Mint Lounge for 19 June 2010

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

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Saturday, June 19, 2010

Vol. 4 No. 24

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

MYTHOLOGY MEETS LIFE >Page 17

RICH MAN’S FLEA MARKET

Pinakin Patel’s new collection, marking his silver jubilee in the design world, is an amalgam of art, couture and eclectic interior design >Page 8

A NEW, PROPOSED AMENDMENT COULD MAKE DIVORCE A SPEEDIER, HASSLE­FREE OPTION. IS INDIA READY FOR THE CHANGE? >Page 10

THE GOOD LIFE

SHOBA NARAYAN

REPLY TO ALL

PIECE OF CAKE

AAKAR PATEL

PAMELA TIMMS

THE PRICE OF PROGRESS

Why are works of the Progressive artists the hottest Indian lot in international auctions? We deconstruct the group’s enduring appeal >Page 9

HAND ME THAT VUVUZELA!

The G­20 will only add to the chaos that the World Cup has brought to Canada’s streets. Here’s a survivor’s guide >Page 12

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

THE COMFORT OF A WHY OUR MEDIA WHEN SHORTBREAD FATHER’S PRESENCE CAN’T EXPLAIN INDIA GOES ‘DESI’

I

n the high-octane orchestra that is the Indian family, the father is often portrayed as the bass player—a preoccupied provider of the background beat—poring over taxes, peering at the computer, signing off on report cards. He comes and goes, this carrier of a briefcase; speaking legalese or financese; good for a buck and an awkward hug but nowhere nearly as colourful as aunts, uncles, grandparents and the diva-like Mom. Mothers are complicated and intense, characterized by fierce love... >Page 4

M

anmohan Singh is rarely interviewed

by Indian media. RSS journal Organiser scolded him for this in an editorial recently. But Singh is actually a talented interviewee and foreign journalists love him. It is almost embarrassing to read his interviews with Europeans because they are so fawning with him.

And yet the press conference he held in Delhi last month was his first in four years. Why does Singh not speak to Indian journalists? Let us look at his press conference. >Page 5

A

s I cool off for a few weeks in Scotland, India sometimes doesn’t seem so far away.

From my window I can see shops like Bombay Nights, selling sparkly lehengas and Bollywood DVDs; there’s the Mumtaz Mahal sweet shop, purveyors of barfi and gulab jamun to the greedy; and umpteen Indian and Pakistani grocers selling parathas, paneer and ghee. Edinburgh is a dinky, sleepy capital with a population of less than half a million, but it has embraced its Indian community with a passion. >Page 6

PHOTO ESSAY

LOLLYWOOD’S LAST REEL

HOME PAGE L3

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

SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SPACE, THE FINAL (COUPLES) FRONTIER

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FOOTBALL HEALTH

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PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

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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

n Sex and the City 2, everyone’s former favourite single girl Carrie feels like she’s overdosing on husband Big’s passions for takeout and television. Two years after happily ever after, Carrie is straining against the everyday rituals of marriage.

All of us know that feeling. I dragged the husband for the film and I felt his eyes on me every time I laughed extra loudly (it must have been the beer) at Big’s reluctance to get off the couch even as Carrie was desperate to dress shiny and shimmy with strangers.

One day Carrie announces she’s going to her old apartment to lock herself up and write without distractions.

When they meet again after the minibreak they’re both happy to see each other, the sex is good and Big has a Eureka moment. I think we should take two days off from our marriage NEEDS every week, he tells Carrie.

Most of us define the amount of space we need in a relationship from the word go. We start with a handicap, of course, because space is not a concept with which we grew up.

Even physical space comes at a premium (our buildings cling to each other; people will always read over your shoulder; and press against you in a queue) and personal space…hmm, explain again why you need to be alone?

When techie-turned-film student Shripriya married, the couple were already in their 30s and her husband negotiated an annual solo vacation for himself. “Of course I have veto rights on the locations he picks,” she says. In the past, she’s exercised that right for Prague, Cambodia and parts of Italy, places they eventually visited/will visit together. “His list grows shorter every year,” she laughs, explaining that he’s free to go with friends too, but again,

Mind the gap: Are you a space invader? she gets a say in the pals he picks. “He does touristy things, reads, doesn’t have to deal with the reality of life for a few days (a week at the most) and I’m totally cool with it,” she says.

Ruchi, 28, needs to get away at least three or four times a year and one of those trips has got to be with herself. “I catch up on my reading or photography. Travelling alone clears my mind, it allows me to converse less and think more. It’s my time out, I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” she says, adding that for this trip she usually picks a place that doesn’t have a cellphone signal. This couple’s other space frontiers include separate bathrooms and separate suitcases. After four years together, they’ve worked out all the details. He loves playing cricket on Saturdays so she does her own thing; every time she wants the house to herself for a girls’ night in, he makes alternative plans.

Like with most things in a relationship, there are no rights or wrongs, just what works for you. The husband and I have dramatically different everyday likes and dislikes but we usually end up swinging one way or the other, depending on our respective moods. So I’ve

watched more animation in the 10 years I’ve been married than ever before, and he’s learned the lyrics of some 1950s Hindi film songs and can eat a (small) bowl of spinach without pulling a face.

Yet neither of us would be eager to repeat that three-year phase when we worked in the same office. While it was fun to lunch together every day, we both reported to the same boss and office conversations often spilled over into the bedroom. For a while there, life was only work, work and more work.

When Hemant, 43, and his spouse decided to work together people guaranteed a disaster. But 11 years later, they seem to be doing okay. “Here’s my number but since we work together we holiday separately :). My wife Geeta is in the US,” he wrote in an email.

The couple currently run their own design studio out of an 800 sq. ft, 10-person office. They have quite a few systems in place to make their life easier, such as clear work responsibilities, no Internet at home, a work-free weekend and no shouting at each other in the office. At home, the TV stays out of the bedroom so she can read in peace while he hangs out in the den. He says working together has helped both of them master the art of detecting the other’s all-important I-need-space signal.

As for the husband and me, I wondered if indeed we were too clingy when a friend’s two-year-old daughter started calling both of us Samaya, a reference to the fact that she always hears our names as SamarPriya.

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com First of all I would like to congratulate ‘Lounge’ for the excellent “The Football Issue”, 12 June, a gift to lovers of “The World’s Favourite Game”. In a cricket­crazy country such as ours, your unique colour issue with the world’s best footballers came as a pleasant surprise for a long­time football fan (from a city where football is religion), such as myself, who can enjoy and savour these moments all the more. It is amazing that we are a nation of 1.2 billion, but are 133 in the current world football ranking. I believe that rather than putting the blame solely on our footballers, the nation should take responsibility for the poor performance—poor administration, lack of infrastructure and, above all, the fact that every game other than cricket is accorded stepmotherly treatment by the government and people.

Not only football, it is high time the media, the sponsors, the common man and the government gave up their obsession with cricket and concentrated on other games so that more and more youth and their parents are encouraged and inspired to bring glory to India in football and every field of sport.

One or two special issues cannot improve the country’s football health.

BIDYUT KUMAR CHATTERJEE

YOUNG INDIANS Priya Ramani’s “Breaking news: I may not be an Indian”, 12 June, was a lovely article, with some great points. I believe we young Indians are all non­Indian in many ways. It’s our rebellious ideology, or just a mindset of growing up with hypocrites around (read: old, narrow­minded elders).

Couldn’t ignore the humorous comments she received on Livemint.com, I think everyone should take this article lightheartedly, and not point fingers at her. Kudos!

MASOOM TULISIANI

IDENTITY CRISIS The article “Breaking news: I may not be an Indian”, 12 June, was amusing, and the points are true. But the comments! I have no idea where this new­age nationalism is coming from. Seems like we are going through a terrible identity crisis as a nation. Why are we so insecure that criticism cannot be accepted? And the less said about misogynistic morons the better.

SANGEETHA

Write to lounge@livemint.com ON THE COVER: IMAGING: MANOJ MADHAVAN/MINT www.livemint.com Priya Ramani blogs at blogs.livemint.com/firstcut

CORRECTIONS & CLARIFICATIONS: In Shoba Narayan’s column “How the rules of the games changed”, 12 June, the correct phrase is champing at the bit.

L4 COLUMNS SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

The comfort of a father’s quiet presence

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LUCY NICHOLSON/AFP

n the high-octane orchestra that is the Indian family, the father is often portrayed as the bass player— a preoccupied provider of the background beat— poring over taxes, peering at the computer, signing off on report cards. He comes and goes, this carrier

of a briefcase; speaking legalese or financese; good for a buck and an awkward hug but nowhere nearly as colourful as aunts, uncles, grandparents and the diva-like Mom. Mothers are complicated and intense, characterized by fierce love for their kids, feral protectiveness, unspoken subtexts; guilt, angst, adoration, hate and envy. All of the above, and often all at the same time.

Mothers will subsume themselves for their children. Fathers, in contrast, seem merely present; and that indeed, is a father’s gift.

Mothers get into the guilt routine—“I do so much for you and this is what I get in return?” It is hard not to when you are so invested in your kids; when your children are such a huge part of your identity.

Fathers, for some reason, don’t get into that “chakkar (cycle)”. Not as much anyway, perhaps because home and kids traditionally have not been their primary purview. Even today’s enlightened dads who help with homework, pack school bags, take kids to music lessons, and are tuned into the emotional life of their son or daughter are able to disengage from that spear-like guilt that mothers are so good at. That is a father’s gift to his child.

This is particularly true with daughters. Every mother I know has done a number on her daughter; and every daughter I know can push her mother’s buttons. No halfway measures here. A mother loves her daughter in toto: with every cell and every fibre in her being. That’s the problem. Fathers

make it easy on their daughters. They slip between the cracks. Their love flows between the cells and—like bone marrow, if I have my metaphors right—offer an omnipresent, stable, nurturing kind of support that is quite different from the high-wire act that is the mother. Fathers offer stasis in the parenting equation.

Fathers accept daughters in a way that mothers, who are caught up in the whole “how to protect and yet improve my offspring” rat race, cannot. All this maternal pressure leaves behind traces in the daughter’s mind. A mother’s intentions, however noble, are not without cost.

Mother says, “I am proud that you are so athletic.”

Daughter hears, “She doesn’t think I am good at my studies.”

Mother says, “Blue looks good on you.”

Daughter hears, “What about green?”

Amid this cross-communication and being at cross hairs, it is easy for a daughter to love her father. It is not that he doesn’t yell at her or set down outdated and antiquated rules about toys, chocolates, extra-curricular activities, curfew time and boys. In some ways, he expects more of her than even her mother. Mom, after all, just wants her to get high marks. Dad—oh, God!—Dad wants her to succeed in life, whatever that is. But Dad, in a weird way, gets her, not just in the superficial “I know your strengths and weaknesses and I am going to mould you into a better person” kind of way but in a much, much more fundamental, “You are my daughter and that’s enough,” kind of way. His accepting eyes are

Papa’s girl: Gwyneth Paltrow got her first lessons in acting from father Bruce Paltrow. different from her mother’s hopeful ones. Or so the daughter thinks. When Mom throws a fit about her tattoos or multiple piercings, Dad simply smoothes her hair back in that primordial parental gesture that says, “It doesn’t matter. All will be well.” When Mom gushes at her teachers about her academic prowess, Dad will glance across the room ruefully and shrug.

Father and daughter share a joke with Mom as the punchline.

For grown-up daughters like me, fathers offer a different pleasure. As a baby, everyone said that I was a mirror image of my Dad. I look different now, but in personality I am a lot like him. It is wrong, what people say. Parents aren’t your past; in many ways, they are your future.

They offer you a glimpse of how you’ll end up. In my father, I see my contradictions and my angst; my eccentricities and imperfections.

Because I love him, I can accept these frailties as my own—without going

through years of therapy like my American friends do.

Most kids emulate their parents in certain areas and rebel against them in others. Daughters of mothers who are terrific cooks frequently hate cooking. Sons of fathers who love golf will frequently not touch a club. We are not carbon copies of our parents.

We are permutations and mutations of their genes.

Fathers teach their daughters things.

My Dad (who I call Appa) taught me how to cycle; he taught me sentence construction and read the awkward poems I constructed. Unlike my mother, who would exclaim and enthuse at my every little achievement, sometimes cloyingly to my teenage ears, my father’s compliments were pleasantly offhanded. He never discouraged but he rarely encouraged in the over-the-top, “Oh, my God, my little baby has written a poem. This is the best thing I have ever read,” fashion of my mother. As a teenager, I

much preferred my father’s barely-there compliments: “That’s nice,” he would mumble distractedly as I showed him my latest creation before turning back to reading Chaucer or Yates (neither of whom I, by the way, have ever read—probably because I hated the fact that they took my father away from me). But, I always started by showing off my stuff to Mom, before rolling my eyes and taking it to Dad. My father’s teaching method too was different from my mother’s and I think this is true for most dads. Mothers get into a frenzy about teaching.

Unknowingly, and almost in spite of themselves, they get into the nag, nag, nag, shove it down your throat, learn-or-else model, all culminating with a final whammy: “I am saying this for your own good.” My father taught me lots of things but in a nonchalant way, usually on demand. When I bugged him about what major to pursue in college, he would never give me choices like Ma did. “It doesn’t matter what you choose,” he would reply exasperatedly. “Just be good at it.

Just become an expert.” When he taught me how to drive a car, he used the word “anticipate” a lot. And when I asked him the meaning of words— he was an English professor after all— he always, but always, told me to look it up in the dictionary.

To fathers everywhere—for the things you do for your sons and daughters; for the stasis you maintain in the home; and for the weird, lovable, eccentric, incorrigible characters that you are—Happy Father’s Day. This one’s for you, Appa. And I did look it up in the dictionary.

Write to Shoba Narayan at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

GOURI DANGE LEARNING CURVE

Too much truth can be a bad thing Emphasizing the need to own up to mistakes can backfire; encouragement, not praise, is the best reward Our 10-year-old son has suddenly gone into confession overdrive. A few months ago, we had a few domestic “mysteries”: a smashed flowerpot, some minor missing items. He has now admitted that he threw away or broke those things. Looking back, I think it was a stressful period for him: His best friend had just left the country and he was trying to make new friends. We told him what he’d done was wrong and should not be repeated. Of late, he has been coming up to us with a new confession almost every day, sometimes, we suspect, even for things he has not done. He seems repentant for past incidents but can’t put them behind him. We placed a lot of premium on telling the truth but, after these incidents, we have tried to loosen up a bit.

Recently, we came to know he has taken some money out of our wallets, and maybe out of his teacher’s as well. How should we react in the current situation?

Your little boy seems to be enjoying earning a bit of a halo each time he confesses. You are right in loosening up. Sometimes we are so anxious to emphasize some particular values that

we give out a slightly skewed or lopsided lesson. And our kids “blow them up” in their minds, creating situations such as yours. Kids tend to look around for “currency” with which they can earn approval. Your son seems to have settled on “coming clean”. It makes me smile, reading your mail.

Most kids think up ways to duck blame and responsibility—here’s one little fellow who seems to have taken the opposite tack!

Jokes apart, you need to shut down this line of communication. Don’t stop him from doing it, but don’t reward him with any positive response.

I wonder if the teacher’s wallet would be so easy to locate and take from, without him being seen? This part is sounding made-up, and perhaps you should just let it go. However, you do say that he has taken money from your wallets. I would urge you to ask him what he wanted the money from your wallet for. From this will come some clues as to whether he’s stealing to get himself things or stealing for the whole act of stealing, the confession, and all that follows.

I have a few questions: Is he the only child? Is he mentally and/or physically

under-stimulated, that is, does he not get enough by way of challenges? The “too much thinking” that you describe sounds like he is not getting to wrap his mind around more stimulating and challenging things.

Also, try to draw him into more physical activity. Kids seriously have too much on their minds and too little joyous “playing” and outdoor fun of the uncomplicated and uncompetitive kind, which sometimes leads to them “living in their heads” a lot.

Don’t worry overly; take away some of the solemnity (and possibly the drama) surrounding the confession mode, and he will let go of it in a few weeks. That’s my feeling.

We have returned with our nine-year-old son from the US. While we are happy with the schooling here, the one thing that seems to be conspicuously different is the use of praise. In the US, we felt, they were praised far too much for the smallest thing. In a way, this made them quite casual and shoddy. For example, he would not bother to think of something particularly good or interesting to take for show-and-tell.

On occasions, I’ve seen him grab something on his way out from the house and present it in his show-and-tell. Invariably, he would come home with stars! Here, the

system demands more thought, and that is good. However, I find there is little or no praise coming from the teachers. Everything is either “correct” or “wrong” or “good work” or “could do better”. Believe me, I am not just looking for praise for my kids. I’m looking at the system as a whole.

Yes, this would be a difference between the classroom atmosphere in the two cultures. You could bring up this issue with the school, while clarifying that you’re not simply looking for your kids to be praised. I would, in fact, prefer to use the word “encouragement” in place of “praise”. Praise in a schoolroom can be difficult to give out in equal measure, and can sound plain insincere to children if the teacher gushes at everyone’s every effort with a “Good job!” or “Wow, great!”

Encouragement comes in the form of words and phrases that are direct and said much more naturally and conversationally. Even in an instance where a child who usually has trouble sharing does share something, it is more effective to say “I liked how you shared your crayons with Madhu”, rather than a sweeping “Oh you have now become a good boy”.

Moreover, praise tends to “grade” things. For instance, when viewing a child’s painting, praise would involve calling it “beautiful”—and promptly every other child would want praise in

Guilt trip: Confessions shouldn’t be forced. that particular form. Encouragement is much more specific, and does not label or judge the final product; it focuses on the process that a child engages in. It’s easier and more honest and more “doable” for a teacher to pick out specific things about each child’s effort: “I like the way you have used red.” Or “you really seemed to enjoy doing that.”

A child slow in reading perhaps cannot be sincerely praised, as her reading is slower than others. However, she can definitely be encouraged for her specific effort on a particular day.

Encouraging talk, by its very nature, does not compare kids—it focuses on each child’s individual potential. And this is something you could perhaps point out to the school.

Gouri Dange is the author of The ABCs of Parenting.

Write to Gouri at thelearningcurve@livemint.com

COLUMNS L5 SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Why our media can’t explain India

M

T NARAYAN/HINDUSTAN TIMES

anmohan Singh is rarely interviewed

by Indian media. RSS journal Organiser scolded him for this in an editorial recently. But Singh is actually a talented interviewee

and foreign journalists love him. It is almost embarrassing to read his interviews with Europeans because they are so fawning with him.

And yet the press conference he held in Delhi last month was his first in four years. Why does Singh not speak to Indian journalists? Let us look at his press conference. Here’s the first question: “Sir, mera naam Umakant Lakhera hai. Main Hindustan*, jo Hindi akhbar hai, uska Dilli mein chief of bureau hoon.

Pradhan mantriji, mera aap se yah sawal hai ki aap se pehle Bharat mein jitne bhi pradhan mantri hue hain, economy ke baare mein vey log bahut zyada nahin jaante the. Yah desh ki khushkismati hai ki aap economist hain aur aap ne azadi ke baad ka, Bharat ki economy ke utar-chadhav ka, bahut lamba samay dekha hai. Mera aap se yah sawal hai ki aaj price rise par control kyon nahin hai?

Aisa kyon hota hai ki inflation kam hota hai aur mehngai badhti hai? Pehle ke zamaney mein mantri jab bayan dete they, to agley din mehngai ghat jati thi, aaj aisa kyon hota hai ki aap ke jo ministers hain, aapke mantri jo bayan dete hain, uske agle din mehngai badh jaati hai? Aisa kyon hota hai ke economy sarkar ke control mein nahin hai aur aam aadmi ka zinda rehna mushkil ho gaya hai? Common man ko lagta hai ke sarkar ke niyantran mein cheezein nahin hai. Economy ka jo slowdown hai aur jo mehngai hai, aap us par apne vichar prakat karein.”

The press conference continues in this manner. There’s little reason for Singh to engage Indian media, especially Hindi media, because it is all like this. The opening question asked by Washington Post’s owner Lally Weymouth, who interviewed Singh last year, was: “You are (US) President Obama’s first official state visitor. What would you like to accomplish in Washington?”

We find this sort of objective

questioning difficult to do, as our television channels testify every night.

This is because Indian journalists look not for information, but for agreement with the convictions they hold. European journalists do not make pleas on behalf of the common man (who in India is represented by the Hindi journalist rather than the prime minister).

There are good journalists in India, but they tend to be business journalists.

Let us quickly understand why. Unlike regular journalism, business journalism is removed from emotion because it reports numbers. There is little subjectivity and business channel anchors are calm and rarely agitated because their world is more transparent.

Competent business reporting here, like CNBC, can be as good as business reporting in the West. This isn’t true of regular journalism in India, which is uniformly second rate.

V.S. Naipaul spotted this in our headlines. Citing ones such as “Masses must be educated to make democracy a success” he concluded, rightly, that India was “a nation ceaselessly exchanging banalities with itself”.

India is the only major newspaper market in the world where newspapers are open to selling their stories. The problem isn’t that Indian proprietors are evil or that they’re looking for short-term benefit while eroding the paper over time. In my experience of six newspapers, the proprietor has always been more knowledgeable than the editor.

The problem is the reader. It is unthinkable that its readers would continue to patronize The New York Times if it were revealed that the newspaper’s reporting was available for sale. But in India it’s fine, and the space is available for the proprietor to profit.

About 10 years ago, Indian editors came under pressure to take their newspapers “upmarket”. In Europe,

Tell­all: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s press conference last month was one of his rare interactions with Indian media. going upmarket means adding pages that carry reports on opera and literature, but that’s not what the word means here.

In India, upmarket means carrying photographs of well-dressed, wealthy people: What is referred to as Page 3.

Coverage of celebrities is actually downmarket, but in India it’s inverted.

There’s no demand from readers for real upmarket content in India, and even if there was, there are few journalists qualified to provide it.

This is because you cannot make a living as a writer in India, which is surprising because we have 100 million speakers of English and think of ourselves as being a giant market. But this isn’t true and there is little consumption of writing. The reason Indian writers are paid little is that it does not really matter what you write here. One writer is as good or bad as another, and the good writer is actually the familiar face (which explains why the same people—Pritish Nandy, Shobhaa De—write everywhere). There is also the problem of quality, it must be admitted, and you can count the number of Indians asked to write for publications abroad on the fingers of one hand.

A century ago, 5% of India was literate.

Formal schooling came to India only after Macaulay’s Minute, which we are taught to hate. Indians were educated in English in numbers quite recently, after we could produce no alternative to Macaulay’s vision. In the 1970s, this

urban literacy in English produced publications that were new and different.

India Today and Sunday sent reporters to write about India’s villages. What they came back with surprised readers, who hadn’t known what a truly frightening place India was.

Bihar’s police blinded a dozen undertrials with cycle spokes and acid in Bhagalpur (the story of this casual act of punishment took weeks to emerge).

Government engineers on deputation regularly abused tribal women, and there was no end to stories about the barbarism in the Indian village (there still is no end).

But there was always something missing from this journalism, and it is this: You could read Indian newspapers every day for 30 years and still not know why India is this way. The job of newspapers is, or is supposed to be, to tell its readers five things: who, when, where, what and why. Most newspapers make do with only three of these and are unlikely to really tell you “what”. This is because urban Indians are tired now of reading the horror stories that come out of our villages.

Only a couple of newspapers, such as The Indian Express, persist in reporting news that isn’t pleasant, and they haven’t much circulation.

No newspaper at all can tell you “why”, because they do not know themselves. The same stories from 30, 50, 100 or 500 years ago keep repeating here,

and the peasant will still murder his daughter for falling in love. The happenings in the city are also difficult to understand. The news from May was that Delhi University sold radioactive Cobalt-60 as scrap. This killed the merchant who bought it and crippled another. The university, which is supposed to be a research body, had unthinkingly buried some of the other Cobalt-60 earlier and this will poison the ground. Why are we so casual? Nobody can say, and there will be an explanation along the lines that it was an accident.

But this will happen again, of course.

Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal was owned by Americans. But it was managed, staffed and run by Indians. Its foreman was Indian and its workers were Indian. Why were they so casual about their own safety? The media doesn’t know, but it is convinced the solution lies with getting Warren Anderson.

Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media.

Send your feedback to replytoall@livemint.com *Hindustan is published by HT Media, which also publishes Mint. www.livemint.com Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakar­patel

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SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010

Eat/Drink HUNGRY PLANET | ARNAUD FAYE

Game and gesiers The chef of Ritz Paris on the classics of French food and how this esoteric cuisine is keeping up with the times

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

···························· hef Arnaud Faye has been working for three years at the Ritz Paris, one of the most prestigious hotels in the world. The hotel also houses the famous Hemingway Bar, named so because it was Ernest Hemingway’s most loved bar.

We get to meet the young chef and Colin Field, the gregarious head barman at Hemingway, at the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, Mumbai.

Faye works at the double Michelin-starred restaurant L’Espadon and was here for a week for a promotion at Zodiac Grill, “to serve French food to Indians as it is in Paris”. He says he has not changed anything in the recipes besides using local produce. With Field translating, we spoke to Faye about French cuisine. Edited excerpts:

C

How has French cuisine changed over the years?

French cuisine has a lot of history, but it is changing. People are travelling more now and want to try new things. There are hundreds of fantastic chefs who are travelling and, with the inputs from their travels, are constantly changing French cuisine. And who creates French cuisine but these chefs? I am

here in India now, and if I see something interesting, I will try it. If I travel to Japan, I take something back. But at the end of the day, what’s most important is the produce. You put little touches, you don’t change it in a major way. For example, I use more ginger now. But I don’t use fresh ginger. I just infuse it in the oil and use the oil in my dish. So you don’t eat the ginger, just taste the flavour. I make lemon and vanilla oil. I use wasabi, lemon grass, coriander and get spices from Kashmir, such as cinnamon, cardamom, clove, etc., and infuse them in oils. I use some of these spices in amuse-bouche. And the people in France like these flavours.

People are overwhelmed

by French food. Is it difficult to master?

Many people say French food is complicated. But it’s not. French food is all about the quality of produce. Otherwise, it can be as simple as some vegetables cooked in butter. In India, you use different kinds of spices; we use wines for flavour. For me, Indian food is difficult, there are so many spices. French food could be a carrot that is perfectly cooked and you can taste the flavours of the carrot. All you need is a little oil and garlic. It’s cooked in a pan without water, in its own juice.

What are the three meals of the day in France?

Breakfast could be coffee or tea, marmalade, butter, freshly baked bread, croissant, and brioche.

People say that breakfast should be big, but in France dinner is a big meal. People are working all day and don’t really have much time to cook or eat. Breakfast

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

Adaptation: (above) French food can be as simple as Crunchy Vegetables in Lemon Dressing and Coriander Emulsion; and chef Arnaud Faye.

and lunch have to be quick. So if you go to a restaurant, you eat a salad or maybe roast lamb with vegetables. Dinner is larger. You get home and make something nice. It could be a filet mignon of pork with carrots or peas. There can be charcuterie and dinner can be followed by cheese.

What is popular street food in France?

Crêpes are very popular as street food. We have mobile vans that serve all kinds of crêpes. Lebanese dishes are also very popular as street food. Otherwise, sandwiches are also available.

Which foreign cuisines are popular in France?

Japanese food is really big in France—sushi is very popular.

Korean, Lebanese, Italian and Indian food are also popular.

What are the uncommon types of meat eaten in France?

Foie gras, escargot, frog legs, duck gizzards known as gesiers are the unusual meats. If you live close to the sea then seafood is an

important part of your diet. Veal, beef, chicken and lamb are commonly eaten. Frog legs and escargot are not easy to prepare at home, so they are mostly eaten at restaurants.

French dishes often have alcohol. What type of alcohol is popularly used for cooking and how?

Cognac and wine are used commonly. But it’s used to add flavour, not so that there can be alcohol in your food. We make marinades and sauces with wine and cognac.

For cooking, you don’t have to take fantastic wines. It’s a personal thing to decide which wine to use with what meat.

One could say that white wine and chicken go well, but look at Coq au Vin, which is a famous French chicken dish that uses

red wine. If you use too much wine then you change the taste of the meat. Red wine also goes well with fatty fish. You can flambé fruits in sherry, cognac is better for making marinades for game, wine is used mainly in sauces.

Has French food become lighter in keeping with people’s demand for healthier food?

Yes, it has. I don’t use too much cream or butter. It’s used just to cook the dish and then a sponge is used to absorb the fat. We often use olive oil, but only for cooking and don’t pour it on top.

What are the popular dishes eaten during celebrations in France?

Foie gras, smoked salmon, lobster with butter sauce, oysters, game is eaten for Christmas and New Year.

Game is special because it’s the only animal, you can be sure, that has eaten naturally from the forest. Vanilla ice cream with meringue, chocolate is important and the meal is finished with a good cognac.

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Broon to Bipasha Basu, I filled little chai cups with shrikhand and mango purée for dipping.

Oh, did I mention that those grocers across the road are also piled high with boxes of Alphonso mangoes?

PIECE OF CAKE

PAMELA TIMMS

WHEN SHORTBREAD GOES ‘DESI’ A s I cool off for a few weeks in Scotland, India sometimes doesn’t seem so far away. From my window I can see shops like Bombay Nights, selling sparkly lehengas and Bollywood DVDs; there’s the Mumtaz Mahal sweet shop, purveyors of barfi and gulab jamun to the greedy; and umpteen Indian and Pakistani grocers selling parathas, paneer and ghee.

Edinburgh is a dinky, sleepy capital with a population of less than half a million, but it has embraced its Indian community with a passion. There’s an Indian takeaway on every corner, it’s home to one of Britain’s oldest Sikh communities, and every summer our local park jumps to the bhangra beat when local band Tigerstyle, whose music appeared in the film Singh is Kinng, performs at the city’s annual “Mela”.

We have everything from the cheap and cheerful, flock wallpaper curry houses where chicken tikka masala is still the order of the day, to dosa cafés

and a new generation of talented young chefs such as Tony Singh whose Oloroso restaurant is one of Scotland’s most innovative and fashionable eateries.

Scots also have a long, chequered history of trying to export our culinary “specialities” to India. Glasgow comedian and broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli recently embarked on a mission to introduce Scottish “cuisine” to India: His attempt to interest a Srinagar boatman in fish and chips made for a hilarious chapter in the resulting book, Indian Takeaway: One Man’s Attempt to Cook his Way Home.

Whilst I accept haggis will probably never make much of an impact, I won’t rest until the fabulous but much derided Deep Fried Mars Bar has found a place in every Indian heart.

Early trials have been encouraging—restaurants around Kullu Valley where we stay in July now think nothing of rustling up a “Bar One Pakora” for us.

Nowhere is our shared

Cumin and Jaggery Shortbread Biscuits Ingredients 250g unsalted butter, softened but not melted 150g caster sugar 110g cornflour 300g plain flour (maida) 2 tsp roasted and ground cumin (zeera) 50g finely ground almonds 1 egg, lightly beaten 150g powdered jaggery

Cookie jar: The shortbread is probably a distant cousin of nan khatai. culinary history more evident than in our mutual love for biscuits; we can match each other crumb for crumb with macaroons, Marie and Bourbon biccies. For today’s recipe, I’ve given Scotland’s national biscuit an Indian makeover. The ubiquitous shortbread, probably a distant relation of India’s nan khatai, is the last word in

simple, sweet, butteriness.

I decided to transform the shortie’s natural homeliness into go-get-’em brazenness with the addition of cumin and jaggery. These biscuits are delicious on their own, allowing an uninterrupted appreciation of both sides of their heritage but to complete the transformation from Ma

Method Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Lightly grease a large baking sheet.

In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light and soft. In another bowl, sift together the flour, cornflour, almonds and cumin. Add half the flour mixture into the butter and sugar and mix well.

Add the remainder and knead gently until the mixture holds together. Form the mixture into a long sausage shape of about 2 inches in diameter.

Chill in the fridge or freezer for

about 1 hour.

Sprinkle the powdered jaggery evenly on to a large sheet of baking paper. With a pastry brush, paint the outside of the sausage with the beaten egg, then roll the shortbread in the jaggery until completely covered. With a sharp knife, slice off discs about a quarter of an inch thick, then place, well-spaced, on the baking sheet. Bake for about 15-20 minutes. The biscuits should still be pale and the jaggery will have spread out to form a frill, but be careful not to let the jaggery burn.

To make the shrikhand, hang 1kg of plain yogurt in a muslin cloth for about 4 hours.

Mix a good pinch of saffron with some warm milk, then beat into the yogurt along with a teaspoon of ground cardamom and sugar to taste.

In a food processor, whiz a couple of peeled mangoes to a pulp. Pile the shrikhand into chai glasses, top with the mango purée and maybe some edible silver leaf (varq).

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 slideshow on how to bake shortbreads, go to www.livemint.com/shortbread.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

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SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010

L7

Play MOBILE PHONES

Copycat callers Is that a BlackBerry Bold or a Zen Mobile Z77? A slew of efficient and cheap imitations make it hard to tell

ERRY BLACKB8900 E V CUR 0 Rs17,99

B Y K RISH R AGHAV krish.r@livemint.com

···························· t’s black with rounded edges, has a curved keypad with angular accents (with highlights in white and red) and a directional track pad below the centre of the screen. Eight months ago, that would have described only one phone—a BlackBerry Bold 9650 from smartphone makers Research In Motion (RIM). Today, it describes six—the Zen Mobile Z77, G-Fone 571, Fly B430 DS, Airfone AQ9,

I

BLACKBERRY CURVE The G­Fone 571 and Karbonn K10 ape differ­ ent models in the Black­ Berry Curve family. The K10 attempts to go one step further, featuring an impressive imitation of the BlackBerry user interface as well. The software, however, lags significantly, making most complicated tasks an exercise in frustra­ tion. Both feature a replica of the signature BlackBerry trackball, though in Karbonn’s case it’s merely a but­ ton. The G­Fone is sleek and light, though open­ ing the back battery case is a task worthy of the Engineer Corps.

Aroma Q2 and H20 V-68. These aren’t the dubious “ePhone” and “Blackbarry” knockoffs the grey market peddles, but phones available on retail shelves and at online stores at prices less than Rs5,000. “Over the last year, the mobile handsets market has gotten more crowded and fragmented with the rise of ‘copycat’ models that have (the) looks and aesthetics resembling those of high-end smartphones,” says Naveen Mishra, lead analyst for mobile handsets research at IDC India. The copycats come from

BLACKB BOLD 9 ERRY 65 Rs20,95 0 2*

what IDC calls the “new vendors”, among them companies such as Micromax Informatics Ltd, Karbonn, Fly and Zen Mobiles. Of the 101 million handsets shipped in 2009, these new vendors now have a market share of 12.3%, higher than the individual share of Samsung (9.4%) or LG Electronics (6.4%).

But Mishra is quick to clarify that these companies are not just about the copycat models. “A lot of genuine innovation has come from this space, with features like dual-sim phones now being imitated by established companies like Nokia and Samsung,” he says.

Delhi-based company Olive Telecom, endorsed by cricketer Kapil Dev, has a model called the FrvrOn powered by an AAA battery in addition to a normal rechargeable lithium-ion cell. Micromax Informatics’ X235 doubles as a universal remote. “These companies

BLACKBERRY BOLD The Zen Z77 and Fly B430 manage a convincing rendition of the BlackBerry Bold.

Neither features the smart track pad that makes navigation on the Bold a breeze, but the four­way directional centre button suffices.

The Zen is the heavier of the two and sports a strange, granulated back cover. The BlackBerry may win on overall sleekness, but it can’t match the sheer loudness of the Zen and Fly speakers, nor the ultra­cheap price.

The Zen and Fly come with a passable camera and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

HTC This was a bit of a surprise. A phone from HTC’s past (when they made stuff other than sleek iPhone­esque smart­ phones) reappearing as the Micromax Q5, a dual­sim Qwerty phone with Opera Mini and a 2MP camera. The phone apparently has an “inbuilt Yamaha audio amplifier”. We’ll take their word for it.

HTC DA SH 3G Rs18,62 4*

Fly B43 0 Rs3,490

571 G­Fone 9 Rs3,99 Karbonn Rs4,950

K10

have portfolios that mix both these attempts at innovation and the cheap copycats, driven by demand for low-end devices that look like a BlackBerry or Nokia,” Mishra says.

BlackBerry makers RIM, the source of much of this design inspiration, seem unperturbed at attempts to copy their phones’ aesthetics. “You can copy the design and functions of a BlackBerry but not the software,” says Keith Pardy, chief marketing officer at RIM. “The software has been created after many years of research and development, and we have unique support systems that make it possible for you to secure your information on a BlackBerry. That is not possible in an imitation.” Many of the cheaper phones, however, do provide equivalent functionality—using freely available open-source applications such as browser Opera or social networking suite Snaptu.

Blessy Augustine contributed to this story.

NOKIA Red centre button?

Check. Red band around the circumference of the phone? Check.

Music­centric features, including buttons on the side of the phone?

Check and check.

Nokia’s 5310 is an odd choice of inspiration, but its aesthetics seem to 0 31 be in demand across NOKIA 5 multiple companies.

9 8 ,2 Rs8 The KKT23C is Lava Mobile’s “entry­level” CDMA phone, with the desired trifecta of entry­level features: long battery life, torch and FM. The Lava KK T23C Micromax X250 adds powerful speakers, Rs2,700 an MP3 player and a VGA camera.

ax Q5 Microm Rs4,566 Zen Z77 Rs3,999

Any claims of intellectual property rights (IPR) infringements, says Mishra, also fall into an uncertain grey zone. “It’s a very soft line. You add one dot somewhere, or a button somewhere else, and you’re safe,” he says.

None of the big firms have reacted in any way to the copycats as the markets they serve are radically different. “Our phones are positioned different, catering to a separate group of consumers,” says Vikas Jain, business director at Micromax Informatics, who categorically denies any “inspiration” in the design of the company’s phones. “I can understand why people would think so,” he says. “I mean, how many ways can you play around with a basic bar phone’s design? You only have a few buttons to move around.”

Microm X250 ax Rs3,045

* Indicates international price

GAMING REVIEW | ALAN WAKE

Mostly harmless The high­profile horror title hits a few highs, but misses the wood for the trees B Y V ARUNI K HOSLA varuni.k@livemint.com

···························· ix years in development limbo. Seven years since their last title Max Payne 2. Countless delays. Finnish game developers Remedy Entertainment are presumably a little rusty, and it shows in their new Xbox 360 title Alan Wake.

You play a best-selling suspense author from New York, Alan Wake (think of him as a Finnish Stephen King), holidaying in the fictional town of Bright Falls with his wife Alice.

Staying in a conveniently isolated cabin in the woods, the

S

writer attempts to free himself of a two-year-long writer’s block.

But his holiday doesn’t go as planned. His better half goes missing. The characters from his manuscripts start coming to life.

Wake, unfortunately, penned fiendish monsters and not romcoms, and is, therefore, forced to spend a large part of his holiday wandering through woods, fighting monsters and trying to locate his wife.

The gameplay is engrossing, the entire game cleverly plays with light and shadow, leading to some impressive levels and scenarios. Each level begins with a “Previously On” tab, quite like recaps on television shows. All episodes start afresh sans items you may have collected in the earlier levels. Wake encounters mysterious human silhouettes known as the Taken. Though ostensibly “dead”, these creatures have to be dodged and dealt with using the flashlight

(provided at all times in the player’s left hand). The Taken are weakened instantly by the light—this provides the time to evade them or kill them with the variety of guns made available.

The combat system is solid and fun—but repeating the formula throughout the game makes it tedious and frustrating.

Optional collectibles such as coffee thermoses and mugs help

build the story. Clues are also provided through abandoned radio and television sets.

The game shows an unknown helper scattering pages from Wake’s manuscript, allowing him to interpret what may just happen to him subsequently.

Wake narrates his story throughout the game, which is broken into a six-episode structure. Even though features such

as this lend a smart look to the game, the predictable nature of the plot is somewhat disappointing. Wake is an unsympathetic protagonist, cold and distant, and much of his interaction with people in the town as the story builds fails to resonate.

The graphics of the game are brilliant—a tired Wake can often be seen sweating or dragging his feet. He also dodges the Taken in

In his wake: The game requires you to assume the title role and search for the protagonist’s missing wife.

slow motion, displaying spectacular graphic detailing. The music keeps the pace going, and is suitably atmospheric. The game also features some rather unsubtle, mostly jarring product placements—from Verizon mobiles to Energizer batteries.

At a stretch, the game can be completed in around 5-7 hours, if played at “Normal” difficulty level (the easiest of three). Alan Wake is a good attempt by Remedy Entertainment. It delivers a competent experience and can be plowed through over a weekend.

But was it worth a five-year wait? Not really. While it’s obvious that a lot of attention to detail has gone into the title, the intricacies never quite add up to the sum of their parts. The larger details—the plot, the experience of the game as a whole—are lacking. At best, Alan Wake is a game you’ll enjoy, but not really remember.

Alan Wake is available for the Xbox 360 for Rs2,399. It can also be purchased online directly at www.microsoftstore.co.in

L8

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010

Insider PREVIEW

Rich man’s flea market PINAKIN PATEL

Pinakin Patel’s new collection, marking his silver jubilee in the design world, is an amalgam of art, couture and eclectic interior design

B Y B LESSY A UGUSTINE blessy.a@livemint.com

···························· inakin Patel, 55, can no longer be called just an architect or an interior designer. Design impresario is more apt. This is his 25th year as a designer, and along with a collection that encompasses furniture and every kind of home accessory, he has also designed a collection of saris. With zari embroidery of traditional Indian motifs on rich hues of chiffon, the saris represent Patel’s signature idiom, which he has been refining over the last decade: an elegant fusion of Indian art and clean Western lines. The silver jubilee collection also includes semi-precious stone tables, metal wall hangings, upholstered chairs, Chinese plates and crockery and some small paintings by him.

Patel says he is trying to create a “rich man’s flea market” with this latest collection by adding a smattering of pedestrian to the precious. Like the metal bathtub in his Mumbai showroom—the tub’s golden exterior, and the silver hue on the inside make it appear precious while its beaten texture gives it a kitschy look.

According to Patel, globalization has made contemporary design predictable and his intention through his eclectic jubilee collection is to revive the 1970s’ boutique culture. “I want to bring back the surprise and delight into shopping. Adbhut bhaava, or the sense of wonderment, needs to be reawakened,” he says.

Patel’s affair with design began 30 years ago in his garage when he, along with two carpenters, made a few stylish picture frames to redecorate his room. He enjoyed the process and the outcome so much that he set up a framing solutions shop called Pictures. He then embarked on a fiveyear journey around the world and across India to understand and experience the aesthetics of design.

Armed with an understanding of both global and local sensibilities, Patel set up his first furniture store in Mumbai called Etcetera.

This was 1985. Since then he has metamorphosed into much more than a furniture designer. His evolution, according to him, has been shaped by the needs of his clients. “I first started making picture frames and then people asked for art, then soft furnishings and furniture. When they saw all this arranged in the showroom they asked me to

P

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

One­stop shop: (clockwise from top) The fully furnished Hara Villa costs Rs28 lakh; a metal bathtub (Rs1,44,000); a Bidri vase (Rs56,000); the Opium Day Bed (Rs4,03,530) and mirrors (Rs7,200 onwards); dinner sets cost Rs13,500; and a view of Pinakin, the store, in Mumbai.

PINAKIN PATEL

PINAKIN PATEL

arrange it all in their homes…and I became an interior designer. When we ran out of space in an interior assignment, the client asked me to ‘enlarge’ his house, and I became an architect,” says Patel.

To commemorate the 25-year journey since he first started

designing furniture, Patel has designed Hara Villa—a fully furnished wooden villa with a bedroom, kitchenette and bathroom and an outdoor wooden deck and sit-out with shaded pergola.

The modular house is the most significant showpiece in Patel’s new collection because it is the amalgamation of the disciplines

he has learnt, practised and honed over the years.

This limited-edition villa requires no concrete foundation and costs Rs28 lakh. It comes completely furnished—bed, air conditioning, kitchen equipment, tele-

vision set, crockery, bed linen, et al. If you own a piece of land, you can transpose the Hara Villa from Patel’s Alibaug showroom to your desired location. Patel has already sold two Hara Villas. He will make another 23 and then revamp the design.

According to designer Sangita Kathiwada of Mélange, Mumbai, Patel’s biggest contribution to contemporary Indian design has been his ability to simplify a design without losing out on functionality. She admits that like other designers, Patel too occasionally ends up creating an impractical piece of furniture. Like the “Acrylic Jhoola” from the jubilee collection.

Though visually aesthetic, the jhoola is neither safe nor inviting. Nonetheless, he has been able to create a unique “Pinakinesque” style.

For Patel, maintaining the “Pinakinesque” quality is the greatest challenge. “If I don’t watch out, it’s very easy for me to lose my individuality,” he says.

Whenever he finds himself slipping, he goes back to local Indian crafts for renewal. For instance, he has used the jaali (lattice) work to enhance a chest of drawers in the new collection.

He is already gearing up to travel all over the country to interact with craftsmen, designers and performing artists from music, dance and cinema for his next collection.

The silver jubilee collection is on display at Pinakin, Raghuvanshi Mills, Lower Parel, Mumbai.

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010

L9

Spotlight ANALYSIS

BEST SELLERS

The price of progress

Sample recent auction sale figures of the Progressives

LEON NEAL/AFP

u Maqbool Fida Husain b. 1915 ‘Horses’ Oil on canvas 78.4x164.1cm €169,470 (around Rs96.7 lakh) Christie’s, London, 10 June u Syed Haider Raza b. 1922 ‘Saurashtra’ (1983) Acrylic on canvas 200x200cm €2,542,050 Christie’s, London, 10 June u Francis Newton Souza 1924­2002 ‘Down at the Lotus Pond’ (1984) Mixed media on board 60.6x76.2cm €42,297 Christie’s, London, 9 June u Krishnaji Howlaji Ara 1913­1985 Untitled Gouache on paper 74.9x54.6cm $10,925 (around Rs5 lakh) Saffronart Autumn Auction, 9­10 September

DINODIA

u Sadanand K Bakre b. 1920 Not available

Why are works of the Progressive artists the hottest Indian lot in international auctions?

We deconstruct the group’s enduring appeal B Y H IMANSHU B HAGAT himanshu.b@livemint.com

···························· ith the exception of M.F. Husain, it is rare for Indian artists and art to feature on page 1 of newspapers.

In the last 10 years, this happened when Francis Newton Souza died in 2002, when Tyeb Mehta’s Mahisasura became the first artwork by an Indian to sell for over a million dollars in 2005, when Mehta died in 2009, and then on 10 June, when S.H. Raza’s painting, Saurashtra, sold for $3.4 million (around Rs16 crore) at the Christie’s auction in London, setting a new record price for an Indian artwork.

Raza, Souza, Mehta and Husain all belong to a generation that came of age around 1947—and they were all members of the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), which was established in Bombay in 1947 by artists who wanted to give a new direction to art in India.

Now six decades later, the Progressives, as they are called, remain India’s most influential and, by extension, highly valued artists. Because their works were fresh, bold and good, in due course, they received support from patrons, critics and galleries, which helped them build enviable reputations. Today, when there are so many with the means and inclination to buy art, the iconoclastic Progressives, who often struggled in near poverty in their early years, have become akin to the Old Masters—safe and solid bets for the collector and the investor alike.

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Who are the Progressives?

“The influence of the British was (strong) in the field of art. We thought we had to strike and find out something of our own,” Raza told Lounge in February. “Between 1945 and 1950, we were all busy trying to find out this reality in our own way—Souza and I were together; and there were others like S.K. Bakre and V.S. Gaitonde.

“We discussed with each other (how) we should (move beyond) this concept of realism—that is, painting the world (as) looked at by the eyes

alone. We wanted to add some imagination to it.”

The idea of establishing PAG was Souza’s, who was a member of the Communist party. As artist Akbar Padamsee recalls, Souza was one of the few in the group who had had the benefit of a modern education and was fluent in English. “There was a progressive writer’s group among the Communists and Souza wanted a similar group for artists,” Padamsee says. Besides Souza, Raza and Husain, members of PAG included K.H. Ara, H.A. Gade and S.K. Bakre. There were others associated with them, such as Padamsee, Mehta, Krishan Khanna and Bal Chhabra.

It was always an informal group whose members basically sought to move away from the academic realism that was a British legacy, as well as the revivalist art of the Bengal school. “It wasn’t a group guided by great philosophical ideas,” says Padamsee. “What the members had in common was that they didn’t like the prevalent paintings.”

The urge to break free of the old and create something new was strong. “We were concerned with the formal elements of painting,” says Khanna. “That painting has intrinsic laws and adhering to them is important….The language of painting had to be understood.”

After only three years, the PAG dissolved and its key members headed overseas—Souza left for England and Raza for France, taking Padamsee with him.

Why do they matter?

“They were the first generation of the post-colonial artist and they had to create a context for themselves,” says art critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote. “It

u Hari Ambadas Gade 1916­2001 Untitled Watercolour, Gouache on paper 53.5x68.5cm €3,825 Sotheby’s, London, 2 May 2008

Courtesy Japa Arts

Masters: (top) Raza’s Saurashtra goes on sale at Christie’s; (above, from left) Mehta, Khanna, Husain, Raza and K.K. Hebbar in Mumbai a few years ago; and Raza. was a historically self-conscious movement. The group didn’t last long but its concerns and struggles shaped the direction of modern Indian art.”

According to Hoskote, there was a heroic and epic quality to their work, which accounts for their lasting influence. There were critics, patrons, art gallery owners and collectors who supported them. “The reputation and the prices have come out of a lot of branding and positioning done by a lot of other people,” says Hoskote.

He cites the three influential European Jewish patrons, Emmanuel Schlesinger, Rudi von Leyden and Walter

Langhammer, who had sought refuge from the Nazis in Bombay, the redoubtable Ebrahim Alkazi who was a colleague, patron and friend to the artists, and art critics such as D.G. Nadkarni, Richard Bartholomew and Sham Lal, who, over the years, focused attention on the Progressives along with other modern Indian artists.

Besides the quality and pathbreaking newness of their work, the reputation of the Progressives rests on other factors, such as their early struggles in the 1950s and 1960s.

They were, in Hoskote’s words, full of “tigerish confidence” in themselves, even when they were starving. And they continued to toil even after they became successful.

Collectors’ favourites How accurately does the market value of an artwork reflect its aesthetic value? There are always stories about backdoor dealings, artificial inflation of prices, speculative bubbles and such like, but none of that can take away from the elementary economic fact—good art commands high prices.

Good art by

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

consistently good artists commands even higher prices.

“The Modernists and the Progressive have been around for four-six decades…This body of work extending over 40-60 years allows you to trace the evolution of their art practice,” says Arvind Vijaymohan of Japa Arts, a Delhibased art advisory for collectors.

Keen students of art love a large body of work, that too of exceptional quality. It is also something investors love. “Given the importance of their practice, a selection of powerful works from the strongest periods of the finest modernists is least prone to market-driven instability,” he explains.

In other words, the value of a Saurashtra or a Mahisasura will never fluctuate wildly; in fact, over time, their prices can head in only one direction—up. A work by a younger contemporary artist, howsoever good, can never be such a safe bet. As Vijaymohan points out, “While a popular contemporary artist might be selling for millions in current auction, there is a possibility of his fading away within the decade due (to) a host of reasons.”

“Indian art values are still minor when compared to the international markets,” he adds. “Consider the fact that the three most expensive works of Indian art— two works by Raza and one by Souza—collectively add up to just above $8.3 million, whereas the international record for the top three works sold is $443 million.”

“Collecting leads to the commodification of art,” says Khanna.

“People buy to invest and sell. And the death of the artist is looked forward to. I prefer my painting to be with people who will see it; their children and grandchildren will see it.” He goes back to the basics: “A painting has a spirit.

When you see a Piero della Francesca or an Ajanta (fresco), it still talks to you if you have the eyes and ears to listen to it…I am still pursuing things that one learnt with the Progressives.”

L10 COVER

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SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LEGISLATION

Lickety

SPLIT

A NEW, PROPOSED AMENDMENT COULD MAKE DIVORCE A SPEEDIER, HASSLE­FREE OPTION. IS INDIA READY FOR THE CHANGE?

B Y C ORDELIA J ENKINS & B HAVNA R AGHUVANSHI ······························ n 2006, the Supreme Court found itself presented with a quandary: a messy divorce case that had worked its way up from the family court of Kanpur through the Allahabad high court.

It was a typical appeal case, fraught with acrimony and confusion, detailing the turbulent relationship of Naveen and Neelu Kohli, married in 1975. But the landmark judgement it was to receive would prompt an overhaul of the Hindu Marriage Act and ease the path to divorce for millions of Indian couples.

The Kohlis had filed for divorce in 1994 and legal documents show details of a bitter and protracted battle involving police orders, claims of theft, cruelty, adultery and physical violence—all relatively common in Indian divorce courts. In Kanpur, the couple had been granted a divorce, but a successful appeal to the Allahabad high court had overturned that judgement. It was for the Supreme Court to settle the matter.

The judges’ exasperation as they attempted to decipher the details of the 20-year battle is clear from their case notes. Should they or should they not grant the estranged couple a divorce? Could they prove cruelty? Who was more to blame? As the issues were debated, it became apparent that the existing legal framework couldn’t encompass the complex realities the Kohlis faced. The law, as it stood, was too rigid for a society that was changing fast.

It wasn’t the only example of the system frustrating otherwise clear circumstances. In December, Smriti Shinde, daughter of Union minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, asked the Supreme Court for a divorce on grounds of “irretrievable breakdown of marriage”. Seeking to end her unhappy marriage and frustrated by her husband’s persistent refusal to a divorce by mutual consent, Shinde’s counsel argued that by not granting her a divorce the court was violating her constitutional right to live life with dignity.

In finally granting the Kohlis a divorce, the Supreme Court added

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a plea to the Union of India “to seriously consider” introducing a new ground for divorce into the Marriage Act: that of “irretrievable breakdown of marriage”. Indian courts have traditionally been wary of this ground, accepted in US and British law, fearing that it diminishes the sanctity of marriage vows, though there have been exceptions. In a 1971 case, Yousuf vs Sowramma, the judge made a poetic plea for more leniency. “There is no rose which has no thorns,” he said, “but if what you hold is all thorn and no rose, better throw it away. The ground for divorce is not conjugal guilt, but breakdown of marriage.” Still, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, judges continued to describe marriage as “made in heaven” and claimed that irretrievable breakdown was not a good enough reason for divorce. Over the last decade, their tone has changed.

“Once the marriage has broken beyond repair,” the judges concluded in the Kohli case, “it would be unrealistic for the law not to take notice... The marriage becomes a fiction, though supported by a legal tie. By refusing to sever that tie, the law does not serve the sanctity of marriage... it shows scant regard for the feelings and emotions of both parties.” Gradually, the way was being cleared for a new path to divorce; one which would be speedier, more even-handed and less humiliating for the unhappy couple.

Last week, a draft Bill from the Union government proposed amendments that would allow couples to cite “irretrievable breakdown of marriage” as a reason for divorce. India’s marriage law looks set to evolve, and there seems little political objection to the proposal. The Bill passed through the cabinet without debate, and the news has been greeted without much fanfare and fuss. In fact, the reaction to the amendment is a clue to its pertinence and evidence of a willingness on the part of the courts and the government to keep up with a changing society. Shinde could be among the beneficiaries of the new amendments.

It is no longer contentious to say

that divorce is on the rise in India.

Though the numbers remain modest (11 marriages per 1,000 end in divorce, compared with 400 in 1,000 in the US and 200 in 1,000 in China), the increase is sharp (in 1991, the figure was 7.41). Marriage counsellors, lawyers and psychologists overwhelmingly attest to the increase.

“Divorce is no longer a stigma, so people opt more readily for it,” says Suhail Dutt, a New Delhibased divorce lawyer, who has been practising for 25 years.

“Women are much less dependent on the husband for matrimony and alimony, so more mutual divorces are being sought.” With a new generation of working, economically independent couples, a divorce can take place without ruining the livelihood of either party. For the most part, these conditions exist only in the cities, however. It is much rarer for women living in rural areas to be financially independent.

With this in mind, the draft Bill makes provision for women without income. A woman can appeal to the courts, citing financial hardship, and the divorce will not be granted unless she is properly recompensed. The same applies to divorces in which children or dependent family members are involved; the court must be satisfied that they are being provided for. Even unmarried adult daughters are being taken into account.

Until now, couples wishing to split have had to choose between two unsatisfactory options. Either they can cite “matrimonial fault” (in which an allegation such as adultery, cruelty or insanity must be proved against one partner) or they can choose the “mutual consent” route (which can be delayed for years in court if either partner refuses to participate, wasting court time and leaving the loser stranded in legal limbo). “It’s time-consuming and it causes a further rift in any situation,” says Dutt of the current situation. But the narrowness of the choice offered to couples at the moment can also make a divorce needlessly acrimonious and humiliating for those involved.

Delhi high court lawyer Arun Khatri cites one case in which a

girl from a traditional family decided to tie the knot without her parents’ consent. Two years into the marriage, she fell in love with a colleague and started dating him. She wanted a divorce but her husband would not consent. So she was compelled to file false charges of cruelty against him.

Later she confided to her lawyer, “I had no ill feelings for my husband, but to seek (an) easy divorce, I had no option but to frame wrong charges against him.” Her story is not unique.

Shaifali Sandhya is a clinical psychologist and the author of Love Will Follow: Why the Indian Marriage is Burning, which, as the title suggests, takes a dim view of the state of Indian marriage today.

Between 1996 and 2009, Sandhya interviewed 400 Indian couples about their marriages and made some surprising discoveries. First, the vast majority of divorces are instigated by women, Sandhya says. The contemporary stereotype of an Indian divorcee is one of a young, financially successful city dweller, who places little emphasis on religion and tradition and more on self-gratification. But Sandhya claims that portrayal can be misleading. “Divorce is not restricted to the youth; nor is it simply an urban phenomenon,” she writes, “it is also afflicting marriages beyond 10 years.

Divorce, it is claimed, is the new accessory to marriage in India.”

The new law promises to address women’s rights issues within the divorce process. The combination of changing attitudes to female divorcees and increased financial independence is a potent one, and along with the changes to inheritance law in 2005, giving equal rights to all siblings, including sisters, heralds another stage in the progress of the women’s rights movement.

Aruna Broota, a marriage counsellor and psychologist, sees shifting attitudes in family life and says the rise in women seeking divorce could be due to this. “Women do not passively tolerate undue treatment to the extent they did earlier,” she says. “The attitudes have changed over the decades. Not only economically independent working women, but also those

from wealthy and affluent families do not take nonsense.” But Broota is cautious about overemphasizing the “progressive” society theory. “Sociocultural attitudes are still backward and conservative even in the most educated and affluent bracket,” she says.

Ajay Singh, research scholar at International Institute for the Population Sciences, Mumbai, agrees with Broota’s reasoning.

“The major cause of divorce in urban India, particularly in metro cities, is the growing self-dependence of women,” he says.

In 2002, Singh conducted a study of divorce in Mumbai for the institute and found that more women were taking the initiative to file for divorce. “Women are no longer submissive and cannot tolerate discriminatory behaviour,” Singh says, “and the fact that men are trapped in their stereotyped gender attitude means more and more discords in the home.”

In the case of divorce by mutual consent, the courts give the couple six months in which they may rethink their decision before moving on to finalize the divorce. This is the danger time, when one of the partners can hold the other hostage by “changing his (or her) mind” and blocking the divorce. It is most often men that use this tactic, says Broota. “Men are more practically oriented; they do not garner guilt about failed relationships or their role in them and are likely to withdraw from mutual consent proceedings to harass the wife. Men are possessive and unwilling to let the partner go.

Many have gone to the extent of stating that they do

not wish to incur the h i g h expenses involved in remarriage, having once borne the cost.”

Now, this kind of emotional blackmail will be impossible. One partner can get a divorce alone if they can prove a broken marriage and show a three-year separation period.

Not everyone predicts that the new law will make divorce an easy answer to marital strife. In researching her book, Sandhya found that most unhappy couples were choosing to stay married, especially if they were in their 40s or older. “With an apparently easier divorce option, we may see a spike in divorce,” she says, “but it may be due to the clearing of a backlog of cases. Most Indians are reluctant to divorce, choosing their own personal options of dealing with unhappy marriages, instead, by leading asexual lives and creating separate spheres of existence in one home.”

The personal stories in Sandhya’s book detail a depressing litany of intimidation, threats and emotional blackmail used against women. “And yet, despite the terrible bargain that divorce offers them,” says Sandhya, “80-85% of wives will initiate divorce.” Sandhya sees Indian women as inherently submissive. “In my 10 years of treating

couples in therapy, I have seen Western women battle for the fulfilment of their wishes too, but the conforming to the family that has to accompany an Indian woman’s struggle, and their resilience, are particularly unique to our culture,” she writes.

Of course, not all Indian wives are victims—Broota gives plenty of examples where the woman has been equally at fault. In one instance, a woman who had applied for divorce under mutual consent, withdrew at the final hour citing suspicions that her husband was being unfaithful. A mutual friend had suggested he might be hiding an affair from her and she baulked at the idea of letting him off the hook. “If I sign this, he will get freedom by midnight,” Broota remembers her saying.

The proposed changes to the marriage Act will not mean the end of the road to reform. There are many aspects that the law ignores and plenty of details that have yet to be decided, including fairer division of assets and access to family property for the wife, not to mention the custody of children. Sandhya points out that without a truly equitable system, “the marriage malaise will continue and the recent divorce changes, in the face of grave and urgent societal need, will be only a cosmetic fix.”

Additionally, the changes are confined only to the Hindu Marriage Act and the Special Marriage Act, covering Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains, meaning other religions (most notably Christians and Muslims, who have the strictest divorce laws) will remain left out of the system.

But the sheer pragmatism of the proposed amendments marks a crucial step forward by the government at a time when the need for a realistic solution to dealing with divorce is becoming urgent.

As the judges concluded in the Kohli divorce case, “Nothing is gained by trying to keep the parties tied forever to a marriage that in fact has ceased to exist.”

Manish Ranjan contributed to this story. cordelia.j@livemint.com

UNRAVELLING THE KNOTS LANDMARKS IN THE LEGAL HISTORY OF DIVORCE IN INDIA

1955 Parliament passes the Hindu Marriage Act which outlines that divorce can be obtained on grounds such as adultery, cruelty, desertion and frustration arising from specific circumstances

1971 The Supreme Court makes the earliest observation to include irretrievable breakdown of marriage as a ground for divorce

1976 The Hindu Marriage Act is amended and a new ground of “divorce by mutual consent” is added to ease the law on divorce

1978 The Supreme Court rules that the right to set up the matrimonial home is not the exclusive privilege of the husband. In cases where the wife is financially better off than her husband, she can choose the matrimonial house

1978 The 71st Law Commission report recommends introducing breakdown of marriage as one of the grounds for divorce

1981 Then Congress government moves legislation effecting the change but is rejected

2005 Parliament passes The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, giving equal rights to siblings, including daughters, over property

2006

The Supreme Court recommends to the Union of India to seriously consider bringing an amendment in the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, to incorporate irretrievable breakdown of marriage as a ground for divorce

2008 The Supreme Court validates live­in relationships as marriages and says children born to such parents would be called legitimate and would have rights to the parents’ property

2009 The Supreme Court denies divorce for the reason that the ground of “irretrievable breakdown of marriage” was not available under the Hindu Marriage Act

10 June The Union cabinet approves the Marriage Laws (Amendment) Bill 2010 to further amend the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and Special Marriage Act, 1954, to provide for “irretrievable breakdown of marriage” as a ground for divorce Manish Ranjan

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SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010

Travel TORONTO

Hand me that vuvuzela!

MARK BLINCH/REUTERS

The G­20 will only add to the chaos that the World Cup has brought to the streets. Here’s a survivor’s guide

B Y S RIRAM D AYANAND ···························· oger Waters, frontman for the seminal prog-rock band Pink Floyd, is in Toronto rehearsing for a grand world tour of his former band’s album The Wall. The classic 1970s album, with songs entrenched in the rock pantheon, was a concept album, dealing with alienation as its central theme. Its climactic denouement features the roars of the crowd chanting “Tear down the wall!!”, demanding an end to the barriers of alienation.

His world tour kicks off this September at the Air Canada Centre in downtown Toronto. But right at this moment, the part of town he will be rocking in a few months is seeing an increase in barriers and fences that seem to be going up at an alarming rate.

Forget tearing down, the walls are going up literally and figuratively at fever pitch.

Welcome to Toronto. Welcome to the city bracing itself to host the G-20 (25-27 June) and G-8 (25-26 June) summits of world leaders this month. Tourists flying in to enjoy this laid-back city, be warned that the last week of June promises to be a nice little quagmire if your hotel is located downtown. If you live and work in the city core, like me, the headaches multiply. The Metro Toronto Convention Centre, located next to the baseball stadium Rogers Centre (previously known as the SkyDome), is summit central. But the security blanket being draped over and around it extends far and deep enough to wreak havoc for locals and tourists alike.

Okay, US President Barack Obama will be in town with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. So will Germany’s Angela Merkel, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and the rest. As will Manmohan Singh, on his first ever visit to Canada as Prime Minister. India, being a part of the G-20 (and represented here by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee), has a seat at the main table. But Singh will also be

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MIKE CASSESE/REUTERS

joining the select G-8 at nearby Huntsville before relocating to Toronto proper for two days. If the past is any indicator of events, Toronto is on the verge of becoming the magnet for every protest group on the planet. Some of the protests have turned bloody and violent before. It may be a party behind the security fences and walls, but it will piss on your parade if you are outside.

Therein lies a problem. For there is a massive citywide party under way right now in Toronto.

This being one of the most ethnodiverse cities on the planet according to the UN, with more than half the population being immigrants, their complete focus and attention at this moment is on that other big “summit” happening halfway across the globe—the G-32, you could call it.

The football World Cup in South Africa is under way and Toronto, as always, is caught up in World Cup fever. The weather is gorgeous, the street-side patios and terraces that lace the sidewalks are packed, and the insides of pubs and bars raucous with football-crazy fans from every single country represented in the beautiful game’s grand ball.

On 25 June, when Portugal take on Brazil on the last day of the group matches, the excitement in Toronto is guaranteed to

Alpha city: (above) A security fence for the upcoming G­20 summit; and the Toronto Police Mounted Unit will provide security during the summit.

ratchet up to the maximum. With its huge Portuguese and Brazilian populations, and with each of them being closet supporters of the other, this will be a loud Friday. The 1994 win by Brazil had resulted in College Street, in the heart of downtown, turning into the venue for a street party of epic proportions. I remember standing there with the shutdown thoroughfare throbbing

sidewalk-to-sidewalk for a mile in each direction to samba bands, chugging down a Brahma beer with tearful Brazilian fans in Ayrton Senna T-shirts and Brazilian flag bikini-tops.

But trying to sneak into a bar in the pubheavy part of downtown for this game may involve a cavity search

Football fever: A South African in Toronto blows the vuvuzela at the start of the World Cup.

GRAPHIC

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

THE CANADIAN PRESS, COLIN PERKEL/AP

this time.

T e n thousand security officers will be on duty in a congested area for those three days. Just a few blocks away, the city has thoughtfully cordoned an area with 10ft-high fences to “host” the anarchists and saboteurs who have been picked up off the streets. “Torontonomo Bay,” my friend called it. I am seriously considering how I can get picked up now, so that I can enjoy the hospitality that my tax dollars are being used for. The estimated cost of security is $1.2 billion (around Rs5,592 crore). Quite a tab to pick up for bouncers guarding the gates of this glitterati-ridden party.

The sidewalks in this part of town have been given a surreal makeover in preparation. Anything that could potentially be used as a missile or a projectile has been swept out of sight— including garbage cans, bus shelters and bicycle stands.

Last week, people walking in the hood were greeted with buried fire hydrants, a sight which promises to perplex dogs out on a walk when the party has blown over.

Highway closures without

notice are on the horizon over the three days as motorcades flit through on route to downtown.

This week came the news of the English contingent scouting local pubs to plan their own World Cup parties. That is grounds for a protest right there. They are even planning to infest the people’s haunts now? This calls for pint glasses filled with the choicest brews being used in lieu of Molotov cocktails.

At least the finals are a way off.

In 2006, the Italian celebration was a sight to behold. Sixteen blocks of a central street packed with half-a-million screaming Italian fans partied through the night. It was a carnival, loud and raucous. Speaking of loud, the latest technological weapon to be used this time to disperse rioting protesters is the “Sound Cannon”—reportedly, the frequencies of sound waves it targets crowds with makes you run in agony, trying to get away from the sound boring into your brain.

I really think this boondoggle of an event messing with our lives and costing the moon needs retaliation in kind. Here is an idea: vuvuzelas! Those awesome buzzing horns emanating from our TV screens from Johannesburg and Cape Town would do the trick. Arm yourselves, my Torontonians and visiting protesting friends.

Let us blow our lungs out and take this party out on to the streets during those days.

Time to reclaim our streets and be heard by our leaders too, don’t you think?

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

Toronto’s a great place for children, though you may want to rethink subjecting them to international conferences.

TRAVEL L13

SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

SAAD

BIN

JUNG

FOOT NOTES | SUMANA MUKHERJEE

Zipping down the Zanskar RUDRANEIL SENGUPTA/MINT

East Africa, exclusively yours Gorge­ous: The trip takes you through a spectacular gorge.

T

he Zanskar rafting expedition in Ladakh is probably the most exclusive adventure tour in India, with only around 50 people squeezing into the tiny window of time when the river is navigable. The sixth edition of adventure company Questrails’ annual Zanskar expedition starts on 1 August. It’s a 10-day round trip from Delhi, with five days on the mighty river that runs through a spectacular gorge. Once on the river, nights are spent at designated camping spots. You will have to brave cold weather, heart-stopping rapids and a lot of exhaustion, but it’s worth every bit of the effort. It costs Rs60,000 per person, including all meals, high-altitude tents, hotel stay in Leh and river gear.

Even if you are not into adventure, Ladakh is must-do during the summer. The Hemis festival, one of the biggest celebrations of Tibetan Buddhism, is on from 20-28 June in Leh, and the entire town will be in carnival mode. Masked dances, ancient morality plays, beautiful thangka paintings and Tibetan jewellery are just a few enticements. Just land up in Leh. For details, go to www.questrails.com Rudraneil Sengupta

It’s sparty time!

SIX SENSES

F Put on your safari hats, there’s more to Africa than the football World Cup

S

outh Africa is top of the mind, but there’s a whole continent beyond the football frenzy. If that’s too much to chew off in one go, let Saad bin Jung customize an adventure holiday just for you in East Africa—specifically, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

With around 30 years’ familiarity with the bushland, Jung promises a finely tuned holiday of a lifetime. “We begin with a chat with the client, to see whether we can meet his

requirements. Once that is sorted, a personal meeting is necessary to figure out the game he wants to see, the geographical area he wants to visit, the season that suits him and how much he wants to spend.

Then we draft an itinerary that ticks all the boxes in association with conservation-oriented camp owners I know personally in Africa,” says Jung, who runs wildlife camps in Bandipur and Nagarhole (www.thebison.in).

“If you want to see elephants, for instance, there’s no point in going to the Masai Mara: We’d recommend Amboseli. Or, if you’re on a budget but want to witness the annual migration, we’ll take you to Kenya with its two-month window, rather than Tanzania, which can be more expensive.”

Jung hopes the experience will make a conservationist of

DETOURS

SALIL TRIPATHI

Finding El Dorado On a Marquezian evening out of Bogotá, the discovery of true wealth

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t had rained most of the five days we had been in Bogotá.

The sun was barely visible, except at the golden hour of twilight, and clouds covered the Andean peaks surrounding the city. The rain knew its place, as it fell lightly, a thin lace cascading on the city, like silken strands.

On Saturday, the sun came out as my friend Jose Rafael had promised it would, and it shone brightly as we made our way on winding roads, headed for a reservoir outside the city, to Guatavita. The ride to La Macarena, the home of our friend Ernesto, was long. As we got off when we reached his house on a hill, we saw flowers growing randomly in the verdant valley.

A vast reservoir filled the valley between us, and the hills across.

Three boats sailed smoothly, leaving a meandering trail, the water looking like a sheet of grey steel. A few huts were scattered on the hill. There were grey clouds on the horizon to our

right, but the sun was still bright.

By midday, the wind gathered strength, and the lamps in the veranda began to sway, the light through their lattice-like frames shifting from one spot to another, like in a dream sequence of an old Hindi film. Two of my friends stepped out to explore the anchor placed at the edge of the house. I sat by the wall, staring at the pristine, calm lake, its surface trembling softly, disturbing the light and dark patches.

Then, out of nowhere, I saw that bolt of lightning. Sharp and bright, it dived like an arrow, leaving its jagged signature behind which disappeared quickly, an imprint impossible to forget. The cloudburst that followed, and the thunder that accompanied it, resounded in the valley. It was loud, as if the sky was falling apart, and its echo could be heard for miles. The sky had darkened; my friends had moved back into the house, safe behind those large glass windows,

Bushed: (top) An East African safari; accommodation at Masai Mara. every traveller. “Africa is far poorer than India, it has conflict issues greater than what we face in our country. Yet they manage to deliver worldclass experiences in world-renowned wilderness regions. We need to learn something from

them,” he says.

For the life-changing holiday experience, expect to spend anywhere between $500-1,200 (around Rs23,500-56,400) per day per person. For details, visit www.toafricawithsaad.com or call Jung on 09886100375.

as we saw that celestial drama, of light and darkness, rain and wind, clouds and lightning, rising and falling as if choreographed, the thumping sound reaching Wagnerian proportions.

A stream of yellow light filled parts of the sky, which had vainly tried to prevent the cloud from covering the entire sky with its dark shroud. When the clouds managed to hide parts of the mountain, they looked as though they were emerging from its peak, like billowing smoke. “It looks like a volcano,” said Ted, our friend, the anthropologist.

The sailboats had disappeared: We sat at the large wooden table, ready to eat the Colombian puchero that Ernesto had been cooking slowly, with chunks of beef, pork, chicken and sausages boiled in a stew, and served when tender, with rice, cassava,

cabbage, sweet potato and corn; the stock poured over the dish, or left next to the dish in a cup, and drunk slowly. It was delicious and nourishing, filling us with warmth, even as the sky outside had turned dark, and the rainstorm had lowered the temperature by a few degrees. We were 2,000m above sea level, which made the afternoon pleasantly chilled.

As we saw the view from the large window, it seemed as if the mountain had disappeared behind the mist and rain, but if you looked closely, you could make out its bare, grainy outline.

The tall glass window had kept the sound of the rain silent, but we could see the bursts of lightning, which continued to reverberate, the thunder obediently following the bolt seen moments earlier.

or an NRI-led business, Six Senses Resorts and Spas has made a rather late entry into the Indian market, but Sonu Shivdasani’s $100 million (around Rs470 crore) resort chain seems to be looking to make up for lost time.

Stretch it: Yoga is part of the package.

Exclusively for residents of India, the Six Senses Destination Spa in Phuket (www.sixsenses.com) is offering a wellness package that could have you realize you’re long overdue for some rest and relaxation. The package includes accommodation in a 450 sq. m hill pool villa (upgrade to a beach-view pool villa for $85 per night), full board (breakfast and two spa cuisine meals per day), an 80-minute spa treatment per day (choice of lomi lomi, Himalayan hot stone, traditional Thai, Six Senses Oriental Fusion or a holistic massage), individual wellness consultation and daily wellness activities (classes, lectures and fitness programmes). It costs $260 per person per night for double occupancy or $325 per night for single occupancy, inclusive of service charges and taxes, and is valid till 31 October. For reservations, contact Shivali Suri on 09871223357.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

But this rain was not cruel, the kind Isabel saw in Macondo, which stole everything, washing away pasts, obliterating stories, leaving only a sad and desolate sunset, which would leave “on your lips the same taste with which you awaken after having dreamed about a stranger”, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez described the torrential rain in Monologue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo.

Here, we weren’t among strangers. We had witnessed a different kind of dance all right.

The clouds had tried to devour the mountain, but sunlight had squeezed through, pushing aside the clouds from every gap it could find, as if playing out an epic war between good and evil. We knew the sun would win, just as we knew the clouds would part, and the verdant valley would be bright SALIL TRIPATHI

again, and the colour of the sky would match the mood of the chardonnay in my glass.

The stream of light that emerged from the clouds looked like pure gold. That yellow light bathed us, and we looked as though we were covered in gold dust. In the Spanish chronicle El Carnero, Juan Rodriguez Freyle wrote of the priest of Muisca covering himself with gold dust at the Lake Guatavita. My friend Luis Fernando told me that the lake at the summit of the mountain where Ernesto’s house is located was the same Lake Guatavita, and the legend of El Dorado, which sparked the greed for gold that brought the conquistadores here, had begun there. That lagoon was the sacrificial site where people offered gold to the gods to appease them.

The elegant simplicity of that meal and the warmth of friends had given us a different kind of protection from those mythical powers. The lake below now looked serene, like the woman who didn’t need gold to look beautiful. The divine landscape and the company of friends made us richer than all the gold offered to that other lake on the hill.

Write to Salil at detours@livemint.com www.livemint.com

Magic realism: Lake Guatavita, where the legend of El Dorado began.

Read Salil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/detours

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SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010

Books TREND

The late bloomers LOCATION

COURTESY

THE BOOK SHOP, DELHI; PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

With a dozen titles forthcoming this summer, the Indian Young Adult novel has finally arrived

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

···························· efore the advent of modern publishing for the teen market, two novels, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and Lord of the Flies (1954), drew the attention of adolescent readers.

Unlike more recent fiction classified as Young Adult (abbreviated as YA), these were written primarily for an adult audience. The American author S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) made definitive shelf space for the coming-ofage novel. And in one of those moves that go down in history as a stroke of genius, a clever suit eventually branded the category that publishers are now flaunting as one of their hottest selling.

Through the golden age of YA fiction internationally (1970s to mid-1980s) and till today, these books have been largely imported or republished for the Indian market. One can credit Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series juggernaut for a new phenomenon: Indian publishers, having recognized the immense potential of the savvy adolescent readers’ market, are now commissioning original YA fiction.

Random House released its first India-centric YA novel this April, a delightful take on the superhero genre, Herogiri by Mainak Dhar.

Hachette India has its first batch of three books forthcoming this year; HarperCollins has its first two in book stores (and four more in the next six months). Even Scholastic India and Roli, publishing houses that attempted YA earlier than the others, seem to have stepped up their focus, with two books forthcoming from each.

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Growth spurt Fantasy fiction writer Samit

Basu, whose book Terror on the Titanic will be released by Scholastic India this month, says several publishers have been approaching him to write books they could market as YA. “Five years ago, when publishers approached me to write books for children or adolescents, they were clear that they wouldn’t pay me a decent advance, make a big deal about my book or try to sell it abroad,” says Basu.

Now, publishers are hungry for writing in this category and the systems and processes are falling in place. “They all want to do it in a big way,” he adds.

Basu’s first YA book features a detective outfit called The Morningstar Agency and the central character is a young Anglo-Indian agent called Nathaniel Brown. In its pre-order stage, the book has already reached the top five status on Flipkart, an online book-selling platform. Through the next month, Basu will be travelling for readings in schools to promote his book. There is talk of sequels and possible videogame adaptations.

At the heart of this new wave are a motley crew of authors who’re trying their hand at this genre with all seriousness. Blog-

ger Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan has been published before but Confessions of a Listmaniac (Scholastic India) will be her first YA book. In it, a 17-year-old protagonist called Layla drives the narrative ahead with her blogstyled diary. A PhD candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, Tushar Raheja, who has published a campus novel before, is making his YA debut with Run Romi Run (Roli), which features a group of cricket-obsessed 14-year-olds. One of Hachette’s authors, Giti Chandra, is an associate professor of English at Delhi’s St Stephen’s College. Her debut novel is a children-YA crossover fantasy novel set in Iceland and Gurgaon, with six protagonists aged between 2 and 18, titled The Fang of Summoning.

Shop talk The YA category has elastic boundaries. The US’ Young Adult Library Services Association defines it as the 14-21 age group but different publishers have their own age bands (some start at 12, some cap at 18). The age group shows a high variation in developmental and emotional levels. This is part of the

Storytellers: (from left) Samit Basu, Giti Chandra, Siddhartha Sarma and Tushar Raheja. reason why the category has been a blur in India, where reading levels are especially varied.

“Children’s and YA books in India have been traditionally dominated by low prices, low margins and low-quality competition in a largely nondiscerning market, with a small clutch of writers of any quality,” says Vatsala Kaul Banerjee, editorial director, children’s and reference books, Hachette India.

Banerjee adds to the list of problems that have plagued the category: The media attention given to children’s and YA books is insignificant and the books are rarely reviewed. “The category suffers from not having shelf space to itself in most book stores.

The whole chain has been weak.”

While parents buy “children’s books”, YA books are bought by young adults themselves, making price points strategic. All of the HarperCollins books, for instance, are priced low at Rs199, including a non-fiction book

called Body Talk by Anjali Wason, which is an innovative sex education manual in Q&A format for teenage girls.

Publishers hope the sheer numbers will help the category gather momentum. This makes one wonder if the branding is an artifice. Sayoni Basu, publishing director of Scholastic India, doesn’t think so. “This is an age group where the individual’s vocabulary and comprehension levels are practically adult, but

their interests and perspectives are somewhat different.

Therefore, it definitely demands a different kind of book.” Typically, the protagonist of a YA book is an adolescent or it’s a mixed cast with an adolescent, and the themes, subjects and storylines connect with the protagonists’ age, experience and environment.

Beyond that, the lines are blurred and all adult genres may be explored.

Writing for this age group is tricky. The author needs to empathize with the adolescent psyche without being didactic. Chandra, a diehard fan of the Percy Jackson and Twilight series, believes it is far more difficult to write for teenagers. Her book was a learning experience for her, with her editor Banerjee frequently sending back paragraphs marked as “uninteresting for the young reader”. “I realized that you don’t need to dumb down for the adolescent reader but there are themes and characters that work and ones that don’t,” she says.

For Siddhartha Sarma, who made his debut with the critically acclaimed novel The Grasshopper’s Run (Scholastic India, December), YA isn’t synonymous with the coming-of-age diary. His book is set in Assam during World War II, pinned on the friendship between two boys. He travelled extensively to the region to research his book. “I tried to stay under 6,500 words to retain the interest of the young reader. I used a linear narrative and relatively simple language—but those are good measures to follow for any book,” says Sarma, who is now working on adult fiction but is committed to writing more YA books in the future.

Bloomsbury UK has recently bought the international rights for Sarma’s book, making one believe that there’s room for growth. Indeed, this might be the summer that the Indian Young Adult novel comes of age. www.livemint.com Read excerpts from ‘Terror on the Titanic’ and ‘The Fang of Summoning’ at www.livemint.com/youngadult.htm

THE ART OF CHOOSING | SHEENA IYENGAR

Facing the choice conundrum An intriguing study on human beings caught between, or turning away from, options B Y C HANDRAHAS C HOUDHURY ···························· n one of the most cheerful poems about death ever written, the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet imagines his coffin being taken out of the courtyard, his face open to the skies. Even when dead, the poet chooses to continue to celebrate life. People will cluster, especially children, who are unafraid of death. “A pigeon might drop something on my brow, for luck,” he muses, and “the washing in the balcony might wave to see me off”. The sombre act of passing, marked by silence, gloom and tears, becomes here an exuberant parade, with the dead man its still centre.

As the Columbia Business School professor Sheena Iyengar

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notes in her new book The Art of Choosing, human beings are distinguished by their power to influence or adapt to a wide variety of situations and challenges by acts of ratiocination, reflection and will—or choice. We actively desire states which offer us liberty, or the power to control our environment, and sometimes manage to create a sense of choice even when we don’t have any, as Hikmet does in his poem. Choice does not merely lead to more desirable outcomes; it is an end in itself. How humans apply themselves to the work of choosing, how their instincts influence or distort the choices they make, and how underlying systems such as culture and religion affect choice are some of the axes of inquiry in

this fascinating set of case studies.

A key element in choice studies is the practice of choosing not to choose, or voluntarily ceding control over key aspects of one’s life to others or indeed to an abstract entity such as God or fate. Why do some adults allow their parents to choose a match for them, thereby setting up for decades of family life on the basis of a few meetings with the chosen spouse? Isn’t it better to go to a place of worship when one wants to be in God’s presence rather than at certain predetermined hours of the day or week? Why do comparative studies of believers and atheists almost always show the former group as being happier and more resilient? “Restrictions do not necessarily diminish a sense of control,” observes Iyengar, “and freedom to think and do as you please does not necessarily increase it.” A world in which everything is open to negotiation can

The Art of Choosing: Hachette, 330 pages, Rs499. be a very confusing and frightening world.

Choice is often seen as the absence of restraints, whether economic, political or social, the better to allow human beings to make up their own minds. But as Iyengar shows in a fascinating set of examples, this kind of freedom—which we might call a “freedom from”—is only one aspect of freedom. For this kind of freedom to be truly meaningful, it

must be complemented in some measure by a “freedom to”—the means to realize our full potential.

Many East Germans who celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the end of political checks on their freedoms, later found themselves nostalgic for the stability of the Communist regime, feeling there were too many pervasive inequalities in the new Germany.

This difference in the understanding of what choice means—one approach valuing the equality of opportunities, the other an equality of outcomes—has become a classic fault line in politics, dividing right-wingers from left-wingers.

Iyengar carefully lays out a set of maps of choice, supplying patterns of causation and correlation. What is seen as a good choice is often culture-specific, depending, for instance, on whether the culture in question tends towards a valorization of individualism, like many Western societies, or collectivism, like many Asian ones. Much of

our choice-making is irrational, subject to forces such as social pressures or the temptations of the moment. We make certain choices not just as an expression of who we are, but also for others to see us in a certain way—a fact that is exploited by advertisers. Sometimes too much choice puts us off completely, making us unhappy with our eventual choices because we feel we might have missed out on a better option.

Increasingly, we live in a world marked not by a scarcity of choices, as our ancestors did, but by a superfluity. This means we have to rethink our attitude to choice, which may no longer be an unconditional good, and become better at managing our expectations and practising the arts of choice. A vast subject is skilfully probed in this astute, practical and often pleasing book.

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of Arzee the Dwarf.

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SERIOUS MEN | MANU JOSEPH

CULT FICTION

A novel of charged strokes

R. SUKUMAR

NON­COMIC JOURNEYS

PUNEET CHANDHOK/HINDUSTAN TIMES

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Characters drown, and don’t survive, in this ambitious debut novel—written in a prose that has a lean richness and beauty B Y A RUNAVA S INHA ···························· anu Joseph is one of the very few stylists in Indian journalism—someone who hasn’t succumbed to the dreary seduction of the breathless cliché. His unique voice sounds loud and clear in his newspaper and magazine pieces, infecting them with a touch of insight that’s all too rare in the media. The same distinct accent is evident in his debut novel, set simultaneously in a lower-middle class housing arrangement and in a rarefied institute of science, both in Mumbai.

Unnervingly, however, early on, all the major figures begin to display flashes of wisdom that seem to flow not so much from their characters as from the sharpness of the author’s pen. Whether it’s Ayyan Mani, the caste-conscious, angry clerk with a personal agenda of retribution, or Arvind Acharya, the brilliant, ageing scientist seeking one last hurrah by pursuing his belief in the teeth of collegiate opposition, their observations are uncannily similar.

Sample this: “But the bed is medieval, and honest, and in it he wanted to believe Oparna would be something else.” “It struck him how complete, how final, an umbrella actually was. As a tech-

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Serious Men: HarperCollins India, 326 pages, Rs499.

nology, it would not evolve any further.” The first is from the mind of the clerk, while the second is from the scientist’s brain—but both are, ultimately, statements that the writer seems unable to resist.

When the bon mot makes characters converge, their individual motivations turn into schematic twists. So it is, alas, in a story that Joseph sets up beautifully with charged strokes in the first half.

Mani is the Dalit who seethes with canny, civilized anger against the age-old dominance of Brahmins, and is plotting minor revenge through resourceful manipulation of people around him. His boss Acharya—once a shoo-in for the Nobel—who’s convinced that the conventional Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, which his fellow scientists at the elite research institute located on the edge of the Arabian Sea want to pursue, is utter nonsense.

Both men are driven by their own defiant missions. Mani is using his son to perpetrate an elaborate hoax on the—what else?—Brahmin establishment in a bid to create India’s first Dalit child genius. Acharya wants to prove that life originated as spores somewhere in outer space, descending gently on to the surface of habitable planets and evolving into unique forms of life.

Woven into the mix are Mani’s son Adi, who happily joins his father’s game, and Oparna Goshmaulik, the scientist who is key to Acharya’s scientific ambitions to begin with, but rapidly moves into a different role. The two threads weave together and apart in expositions of fraud, betrayal and fall from grace, with science and academics—the prized playground of the intellect, so valued in India— providing the ideal setting for manoeuvring, chicanery and political games.

However, the resolution doesn’t meet the high expectations of the first half. Acharya’s ontological quest flounders while he sorts out his morals and turns into a mythi-

The milieu: Half of Joseph’s book is set in a chawl in Mumbai. cal figure. And Mani’s rage remains a low-stakes game. In a lesser writer’s hand, this might even have been a satisfying novel.

But Joseph sets the bar high with his ear for high as well as low dialogue—so effortlessly rendered in English, which is not the language all the people in his book speak all the time—the lean richness of his prose and the felicity with which he conjures up images. That is why the perfunctory characterization of the supporting task is disappointing: the wronged lover, the missionary principal, the corrupt journalist, are all scarecrows, not flesh-and-blood figures.

The cameos hold promise: the debate between free will and determinism, between the two conflicting views on extraterrestrial intelligence that the scientist characters represent; the political battles for control in an institute of research. But they are less important thematically than the caste-

conflict at the core of the action, which propels the action towards a structurally predictable—though sardonically restrained—climax.

While that might make Joseph’s eminently readable novel a point of curiosity for Western audiences, it makes you wonder what, ultimately, the serious men are left with when the anger has abated, the manipulator has registered his minor triumphs, and the Brahmin bad guys have failed to succeed.

Still, this is a novel better read than passed.

Arunava Sinha is the translator of Sankar’s Chowringhee and The Middleman, and of Moti Nandy’s Striker, Stopper.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS The writer’s voice overwhelms his characters’

ALEX’S ADVENTURES IN NUMBERLAND | ALEX BELLOS

Not just for math junkies It’s a word some dread. But these adventures make mathematics fun B Y R AVI K RISHNAN ravi.k@livemint.com

···························· ost of us have feared math since childhood. To most, it represents equations and formulae rather than something that underpins everything in our daily lives, from the structure of our iPods to the beauty of a smile, to how leaves grow. In this delightful book, Alex Bellos tries to prove that the ability to calculate fast has nothing to do with understanding the beauty of the subject. In charming, witty prose, he peels away the abstruseness surrounding math to reveal the magic of numbers and the elegance of their underlying patterns to the lay reader.

There are moments of epiphany. For instance, when I discovered that a variant of slide rules—a defunct 17th century calculator—is still used by pilots to navigate despite being aided by

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the most advanced computers. Or that natural phenomena, such as the number of petals in a flower or the number of seeds, are mostly 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 55…the famous Fibonacci sequence, where each number is the sum of the preceding two. Elegantly, the ratio of each successive pair tends to be 1.618, the so-called golden proportion, or phi, which finds equal application in the construction industry and aesthetics. It seems that in the most attractive smile—the big top front teeth are wider than the adjacent ones by a factor of phi.

Bellos’ book, part-travelogue, part-history and part-reportage, traipses through time and around the world to unravel the links math has with philosophy, religion, aesthetics and nature. In its grandeur and scope of subject matter, it resembles Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Math was never so romantic, never so accessible and never so much fun.

As he goes back and forth between topics, he exposes interesting everyday fallacies, such as the gambler’s belief that one is due for a win after a string of losses, or how the odds of win-

Alex’s Adventures in Numberland: Bloomsbury, 448 pages, £18.99 (around Rs1,300). ning a double jackpot are not weird after all, while introducing mind-boggling concepts such as countable infinities and uncountable ones.

Counting, it appears, is not so simple after all. Bellos goes back in time to decipher the origins of numbers. As children, most of us are taught the basics of counting using our fingers. Five and five make 10, include your toes, and that makes 20. This is why we still

use the decimal number system with base 10, while 20 was another popular base (a base is the number of digits in a number system). But does the limitation of using body parts lead us to only these two numbers as bases?

Meet the Venerable Bede, an eighth century clergyman, who devised a system for counting up to a million. Grasp your loins with your left hand with the thumb pointing towards the genitals.

That is 90,000, the priest is supposed to have said, forgetting his holy propriety for a moment.

Such quirky characters and incidents—an ancient Greek mathematician with thighs of gold, whiskered Victorians who measured everything in sight, how tally sticks (an ancient number calculator) burnt down Westminster Palace—make the book memorable.

They enable us to connect the dots, see the underlying pattern to the big ideas and grapple with concepts that we think should be best left to grey old men in dusty university classrooms or a mad genius like John Nash in the movie A Beautiful Mind.

“The thrill of maths is the moment of instant revelation…when suddenly everything makes sense,” writes Bellos. “It is immensely satisfying, an almost physical pleasure.” That, aptly, sums up the book.

his is a unique edition of Cult Fiction (CF) because it isn’t about a comic.

Then, it is extraordinary simply because it would seem to be dealing with an extraordinary talent.

Among contemporary comic-book writers Neil Gaiman has perhaps made the most successful journey into non-comic literature. American Gods, Anansi Boys, and The Graveyard Book are all minor classics (American Gods, this writer believes, is well on its way to becoming a major one).

Peter & Max marks Bill Willingham’s first effort to move from comic to non-comic literature and the result is one of the finest works of fantasy—and arguably one of the finest first works of an author—this columnist has read (and he has read a lot of science fiction and fantasy).

Willingham has made an appearance in CF before. He is the author of the Fables series of comic books, about Fables (think Red Riding Hood, Old King Cole, Prince Charming, Sleeping Beauty) who have been thrown out of their homeland by an enemy known only as the Adversary, and who live in exile in a part of New York that is warded off from the Mundys (as the Muggles are known in this book). Fables has sort of reached its end (and all has ended well), and Willingham has spun off a side project on one of the characters Jack of Fables, but Peter & Max (Peter as in Peter Piper) is his first effort to write a book (a Fables novel, he calls it).

I don’t know what it is about Peter & Max: comic-book writers who end up Vertigo/DC Comics, writing non-comic books—they 376 pages, Rs995. write so well. Willingham’s prose is, in many ways, like Gaiman’s— lucid, charming, as light as a cold glass of beer on a pleasant summer afternoon.

You don’t have to be a Fables follower to read Peter & Max (this writer is aware that a lot of serious readers have a mental block when it comes to reading comics), which is a story about sibling rivalry, magical pipes, and, for those into such things, the real story behind the Pied Piper (yes, of Hamelin).

I am hoping that the success of this book (which came out last year) will encourage Willingham to write more non-comic books.

Peter & Max is published by comic-book publisher Vertigo and features around two dozen wonderful illustrations by Fables illustrator Steve Leialoha.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com

FREE VERSE | MUKUL KESAVAN

Dogwalker From B.A. (Hons) until his end he walked a bitch around the park, not stooping once to bag her waste, and always home before the dark.

He held her on a shortish lead, looked out for cars and feral strays, kept her from licking doggy spoor, then schooled her in a virgin’s ways.

Her colour changed from blonde to black as his head went from black to white, the shat-by postbox stayed the same, red even in the dying light.

Along their route tall houses rose, and waters sank and hedges died, things might have come apart but for his walk, his dog, his measured stride.

He walked his way through breaking news, where others rushed to succour Sikhs; she peed on pogroms on her way past Orwell’s hell then Kubrick’s.

His steps spelt out what did not change despite old age and metal hips; the Labradors were props for his denial of apocalypse.

Mukul Kesavan is a professor of social history at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and author of The Ugliness of the Indian Male and Other Propositions.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010

Culture Q&A | VIKRAM

‘My blood group is B+ and that’s my motto’

SHRIYA PATIL SHINDE/MINT

Tamil superstar Vikram on his Hindi film debut and the switch from being a superstar to an anonymous actor

B Y S HRADHA S UKUMARAN ···························· e plays the upright cop Dev Pratap Sharma in Mani Ratnam’s Hindi film Raavan, then makes the personality switch in the Tamil version, Raavanan, as the cruel outlaw Veera. Luckily, Vikram Kennedy, better known as just Vikram, says he enjoys being “chameleon-like”. The star, who made it big with Tamil blockbusters such as Gemini, Dhool, Sethu, Pithamagan and Anniyan has been described as “stepping into Bollywood at age 44”. He grimaces at the idea. “It’s just a different language. And if you see, all superstars here (Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan) are my age.”

Vikram is a “regular guy” at a lounge bar in a suburban Mumbai hotel as he chats about Hindi cinema, Ratnam and his pet cockatoo. Edited excerpts from the interview:

Two hats: Vikram plays the villain in the Tamil film and the good cop in the Hindi version.

How does it feel acting in your first Hindi film?

It’s intoxicating. I probably would have felt the same if I had just done my first Oriya or Bengali film. What’s exciting is that with Hindi I reach out to a much wider audience.

‘Anniyan’, directed by Shankar, was dubbed in Hindi and released as ‘Aparichit’, but made no waves. Were you disappointed?

No, because Anniyan was a roaring success. I didn’t know that it was going to be dubbed

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STALL ORDER

NANDINI RAMNATH

NORTHERN EXPOSURE

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ani Ratnam was already a huge name in Tamil cinema when the Hindi dubbed version of Roja (1992) was released north of the Vindhyas.

The film was a success despite the incongruities produced by the dubbing process. The emerald village in which Roja prances about was relocated to somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, and the characters spoke in rustic Hindi despite having Tamilness written all over their faces.

Audiences ignored the distracting lack of synchronization between the dialogue and the lip movements of the actors and revelled in the gorgeous imagery that is a trademark of Ratnam’s cinema. Oohs and aahs similarly greeted Ratnam’s Bombay (1995) when it was dubbed into Hindi, so when he embarked on Dil Se.., his first film in Hindi, in 1998, the crossover to Bollywood seemed to be a foregone conclusion.

Dil Se crashed at the box office, so Ratnam’s next move was the dual-language film. In 2004, he made two movies on the same subject at the same location and with the same musical score, but

with two different sets of actors.

Neither Yuva nor Aayutha Ezhuthu did anything for Ratnam’s reputation. With Guru (2007), Ratnam jettisoned the dual-headed approach. He made the film in Hindi, cast leading Bollywood stars and picked a safe subject—a businessman’s rise to fame and fortune against the odds. Viewers loved it.

With Raavan, Ratnam has once again taken up the challenge of juggling two languages and two vastly different cultural sensibilities. The Hindi Raavan stars Abhishek Bachchan as a forest brigand who falls in love with his hostage, who is the wife of a police officer (the parallels to the Ramayana are obvious). Tamil star Vikram plays the cop in the Hindi version and Bachchan’s role in the Tamil one.

Ever since the movie’s trailers released a few weeks ago, the Internet grapevine has been jangling with comparisons. Is Vikram more convincing than Bachchan? Do A.R. Rahman’s songs sound better in Tamil?

The debate would have been much simpler if the boundaries

in Hindi. Yet Aparichit had so many shows in Bihar, Bengal and Punjab. When I was shooting Raavan at Orchha, Madhya Pradesh, the driver assigned to me looked at me and asked, “Aparichit?” He said that he had seen it over 100

between Tamil and Hindi cinema weren’t so rigid. National integration is an avowed aim of the Indian state, but talent cannot cross over from one state to another without causing tongues to wag.

Hindi cinema is considered to represent all of India. Regional cinema is just that. Migration widens the market for a Tamil or a Bengali movie, but only Bollywood can cut across regional and international borders. This fact rankles a great deal in the southern industries, who take their revenge by routinely casting north Indians as villains. However successful Tamil cinema is in its backyard, it cannot compare with the sheer power and reach of the Hindi film industry. Hence the attempts of Tamil pin-ups such as Vikram and Suriya to roll their tongues around the language that is still reviled in their state.

Will Ratnam bridge the divide between the south and the rest of the world? Few southern film-makers are better placed to do so. Ratnam’s technical dexterity is a matter of shock and awe across production houses in Mumbai. In the short term, at least, Raavan will do more for Vikram’s career than his critical and commercial hits back home. However, the prospect of Mumbai film-makers rushing to Vikram’s Chennai residence with chequebooks and

times when it played on television; he even introduced me to his mom! But Raavan, of course, is a different platform.

Mani Ratnam, the banner, the hype all adds up here.

How did you feel when Mani Ratnam offered you

both roles?

It was so challenging. We shot both versions together. At first, I took about 45 minutes to change. By the end, I was in my next get-up with different wounds in less than 9 minutes!

Did you discuss Veera’s character with Abhishek Bachchan, who plays it in ‘Raavan’?

I never watched Abhishek perform Beera when I wasn’t in the same scene, even though Mani sir asked me to a couple of times. I wanted to be original. This isn’t strictly Ramayan or just Raavan’s story.

Veera keeps changing. Is he a poet, singer, womanizer, free spirit? (Laughs) I just go where the emotions take me.

You’ve played characters before with mental conditions.

Split personality in ‘Anniyan’, disturbed in ‘Sethu’, autistic in ‘Pithamagan’ and now, complex in ‘Raavanan’. What’s the real Vikram like?

(Puts his hands up, makes a crazy face, laughs) No one has seen the real me in my films. I remember after Sethu released, a rickshaw driver in Chennai chased after me, shouting, “Thalaivaa (leader)!” When he caught up, he was disappointed. “But you’re so normal,” he said. I guess he vibed more with the tough guy in Sethu. In real life, I joke around constantly. My friends ask me to play that on screen, but I prefer what’s far removed from me.

In Chennai, you’re chased around…

Yes, but not so much in T-Nagar and such places. I’ve built a wall around myself. I keep moving when fans approach me. I’ve made it an art form at airports.

How does it feel being a huge star in parts of India and anonymous in others?

I like switching off from work, being a normal guy. In Chennai, I work out at a gym or go to a store and pick up DVDs or gifts. I only feel bad sometimes when I see that so many Hindi actors have watched my movies to remake them. But when will Hindi audiences see my work? I guess that will change with Raavan.

What did you think of ‘Tere

Not lost in translation: With Raavan, Mani Ratnam is betting once more on the bilingual film category. contracts looks dim. Bollywood’s stars are incubated in Mumbai.

To appeal to audiences, they must speak Hindi, however Anglicized or bastardized it may be. A typical Bollywood hero must appear to be from somewhere in north India.

Indian Idol finalist Meiyang Chang probably made it to the Badmaash Company cast because the reality show had already made him a national figure. Rohan Sippy’s upcoming movie Dum Maro Dum stars leading Telugu actor Rana Daggubati, but mostly, Hindi film-makers try and keep their cast as cookie cutter as possible.

Why take the trouble when most Hindi movie characters have no

discernible backgrounds or personal geographies anyway?

Regional cinemas are no less parochial, even though the ground realities are vastly different. Tamil cinema’s leading stars are mostly from outside Tamil Nadu, starting with M.G. Ramachandran (Kerala) and Rajinikanth (a Marathi manoos from Bangalore). Khushboo? A Mumbaikar. Asin? From Kerala.

Jyothika? A Punjabi from Mumbai. Tamanna? A Sindhi from Mumbai. Shriya Saran? An Uttarkhandi from Dehradun.

Only Punjabi has successfully invaded Hindi cinema, probably because of the strong presence of film-makers from the state in Bollywood, as well as the vast

Naam’, the ‘Sethu’ remake?

Salman (Khan) is a great friend.

He rose to the occasion in Tere Naam and made it romantic. In Sethu, people liked that I was this tough guy in the first half, then lost 15-16 kilos to become like a vegetable in the second. I enjoy transformations.

You had a horrible accident when you were in college.

Yes, I was knocked down by a truck and was on a hospital bed for three years. I had to go through 23 surgeries. Doctors said I wouldn’t walk again. But there was no stopping me; I wanted to be a hero. My blood group is B+ and that’s my motto as well. The experience made me more tenacious.

Success was mine when I got it.

I’m one of Tamil cinema’s best fighters despite my leg; I dance competently too. Make your weakness your strength.

You had a long struggle before you made it as a star. What was that phase like?

Yes, I dubbed for other heroes.

For Prabhu Deva, Chakri (J.D. Chakravarthi), who did Satya, Telugu star Venkatesh and Abbas for Kandukondein Kandukondein and other films.

Even then, I was selective (laughs). I didn’t look down on dubbing. I saw it as dignity of labour. I took my time to understand a scene, not rattle off dialogues. I learnt a lot—how to sound when you’re cold or beaten. It’s helped me dub now for the Hindi, Tamil and Telugu versions of Raavan.

What are your other passions?

I’m a professional bathroom singer. But I don’t sing to my wife (Shylaja); she’d probably run away! I have pets— cockatoos, a beagle, boxers, geese and chicken on my farm.

I like taking care of them.

Do you discuss your roles with your wife and children?

No, I like it to feel like a surprise when it’s unfolding on screen. I remember during Sethu, I lied to them and said I had to lose all that weight because I was playing a bank robber who had to escape through the exhaust vent.

Raavan and Raavanan released in theatres on Friday.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

swathes of Punjabi-speaking Indians in foreign markets. Over the last few years, many of us have been forced to come to terms with our inner Punjabi selves. We have driven on tractors through mustard fields, bopped our heads to bhangra beats, and accepted the logic of lavish, booze-filled weddings.

Dialogue writers and lyricists working in Hindi cinema are now expected to know a smattering of Punjabi, and except for Ram Gopal Varma, most directors have succumbed to the need to include at least one Punjabi matronly character.

This courtesy hasn’t been extended to other Indian languages. Bollywood badly wants to go international and make movies that simultaneously impress audiences in Ludhiana and London. Creating a truly national cinema and finding a way to use the diverse talent that exists in various states in the country may be more achievable. Most Indians manage to speak only their mother tongue and English adequately. Why not celebrate difference instead of ignoring it?

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

Write to Nandini at stallorder@livemint.com

CULTURE L17 SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

Q&A | MANI RATNAM

Mythology meets life

TELEVISION REVIEW | GLEE

Musical cheers Broadway­style singing and endearing characters make ‘Glee’ a feel­good show B Y R ACHANA N AKRA rachana.n@livemint.com

························································ ey, what’s the big idea? asks the cheerful Mika number that plays in the background for the Glee promos on Star World.

After watching a couple of episodes of the most talked about television show in America, we found that Glee does rest on one big idea—its novelty factor. Of course, there are also the quirky characters, tongue-in-cheek humour, great music and a plotline that keeps you hooked.

A musical comedy set in a high school, Glee triumphed in America, winning many awards and hordes of fans—called Gleeks—and will hit TV screens in India one season after its American debut. It promises to be a big-ticket show for Star World, which lost its Grey’s Anatomy fans to Zee Café.

Glee is about the Glee club, William McKinley High School’s school choir, and a teacher’s efforts to restore it to its former glory. The teacher, Will Schuester—an alumni of the school and now the director of the Glee club—struggles between fulfilling his wife’s demands for a bigger income and rediscovering his own passion for music. The club starts out with six students—the ambitious and fiercely talented Rachel Berry, the football star Finn Hudson, who is blackmailed into joining the club but soon discovers his passion, the talented Mercedes Jones who is overweight, fashion-conscious and has a chip on her shoulder, the effeminate male soprano Kurt Hummel, the wheel chair-bound Artie Abrams and the punk Tina Cohen-Chang, who auditions for the club singing Katy Perry’s I kissed a girl. They are considered misfits by their peers, who constantly bully them for being part of the club.

But then begin their efforts to recruit more performers for the group, popular students who could take the standing of the club higher and, along the way, fighting the aggressive cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, who is anxious that the spotlight doesn’t shift from her team. “You do with your sad little group what I did with my elderly, wealthy mother. Euthanize it,” she tells Schuester. There’s also a mysophobic guidance counsellor who has feelings for Schuester.

H

The director on his new film, why he keeps going back to mythology and the way he works with technicians

B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com

···························· ani Ratnam started making films in the mid-1980s. He spent his college years in Mumbai, watching Hindi films (Guru Dutt is one of his favourite directors) and began making films in Chennai. His first feature film, Pallavi Anu Pallavi (1983), had Anil Kapoor, then a rising star of Hindi cinema, in the lead role.

Ratnam, now 54, has been an innovator since then. There is a Mani Ratnam gaze on life, society and politics, a staggering achievement in a country that produces hundreds of films every year.

He is arguably India’s “biggest” director—his movies are big in scale, big on ideas and thought, and big in budget. In 1998, he made his first Hindi film, Dil Se..; but his Tamil films have been dubbed in Hindi since the early 1990s.

Few directors can contemporize mythology like he does. He is a master of the cinematic moment—the perfect synthesis of acting, dialogues, framing, and of course, making the camera speak. The personal and the political seamlessly merge in his best films. Film-maker Shaad Ali, who has been assisting him since Dil Se.., says there is never a dull moment on Ratnam’s sets. “He is absorbed in every tiny aspect, that’s how he makes his scenes breathe,” Ali says.

Ratnam’s forthcoming film, Raavan, with Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, is a story drawn from the character of the villain from the Ramayan, set in rural India. Earlier, Ratnam made Thalapathi (1991), which was the story of Karna. A Tamil potboiler with song, dance and action sequences, it was one of Rajinikanth’s most memorable roles. Raavan released in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi on Friday.

Ratnam was in Mumbai for a short while the week before the film’s release and I met him at

M

JW Marriott over tea. Dressed in a blue pinstripe shirt neatly tucked into dark trousers and in immaculately polished black formal shoes, Ratnam looked like an film-maker’s antithesis, often how Martin Scorsese turns up in public gatherings.

Edited excerpts from the interview: It’s been three years since your last film.

Yes, and a very gruelling but rewarding three years, I have been obsessed with this idea for years now, and finally it’s out there.

Did one event or phenomenon inspire you to make ‘Raavan’?

Not an event or phenomenon. It wasn’t even an idea to begin with. It was a germ of an idea that has been with me for many years. You go back to it, then leave it and then go back to it again. I was interested in finding out who this 10-headed demon, the ultimate Indian villain, so to say, is. What makes Raavan the person? He made an epic several thousand years ago, but is still relevant today. What does 10 heads mean? Does he actually have 10 heads or it’s just that he has so many facets to him that when we see him close we see 10 different people?

It’s set in a contemporary rural setting. The associations with tribal livelihood and threats to it, and in turn, Maoism are unmistakable in the promotional videos.

Anything that can be drawn from the story is fair. I am not denying it. But it is ultimately about a human being who is typically a villain. Then you go closer to him and start peeling the layers and get to know a human being. After I know the human being, does my stand on his villainy remain the same, does my stand change?

Yes, perhaps it does. Raavan was a learned man, there’s a certain kingdom, culture and life to where he and his men are. There are certain rules there which can be threatened and attacked.

You have always engaged with politics, most of your films have political settings. Do you believe in a specific political ideology?

That is always evolving. I am a citizen and have political stands like everyone, but I can express a shade of a reaction to an issue because of the work I do. That is the advantage of a writer or a film-maker. We can see it from different perspectives. I am ideological, not dogmatic. Instead of starting off by saying “I know why”, I want to know why.

Cinematically, have you tried anything entirely different in this film?

It happens in every film. You don’t start the process thinking I have to be different, do something new. The idea is to tell a story as well as I can. That pushes you into pressure zones, and you try to make it real, and not just dramatic. That has been the primary concern in all the years I’ve been making films. If, in Raavan, it comes through better, then yes, we have probably tried something different. If it doesn’t, then no, we haven’t. A lot of it is new. But that is unimportant. When I go and watch a film, what’s important is what I bring back, the overall impact or impression or thought, whatever you call it. Your spelling, grammar and punctuation are additional.

Talking of spelling and grammar, you have often said that you give your technicians, especially the cinematographer, a lot of freedom.

Technique for me is not the dominant factor. Characters have to be believable, portrayed with reality, so that there is a deep connect. Film-making is a collective art no matter how much you want to shout from the top and say I am the director.

The director actually does very little, he puts everybody together. That’s basically what you’re doing. It is important to have people who are like-minded, who like to push things the way you want it to be pushed. I like my technicians not to need me so much when they are working, they should be able to push their envelope on their own. That’s the best way to work a chemistry between technicians and the director.

Was your decision to make a Hindi film in 1998 calculated?

Your Tamil films were already a rage, some of them watched all over the world.

About Hindi films, I was reluctant in the beginning. But the subjects started changing. In Bombay and Roja, I had to invent small things, like ways for them to behave and speak. How does a Tamil from Coimbatore speak? How does a Tamil from Kashmir speak? Hindi makes it easier. Once you do it once, your inhibitions go and you can do it again.

When you look at the Hindi versions of your films, say ‘Yuva’, and now ‘Raavan’, do you think something gets lost in translation?

When I work in Hindi, I tend to trust people more, in Tamil I

Camera, action: Ratnam directs Abhishek Bachchan on the sets of Raavan. have things much more in my control. But I collaborate with people I am comfortable with; we travel together, spend a lot of time together. I trust them and make them responsible for everything, so it becomes, in a way, liberating.

Mythology has been a big part of many of your films.

We have all grown up with mythology, haven’t we? I probably just engage with mythology and think about it more than you, that’s all. There’s so much colour in mythology.

You touch almost anything in Indian mythology and make a film out of it. Over the years, my interest in mythology has grown.

Another of your primary concerns has been what drives people to violence, be it ‘Kannathil Muthamittal’ (2002) or ‘Dil Se’ (1998) or ‘Yuva’ (2004). What fascinates you about violence?

It’s not a fascination. We can’t say there is no violence, there is no trouble, that everything is fine with the world and India. There are problems happening to states and to people because of various reasons; there are problems at different levels. And there is a lot of violence all around.

The great advantage of art is that you can engage with the world in a non-academic fashion and try to see what comes out of it. It’s not a logical, analytical study of what is happening, but understanding of an emotion and the human mind.

Do you begin with the characters and then go into the bigger picture—the politics or the society? Almost every film of yours is about relationships, mostly a man-woman relationship.

We are functions of relationships, no matter how political or comical we are.

And so that’s the core of my films. Any kind of relationship is exciting, be it between brothers or a man and woman or father and child. It’s the exciting part. I try to make the relationships real, and with enough meat to make people connect with them, so that even without the backdrop, they can stand themselves.

Do you revisit your films?

Once you have finished a film, you have already learnt and unlearnt a lot. I can’t go back to old films, I can’t bear it.

Misfits: Eternally optimistic, Glee roots for the underdogs.

An eternally optimistic series that roots for the underdog, Glee doesn’t possess many novel elements. The stereotypical American high school characters and situations are all in place—from bulimia to bullies, hormonal teenagers to love triangles and students navigating the high school caste system. But once established, the stereotypes are upended. The cute, curly-haired idealistic Schuester plants marijuana in Hudson’s locker and blackmails him into joining the club. The popular cheerleaders are all part of the Chastity Club (their motto: It’s about the teasing, not the pleasing), but it’s the bullied, plain-looking Berry who stands up to them and says, “girls want sex just as much as boys”.

There is humour in almost every scene, but unless you’re paying attention, you are liable to miss it. There’s no laugh-track cue when the effeminate club member comments at Schuester’s choice of disco music as being “too gay”, or when the camera pans at the pamphlets on the counsellor’s shelf, Divorce: Why Your Parents Stopped Loving You and I Can’t Stop Touching Myself. Or when Schuester’s wife while buying her dream house, has to make a choice between a grand foyer and something else, exclaims, “Oh, this is my very own Sophie’s Choice”.

Most of the show’s cast has Broadway experience. Numerous cover versions of songs are featured by artists ranging from Rihanna and Kanye West to Madonna and Amy Winehouse. But the characters don’t break into songs at any point.

To keep the proceedings realistic, songs are usually performances on stage.

True to its name, the show works on spreading cheer and keeps you smiling. It’s hard to say if the series will find as fanatical a fan following in India, where viewers are more used to tear jerkers and women-oriented shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives.

But we shall be eternally optimistic.

Starting 25 June, Glee will air on Star World every Friday and Saturday at 10pm.

L18 FLAVOURS SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 2010 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

CHENNAI KOOTHU | GANESH & ANUPAMA CHANDRASEKARAN

Birdsong amid kutcheris The dimming sound of tweets from the city periphery is a reminder of a past when the music festival season had winged participants

D Your city has treasures you pass by without ever taking notice. In this fortnightly series, experts help you discover these gems.

This is the concluding part.

ecember is the month when the musically inclined make their annual pilgrimage to Chennai for the month-long classical music festival or kutcheris. It is also the time when numerous birds chime at their own sabhas as they fly in to breed and spend winter in and around the city.

While most people find big game sightings at far-flung wildlife reserves magnetic, birdwatching is an equally fascinating activity that may require just a day’s trip and can be practised even around one’s home with just a pair of binoculars.

The natural wonders of Chennai, as with any urban

sprawl, are under threat because of pollution and concretization. So, award-winning wildlife film-maker Shekar Dattatri zooms in on precious pockets around Tamil Nadu’s capital that are hot spots for various winged beauties offering a glimpse into the city’s beautiful past.

t Pallikaranai marshland Situated in the southern suburbs of Chennai, this freshwater swamp is home to several birds that cannot be spotted within the city. The Pheasant-tailed Jacana is one of them. Jacanas are also called lily-trotters because their unusually long toes allow them to distribute their weight evenly and effortlessly walk on lily or lotus leaves without sinking. Then there is the domestic chicken-sized purple moorhen that stands out because of its red beak and dark blue-green body. Sadly, the marsh is so polluted with the toxic waste of the city that these innocent winged visitors are exposed to heavy metals and other poisons in the food they eat here.

p Adyar estuary The mix of seawater and freshwater at river mouths creates a nutritious and safe environment with little wave action for crabs and fish to spawn. The abundant food makes estuaries attractive hunting grounds for numerous migratory birds. Sandpipers of various kinds, golden plovers and black-winged stilts throng the Adyar estuary in winter. Twenty years ago, I remember seeing flock sizes of 5,000-6,000 birds.

Today, you can count yourself lucky if you can see more than 1,000. Unfortunately, the Adyar estuary has turned into a cesspool because of the city’s raw waste being dumped into it.

q Pulicat Lake An hour north of Chennai by road, Pulicat is the second-largest saltwater lake in India after Chilika in Orissa. The winter months are a great time to sight flocks of greater flamingos. Adult flamingos have a bright pink tinge on their wings, which is a result of beta-carotene in their diet from the brine shrimp and other crustaceans they eat. Pelicans from neighbouring Andhra Pradesh’s Nelapattu sanctuary also come to Pulicat to feed. Sometimes you can see a flock of pelicans cooperatively herding a school of fish towards the shore and engulfing them in their large throat pouches.

u Guindy National Park Entry to this forest reserve in south Chennai requires a special permit from the forest department. But a trip to this dry evergreen forest is well worth the red tape because it is one of the last of its kind in India’s coastal belt. The park is home to all sorts of forest birds, including the rare Black Baza, a migratory bird of prey with attractive black and white plumage and a little crest on its head. The many-hued Indian Pitta passes through here during its winter migration. The park is also an interesting place to spot a range of mammals, such as spotted deer, blackbuck, mongooses, jackals and fruit bats; and all this right in the heart of the city.

t Vedanthangal One of India’s oldest bird sanctuaries, Vedanthangal is just an hour’s drive from Chennai. This large irrigation tank, rich with nitrogen and phosphorous from bird droppings, has served as a great source of fertilizer for surrounding farmlands. The most spectacular sight in the winter months are nesting painted storks in their magnificent breeding colours—pink wing coverts and bright yellow beak. The “magic hour” at this sanctuary during December-March begins at dusk, when thousands of ibises, cormorants and other birds return to roost after feeding in the countryside. So what you see during the day is just a fraction of the population.

www.livemint.com To read the complete series, go to www.livemint.com/ctiysecrets