogal’s congested Central Market road.

Ainuddin, who is known here as Mullah Jan, is only 26. He looks far older, sitting on a table covered with a carpet from back home, counting change. By 6 in the evening, he is expertly wrapping batches of roti for the steady stream of customers—Afghans, a few Indians and expatriates—who come by to pick them up at Rs10 apiece.

“We usually buy our bread and don’t bake at home,” explains Mullah Jan. He learnt Hindi from the movies and speaks it well as we converse. The Afghans who stop by talk to him about the weather or their children. They speak in Dari, the variety of Persian spoken in Afghanistan.

They rarely mention how much bread they want. Mullah Jan intuitively packs it—one, two or even four—in sheets of newspaper. He knows the families well. Most come by three times a day to buy bread that is baked to coincide with meal times. The bakery sells around 600 rotis each day.

The May data of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) puts the number of Afghan refugees and asylum seekers in India upwards of 11,000, making them the largest community of official refugees in India. Unofficial figures are higher. And almost all these Afghans are settled in Delhi, split between Lajpat Nagar, and more recently, neighbouring Bhogal.

They come to escape the violence plaguing their country, but medical tourism is a growing reason as well. Syed Ghulam, who stops by to say hello to Mullah Jan and Sarwar, introduces himself as a medical tourist guide and translator. “I help the Afghans with hospital formalities,” he says, fishing for his visiting card. Sarwar breaks in on hearing this: “We Afghans were never as sick before. It is only now…because the Americans have planted bombs in our land.”

PHOTOGRAPHS

Most of the 300-odd families settled in Bhogal have disposable wealth and brokers say real estate prices have gone up because of the Afghan community. Mullah Jan and Sarwar have their own reasons to be here. They would like to get married. Sarwar says poverty and drought has raised the bride price, known as walwar, to exorbitant levels in Afghanistan. According to tradition, prospective grooms have to pay the bride’s family in order to wed. This has risen to as much as $10,000 (around Rs4.7 lakh) these days. However, Afghani custom calls for a senior family member to make the proposal. The two don’t have any family here. “We will make proposals for each other,” says Mullah Jan, smiling, suddenly shy.

He has known Sarwar since they were boys. They left Afghanistan at the age of 15, when they were pulled out of school by members of the Taliban. The two travelled through Iran and Pakistan. They landed in India last year. Here in his little flat adjoining a mosque in Bhogal, Mullah Jan

BY

JOCELYN BAUN

Oven fresh: (clockwise from above) Sarwar with a customer; the old bak­ ery in Lajpat Nagar; Afghani roti; Mullah Jan; and dough ready for the oven. feels at home.

Mullah Jan comes from a family of nanwais or bread-makers so setting up a bakery in Delhi was the sensible thing to do when they landed here. Afghans in the neighbourhood were keen on this too. They had to go all the way to Old Delhi for the quality of roti they were accustomed to. Afghani bread is also available in the areas of Nizamuddin and Lajpat Nagar but since it is bought thrice daily, even a 15-minute commute is cumbersome.

Manjit Singh Modi, the Sikh owner of Modi Pastry shop opposite the street, says that in winters, when more Afghans descend on the city, the queues at the bakery stretch right up to his shop. He personally likes the rogani bread the most—a butter-infused edition made only in the mornings.

When asked about their loyalty to their bread, the Afghans refer to the “other” bakery. The only other thriving Afghan bakery is in the main market of Lajpat Nagar-II, where it has existed at various venues for the last 15 years. There, the bread is baked in a wood-fuelled oven.

Around 1,000 are sold every day for Rs8 each. According to what Mullah Jan has heard, at

least 20 such bakeries dotted the city in the 1980s. Then, large batches of refugees moved to the US and Canada, and the bakeries shut down.

Apart from these two, there’s the Kabul Restaurant in Bhogal (two shops down from the bakery), which is also less than a year old. Lajpat Nagar has two more eateries, in addition to an Afghan provision store. The

Afghan restaurants are known for their korma pulao—a flavour-rich rice preparation with generous helpings of mutton slivers and raisins.

As the bakery gets ready to shut at around 10 in the night, Mullah Jan pours out a last cup of Afghani chai. It is best had with cold bread, he says, as he puts a dollop of white butter on one piece. The business isn’t very profitable yet and his parents send him money occasionally. He calls home every day but doesn’t miss Afghanistan as much, he says. He has everything he grew up with here: Bollywood movies, Shah Rukh Khan posters. The local cable service provider even broadcasts Afghani television.

And then there’s the food, he says, gesturing to Kabul Restaurant. “Things might look different but everything sounds and smells so familiar. What is there to miss?” he says.

He stops talking as he tears a piece of bread and brings it to his mouth. The taste of memory is warm on the tongue. anindita.g@livemint.com