OPEN Magazine 1 December 2014

FORGOTTEN FLAVOURS OF TELANGANA

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THE ROGUE GODMAN OF HISAR

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DAVID DAVIDAR THE GREAT INDIAN SHORT STORY

Open Mail | editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor S Prasannarajan managing Editor PR Ramesh Deputy Editors Aresh Shirali, Ullekh NP art director Madhu Bhaskar Senior Editors Kishore Seram,

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Anil Budur Lulla (Bangalore), Shahina KK, Chinki Sinha, Sunaina Kumar, Rajni George, Kumar Anshuman Special Correspondents Aanchal Bansal, Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai), Gunjeet Sra, Shreya Sethuraman senior copy editor Aditya Wig copy editor Sneha Bhura Assistant Art Director Anirban Ghosh SENIOR DESIGNERs Anup Banerjee, Veer Pal Singh assistant Photo editor Ritesh Uttamchandani (Mumbai) Staff Photographers Ashish Sharma, Raul Irani photo Researcher Abhinav Saha Associate publisher Deepa Gopinath Associate general managers (advertisement) Karl Mistry (West),

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(South), Melvin George (West), Basab Ghosh (East) Head—production Maneesh Tyagi pre-press manager Sharad Tailang cfo Anil Bisht hEAD—it Hamendra Singh Chief Executive & Publisher

Mohit Hira

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Volume 6 Issue 47 For the week 25 Nov—1 Dec 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

JAGDISH SAGAR

This refers to ‘Bigger than the Sum of His Imperfections’ (24 November 2014). A good article.

Nehru renounced the advantages of his privileged birth and background, forsook a life of ease and comfort, joined the national movement, spending ten years of his life in jail, long before he could have dreamt that he would one day hold high political office. Vajpayee’s tribute to him is revealing of the personal qualities of Nehru renounced both. As for economic policy, Nehru’s ideas the advantages of his were those of his time: privileged birth long in fact the BJP bitterly before he could have opposed the economic dreamt that he would reforms of the early one day hold high 1990s when they finally political office came. Give Nehru credit for the IITs, the nuclear energy programme, and generally for being a great moderniser; and for not creating a dynasty—remember that it was Shastri who followed him.  letter of the week Privatisation Works

This is in reference to your article ‘Sorry, It’s Not His India’ (24 November 2014)[The point on] land reforms and privatisation does not acknowledge the lowering of poverty figures.

My father tells me of how in the 70s there was never enough food. Wheat was stored for use when someone in the extended family was sick. Then in the 90s, we had food, but life was still difficult.

Local ration shops were neighbours and friends who helped in bad times and enjoyed with us the good times. Now, it is still better. My point is this: if I and many of my friends coming from desperately poor backgrounds are now in a good situation, without being extraordinarily talented or because of reservations, then privatisation is working. Yes, it is taking time, but the scale of poverty is unfathomable as well.  SHIV KUMAR MISHRA

1 december 2014

with Nadeem well aware that he was involved in Gulshan Kumar’s death.  lalit

Strength of a Symbol

Bose Chose Wrong

this refers to the article ‘The Clever Panditji and the Emotional Netaji’ (24 November 2014). Bose’s fascist leanings cannot be simply swept away by saying that he was unaware of the ‘Final Solution’ until the end of 1945. Or that he was unaware of the massacre of the Chinese by the Japanese. Imagine the horror of being ruled by the cruel Japanese regime after getting liberated from the British. His reaching out to the most brutal regimes in human history, Germany, Japan and Russia, shows his lack of political maturity.  K SINHA

Bloody History

the article ‘When the Don Drew Blood’ (7 November 2014) is a fascinating read about the inner circles of Bollywood and the notorious nineties. But it also reminds me that some filmmakers still chose to keep working

This is regarding the article ‘First a Democrat, Then a Socialist’ (24 November 2014).

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was a phenomenon that belonged to every individual and political party. The Congress’ refusal to invite the Prime Minister for [Jawaharlal Nehru’s] 125th birthday celebrations has set a bad precedent and is most unfortunate. Further, the Congress trying to appropriate Nehru’s legacy as one belonging only to itself and no one else is ridiculous and unacceptable. Jawaharlal Nehru was a tall leader because his vision was liberal, tolerant, secular and democratic. He aimed at the creation and consolidation of a strong united India. Even today, his ideals are being followed by every political party.  KR Srinivasan

Perplexing Leaders

The article ‘The Anomalous Imam’ (7 November 2014) [echoes] the sentiments of not just the Muslim community, but millions of other Indians as well. No one had heard of the Imam till about 1977. It was only after the postEmergency era that the political class cultivated the Imam in the specious belief that he wielded significant influence. The Muslim community is not so naïve as to be led by disconcerting and perplexing leaders.  HN Ramakrishna

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The head of a Royal Bengal tiger seized by Crime Branch officers in Nagpur, 2011

The Case of the Counterfeit Tiger Skins How policemen, unable to identify fake animal products, arrest traders under the Wildlife Protection Act Earlier this week, policemen from Thane arrested two individuals in possession of a tiger’s skin. The police held a press conference where they told reporters that the tiger skin, apparently brought from Nasik, was worth Rs 7 lakh in the Indian market and at least Rs 20 lakh in the international market. This was the third instance in the last two months of people being nabbed in possession of tiger skins near Mumbai. The police charged all of them under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972.

1 december 2014

But it now turns out that in all three cases, the tiger skins were counterfeits. In the case of the alleged tiger skin found earlier this week, a dog’s skin had been worked on to make it look like a tiger’s skin.

According to the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), a major issue concerning wildlife protection is the misuse of the Wildlife Protection Act by law enforcement agencies. The reason: policemen, and even forest department officials, are unable to tell a genuine wild-

life product from a fake. Says a WCCB official, requesting anonymity, “The market of counterfeits in wildlife products is huge in India… So, in every 10 cases of the Act being invoked, only one will turn out to involve a genuine wildlife product.”

The WCCB has issued a nationwide notification objecting to the invocation of the Wildlife Protection Act in cases of trading and possession of counterfeit animal products. Adi Malaliah, an inspector

with the WCCB’s Western Regional office in Mumbai, says, “These people try to sell a counterfeit tiger skin as a genuine one. But after their arrest when they inform the police about the skins being fake, the cops charge them under the Act and produce them in court. The truth only comes out when we are brought in to identify the skins. We will be providing tips to cops to help them distinguish real tiger skins from fake ones.” n Lhendup G Bhutia

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reuters

small world

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contents

25 rampal

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hurried man’s guide

The rogue godman

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2014 Global Slavery Index

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online

All that’s fit to sell

food

Flavours of Telangana

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locomotif

The Gospel according to Dan Brown

crime

cover story

Anatomy of a medical butchery

The last farce

person of the week Srikanth Nammalwar Kidambi

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The Dragon Slayer How a little-known shuttler from India defeated the greatest badminton player of all time Lhendup G Bhutia

aina Nehwal is perhaps India’s

greatest badminton success story. She attained a career best ranking of No 2 just a few years into her appearance in the international circuit, became India’s first Olympic medal winner in badminton, and before entering the China Open earlier this month, had the Super Series titles under her belt. Yet, in the last few years there have been murmurs about the decline of her skills. Apart from the Australian Open this year, which she won, she has not entered the finals of a Super Series tournament since 2012. When she won the China Open last week, an explosion of euphoria around her was expected. But that didn’t happen.

The return of Nehwal was completely overshadowed that day. Something even more remarkable had occurred. A relatively little-known player from Andhra Pradesh, Srikanth Nammalwar Kidambi, had defeated someone who is widely considered the greatest singles badminton player of all time—Lin Dan. The final between Kidambi and Dan, or Super Dan as he is sometimes known, seemed to have been a foregone conclusion. Dan, who hails from Fujian in China, is a 31-year-old pro. He is a two-time Olympic champion, a five-time world champion, and a five-time All England champion. Before the start of the match, Dan had won 495 of his 559 overall matches. This year alone, Dan had won 28 of his 29 matches, the solitary loss occurring due to an injury. In comparison, Kidambi, only 21 years of age, had won 67 of his 104 total matches. His record this year wasn’t particularly stellar. He has

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won only 16 of his 31 matches. In the last two encounters between the two, Dan had convincingly defeated Kidambi, first at the 2012 Thailand Open, where Dan trounced him 21-11, 21-13, and later in the Badminton Asia Championships this year, where the victory margin was even more stark—21-7, 21-14. Even though Dan was recovering from an ankle injury, the China Open final was expected to be a cakewalk.

Instead, Kidambi completely stunned his opponent and the home crowd. In a carefully strategised game, where Kidambi did not allow his Chinese opponent to settle down or control the pace of the match, he took the game 21-19, ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

21-17. Pullela Gopichand, Kidambi’s coach, later told The Indian Express, “Anything predictable would not have worked against Lin Dan. Srikanth played a lot of tosses, pushing Lin Dan to the back of the court, and he also had some crisp net shots, which ensured that he didn’t allow Lin Dan to settle into any sort of rhythm… Anyone with a set game has no chance against Lin Dan. But Srikanth mixed it beautifully.”

Kidambi currently holds the world ranking of 13, up from the ranking of 240 which he held two years ago. He first arrived at the Gopichand Academy in 2008-09, after his brother, Nandagopal, who was then a trainee at the academy, got Srikanth enrolled there since he was apparently not doing anything worthwhile with his time. Kidambi was first noticed in 2013, when he upstaged the then national champion, Parupalli Kashyap, in the All India Senior National Championships at New Delhi. This year had so far proved a low point for the young shuttler. In the first week of July, he had to recuperate in a hospital ICU after he was found unconscious in a washroom. He was diagnosed as having a bacterial infection in the brain. Gopichand had told The Times of India, “We were worried about his survival. He went through the most dangerous phase of his life. From then on, it was a big task for us to motivate him. He struggled in a few tournaments after that.

But all along, he was confident and working very hard.” But now, four months later, his life seems to have turned around.

From here, it can only get better. n 1 december 2014

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The house of stories

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The master blaster’s autobiography

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

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f o r blaming laptops for the

poor showing of his Samajwadi Party in the General Election Normally, you would laud a government that gave free laptops to students, but Mulayam Singh Yadav has suddenly developed a difference of opinion on this.

And he has expressed this difference with his son Akhilesh, Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, who initiated

Geetu Mohandas’ turn as director

the free laptop scheme. In Mulayam’s worldview, those who had received these laptops saw Narendra Modi’s speeches on their screens and ended up voting BJP. It acted like a fifth columnist of the BJP, except that the man who oversaw it was Akhilesh. But this man is also the same Chief Minister who has turned Uttar Pradesh’s law-and-order clock backwards. And between laptops and law-and-order, even a blind man can see what swayed the voter. The position that Mulayam has taken is not new. A quarter century ago, you could hear such voices in India—of people who believed that computers and technological innovation were forces of evil. That someone should now hold such a view is bizarre, but that he is in a position of power to enforce the implications of such a view is dangerous. The Samajwadi Party chief assumes that rolling back progress will get him votes. The truth is the reverse: it is regression that loses leaders like him votes. n

After she left the UPA, Mamata Banerjee had said it was a mistake to ally with the Congress, but now she is warming up to the Grand Old Party again r e va l u at i o n

“It was not a correct decision to ally with Congress in the [2011] Assembly election. There is always good results in fighting alone”

“Let [the Congress] decide... Let them invite. But I can tell you that from myself there will be no problem.

For the greater interest of the country... I will be with them”

— Hindustan Times, 16 July 2013

—On a news channel, 17 November 2014

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am sin mulay

The devotion of Deepika

cinema

Rameshwar Broota’s scrutiny of the male form

on able Pers n o s a e r n U ek of the We

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MAL FAIRCLOUGH/AFP/Getty Images

The Man Who Always Stays Not Out

N Srinivasan, chairman of the ICC 1 december 2014

T h i s i s w h a t we know of the former BCCI head and Chennai Super Kings’ (CSK) de facto owner, N Srinivasan, from the Mudgal Committee report: he was not involved in match-fixing or betting, but turned a blind eye to a player who was seen in the company of a woman connected to bookies. That player belongs to the CSK. Srinivasan’s son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan, has been indicted for betting, and the report claims that he was indeed a team official of the CSK. The most powerful man in

Indian cricket seems to have been surrounded by people who thought betting was par for the course. This should ordinarily have sent him packing from Indian cricket. But Jagmohan Dalmiya, another BCCI strongman, is going to get the entire East Zone block to vote for Srinivasan in the presidential polls of the BCCI, guaranteeing him victory. If that happens, what moral authority BCCI will have to crack down on bookies is anybody’s guess. The apex court may have to intervene. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to the Global Slavery Index The second edition of the Global Slavery Index has been released and India tops the list: of all countries, India is estimated to have the most number of people who live like slaves.

Pakistan and India together have a little under half the world’s people who live under slave-like conditions. In total, around 38.5 million are estimated to live such abject lives of human deprivation, and India accounts for 14 million of them. That, as The Times of India put it, makes this the ‘slave capital of the world’.

PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images

The study notes: ‘Across India’s population of over 1.2 billion people, all forms of modern In total, an slavery, including estimated 38.5 inter-generational million live like bonded labour, trafslaves globally, ficking for sexual and India accounts exploitation, and for 14 million forced marriage, of them exist… members of lower castes and tribes, religious minorities, and migrant workers are disproportionately affected by modern slavery. Modern slavery occurs in brick kilns, carpet weaving, embroidery and other textile manufacturing, forced prostitution, agriculture, domestic servitude, mining, and organised begging rings. Bonded labour is particularly prevalent throughout India, with families enslaved for generations.’

Protestors pose as bonded labourers in New Delhi

As a percentage of the population who have been enslaved, Mauritania is on top with 4 per cent. Indian is fifth by that measure, at 1.2 per cent. Other countries worse than India are Uzbekistan, Haiti and Qatar.

This year, Walk Free, which conducts the study, also measured the response of governments to slavery. With AA the highest rating, India gets a CCC, which is below B but better than CC, C and D. Dalits were said to be the most vulnerable.

The report said, ‘The limited ability [of] people to move out of this [caste] group increases their vulnerability.’ n

Terminal Decline?

The woes of Indian hockey seem never-ending M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

A

n interesting period in

Indian sports was when the hockey team had not even qualified for the 2008 Olympics under the charge of KPS Gill, the president of Indian Hockey Federation (IHF) then. The supercop was seen to be the overlord of the complete mess that the sport was in and things came to such a pass that everyone wanted him out, but he remained firmly ensconced in his seat because of a stranglehold over the IHF. To remove him, the IHF itself had to be suspended. But the irony would only become apparent later when the man who had engineered Gill’s removal, Suresh Kalmadi, found himself in a similar situation.

Everyone wanted him out as Indian Olympic Association (IOA) president after the Commonwealth Games scam, but he refused to go. Eventually the IOA had to be suspended to force him out. In sports administration in India, everything always comes a full circle.

Gill went and was replaced by an ad hoc committee of sportsmen. Later Hockey India was formed to administer the sport but it didn’t make much difference. Hockey remains as interesting off-field as on-field. Normally you expect things to go topsy-turvy when the team is doing badly, but for it to happen when they have been performing admirably does take doing. Terry Walsh, our erstwhile national hockey coach from Australia, who has just led us to a victory in the Asian Games, our first in 16 years, has decided he can’t stand it any longer. One version of the story says that he was negotiating after the end of his contract and asking for too much. Walsh says it is more than money. The resignation letter that he tendered last month (and then withheld pending negotiations) had these lines: ‘I am finding considerable

difficulty adjusting to the decision making style of the sporting bureaucracy in India which I believe, in the long term, is not in the best interests of Indian Hockey or its players.’

But he also has a very strange demand to make. This week, as talks broke down, he told the media that he wanted the flexibility to work from Perth in Australia. For an analogy, consider the uproar if Greg Chappell had said that he would remain in Australia while coaching the Indian cricket team. To make it even more surreal, Hockey India President Narinder Batra now says that Walsh is Things can leaving because go topsy-turvy he committed a financial when the irregularity, not team is doing here in India but badly but for in the United it to happen States when he was coaching when they there. Batra and have been Walsh don’t get performing along, and, given well does that there had take doing been a committee set up to negotiate with Walsh which excluded Batra, this seems like petty politicking. It is only shocking because it is happening at a level where the trajectory of Indian hockey is being decided.

Indian hockey, some say, has been in terminal decline for a long time. In places like Mumbai, hockey used to played on the streets but the sport is almost invisible now to the public eye. And likewise for many other parts of the country. Hockey’s problems begin from both ends; lower down, less and less people are playing the game, and at the top, administrators botch it up at every opportunity. And on both ends, it will only get worse. n 1 december 2014

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S PRASANNARAJAN

I

The Gospel According to Dan Brown

met Dan Brown the day after I read about the

publication of The Lost Gospel, a book that tells the story of Jesus and Mary, man and wife, with children playing somewhere in the back garden. Such books in the cultural pages of Sunday newspapers are called Dan Brownish, not Nikos Kazantzakis-esque. For, the last time we met a living descendent of Jesus was in The Da Vinci Code—Sophie Neveu, a French cryptologist and Robert Langdon’s fellow adventurer, standing face to face with the secret of her ancestry in Rosslyn Chapel, a temple built by Knights Templar near Edinburgh, deriving its name from the Line of Roses, the lineage of Mary Magdalene—and a bit of code-breaking would trace her origin to the ‘womb of the goddess’. That was enough ‘Holy Grail’ and the ‘Sacred Feminine’ in one ‘silly’ book, read by millions, for the keepers of the Book.

I met Dan Brown at a time when the epidemic of Ebola was making the world ‘less dense’, and in a most horrible, dehumanising way. Was it, in the karmic elipse of evolution, an inevitability of nature? I’m not a Transhumanist, and the last time I saw one at play was in Dan Brown’s last book, Inferno: ‘The Transhumanist movement is about to explode from the shadows into the mainstream. One of the fundamental tenets is that we as humans have a moral obligation to participate in our evolutionary process… use our technologies to advance the species, to create better humans—healthier, stronger with higher functioning brains. Everything will soon be possible.’

We saw its cinematic, subterranean denouement in Istanbul, otherwise an unlikely destination in a world imagined by Dante, and remade for dummies by Brown.

So here he is, the lone occupant in a business room in a Delhi hotel. The day before, he delivered the Penguin annual lecture, which was reportedly attended by starry-eyed college students and others who wanted to hear about codes, symbols, religion, science and art from one of the world’s bestselling writers of— what shall we say, religious noir, quasi-metaphysical pulp? He is not exactly Robert Langdon—no Harris tweed jacket, no Mickey Mouse watch, and no brainy female partner deciphering the scroll in the corner. What he exudes this morning is the raw confidence of a man who is at the top of his form. I said form, yes.

To know what exactly that is, or even before we, from the Mount Sinai of our sensibility, condemn him to the lowbrow gutters, let

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us accept that thrillers of the popular kind are now definitively pre-Brown and post-Brown. It’s almost saying pre-Wall and post-Wall, if we require a more historical reference.

Then: It was mostly a cat-and-mouse game between the sunny West and the bleak East, and the mouse invariably wore a Russian-made fur cap. The Cold War morality of Good versus Evil gave us some wonderful types and originals, some brooding detectives, and some action heroes, and villains hatching comic-strip geopolitical conspiracies. Post-Wall, Islam’s attempt to replace communism as the thriller theme didn’t quite work.

Maybe it was a reflection of radical Islamism—and its abiding image of Osama spewing apocalypse from Mount Jihad of the Hindu Kush—itself. There were, perhaps, no smokescreens, no shadow play, and no fiction-friendly jihadi type; it was blunt and direct, too spectacular to be subtle. Of course, there is the Nordic noir, Jo Nesbø and the rest, and that’s a different story, played out in the twilight zone of the mind, not politics. With the arrival of newer stars, it is not formulaic yet. And I have no idea what Thomas Harris may do next with Hannibal Lecter. His sophistication is being missed, if not his gourmet taste.

Now: The religious noir is in vogue. Stories mined from the revisionist texts of the sacred. The charm of Christianity is that Christ—sorry, Jesus—is a character with a less than definitive back story, and the life he lived, as a man, could have been straight out of a García Márquez novel. It was a life, told by different storytellers, caught between passions and actions. And the rich literature of anti-Bible, of stories untold or suppressed, is an arcana junkie’s delight. The Western canon is unimaginable without Biblical reference; so is Western art. If we take Brown’s four bestsellers together, it is a journey through the shadow lands of religion, subterranean and labyrinthine, and the pace is so supersonic that you hardly notice the adjectives, the syntax, the whole damn language; and language, there is little left here to be condemned further by those who were appalled by Brown’s crime against literature—and popular culture. And each one of them, in the end, has a here-and-now revelation. The art, the cult, the sect, the ritual… they are facts. The war against the Vatican is not over yet (Angels and Demons). The bloodline of Jesus is still intact (The Da Vinci Code). The Freemasonic power of Washington is almost unalterable (The Lost Symbol). The mad scientist at work for a world populated by healthier, brainier human beings is a 1 december 2014

JERRY LAMPEN/AFP/Getty Images

distinctive possibility (Inferno). And you are, meanwhile, being introduced to the ways of such opaque organisations and cults as the Priory of Sion, the Illuminati, Opus Dei, Freemasons, Transhumanists… Also, post-Brown, you won’t be entering the Louvre without a second glance at the pyramid; you won’t be looking at the historical landmarks of the city of Florence without sparing a thought for Dante; and you won’t be walking across Capitol Hill without being puzzled by Masonic symbolism.

Faith, science and art meet in the pages of Dan Brown to reveal the other side of our biggest certainties. Not God complex, but God’s complexities sell.

That said, ‘complexities’ is not the word one would use after a conversation with Brown. These are snatches from my morning with him: “So what do you think about the new Dan Brownish discovery, The Lost Gospel?” I ask him.

“I heard about that. And more is likely to come to support the idea that Jesus led a married life.”

“Do you believe the foundation of Christianity is still an unresolved issue?”

“I believe that Jesus was a man, and had a family. The concept of a divine Jesus does not make sense to me.”

“Remember the last pages, a dream sequence actually, of Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation, where Jesus on the cross dreams of his married life with Mary.”

“I don’t think the idea was as controversial as it was made out to be. In Christianity, the Resurrection is absolutely critical to the Church’s power, to the promise of life after death. One of the great challenges that Christianity, or any religion for that matter, faces is the tendency to read metaphorical scriptures as history.”

“So many shadowy, but utterly fascinating, organisations in your books. How do you strike a balance between fact and fiction?”

“I write novels with fictional characters who carry out fictional action in a factual landscape. For instance, the Transhumanists—H Plus—meet regularly at Harvard.”

“The big mystery in your books comes to an end with a contemporary note. In the latest, it’s about controlling evolution.”

“I don’t read much fiction. I’m fascinated with the here and now. I would never write a novel which has nothing to do with the real world. Genetic engineering, the divinity of Christ, technology of the future… I find such ideas interesting.”

“So you mostly read…”

“History, religion, philosophy, art…”

“Robert Langdon is a type. How did he happen?”

“He is an amalgamation of many people I respect. I want my hero to think his way out of a situation.”

“Why have you made him so emotionally dry, so boring?”

Brown laughs, as if I had made a personal remark, only to justify: “He is someone who is clinical in his approach to the world. There’s no room for emotional drama in his life.”

“You travel through the darker, hidden alleys of religion. Is this out of disagreement, or scepticism?”

1 december 2014

dan brown

“The dogmatic religion does not sit well with me. My mother encouraged me to question religion; and my father was a mathematician. So there were both religion and science in my family. I believe that the Bible is a collection of stories heavily edited to create a certain picture which is not totally accurate.”

“And you love secret passages.”

“Yes, an absolute fascination. The house me and my wife built in Boston has five or six secret passages, which others can’t see.

There are mysterious book shelves and spinning paintings. I like everything that is hidden. I like secrets.”

“You are worried when they make fun of your style?”

“Some people may not share my taste and their job is to criticise me. That’s okay. I will be worried if my fans say they don’t like my book.”

Fans are happy, and so is Brown. Still, I couldn’t believe it when he told me that he couldn’t remember whether he read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the brainiest of metaphysical thrillers with a big religious secret, featuring a semiologist as a detective.

Did Jesus ever laugh? That was an incendiary question from the last pages of The Rose. Dan Brown is Eco without the metaphysics.

And in his pages, you may not hear the laughter of Jesus but the giggles of his descendent, and it is a pity that the code-breaking professor cannot read that lovely lady with the rarest pedigree who helped him crack the Holy Grail. Even Indiana Jones could be romantic. Try to be not so boring next time, Mr Brown. n open www.openthemagazine.com 9

ishan tankha

terror

A Despatch from

the last farce

the maoist heartland

M

eeting Deva, the Maoist commander of Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region, India’s most militarised zone after Kashmir, is an anti-climax, especially after a long and uneasy wait in the darkness. The man hasn’t heard of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Neither is he aware of the pro-capitalist changes that have buffeted Chairman Mao’s China.

Sitting on a tarpaulin spread inside an unwalled shack in some forlorn hilly outpost in Dantewada, anticipating this ‘top Maoist’s arrival is not particularly exciting when accompanied by a fear-inducing buzz of malarial mosquitoes, which, it is said in a lighter vein, kill more Maoists than Indian security forces do. And you cannot really see where you are going to sit and wait because the teen sentries have stopped lighting their torches after guiding you to a halt. The other option, more viable for your city-dwelling back, is to stand and lean onto one of the three wooden poles that hold the roof of hay, and watch the glow-worms and stars.

But the high point of the day is that Soni Sori, the teacher-turned social activist, darling of civil society members and an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate in the last General Election, is there too, chatting away with her nephew, Lingam Kodopi, an energetic and muscular Tribal activist given to frequent guffaws. In the run-up to the polls, Sori had said that, “I am not a Maoist, but an Adivasi from Bastar.” But she is there to meet the Maoist commander to seek his blessings and direction to launch a new organisation, likely to be called ‘Sanyuqt Prajatantra Manch’ (roughly, ‘joint democratic platform’). She had her team prepare a set of logos for the new outfit: one of them has a picture of Pravin Chand Bhanjdeo, the late Bastar king who campaigned for equal rights for Tribals. The Maoist leader can handpick one of the logos for them.

With Sori and Kodopi, we had already spent close to nine hours together at four different locations, waiting for word on the place and time of the meeting with the ‘commander’. “You will be meeting a very senior guy,” a point person for the Maoists who is popular among journalists had told us as early as 7 am. A conversationalist, he announced immediately that the BBC had been there recently, and that a “German TV channel” was there a few days earlier to meet a senior member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). Since its formation in 2004 with the merger of the People’s War Group (PWG) and Maoist Communist Centre (MCC), the CPI (Maoist) has eliminated more than 6,000 civilians and security forces across the Red Corridor, a vast belt of India’s east controlled by armed Maoist cadres, and especially in Bastar, the epicentre of the insurgency where the newly elected Narendra Modi Government has sent additional troops to check left-wing extremism.

By Ullekh NP

Maoists in the interiors of Dandakaranya

ishan tankha

1 december 2014

Soni Sori (centre) being taken to the Delhi High Court

raul irani

This person, who proudly declared that he worships the activist-author Arundhati Roy for her pro-Maoist stance, asked us to wait until 9 am before we set off for the meeting. While Roy, in an article published in 2010 in Outlook magazine, had made clear her sympathy for Maoists in their fight against exploitation by corporates, contractors, the police and politicians, she had commended them for being more Gandhian than Gandhians themselves in their consumption patterns and lifestyle.

Others who have earned their respect include those who cheered the Supreme Court-imposed ban in 2011 on the Salwa Judum, a state-sponsored militia propped up by security forces to combat Maoists in Chhattisgarh.

The Salwa Judum was meant to be an answer to the idea of khatam—or annihilation of ‘class enemies’—first proposed by Charu Mazumdar in 1967, notes a state government official. “But it was a botched-up effort. The government armed villages that wanted to wean themselves away from Maoism. But mostly, they gave away arms and ammunition to untrained young men who used those weapons to settle personal scores and indulge in anti-social activities or go on a drunken spree of rape. It was destined to be counter-productive,” he says.

Maoists got a major morale boost with the ban imposed on the militia. Swept under the carpet were the brutal massacres by Maoists of villagers who had taken refuge under Salwa Judum forces. In some cases, there were public executions of Salwa Judum supporters. Other forms of gross repression have been recorded as well.

Former Maoists say many people were publicly beaten to 1 december 2014

death for their misplaced loyalties. All this does not seem to bother intellectuals sympathetic to them. Like the protagonist in Neel Mukherjee’s book The Life of Others, shortlisted this year for the Man Booker award, wellmeaning urban students, inspired by successful armed rebellions elsewhere in the world, gave a bohemian boost to the Maoist cause in the late 60s and early 70s, and it was all very fashionable in certain Soni Sori met Maoist charmed circles to support the poor Maoist. They had been commander Deva to shortchanged, after all, by a seek his blessings middle-class led India. and direction to The poor Maoist of the ‘Che Guevara’ vintage has changed, launch a new tribal however. But the sympathy outfit, likely to be nonetheless persists. called Sanyuqt We wait until 11 am, when Sori and Kodopi arrive at our Prajatantra Manch first location, vowing to fasttrack the meeting with the ‘top Maoist guy’. Then they go on to tell stories of police atrocities on them and other Tribals.

They say they were framed by the police for opposing corporate greed and for standing up for the rights of Tribals in the mineral-rich state, which accounts for 15 per cent of the country’s steel output, and yet stands lowest of all states on human development indicators. In September 2011, Sori and Kodopi were chased by the police while they were allegedly trying to collect a bribe of Rs 15 lakh from a open www.openthemagazine.com 13

Women carrying water in the Bastar region travel well armed

contractor at a steel-mining facility run by the Essar Group at the behest of Maoists. While Kodopi was caught at the Palnar weekly market in Dantewada, Sori escaped. “They do all kinds of unimaginable torture in police stations.

They target your genitals. They strip you of your dignity and often try to destroy you physically as well as mentally,” Kodopi tells us, emphasising that Tribals are denied any kind of rights, facilitating the growth of Maoism in the state and elsewhere in the so-called Red Corridor, home to a large number of Tribals in the country. Apart from the Northeast, Chhattisgarh has the largest proportion of Tribals among Indian states. Despite being rich in natural resources such as iron ore and aluminium, the region that falls inside the Maoist corridor,comprising parts of Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, continues to languish in poverty.

Without doubt, Maoism was a political response to gross exploitation of natural resources by corporates and manipulation of Tribals by unscrupulous contractors. But it has, over the years, become almost an organised crime syndicate, and corporates and contractors find themselves paying protection money in order to run their businesses in peace. WikiLeaks posted a diplomatic cable dated 11 January 2010 that claimed that ‘a senior representative from Essar, a major industrial company with large mining and steel-related facilities in Chhattisgarh, told Congenoff (Consul General Office) that the company pays the Maoists significant amounts not to harm or interfere with their operations.’ The police had also arrested many 14 open

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corporate officials for paying bribes to Maoists. Several companies, the Tata Group among them, had come under the police scanner for allegedly offering bribes to extremist groups so that their business operations are not hurt.

Then, Sori makes a statement that borders on the farcical: I am no Maoist sympathiser. She also vows that she had nothing to do with collecting protection money from corporates. In 2011, after Kodopi’s arrest and that of an Essar official, Sori fled to Delhi where she was arrested by the Crime Branch of the Delhi Police on 4 October on charges of ‘acting as a conduit for Maoists’. Despite her pleas that she feared for her life, a court transferred her to the Chhattisgarh Police, which held her in her homedistrict Dantewada, where she alleged she was sexually assaulted and tortured for days. Sori accused the thendistrict police Superintendent Ankit Garg of stripping her and asking policemen to sexually harass her.

Support from Activists During the period she was in custody, Left-liberal activists raised a storm, and a group of intellectuals, including the likes of Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Aruna Roy, Jean Dreze, Meena Kandasamy and Anand Patwardhan, wrote to the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressing concern about the condition of Sori, who had since 11 October gone on a fast to protest her ‘framing’ in the payoffs case. Within the next two years, most charges against her were dropped for lack of evidence. There was similar outcry when the Chhattisgarh-based paediatrician and public-health activist Dr Binayak Sen was arrested for 1 december 2014

pro-Maoist activities.

“If Maoists were not here, the government here would have sold off the entire region to corporates,” Sori now tells us, as we wait for ‘the call’. When I ask her about the new strategy that the Maoists may be devising in the face of the increasing presence of forces in the Red Corridor, especially in Bastar, she signals to Kodopi to field that question. “Until the last man is dead, there will be revolution,” he starts off, pointing out that strategies will have to be redrafted from scratch whenever there is a setback. The particular setback he is referring to is that of Maoists surrendering to the police in droves. While Sori says that most of these ‘surrenders’ were staged by the police by paying “ordinary villagers”, Kodopi admits that if a senior leader gives himself up to the police, it is only natural that the cops would uncover numerous Maoists plans to keep them at bay. “And that means it takes a while before new strategies are adopted,” he notes, but hastens to add that he is no Maoist. “If [the police] see us here in the forest, they will bump us off. They are just waiting for an opportunity,” pitches in Sori, who contested the Bastar seat for the Lok Sabha polls on an AAP ticket but lost to Dinesh Kashyap of the BJP. Intellectual Dilemma Bibhu Prasad Routray, an expert on leftwing extremism in the country, dwells on reasons why left-leaning liberals tend to endorse the violent ways of Maoists.

“The way I see it is that there is no black and white scenario anywhere. Like those who join the ranks of Maoists, the intellectuals who back them also do it for different reasons,” he notes, adding that organisations such as the Taliban exhibit similar traits. “Different people have different motives. In the case of people like Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal and other founders of the movement, ideology was the driving force,” he says, suggesting that ‘quality’ restrictions were imposed on initial ‘hires’. In later stages—at a time when they faced recruitment difficulties, as Maoists face now— teens could walk in with the intention of holding a gun, or target rivals, to loot, or for any other flimsy reason, says Routray, who has served as a deputy director in India’s National Security Council Secretariat.

Similarly, intellectual classes sympathise because some of them see Maoism as a check against Western capitalist intentions. These mostly urban educated voices end up condoning the illegal actions of Maoists in the belief that they can stop the ‘onslaught of capitalism’ or contain the sway that MNCs might end up enjoying in mineral-rich areas of the country.

As regards Sori, Routray feels that she, born into a Tribal family in Dantewada, would naturally find it difficult to 1 december 2014

distinguish between Maoists and the State. In at least 75 districts in the country, including south Bastar, Maoists call the shots, and wield tremendous influence in 105 other districts. “She has ended up being a pawn in the hands of Maoists and Left-liberals. It is a tragedy,” Routray says.

S

ori gestures to a villager, a Maoist sympathiser, to

make a quick enquiry about lunch and the proposed meeting. Soon, she is gone, riding pillion on Kodopi’s bike, to a place where lunch is arranged.

“We will get a message soon,” assures the man meant to interact with journalists. Rice, dal and desi chicken curry are served, and we are joined by more people. Sori’s advocate, who has come from Jagdalpur and sports a Tom Selleck moustache, shakes hands warmly. We then head to another location, some 10 km away. An affable, lean and hungry-looking villager also joins us, giving directions to a place near a Sunday market where they barter local produce—vegetables, country liquor, etcetera. He goes on for hours about the police having framed him as a Maoist. But when quizzed about various leaders, he is happy to talk about them. He also

Maoist leaders dismiss as ‘fake’ the recent wave of surrenders by cadres from the lower rungs; Sori claims that these were staged by the police

admits with a chuckle that he has worked closely with senior leaders of the stature of Ramanna.

It is 2 pm when Sori and others take shelter in a shed next to a home awaiting ‘the message’, and a few of us, including the friendly villager, decide to take a walk.

“This is like what the rest of India was like in the 1930s,” exclaims a journalist-friend. Breathtakingly beautiful and green, the hamlet we were waiting in is a quiet backwater at first look, but residents have several queries while being photographed. Some of them object angrily.

Government offices in the village closed down some 10 years ago, we are told, implying that this is a place where only the Maoist writ runs. There is uneasy calm in the air.

Such criminal underdevelopment helps Maoists keep the villages under their thumb. Tribals who have broken free of poverty have often not bothered to either return to open www.openthemagazine.com 15

Its

the villages or align with the Maoists. The poor have to bear it. Evidence of this is visible across Bihar, Jharkhand and other regions where Maoists have strongholds.

“Under-development is the key to their success,” a former member of the Maoist intellectual wing tells me.

Maoists, as the Union Ministry of Home Affairs puts it, ‘...try to derive benefit from overall under-development and from sub-normal functioning of field institutions like police stations, tehsils, development blocks, schools, primary health centres and anganwadi centres... The Government’s approach, accordingly, is to deal with Maoist activities in... the arenas of security, development, administration and public perception.’

Says a senior police officer, “The so-called intellectuals seem to have focused their ire on the government and contractors alone. They have, to my mind, pretended not to see the atrocities perpetrated on Tribals by these Maoist leaders, not to mention the crores of rupees they amass through protection money, which renders them as more of a mafia than liberators conceived by leaders say that Chairman Mao.”

the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has recruited armed guerrillas in “new” states like Kerala

Myopic Slant While nobody rubbishes the lofty goals of the original Maoist movement, its founding leaders like Kanu Sanyal favoured bloodshed only as the last option. Over the years, however, especially with the expulsion of the late Kondapalli Seetharamaiah from the PWG in 1991, Routray notes, the organisation and its numerous factions remained “the source of extreme violence targeting politicians and security forces”.

Writes Routray in a paper authored this September: ‘Each transformation of the movement thereafter in terms of splits, mergers and formation of new identities escalated the ingrained proclivity to use violence as an instrument of expansion and influence. The CPI (Maoist) represented the natural progression of this trend.’

Says the former Maoist functionary: “So far, upper-class leaders from Andhra had used Tribals as cannon fodder to collect bribes, fight and die. Now there is a tilt to greater violence as Tribals wrestle their way to top positions, realising that they have been fooled for long. They happen to be much more violent and less ideologically disciplined than the founding fathers, for obvious reasons.” He hastens to add that across the Red Corridor, Maoists have become “more or less extortionists and not mere takers of protection money”. “They are not satisfied with decent payoffs. They want huge sums,” he says, claiming that the pattern is plainly visible across the bauxite-mining areas of Kalahandi in Odisha, other areas like Paradip, and in many parts of Jharkhand and Telangana. He says that the local media groups in all these areas have incurred the 16 open

photos ishan tankha

wrath of Maoists for suggesting that they are hand-inglove with corporates and politicians in looting natural resources. All of them have denied any such wrongdoing.

“People, especially Leftists from Delhi, easily get carried away by the Maoist story of sacrifice and a crusade against corporate invaders. They story on the ground is vastly different, with Maoists showing scant respect for villagers,” he says, alleging that they often raid villages and forcibly recruit teens and young women. “They use women for sexual gratification. The supply of condoms and anti-pregnancy tablets to forest camps merits an investigation,” he says. “Sexual harassment is rampant.

Women in these camps are used like sex slaves. All that ideological flourish of the movement is history.”

Sori has by now sensed our impatience with no word of the meeting from anywhere. “You have come a long way from Delhi. It will happen soon,” she says calmly. Kodopi has by now decided to stretch his legs on a charpoy and take a short nap. The advocate and the “PR guy” are busy with Sori drafting the new Tribal forum to fight injustice.

Many hours and motorbike surveys by Maoist volunteers later, we are told that the meeting is going to happen in “10 minutes”. In a place where time seems to have stopped ticking long ago, it stretches to one-anda-half hours before we set off through tortuous and muddy roads for the destination. It is dark, and the only light is that of the six motorbikes along the trail, carrying us three journalists, Sori and others. We have to alight from our bikes twice and wade through water before we make it to a spot from where we are escorted by the teen recruits to an isolated location in a dusty village.

We are expecting Ganesh Uike, secretary of the South Regional Committee (SRC) of the CPI (Maoist), and perhaps the most powerful man in the organisation after 1 december 2014

(Facing page) In Bastar, even ordinary utensils like plates carry ideological markings; (Above) A rebel fills water at a riverbank in Dandakaranya

Ganapathy. He is a controversial figure, with some Maoists suggesting that he gave the police tip-offs that led to the killing of Maoist spokesperson Azad in July 2010 under odd circumstances. In the words of the former Maoist, “The civil rights groups refuse to believe that perhaps some Maoists colluded with the police to finish off Azad, who was opposed to misuse of funds and collection of hefty protection money.” For its part, the CBI has maintained that Cherukuri Rajkumar aka Azad and journalist Hemchandra Pandey were killed in a genuine encounter.

A

fter a long wait, the ‘Gandhians with guns’ (as a

magazine blurb once called them) appear in uniform, shaking hands and warning against taking pictures. One of them is a young girl. They have AK-47 rifles and walkietalkies. It emerges within minutes that Deva, whom the National Investigation Agency has named as the one who killed Congress leader Nand Kumar Patel and his son, is our host of honour since Ganesh has been hospitalised in Andhra Pradesh for complications that arose from his diabetes. Or so goes the story. The criminal-commander has an hour-long conversation with Sori, Kodopi and others. Then we are called in.

Modi is class enemy, he says. “He is travelling the world to acquire support to take on Maoists,” he says in halting Hindi with absolute conviction.

“Are you scared?” I ask.

His face turns red with anger. “Me, afraid? What happened in Darbha Valley in Sukuma district [where 27 Congress leaders, including Salwa Judum founder Mahendra Karma, were ambushed and killed in 2013]?

We cannot be stopped by the whole strength of the armed forces of the whole world,” says Deva, his muscular

1 december 2014

posturing at odds with his ample tummy.

“Even the great apostle of armed struggle, Fidel Castro of Cuba has said that armed struggle and guerrilla warfare have lost their sting. What do you think?”

“Who?” “Fidel Castro.”

“Who is that?” he asks, leaning towards the ‘PR guy’, who informs him that Castro is a Cuban revolutionary.

“Kooba? Kooba? No. Let’s talk about India.”

“What do you think of changes in Chairman Mao’s own country?”

“I told you, let’s focus on Bastar.”

“Are you preparing for attacks in states like Kerala?”

“Yes, we have armed guerrillas there. We are picking up in strength. What you have to remember is that power flows only through the barrel of the gun. We are convinced and we will keep fighting till the last man,” he says, his voice rising to a rage.

Deva loudly demands that all cameras be turned off.

The weather is awesome, but the mood is rotten, and the interview is soon over, and we hear him muttering, “These crazy journalists and their questions.”

It is past 10 pm and we have a long drive back to Jagdalpur.

While we are leaving, Deva gets into a huddle, yet again, with Sori and Kodopi.

“It was a disappointment,” I tell my journalist-friend.

He nods. “But we see that Sori has a lot to share with him.

That is not bad,” he says and I agree.

The fire at our makeshift camp sways violently in the snake-infested terrain. We are left feeling that the Maoist leadership has fallen into the hands of petty thugs and reckless criminals, rendering Left-liberal pro-Maoist postures a joke. The romance of the revolution just went up in smoke. n open www.openthemagazine.com 17

ECONOMY

Rising from the Ashes, Slowly The three ‘shocks’ that are transforming India. But don’t expect miracles

by SAJJID Z CHINOY

W

hat a difference 18 months can make. Last May, India was the poster child of emerging market vulnerability. The current account deficit had reached an unsustainable 5 per cent of GDP, gold imports were surging as households—faced with negative real rates of return on financial assets—had moved to gold and physical assets, the current account was increasingly being financed by ‘hot money’ portfolio inflows, retail inflation was stuck close to doubledigits, and the Rupee increasingly seemed overvalued. An accident was waiting to happen.

And it didn’t take long. At the first signs that the US Federal Reserve was going to ‘taper’ its asset purchases—the beginning of the end of easy money in the US—capital flows into emerging markets began to reduce, exposing India’s vulnerabilities.

This was manifested most clearly in the manner the rupee came under severe pressure—depreciating 30 per cent peak-to-trough between May and August—and easily becoming among the worst-performing emerging market currencies.

But all that just seems like a bad dream at the moment. Fast forward to today, and India has transitioned from a sinner to a saint. Foreign investors cannot get enough of India. Almost $40 billion dollars of foreign portfolio flows have come into India since the start of 2014, and the rupee is now the best performing emerging market currency this year!

What changed? The transformation of India’s prospects over the past year has its genesis in three ‘shocks’ that India has been subject to: first, the macroeconomic adjustment that actually began with the fiscal consolidation in September 2012 and included a complete overhaul of the monetary policy regime by the RBI in January 2014; second, a historic election result that delivered greater-than-expected political stability and a new government that appears fixated on growth, development and reforms; and, third, the plunge in global oil prices over the last three months that has a large and positive impact on commodity importers such as India.

But let’s start with September 2012, which was a key inflection point in India’s recent economic history. The Central Government’s fiscal deficit had surged to almost 6 per cent of GDP the previous year, retrospective taxation in the Budget earlier in the year had vitiated investor sentiment, and 18 open

implementation bottlenecks (land, coal, iron ore, environmental clearances) had become the binding constraint on investment and growth. All told, India was just a few weeks away from a sovereign ratings downgrade that would have been catastrophic for capital inflows, the currency, investor sentiment and growth.

To his credit, the new Finance Minister at the time jammed the fiscal breaks and brought a sense of sanctity to the fiscal outturn that had been missing since the crisis. The fiscal deficit in 2012-13 was reduced by a full percentage point of GDP (from 5.9 per cent to 4.9 per cent of GDP), and this was the start of a much-needed macroeconomic adjustment in India. Investors around the world finally began to take notice. This was not business as usual.

In addition, the Government at the time realised the gravity of the investment constraints and set up a Cabinet Committee on Investment to centralise decision-making and debottleneck projects on the ground. Bottlenecks are still being worked through, two years later, but these actions laid the foundations for the new Government to build on.

Despite these actions, India could not be saved from the tremors of the taper tantrum of 2013 because too many other macroeconomic vulnerabilities existed. None more pressing than the fact that retail inflation had averaged 10 per cent since the global financial crisis and the rural economy was stuck in a wage-price spiral. Unsurprisingly, inflation expectations had gotten deeply entrenched and inflation was caught in a selffulfilling spiral: expectations driving inflation, which, in turn, further reinforced expectations.

This cycle had to be broken and, therefore, the second pillar of stabilisation was put in place when the RBI decisively moved to inflation targeting in January 2014, making headline CPI inflation its target and publicly committing itself to reduce retail inflation to 6 per cent over two years. Scarred by the memory of living with double-digit inflation, markets were (unsurprisingly) sceptical that this could be achieved at all, or worried about what the growth consequences would be. But, yet, less than a year into the process, markets now believe that the 6 per cent target will be met ahead of time and the RBI will actually have space to cut rates in a few months! What changed? Tight fiscal and monetary policy has worked in tandem to push down core 1 december 2014

inflation, even as softening oil and commodity prices have lent One area where the Government has pushed hard has been a helping hand, and the Government, to its enormous credit, internal governance reforms to streamline and speed up is working hard to push down food prices—which comprise decision-making. While this may not be visible to markets, almost half of the CPI basket. Across both the old and new we believe it is crucial to India’s economic prospects. We governments, we’ve seen minimum support prices for farmers estimate that almost 45 per cent of the nearly 700 basis points only go up 3-5 per cent over the last three crop cycles, and the slowdown in GDP growth between 2010 to 2013 (peak to trough) new Government has been more active about selling rice and has been on account of implementation bottlenecks (land, wheat from its buffer stocks to contain cereals inflation. There coal, clearances, raw materials). So if the Government can is a welcome urgency about fighting food inflation in Delhi, address these through faster, smarter and better coordinated which is helping keep prices in check. And this is not surprising. decision-making, that could be its biggest contribution to Guess what the No 1 voting issue in the General Election of May India’s languishing investment cycle. and most state elections last December was? Not governance But markets need to be realistic. Any growth acceleration is or jobs or corruption, but inflation. The message was clear: likely to be modest and lagged. There are real constraints on growth—highly leveraged balance sheets in the infrastructure inflation is not just bad economics. It’s terrible politics.

The aforementioned fiscal and monetary ‘regime changes’ sector, banks laden with non-performing assets—and these will take time to play out. India will do well have been critical to India’s macroillustration by anirban ghosh to touch 6 per cent growth in 2015-16. economic prospects. Yet, perhaps the defining moment of 2014 was the May They say people—and economies?— election—and the scale of the new make their own luck. And India seems Government’s victory. While markets to have done so. And, so, the third had been pricing in increased politishock that is responsible for India’s cal stability in the run-up to the polls, attractiveness is the sharp correction nobody quite expected what transpired in global commodity prices. The global on 16 May. price of crude oil, which is India’s single largest item of import, has collapsed from $115 to less than $80 o how does one assess the per barrel over the last few months. If Government’s first six months in sustained, this serves as a massive, office? Those who were expecting ‘big positive terms-of-trade shock for India. bang’ reforms have been disappointed.

It will help the current account, the But this was always an unrealistic fiscal deficit, inflation, push down expectation. The politics of economic input costs and allow firms to reforms necessitates moving in small normalise margins (good for investincrements to spread out the adjustment) without raising output prices ment costs and make reforms more (good for core inflation). politically palatable. Think about the All told, India has been on a rollersuccess of diesel-price reform versus coaster ride over the last 18 months the failure of FDI in multi-brand retail. In the case of the former, and gone from the prodigal son to the favoured child in the policymakers moved in such small increments—1 per cent emerging market universe—helped by a macroeconomic a month—that it did not invite any opposition, and yet, over adjustment that was started by the previous Government and time, added up to a lot. Over 18 months, 80 per cent of the diesel carried on by the new one, the thrust on infrastructure reforms, under-recovery was wiped out, and when oil prices underwent a albeit incremental, by the Modi Government, and pure luck correction, the new Government was quick to seize the moment on global commodity prices. and deregulate diesel. Now compare this to FDI in multi-brand But it is critical that the economy does not rest on its retail—a big-bang announcement that become a rallying point laurels or indulge in self-congratulatory behaviour. The for vested interests to coalesce and shoot it down. capital expenditure cycle is still languishing, challenges abound It’s no wonder then that the new Government is moving in on the ground, and the slow and modest growth recovery small increments: inducing states to gradually liberalise labour could disappoint markets in the coming months. Therefore, laws, re-auctioning coal-mines and hopefully setting up a frame- the new Government needs to press on the reforms pedal with work for commercial coal mining, announcing its desire to make continued vigour and enterprise, and all indications are that it easier to acquire land, increasing gas prices (though by less than it is preparing to do so. Reforms must be some has expected), getting closer to an agreement on the protaken to their logical conclusion and we can’t posed Goods and Services Tax (GST), and gradually introducing afford to go back. Because the memory and cash transfers. By itself, none of these has been a game-changing, pain of last summer is still too raw. n big-bang announcement of reform. But together, taken to their logical conclusion, they could have a very meaningful and posiSajjid Z Chinoy is Chief India Economist at JP Morgan. All views are personal tive impact on the structure of the economy in the medium-term.

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1 december 2014

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crime

Anatomy of a Medical Butchery

It was the kind of horror that could have happened only in a place where life is cheap and Chhattisgarh, where fifteen women died after attending mass sterilisation camps and more

I

t is five in the evening, and she is waiting for the evening tea to arrive. It has been

three days since her daughter Leelabai was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the Chhattisgarh Institute of Medical Sciences (CIMS), in Bilaspur, and 50-year-old Harkubai is tired. She is tired of waiting in a makeshift camp in the common passageway of the hospital, now weary of the nagging fear that looms over the camp. “What if they call out Leela’s name next?” she snaps. “Three girls have already died,” she says anxiously, almost crushing an empty plastic bottle that she has been holding for the past half hour. She found it near the hospital canteen in the dustbin, lying on top of a garbage pile, and rinsed it with tap water, she says.

As the tea arrives, hot and steaming in two steel decanters, Harkubai dashes off to the counter to be the first in line for it. As she emerges triumphant from the crowd gathered around, she still has the 1-litre soft drink bottle. It now contains some warm milk, seemingly diluted with water. She makes her way through the crowd and finds a three-month old baby wailing away in a pink cradle. She takes the baby in her lap, fills the bottle cap with a few drops of milk and feeds Muskaan, her daughter’s third child.“This the only way to keep the baby quiet,” she adds.

This makeshift camp at CIMS is home to about 20 toddlers and their relatives, as their mothers struggle to survive the tubectomies carried out. Most toddlers are under six months old, being looked after by aunts, grandmothers or hapless fathers learning to tend to their children in the mother’s absence.

As the crowd settles, one realises that most of the attendants sitting in the passageway were actually waiting for milk to arrive. Each person is allowed about a ladle of warm milk, “only for the babies”, as a staff member announces. The tea in the other decanter is meant for the adults. The passageway is dotted with pink and blue plastic cradles, provided by the hospital authorities just the day before for toddlers whose mothers are among the 138 women recuperating in three hospitals—a private one included—from a round of botched sterilisation camps organised in the district on 8 November.

Harkubai too had accompanied her daughter to one of the four birth-control camps held that day. She had taken an hour’s auto ride from village Sakri with the daughter who decided to have a laparoscopic tubectomy done after having Muskaan. The surgery was done at a camp near a foodgrain godown in Takhatpur. She was given a cash incentive of Rs 600 by the government for her participation, and a few strips of tablets for pain relief and to limit infection as part of post-operative care. Of the incentive, Rs 100 was spent on the auto fare, Harkubai clarifies. Leela started vomiting after the third dose of an oblong white tablet, which has now been identified as ciprofloxacin 500, a broad-spectrum antibiotic often given to patients recovering from surgery. Next, before Harkubai knew, an ambulance came rushing during the wee hours of 10 November. “The mitanin (health

easily disposable. AANCHAL BANSAL in Bilaspur, than a hundred were taken ill, finds out what went wrong photographs by raul irani

Destroyed spurious medication not far from the site of the botched mass sterilisation operations in Chhattisgarh

worker) said there were other girls who were falling sick and needed to be taken to hospital,” she says. Leela is listed as the first patient in the ICU list that hangs by a thin nylon string outside the chamber, and is said to be ‘critical’.

As the night begins to settle, the temperature begins to dip in the dark and dingy corridor. Sita, a nurse looking after the toddlers, chides a father for not bringing sheets to keep the baby warm. “It’s getting colder and they don’t have sheets to cover their babies. We don’t want babies falling sick with pneumonia, anything can happen,” she says, rummaging through a pile of sheets brought in by the hospital staff. But the thin cotton ones they have got are not warm enough.

Ramchand, a labourer, pulls out a thick and dusty sheet he has been sitting on for hours, and puts it on his six-month-old baby. His village is about 25 km away from Bilaspur city. He is not sure of how to handle Kisna, the baby, when he cries or gets hungry. “His mother would have looked after him, but the baby has to be with me,” he says. His mother Malti, is still in a critical state on an ICU ventilator.

I

n a major medical tragedy, 15 women

have died so far, and about 138 others have taken seriously ill after attending mass sterilisation camps—four separate ones—organised on 8 November by the Chhattisgarh government in Bilaspur district. Within 24 hours of the tubectomies, conducted by doctors from government hospitals, women began reporting nausea and vomiting, and suffered sudden dips in their pulse and heart rate.

The first few deaths, two on the way to the district hospital, also happened within that span of time. As the news came in, the Department went into a tizzy, sending ambulances to all primary healthcare centres in villages and tehsils. The situation, they found, was grave. By 12 November, 13 women were reported to have died and 30 were critically ill. Over a hundred were showing other symptoms of illness—non-stop vomiting, fluctuating pulse rates and extreme dizziness.

The unravelling of what caused the tragedy is a reminder of the abysmal healthcare services in India. Suspecting negligence at the surgery level, initial police action involved the arrest on 12 22 open

Roop Chand with his children

“Once the relatives are gone, I will be alone with my three children.

The youngest is only a year old. The money should be for them, but I don’t know how long it will last” Roop Chand Widower of Phool Devi November of Dr RK Gupta, a celebrity government doctor who had won accolades for conducting 50,000 tubectomies in his career—a record of sorts in 2014.

But he had done 83 laparoscopic tubectomies—more than double the permissible limit as per government guidelines—in less than two hours on 8 November at one of the camps, a makeshift one in a rundown and abandoned charitable clinic, and was thought to be the culprit.

Performed under general anaesthesia,

a laparoscopic surgery involves the use of a telescope-like instrument called a laparoscope that is inserted into the body through a small incision which is made near the navel. Another surgical instrument is inserted lower down the abdomen to block the fallopian tubes.

The cuts are then closed with one stitch each and the patient is fit to leave within a few hours. The stipulated time for such a surgery is about half an hour.

The initial post-mortem reports suggested septicemia as a cause of death, which could have been due to a bacterial infection developed after surgery— or perhaps due to the use of rusted or unsterilised instruments. However, on 13 November, the state government announced that chemical analysis of samples from the victims suggested spurious medication. Mitanins were sent to villages and homes of victims to take away the medicines given to them after the surgery.

It was later found that the white oblong 1 december 2014

Bahoreek Kevant, widower of Shivkumari, one of the first victims of the tragedy

tablets, thought to be a commonly used antibiotic, may have been the culprit.

The manufacturer of the medicines was Mahavar Pharmaceuticals, a Raipurbased drug maker. Its executives were arrested, their offices raided. All tablets of that particular batch were confiscated by the government. However, the following day, the health secretary of the state made another shocking revelation. Samples of the collected medicines contained traces of zinc phosphide, commonly used as rat poison. The symptoms displayed by patients were consistent with those of being poisoned by this chemical.

The drug analysis departments of the state and Centre are yet to submit their final investigation reports. While the Chhattisgarh government is in the process of probing the tragedy, the death of a 70-year-old man on 14 November added yet another dimension. Mahavir Suryavanshi of Ganiyari village—which witnessed the death of a local woman 1 december 2014

who attended a camp on 8 November— had died with similar symptoms. He was believed to have visited Dr DC Jain, a retired government ayurvedic doctor in the village. With district hospitals too far away from this cluster of villages, Dr Jain had many villagers in the district as his clients. Suryavanshi, it turned out, had taken the same white oblong tablet made

by Mahavar. As panicky villagers rushed to CIMS with samples of the same tablets prescribed by doctors, the government raided Dr Jain’s clinic on 14 November and recovered samples of medicines manufactured by the company. Dr Jain, 77, is still on the run, and according to Sonmoni Borah, Divisional Commissioner of Bilaspur, “Nothing can be confirmed till the drug analysis reports come in.”

A

s the nurse comes with a syringe

to draw some blood, 23-year-old Shagun screams in panic. The wife of a

driver in Bilaspur city, and a mother of two, Shagun is from Pindari. Lying on a bed in the general ward at CIMS, she refuses to let the nurse draw a blood sample for a routine test. Her five-month-old daughter, in her grandmother’s arms, begins to howl too. “What if it is a used syringe? They are saying that we fell sick because of the instruments used in the operation,” she says, bursting into tears.

Like most of the victims, Shagun too had a bout of vomiting within 24 hours of her tubectomy. She, however, recovered quickly. As she pulls down her salwar to show the incision, covered by a taped rectangular swab of cotton and a bandage, she recalls regaining consciousness before the surgeon had finished the sutures. “I was slapped by the doctor as I was moving too much,” she says, and then surrenders, letting the nurse prick her with the needle on the reassurance that it’s a fresh needle. Shagun remembers lying on the floor, on a gadda, with two open www.openthemagazine.com 23

Patients of the botched surgeries recuperate at a ward in Chhattisgarh Institute of Medical Sciences

other women on either side. “We arrived at the camp at 1 pm, the doctor arrived at 4 pm, and by 6.30 pm, I was on my way back home,” she says. Her mother, Parwati, who accompanied her to the camp, adds that most women were lying on the floor during the surgeries. And like Shagun, many regained consciousness while the doctor was still doing the procedure.

According to Kerry McBroom, director of the reproductive rights arm of Human Rights Law Network based in Delhi, this is typical of such camps. As part of a factfinding team that visited the victims of Bilaspur, McBroom says that most women she spoke to remembered receiving five injections, with at least five of them made to sit on one bed. “They remember being stitched up on the floor and absolutely none of them know about the consent form that is mandatory to be signed by the patient before the surgery,” she says. None of the victims or families of the deceased was given a sterilisation certificate—also mandatory.

The sterilisation programme depends heavily on cash incentives offered to women who volunteer to get themselves sterilised and on Accredited Social Health Activists, community health workers popularly known as ASHA workers or mitanins (‘friends of the village’) in Chhattisgarh. These workers are volunteers from within the community who act as mediators between citizens and the state’s primary healthcare system.

Mitanins too are given cash incentives for drawing volunteers to the camps. Most women who attended these camps were women who visited vaccination camps held by the state. According to Meena Suryavanshi, a mitanin in Ganiyari, a meeting was held after Diwali and mitanins were asked to bring volunteers 24 open

for the camp. “We started asking young mothers to volunteer and spread the word,” she says. The selection criterion would involve mothers with two or three children—at least one being a boy. “This happens every few months, but women never fell sick. People have now lost their trust in me,” she says helplessly.

Veda Bai, a 70-year-old midwife associated with the district primary healthcare centre in Amsena, a village 25 km away from Bilaspur, is still in shock. She had taken her youngest granddaughter Rekha for the surgery, but ended up losing her on 12 November. As Rekha’s four-month-old son struggles to digest powdered milk bought by his uncle from a market 7 km away, Veda Bai says her elder granddaughter Nandini now refuses to undergo a tubectomy. “It would be a good thing for her, she has already had three children, but how do I explain to her now? No one will trust me,” she says, wiping tears.

Recalling the night of 10 November, when Rekha started vomiting, Veda Bai speaks of her panic when she realised there weren’t enough glucose bottles in the primary health centre barely 50 metres away from her house. “There were two other girls who needed drips too. Fortunately, the ambulance came at around 3 am and took all three of them,” she says. Two of them died, Rekha and Phool Devi; and 28-year-old Shitla Devi’s condition is still critical.

Apart from the way sterilisation camps are held in India, the Bilaspur tragedy has exposed gross irregularities in the way drugs and medicines are made and distributed in rural areas. According to a statement made in 2012 by Amar Aggarwal, the state health minister who happens to be an MP from Bilaspur, Mahawar Pharmaceuticals was found

guilty of manufacturing faulty medicines in 2011 and was issued ‘show cause’ notices for the same. 13 of the 17 samples were found faulty. While the firm kept making medicines at its plants in Bilaspur and Raipur, and even received a ‘Good Manufacturing Practices’ certificate in 2013, the outrage evoked by this case has brought it firmly under the scanner.

Witnesses to the raid on Mahawar’s units claim that these plants were not properly functional and that its record books were riddled with irregularities. A press statement by the company alleges that claims of rat poison in the tablets are being made solely on the basis of a sticky pad, meant to trap rats, that was found in its laboratory during the raid. The role of the local district procurement agency, which procured the medicines especially for the camps, is also likely to be examined closely; there are signs of clandestine attempts to destroy samples, pointing to irregularities in procurement. That medicines from the same manufacturing batch landed in Dr Jain’s clinic, who is believed to have bought these medicines from government sources, only highlights the problems further.

A

s the dust around the village settles, following a flying visit by Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on 15 November, memories of Phool Devi’s death already seem to be fading. As residents of Amsena throng the village chaupal, first to catch a glimpse of the celebrated politician who was in the village to both point fingers at the state government and demand a probe, and later to watch a fellow villager bring a brand new truck into the village, her husband Roop Chand is already thinking of going back to work. A barber in the village, he claims that he has spent about Rs 40,000 on the last rites of his wife.

“We will now make a trip to Allahabad,” he says, adding that the expenses will be borne partly by the Rs 2 lakh compensation offered by the government for his wife’s death. “Once the relatives are gone, I will be alone with my three children,” he says dolefully. “The youngest is only a year old. The money should be for them, but I don’t know how long it will last.” n 1 december 2014

stake out

THE ROGUE GODMAN OF HISAR Jaipal Singh/Express archive

The high voltage drama at Barwala town ended with Rampal’s arrest and crowds of dismayed followers

by Kumar Anshuman

Rampal being escorted to a police van after his arrest and a medical examination in the wee hours of 20 November

H

e called himself Jagat Guru and an incarnation of Kabir, and in discourses to followers, said that to reap the benefits of true bhakti, they must have faith, patience and follow rules. When it came to saving his own skin, those words went out of the saintly window. Sant Rampal, as his followers call him, is yet another godman who decided that he was only beholden to himself, and that his followers were merely a sacrifice towards that end. The

1 december 2014

11-day standoff between the Haryana Police and Rampal, at the fortress-like Satlok Ashram situated on the outskirts of Barwala town in Hisar district, ended with his surrender at 9.15 pm on 19 November. A day before his arrest, however, a massive showdown took place between the Haryana police and Rampal’s private army, called Baba’s Commandos. They fired bullets, threw petrol bombs and even hurled acid pouches at the police who had arrived to

arrest their guru. The tragedy is that six people lost their lives in the face-off— including five women and one infant— before Rampal gave himself up.

W

e reach Barwala at midnight

on 18 November to find a deserted town. The silence of the dark is only broken by the sirens of police vans roaming this small city just 200 km from Delhi. Checkposts stop every open www.openthemagazine.com 25

vehicle, only allowing them past after the occupants are thoroughly frisked.

As we near the Ashram, the signs of the desperate war called by the godman become readily apparent. On both sides of the road are hundreds of vehicles, all destroyed or damaged; luxury SUVs, media OB Vans, small cars, buses, all of them mere shells of themselves. About 700 metres from the Ashram, the police have blocked the highway going to Chandigarh and Ambala. These barriers are pulled aside only for police vehicles to enter or leave the Ashram.

Ram Chander Panchal, who runs an ironworks shop in Sonepat, is waiting a hundred metres away from the barricade.

His wife Kavita, daughter Sapna, and his son-in-law had arrived four days ago to participate in a Satsang. Panchal has no news of them. After watching what happened here on TV, he had left for Barwala in the evening. “My family follows Sant Rampal. They regularly come here,” he says. “We call him God but no God would use his followers to protect himself.” He checks every bus that emerges from the Ashram, asking for news of his family.

The police are relentlessly flushing people out of the Ashram. “There are more than 10,000 inside. We are trying to ensure they safely return to their homes,” says a police officer involved in the operation. At 2 am this night, Barwala Railway Station is swarming. There is no train until 5 in the morning, and families with children and elderly folk sit huddled together. Every ten minutes, another police-escorted bus arrives and a hundred more descend from it. A police constable stands at the gate and releases them one by one while video capturing it on his mobile phone. “Every person is being searched before taking the bus,” he says. As soon as the bus stops, people run towards it in the hope of finding family members.

“Is Akhilesh in the bus?” shouts Guddi, a mother with three children who had come to the Ashram four days ago from Delhi, along with her husband Akhilesh and their children. While they were boarding a bus, the police took Akhilesh away. “He called me half an hour ago to say that he has been taken to the police station. His cellphone was switched off after that. Where would I go without him with my kids?” she asks. Since the police 26 open

photos SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP/Getty Images

had not been able to enter the Ashram, they were interrogating young people about the situation inside.

“We were requesting Baba’s men to let us go, but they threatened us, ‘If you go outside, police will kill you’. They locked all of us in,” says Kunam Chand, a farmer from Churu, Rajasthan, who had come with his wife, one-and-a-half-year old son, elder mother and sisters. “Some people were throwing stones outside. Some even asked me to join them. I told them, ‘Even if I die, I will go out,’ and came towards the gate.” The police rescued them.

Some of them are angry with the

Rampal, using a wide support base that extends to nearby states, held law-and-order in Haryana to ransom for half a month

police, like 36-year-old Priya Lamba from Jammu. “I am yet to figure out what heinous crime our guru has done that the government is torturing us. I was very ill and not able to sleep properly for the last five years,” she says. “Ever since I visited the Ashram in July, with his blessings, I can properly sleep now. He is God to me.”

Within half an hour, the small station runs out of space. Ram Murti, the subinspector in charge of the Government Railway Police at Barwala, has to call the Railway SP and IG of Police to divert the vehicles to the nearby Jind and Hisar railway stations. Interestingly, no one who comes out of the Ashram can confirm having seen Rampal inside.

“It was only his VCDs playing on large screens. We did not see him,” says Kunam Chand. But the cops are sure Rampal is still holed up inside.

At the end, the police recovered six dead bodies from the Ashram: five women and one child. “All this has happened because of one person who hardly cares about the life of any other person. He will be dealt with in the strongest possible way,” said SN Vashisht Haryana’s Director General of Police S N Vashisht 1 december 2014

Trouble began in July 2006 when Rampal made derogatory remarks about Swami Dayanand Saraswati. A clash between their followers resulted in one death

I

t took 15 years for Rampal to reach a level where, using a wide support base that extends to nearby states, he could hold law-and-order in Haryana to ransom for half a month. A junior engineer in the state government, he was born to a family of farmers in Thanana village, Sonepat. There is no clarity on whether he resigned, as he claims, or was dismissed because of carelessness in work. But while in government service, he came in touch with one Swami Ramdevanand and became his disciple. He started giving religious discourses on his own, and by 1999 had become famous enough to start his own ashram in Rohtak. His fame grew in several districts of Haryana. His discourses were mainly the writings of Kabir, the 15th century poet whose reincarnation he claimed to be.

His present troubles began in July 2006 when he made derogatory remarks about Swami Dayanand Saraswati of the Arya Samaj. A clash between his supporters and Arya Samaj followers resulted in one death. He was booked for murder with 24 others and arrested. After being released on bail, he shifted his base from Rohtak to Barwala in Hisar. The

1 december 2014

(Above) Police keep watch as followers of Rampal leave the Ashram on 20 November; (Right) Buses ferry those leaving the Ashram for railway stations

12-acre ashram has been his fort since then. In April 2008, the Punjab and Haryana High Court granted him an exemption from making an appearance at the Rohtak court, allowing him to depose before it via video conferencing from the Hisar court in July this year.

His supporters nonetheless created a ruckus, and after both the Hisar and Rohtak courts took the matter to the High Court, contempt proceedings were initiated against Rampal and his close aide Ram Kanwar. Despite 42 court orders, the two did not bother to answer summons. On 5 November, the court issued a non-bailable warrant against him. His lawyer claimed that he was unwell but it didn’t stop the court reissuing the warrant twice—on 10 and 17 November.

While Rampal enjoys great support in Haryana and other states, he has few

followers among locals in Barwala. “You won’t find any local person visiting his Ashram,” says Nek Chand, a tea stall owner. “They all come from nearby states. We don’t consider him a saint.” On 18 November, when the clash took place, a meeting of 15 villages around Barwala town had ended with a decision to support the police. The night he was arrested, locals celebrated, with people dancing in the streets.

What Rampal leaves behind are many confused followers; some still vehement in their faith, others with profound doubt. His website says: ‘Do not criticize your Guru even by mistake, nor hear it. To hear means if someone says false things about your Guru Ji, then you do not have to fight, rather should think that he is speaking without thinking i.e. is telling a lie.’ Those taking this advice will be a lot less now. n open www.openthemagazine.com 27

sale

All That’s Fit to sell Can you think of any shop that would sell a toothpaste, or a 67-year-old newspaper, or an aircraft? The curious world of online classifieds

By Madhavankutty Pillai ‘Have colgate active plus toothpaste 200g in seal packed condition. I am moving to other country and colgate is banned there. Please get this awesome toothpaste in just 80 INR where market price is 94 INR’

Sunday and I was free and I thought let’s do this,” he says.

It is an unusual item to sell but then what happened later was even more interesting because he did get a response and a somewhat strange one at that. “One Gujaratibhai called and said that o one really sells a tube of toothpaste because they are the rate is a little high. If you reduce it a little, we will think moving out of the country and Amit Lakhra, a mechanical about it!” he says. engineer from Surat who put up this advertisement on A couple of days later he got another call asking whether the the online classifieds website OLX, in fact has no plans of doing toothpaste had been sold, but by then Lakhra had started using anything like that. The ad itself is however real; he did want to it because his medicated paste had got over and the medical sell the toothpaste. He had just bought it when two days later on shop didn’t have a new batch. Lakhra has used OLX before too, a dental visit he was told to start using a medicated paste. Lakhra but that was for mobile accessories. One part of him wanted to decided to put up the Colgate for sale and says he added the test the limit to which it could be used. “Thousand, five-thoumoving abroad part because he needed to “give some reason”. sand rupee things people are eager to buy. Selling something “I also knew that such a small thing might not get sold. It was a which is of a cheap price, that is a big question. I thought let’s check the extent,” he says.

In the eastern end of the country, Kolkata, Barun Deb, a wandering trader of T-shirts who picks up the clothes in the city and then goes to nearby villages to sell, has another interesting item put up for sale. The title of the listing goes: ‘The Statesman 15 August 1947 First morning newspaper’ and the text itself, ‘Pages 1,00 0 of newspaper very good, side of peop , 5,000 r upee le ar pages no fracture. Paper is good e Sellin th condition. First page and opposite g som eager to ings is of buy. ethin side also available last page and a is a b cheap p g which opposite side.’ The image of the ri ig qu newspaper’s masthead is alongside estio ce, that amit Lakh n and the banner headline screams ra Se ller on ‘TWO DOMINIONS ARE BORN’.

OLXt

N

illustration by anirban ghosh

Deb says the paper had always been in his home but he came across it about 10 years ago. Recently he started noticing all kinds of old things being sold online and commanding huge prices. “I thought I also had something. I will also try to sell it,” he says. The paper cost 2 annas on Independence Day but Deb, somewhat ambitiously, is asking for Rs 33 lakh for it in the listing with ‘negotiable’ in brackets under it. He really has no clue what it is worth. “Whether anyone gives or not (the Rs 33 lakh), it doesn’t make any difference to me,” he says.

On an e-commerce site like Amazon or Flipkart, businesses trade with consumers, money is exchanged online and the product delivered. But online classifieds are different in that they only bring buyers and sellers together over the internet; the transactions happen offline. It is in a sense a free-for-all. The website is just a platform or a meeting place which the two main players in India in this sector—OLX and Quikr—leave free for people to put up goods and services they want to sell.

Odd consequences can follow with such freedom.

A couple of months ago, just before Bakri Eid this year, Amarjeet Batra, the CEO of OLX India, suddenly noticed an unusual product being traded on his website—goats. Listings in the form of: ‘…goat of pure breed going very cheep long ears and healthy 17 inch long and 7 inch width’ or ‘we have pink skin goat. 80 kg wait. every goat is white’. It has a pets section where animals are traded, but sale for slaughter was not something it was comfortable with, and soon OLX started discouraging it. But that still indicated the uses that Indians came come up with once they have a marketplace on offer.

“Because we are such a frictionless platform, people are finding creative ways to use the platform. For example, we have a category called ‘pets’ in which we allow the sale of animals like dogs and cats for adoption.

We found that people in rural India were selling

their cattle also. There are many such things happening over the last year. We were okay with that. Cattle is used for farming, it is more useful than a pet sale and actually improves livelihood. We allowed it to flourish. Suddenly during Bakri Eid we found people selling goats. We stopped this particular thing because we don’t want [the trading of] animals which are there for killing,” says Batra.

Quikr too saw an efflorescence of goats being traded on its site before Eid. To a question on whether it surprised him, Quikr’s CEO Pranay Chulet replies that being a country of jugaad, Indians have found their own ways of using his website.

“Nothing surprises me about the use people find for Quikr in this country. We stopped being surprised two or three years ago.

At first it was electronics and so on that was getting sold. But over time [there were items like] cattle, ploughs in Punjab… goats don’t surprise me. It is just a reflection of how big our platform has become.”

Batra even remembers an aircraft that was once put up for sale on OLX. “It was there for some time. I saw it one-and-a-half to two years ago,” he says.

B

oth OLX and Quikr claim to be the biggest player in the

market and have arguments to support it. But neither will reveal its numbers, so there is no way to verify which is bigger. Both are however in unison on the market being huge and growing exponentially. Chulet was in the US before coming to India in 2008 to launch Quikr, and saw the power of Craigslist up close over there. “It sort of singlehandedly took the classified business from newspapers in that country. I knew the power of this model. In 2008, when I was looking to come back to India and do something in the digital space, it was natural for me to think about it” he says.

He thought there were elements about online classifieds that made it a better tive crea ng findi are le Peop business to get into than e-commerce. For We orm. ways to use our platf instance, many in India don’t have credit have a category called ‘pets’, cards or are wary of online transactions. In the online classifieds model, the deal is in which we found people sealed face-to-face, which Indians are selling their cattle also comfortable with. “As a society we like to see Amarjeet Batra CEO, OLX India a product before we buy it, haggle and negotiate the prices. Categories like cars and real estate, there is no way people will buy these things online. So you can’t have online transactions and it is important to have classifieds in those categories. For all these reasons, I felt something like this would make a lot of sense in India, and over time, it has been proved right,” he says.

Unlike Quikr, which is a start-up, OLX is a multinational that also saw in India a huge market. Batra says that when it launched in India, online classifieds were linked to verticals but not individual to individual (or consumer to consumer) sales. “So people were a little bit more aware of matrimonials, looking for jobs, maybe real estate also. But they were not selling their own cars or mobile phones or sofas. We came in and looked at the market in a different way. We worked the last three-four years to build the market. The metros were the first 1 December 2014

places where this became popular. Now we are spreading to the interiors of India also, the tier 2, tier 3 towns, and even sometimes rural villages also,” he says.

A couple of factors have led to the growth of this model. For one, the availability of second-hand goods with people as India goes from scarcity to abundance. “People have more stuff today to sell, but they didn’t have an avenue for it. We brought that platform to them,” Batra says. Many of these products, like electronics or vehicles, were good brands that depreciated fast, turning people keen to sell them once they saw they could do it online. Then followed another stage of evolution with people putting up goods that they didn’t need and were cluttering their homes. Especially things that were blocking space, like a large cabinet or almirah. Or if they were upgrading their AC or TV, then they wanted to unlock the value of the old one. Recently, OLX has noticed another trend—of hobbies and collectibles being sold. There are also the seasonal trends, like the goats before Bakri Eid. “When something like a marriage season happens, people sometimes sell their old lehengas also. When colleges are to start, people sell their old books,” says Batra.

Underpinning all this is the explosion of mobile phones and the penetration of the internet via these handsets. Chulet says, “Eighty per cent of my business comes from mobile [phones], and that is where growth is going to be.”

T

he category that gets the most listings is electronics goods, including mobile phones and accessories. Cars and bikes are also big. Within that, there are interesting subcategories that are finding sellers. Like Atul Rever from Rajkot, who is in the construction business and recently wanted to sell a vintage Woseley 1944 car for Rs 11 lakh. He bought it ten years ago from the collection of the Maharaja of Jetpur, a former princely state of the region. “That time the car was in a very bad condition. I repainted it,

1 December 2014

brought tyres from London and refurbished it into a completely original piece,” says Rever.

He also has an Austin 1946 model and is selling the Woseley so that he can buy another. He had been interested in vintage cars ever since he learnt to drive in 1979. Rever put it up online because he wanted to reach out to a wider network of buyers.

And he did get enquiries. “I got three calls. One from Bhopal, one from a local Rajkot person, and one from Palanpur. The Bhopalwala told me to reduce the price. I said, ‘You come see the car, drive it, later I will negotiate.’ He said, ‘Nine lakh.’ I said, ‘The Rs 2.5 lakh [discount] won’t happen, but first see the car, I won’t disappoint you, I will make some adjustment’,” he says.

While the numbers of listings and variety have grown exponentially, the online classifieds business is still at a nascent stage when it comes to making profits. Quikr says it is revenue driven and all about premium listings. OLX, on the other hand, says it will only monetise its web traffic when the time is right and that it is not a factor in its calculations right now.

If you want someone to write or round up your PhD thesis,

Nothing surprises me about how people use Quikr. First it was electronics, but over time, cattle, ploughs in Punjab… even goats don’t surprise me Pranay Chulet CEO, Quikr

you can find such a service here. There are also ‘lucky donkeys’ on offer that look white in colour; there is the sole goat milk seller in Madurai, though only for local delivery; an invitation card of ‘Her Majesty Queen Mary showcasing Carpet made by her’ which on closer perusal makes itself apparent as an official souvenir; and struggling scriptwriters offering their works to directors and producers.

There is also Fatima Poonawalla, a housewife from Mumbai, who has just put up a Cadbury’s pack. Her son’s birthday had been celebrated recently and she found herself with more chocolates than was healthy for the family. “I thought if some other people want, they can buy from me,” she says. Earlier she had put up a fan and a ceiling lamp. And then there was also her mother’s flat in a far-flung suburb of Mumbai. Not exactly in the price bracket of a chocolate, but for some reason, it all seems the same on the website. n open www.openthemagazine.com 31

food

The Primal Flavours of Telangana In Hyderabad, a city where you are what you eat, V SHOBA looks for the original, minimalist cuisine of India’s newest state photographs by harsha valdamani

(Clockwise from here) Women make Sakinalu; Sarvapindi being fried (Both at Sri Devi Swagruha Foods in Nacharam, Hyderabad); Nalli Mamsam, a mutton dish

F

ood never lies. In Hyderabad, a city of unmatched culinary pageantry, it becomes a cultural lens, revealing people for who they are. An old-school glutton enamoured of the dum biryani, the vestige of a long and sumptuous Nawabi reign that today casts a shadow over dinner tables and waistlines. An unwitting tourist who benumbs his palate with the Chicken 65 and then struggles to keep it down. A lover of conversations endless as the boiling of condensed milk at Irani chai shops. A homesick newbie lured by the promise of Andhra bhojanam served at roadside messes. In this city, you are what you eat. But beyond the scope of these superficial identities is an under-represented cuisine that speaks, in a sparse, rustic tongue, of something primal. It is the native food of Telangana, and it evokes its vast agrarian heartland in the Deccan. A marriage of earthy lentils, rain-fed millets, omega3-rich oilseeds and a burst of chilli and garlic for flavour, it is not for the sophisticate, yet its deep reverence for seasonal, local ingredients is now rekindling interest among gourmands who expect it to break into the mainstream in the wake of bifurcation.

Imagine washing down a hot, charcoal-baked jowar roti with a gazpacho of aged tamarind spiked with bits of onion and green chillies, toasted sesame and cumin.

Pachi pulusu, a poor man’s comfort food, is nowhere to be found in modern-day Hyderabad, a city that harbours a supercilious nostalgia for royal excess. But there are stories. Of liver cooked with soy leaves to subdue the flavour of the pancreatic juices, for it was a sin to waste even the entrails of a butchered goat. Of watery gravies enriched with galijeru, a native hogweed foraged from the forests after the first rains.

Of a time when mutton was slow-cooked with tender tamarind leaves and meat grilled on an open fire sans marinade or oil. “Telangana food has the distinction of being true to its key ingredients. We believe in minimalism. There are no ancillary spices camouflaging the real taste of a vegetable or meat entrée,” says Sudhakar N Rao, director, Culinary Academy of India, a cooking school in Hyderabad.

On a cool evening after a steady rain has lashed the city, Rao is overseeing a Telangana spread for his son Adarsh’s thirteenth birthday bash at their threestoreyed villa in the urban thicket of Manikonda, near Gachibowli. “Most of my friends are from Andhra and I want them to savour this food,” he says, adjusting his traditional red turban. In Telangana, even the food has been camouflaged by the dominant culture of undivided Andhra and its Nizami heritage, Rao says. “Things are changing now. I expect that our food and culture will emerge from the shadows in the coming months.”

A vegetarian, I try to keep my wits about me at Rao’s astroturfed terrace, where a counter is laid out, inter alia, with nalli mamsam, tender pieces of mutton cooked in bone marrow, boti kura or lamb intestine curry, and thalakaya kura, goat head meat curry with bits of bone. Offal isn’t offensive in Telangana, which has its own versions of brain fry and blood pudding. It is a gastronomy born of need, says Rao. “In the state’s open www.openthemagazine.com 35

poorest districts, where meat remains a rare delicacy even today, a feast would mean butchering one of the local chickens (ooru kodi) or a ram—called pottel, its high-fat meat is preferred over ewe meat,” he says. Some of these specialties find a place on the menu at Palamuru Grill, Rao’s restaurant in Madhapur, Hyderabad, named after an ancient moniker for Mahbubnagar, a district south of Hyderabad.

At T Radhika Ravi’s chic apartment in Gachibowli, I am treated to a relatively sedate Telangana breakfast of uppudu pindi, a fluffy, delicate upma made of rice-rava and onion, and mokka jonna garelu, or golden corn cakes served with tamarind relish. “You won’t get these anywhere in town,” she says, with the triumphant air of a champion of tradition. Growing up in Alampur, Mahbubnagar district, Ravi picked up a wealth of culinary material from her grandmother. Her fondest memories are of picking tamarind flowers to be fried in groundnut oil for a crunchy side dish. “The aroma of puntikura (as gongura or sorrel is known in Telangana) cooking on the wood stove was like a gift from heaven,” says the 40-year-old software consultant. Ravi left behind her slice of heaven for the opportunities of Silicon Valley, California, returning to settle down in Hyderabad in 2004. “I missed the taste of home, until I found a cook from Adilabad who makes the best jonna (jowar) roti,” she says, introducing B Sehar Fathima, a shy woman in her twenties.

The urban Telanganite who acknowledges the grounding force of his native food is a rare bird today, even threatening to go extinct. Amnesia is his first line of defence against an impoverished past, and cultural coalescence the only way forward. “We are so assimilated into the modern way of life that our everyday diet is now dosa, dal, rice, and subji,” Ravi says. The fiery vegetable vepudus (stir-frys) and pachadis (pickles or sidedishes blended with spiced yoghurt) are all that is left of a robust cuisine that spanned the 10 districts of Telangana. “Many old recipes are lost, sometimes discarded because as we moved up in society, we did not want to eat like poor people. We were no longer dependent on the home harvest. Hyderabadi food was something we aspired to,” Ravi says. Not today. Today, as Fathima cooks up the most basic Telangana fare—mokka jonna gatka, a thick corn porridge tempered with jeera V Savitri and chilli—we speak of the hot earth and the long days of toil, of mangoes sucked dry by children and the values that informed a spartan way of life.

“This is the gruel Telangana was built on,” Fathima says, offering me a ladleful. “But go to Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s house in Karimnagar and you won’t find this.

Class is a major ingredient in the Telangana kitchen.”

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usterity isn’t bland in Telangana. My mouth on fire even after a cool glass of ragi ambali, a nutritious millet drink, I make a mental note never to douse my food with Sriracha again. For I have discovered a condiment several times as flavourful and potent: a spice powder of roasted niger (valiselu) and linseed (aviselu) ground with salt and chilli. Warm and earthy, karam is the perfect thickening agent for vegetable curries, just a spoonful of it adding body, nutrition and depth. “When you are poor, you pour more water into your gravies and add a lot of spice so that people eat less and there is enough food to go around,” says Salome Yesudas, a researcher from Zahirabad who has been documenting traditional food systems for two decades. Telangana food has the perfect balance of nutrients, argues Yesudas. “Until rice was introduced under the PDS, the region had a food crop-based hyper-local cuisine focused on millets (ragi, foxtail, little, pearl, barnyard, kodo and proso millets), pulses, oilseeds and green, leafy vegetables. People hunted wild boar, consumed beneficial weeds and grew local varieties of sugarcane. Jaggery-making was a beautiful ceremony that went on from November to February, when fresh jaggery syrup would be added to dishes and turned into sweets. This has been replaced by hard, commercial sugarcane that you can’t bite into.” The colourful Telangana palate, she laments, has turned as white as the rice that has now crept into every meal.

Travelling in the remotest reaches of Telangana to document festive recipes, Yesudas retrieved from the dim niches of history treasures like the yavva polelu, a bread made of barley flour stuffed with jaggery and chana dal, sweetened ragi dosa, and karijelu, small puris of wheat flour filled with jaggery, sesame and roasted semolina. The latter is a favourite at Sri Devi Swagruha Foods, Hyderabad’s first Telangana snack shop.

Sprawled over an entire wing of a shopping complex near Habsiguda, it is no longer the small enterprise V Savitri, an enterprising woman from Karimnagar, founded two decades ago. Over two dozen women in red saris sweat it out in makeshift kitchens at the back of the shop, heating cauldrons of oil, frying peanuts and curry leaves, dusting sugar onto buttery pheni, and fashioning a thick, sesame-laden rice flour dough into impossibly thin concentric circles. Called sakinalu, this deep-fried snack is Savitri’s claim to fame. “People come from afar to buy Sakinalu Savitramma’s snacks,” says B Radhakishen Rao, a Green Card holder who is here to stock up before flying out to the US next week. “We used to make these at home, after the sankranti harvest. To me, it is tradition readily packaged and made enjoyable for the benefit of our children, who are now scattered across the world.”

“People come from afar to buy Sakinalu Savitramma’s snacks,” says B Radhakishen Rao, “We used to make these at home, after the sankranti harvest”

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Sudhakar N Rao (centre)

Savitri’s son Rajesh Rao says demand for their snacks has never let up. “We do more than 100 kg a day and we are expanding our capacity, especially now that Telangana culture is in the limelight. None of this can be machine-made, though,” he says.

He walks me to a quiet corner where M Sadamma from Nalgonda district is spreading a thick layer of rice paste flecked with chana dal, chilli and peanuts on the flat bottom of an aluminium pan. She pokes a few holes in the pancake and pours oil on top, carefully watching it for five minutes— the time it takes to cook. “This is sarva pindi, a breakfast staple from Telangana that was once made in a heavy curved vessel called the ‘sarva’,” Rao says. “It is one of our most authentic items. Encouraged by our success, 15-20 Telangana families in Hyderabad have now taken to supplying native snacks to local bakeries.”

A golden era of regional cuisine is upon us, says chef Chalapathi Rao, who recently opened a fine-dining south Indian restaurant in the upscale neighbourhood of Film Nagar in Hyderabad. Simply South showcases culinary traditions from Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and other south Indian states, devoting a page on the menu to each cuisine (Hyderabadi food gets a page of its own). “We were in the middle of conceiving a menu when the bifurcation happened,” says Amita Lulla, a partner in the restaurant. Almost instantly, Simply South’s Telangana Kodi Roast (chicken roast) and its Oorgai Mamsam (mutton in a pickle sauce) hit a sweet spot that restaurateurs didn’t know existed. “You typically don’t associate such hearty regional food with fine dining.

But we saw a gap in this space and we knew we wanted to fill it,” Lulla says.

Chalapathi Rao says the notion that Telangana is a culinary wasteland is entirely unfounded. “In undivided Andhra, there were always three culinary threads—one from coastal Andhra, one from Rayalaseema and the third from Telangana—each mirroring the landscape and the culture of the respective region. In the dry, hot districts of Telangana, people preferred spicy, heat-producing foods to balance their metabolism,” Rao says. “In a few months, you will see a lot of interest in this cuisine. Diners are already asking for jonna roti.”

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Sudhakar N Rao is overseeing a Telangana spread for his son Adarsh’s thirteenth birthday.

“Most of my friends are from Andhra and I want them to savour this food,” he says

hanks to a health food wave and advocacy by

progressive farmers and NGOs like the Deccan Development Society, millets may slowly inch their way back into the mainstream. At Aahar Kutir, a rustic eatery tucked away in a lane in Begumpet, Hyderabad, Ram Babu, a partner in the venture, is a passionate proponent of millets and native foods. Over a steaming mug of herbal tea, Babu talks about the ethno-botany of the tribal belt in Adilabad and how tribal food can be made relevant to the modern diner. “From using mahua blossoms to sweeten their food to identifying edible roots and wild varieties of rice, the tribals of Telangana still follow a sustainable lifestyle. In an urban setting, the least we can do is to substitute rice and maida with processed millets,” says Babu. “Today, a health-conscious section of people in Hyderabad, aware of Telangana’s agrarian history, wants to explore millets as a supplement, if not an alternative.”

Ironically, as Hyderabad discovers this forsaken spice-kissed cuisine born of the soil, agrarian Telangana is suffering its worst crisis in years, with over 350 farmers ending their lives in frustration in the past five months. The crop diversity of Telangana has dwindled drastically in the past two decades, with commercial rice and BT cotton cultivation wiping out millets and dryland grains. “It takes 5,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of rice. Millets consume just 200 litres per kg,” says GV Ramanjaneyulu, executive director, Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, Hyderabad. “This forced change in cropping patterns—and the subsequent crop failures—is Telangana’s biggest challenge today. The only viable solution is not a dam or an irrigation system, but a return to the roots and a shift towards more wholesome, sustainable food consumption.”

Local food is increasingly trendy abroad. But in India, diners are easily blinded by the grease and glamour of Punjabi and Hyderabadi food. To vindicate itself, Telangana cuisine must first duck the crossfire of KCR’s bottle gourd politics— an Andhrite will call the vegetable sorakayi, and not anapakayi as it is known in Telangana, he famously said, declaring war on Andhra’s taste buds. And it must offer up accessible fare lovingly garnished with the crushed kernels of a sensible, folksy culture. n open www.openthemagazine.com 37

open essay

By DAVID DAVIDAR

THE HOUSE OF STORIES

A literary journey that began from the jasmine-wreathed verandah of ancestry reaches the expansive and exhilarating world of the great Indian sensibility

W

hen I was a boy, I spent summer

vacations with my maternal grandparents in a small town near the southern tip of the country.

My grandparents lived in a cottage with whitewashed walls, a red-tiled roof, and brown windows. A jasmine creeper, with tiny flowers, bright as stars, climbed across the trellised front David Davidar verandah, shading the interiors of the is a novelist, house, and ensuring it never got too hot, even when temperatures soared outside. publisher, editor On the verandah was an old-fashioned and anthologist. planter’s chair with extendable armrests.

He has been I spent most of my days sprawled in this an attentive chair, eating fat, crisp banana chips, and reader of Indian reading books that my grandfather fiction for procured for me. It was the start of a nearly forty years literary journey that has lasted about five decades now.

My grandfather, or Thatha as I called him, was a strict disciplinarian, and I was genuinely afraid of him—although to my knowledge it was only once that he threatened to thrash me with his walking stick. Tall and gaunt, he would set off every morning in starched white drill trousers, a clean white shirt, cufflinks, black shoes shined to a mirror finish and sola topi, to the school that he was the headmaster of. He believed that little boys were meant only to be seen and not heard, and should only speak when they were spoken to. As he spoke to me only in English, and as my spoken English was extremely poor (I could read and write English fairly proficiently, but until I was four or thereabouts I spoke no language but Tamil; this gradually became a kind of English-Tamil patois until high school, after which English became my first language), there wasn’t a great deal of communication between us, even if I’d been able to summon the courage to speak to him. However, my grandfather gave me the gift of literature because every weekend he would bring me a few books from his school library. These tended to be abridged, simplified classics of Western literature—The Count of Monte Cristo, Lorna Doone, Moby Dick, Tom Sawyer, A Tale of Two Cities and so on. I found several of them quite absorbing but often mystifying—the names, the customs and the mannerisms of the characters in the books were frequently bizarre. Much as I wanted to, I could hardly discuss these oddities with my Thatha, so I would simply swallow the stories whole.

My grandmother, my Ammamma, a serene and beautiful woman, whom my sister and I doted on, provided an altogether different diet of fiction. Whenever I pestered her for a story, she would tell me tales that were rooted in family lore, or folk tales from the region. I did not need my grandmother’s stories to be interpreted for me as they took place in situations and locations that I was familiar with. The stories I liked the best

either featured ghosts, or, sometimes, Satan. I found them extremely gripping, even chilling. Cohorts of the Evil One included pigs with backward turned hooves, beautiful women with jasmine flowers in their hair (but whose feet didn’t touch the ground), or horrible old women with giant splayed feet who would squat on the windowsills of the dying. I noticed that the only way to detect the presence of Satan was to focus on the feet of those whom he had possessed, so I went through a phase of looking at people’s feet before I would look them in the face.

Besides these two streams of stories, my parents (especially my father, who worked for a British company, and was an unabashed Anglophile when he was younger) would give me books by Beatrix Potter and, as I grew older, tales of British public-school life like Tom Brown’s School Days. This led me to books like Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ series and the Billy Bunter stories by Frank Richards (the pen name of Charles Hamilton) in my school library, from which I graduated to adult fiction from around the world, thanks to an English teacher who managed to instil in some of her students a genuine love of good books. But there was also a fourth stream of fiction that I immersed myself in—Tamil pulp fiction, as well as tales from the Hindu myths and epics, which my schoolmates would tell me. This was not an unusual experience for Indian children from my socio-economic background.

In his seminal essay, ‘Telling Tales’, the great poet, linguist, scholar and translator, A. K. Ramanujan, writes about the traditions and sources of Indian stories that were available to the average middle-class Indian child: ‘Even in the most anglicized…families or in large cities like Bombay and Calcutta, oral tales are only a grandmother away, a cousin away, a train ride away, and mostly no further away than the kitchen.’ He talks about the European stories that he read in books, the Tamil stories that were narrated by a grandmother, an aunt or a cook, and Kannada stories which he heard in friends’ houses: As we grew up, Sanskrit and English were our fathertongues, and Tamil and Kannada our mother-tongues. The father-tongues distanced us from our mothers, from our own childhoods, and from our villages and many of our neighbours in the cowherd colony next door. And the mother tongues united us with them. It now seems quite appropriate that our house had three levels: a downstairs for the Tamil world, an upstairs for the English and the Sanskrit, and a terrace on top that was open to the sky, where our father could show us the stars and tell us their English and Sanskrit names…

We ran up and down all these levels.

Sanskrit, English, and Tamil and Kannada (my two childhood languages, literally my mother’s tongues, since she too had become bilingual in our childhood) stood for three different interconnected worlds. Sanskrit stood for the Indian past; English for colonial India and the West, which also served as a disruptive creative other that both alienated us from and revealed us

As the Indian writing tradition matures, we will see an ever decreasing tendency to seek approval from cultural arbiters other than our own peer groups

1 december 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 39

(in its terms) to ourselves; and the mother-tongues, the most comfortable and least conscious of all, for the world of women, playmates, children and servants. Ideas, tales, significant alliances, conflicts, elders, and peers were reflected in each of these languages. Each had a literature that was unlike the others’. Each was an other to the others, and it became the business of a lifetime for some of us to keep the dialogues and quarrels alive among these three and to make something of them. Our writers, thinkers, and men of action—say, Gandhi, Tagore, and Bharati—made creative use of these triangulations, these dialogues and quarrels.

A large number of us can draw upon two or three literary traditions, others may have been schooled in more languages or fewer, but one of the reasons Indian literature is so diverse and rich is because of the multiple languages and sources in which it is rooted and created. The country has 24 national

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languages (including English and Hindi) and the 2011 census recognized 1,635 ‘mother tongues’. Of these, thirty were spoken by more than a million native speakers, and at least fifteen had long-standing literary traditions. This polyphonic, incredibly complex environment has given rise to some of mankind’s most remarkable storytellers.

To this must be added the fact that we’ve had a lot of practice in the art of telling stories. Our earliest stories were told over 2,000 years ago. Although purists might point to, say, the parables in the Brahmanas as possibly the earliest stories we can lay claim to, even if we started with the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Panchatantra and the Jataka tales, all of which were composed within a century or two of each other, ours is an incredibly old literary tradition, pre-dating those of practically every other civilization on the planet, with the exception of the Egyptians and our neighbours in West Asia (the Babylonians of ancient times). The first stories in Sanskrit were followed by tales told in Pali, Tamil, Prakrit, and as we move into the medieval period, Kannada, Telugu, Persian and Urdu.

Some scholars have divided Indian literature into the Great Indian Tradition (pan-Indian and Sanskritic) and the Little Tradition (local literature, folklore and so on) but others reject these classifications. Ramanujan says in his essay, ‘Where Mirrors are Windows’, that the only way to look at our literary roots and traditions is to see them as ‘indissolubly plural and often conflicting but…organized through at least two principles (a) context-sensitivity and (b) reflexivity of various sorts, both of which constantly generate new forms out of old ones’.

This plurality is one of the things that makes the Indian literary tradition unique. Another aspect of our stories that is seen virtually nowhere else in the world is the fact that our oldest tales, dating back a couple of thousand years, are still in circulation, in prose, in verse, in street theatre, television, the movies and in online forums of storytelling.

In the future, as the Indian writing tradition matures and grows in confidence, we will see an ever-decreasing tendency to seek ‘approval’ from cultural arbiters other than our own peer groups—in other words, we will gradually grow out of the dreadful syndrome known as ‘cultural cringe’ that so many former colonies have to deal with. All this would seem to project a bright future for Indian literature in the twenty-first century. There are many obstacles that will need to be dealt with—the decline in reading habits, newer and newer forms of entertainment, a lack of resources for writers besides a small group of publishers who are increasingly under siege, and so on—but I’m an optimist when it comes to the power of stories to survive and thrive. Our stories will grow richer, more distinctive, and show us the real India for centuries to come.

As this is not intended to be an essay on Indian literature as a whole, but a brief introduction to the modern Indian short story, I am going to jump ahead to the second half of the nineteenth century when the first modern short stories made an appearance. There was one very specific difference in technique between the older forms of Indian literature and the new forms. Ramanujan explains: ‘No Indian [literary] text comes without a context or frame, till the nineteenth century…

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One might see “modernization” in India as a movement from the context-sensitive to the context-free in all realms.’

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R. K. Narayan, one of the world’s greatest writers, tells an amusing story about creative writing in general, and the short story in particular. He writes: ‘Once I was present at a lecture on creative writing. The lecturer began with: “All writing may be divided into two groups—good writing and bad writing. Good books come out of good writing while bad writing produces failures.” When touching on the subject of the short story, the lecturer said: “A short story must be short and have a story.”

At this point I left unobtrusively, sympathizing with the man’s predicament.’

The story is amusing but when you come down to it, the short story is devilishly difficult to define if you exclude length as a criterion. Dictionary definitions are banal in the extreme. Here is one example: ‘A story with a fully developed theme but significantly shorter and less elaborate than a novel.’ If you were taking a creative writing class, your instructor might tell you that your story would need to have the following elements—exposition (the setting up of the story, its backdrop, main characters etc.), conflict, plot, theme, climax and so on. If s/he was of a Chekhovian bent of mind, s/he might tell you to write a ‘slice of life’ story that was relatively loosely constructed when compared to tightly plotted stories that hinged on events and turning points. There are many other categories that short stories are classified under but these do not need to detain us. Let us instead take a quick look at the origins of the modern short story, and how it spread around the world before speeding ahead to the focus of this introduction— the modern Indian short story.

The short story began to flourish in several parts of the world at about the same time—the nineteenth century. The United States had great practitioners of the form, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe (who wrote an essay about short fiction that practically every creative writing course will point you to called ‘The Philosophy of Composition’); France had prolific and excellent story writers such as Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet; in Germany the brothers Grimm published their retold fairy tales; and in England, writers like Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells and Conan Doyle put out not just literary stories but some of the first modern detective stories and science fiction tales. Modern European and American short fiction followed in the wake of books by writers like Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales was published in the fourteenth century) and Boccaccio (The Decameron) as well as the great epics of European classical literature like The Iliad and The Odyssey. The single greatest leap forward in the evolution of the short story in the nineteenth century is attributed to a writer many think of as the father of the modern short story, Anton Chekhov.

Chekhov’s precursors themselves were among the best modern writers of fiction the world has ever seen, notably Nikolai Gogol, whom the novelist and essayist Vladimir Nabokov considered ‘the greatest artist Russia has yet produced’. One of Gogol’s contemporaries, the novelist Fyodor 1 december 2014

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Dostoevsky, went further when he famously proclaimed: ‘We all come out from Gogol’s “Overcoat”.’

The British writer William Boyd is effusive in his praise of Chekhov. He writes in Prospect magazine: Why is Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) routinely and correctly described as the greatest short story writer ever?

All answers to this question will seem inadequate but, to put it very simply, the fact is that Chekhov, in his mature stories of the 1890s, revolutionized the short story by transforming narrative. Chekhov saw and understood that life is godless, random and absurd, that all history is the history of unintended consequences… By abandoning the manipulated beginning-middle-and-end plot, by refusing to judge his characters, by not striving for a climax or seeking neat narrative resolution, Chekhov made his stories appear agonisingly, almost unbearably lifelike.

As the nineteenth century bled into the twentieth century, the short story continued to flourish in every corner of the world, driven by increasing rates of literacy, the growth of literary magazines and supplements, especially in the Western world, the packaging and marketing of famous authors as superstars, and so on. It continued to morph into newer and newer forms as the decades went by.

In our country, the modern short story made an appearance almost simultaneously in several languages beginning naturally enough with Bengali. The writer and translator Ranga Rao credits the first modern short story to Poornachandra Chattopadhyay who published ‘Madhumati’ in 1870 (Poornachandra’s older brother Bankim Chandra published Rajmohan’s Wife, the first Indian novel in English).

Rabindranath Tagore soon established himself as one of Bengal’s finest short story writers; in Hindi, Munshi Premchand wrote hundreds of stories, many of which appeared in Hans, the literary magazine he published; and, in Oriya, the writer Fakir Mohan Senapati published some landmark stories. Throughout the twentieth century, most of the major literatures in the land threw up great practitioners of the form—Saadat Hasan Manto in Urdu, Kalki in Tamil, Gurzada open www.openthemagazine.com 41

Boyd said of the form:‘Short stories are snapshots of the human condition and of human nature, and when they work well, and work on us, we are given the rare chance to see in them more “than in real life”.’

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12 1. Rabindranath Tagore; 2. Ruskin Bond; 3. RK Narayan; 4. Saadat Hasan Manto; 5. Vaikom Muhammad Basheer; 6. Anita Desai; 7. UR Ananthamurthy; 8. Ismat Chughtai 9. Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai; 10. Mahasweta Devi; 11. Vikram Seth; 12. Munshi Premchand

Appa Rao in Telugu, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao in English, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer in Malayalam, and dozens of notable writers in every corner of the country. Their stories reflected their region, their upbringing, and their (often) cosmopolitan reading. A number of India’s pioneering short story writers had a common element in their stories—they were often extremely political in nature.

It couldn’t have been otherwise in a country trying to free itself from a predatory and oppressive colonial power, while at the same time grappling with a huge variety of hellish social evils.

George Orwell writes eloquently about the power of writing that is overtly political: ‘I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally’. Stories without humbug.

Stories that are full of life. Many of the stories in this book would fit that description. Others exemplify what William 42 open

Time now to address two contentious issues that have simmered for decades. Let me deal with the easier issue—the authenticity or otherwise of Indian writing in English. I think it is fatuous to consider Indian writing in English unauthentic for two reasons: (1) Those of us who write in English do so because that is the language we are most comfortable with (‘our father-tongue’) and it makes us no less Indian, nor our reality any less Indian and (2) English has been an Indian language for many hundreds of years now, and is as rooted in this soil as any of the other ‘Indian’ languages that arrived from beyond our borders. Vikram Chandra, one of our best story-tellers, built up a fine head of steam on the issue a few years ago. Here’s a brief excerpt of what he had to say: Indians have lived in many languages simultaneously for thousands of years. Did the great Sanskrit playwright Kalidasa speak Sanskrit at home? Maybe he did, and maybe he spoke a Prakrit. We’ll never know for sure. But we do know for certain that the Bombay poet Kalidas Gupta, whose takhallus or nom-de-plume is ‘Raza’, was born in Jullunder, Punjab, in a Punjabi-speaking household. Raza first wrote in Farsi, then in Urdu and English…

I was born into a household that on a census form would undoubtedly be tagged as ‘Mother Tongue: Hindi’. But I called my mother ‘Mummy’ and my father ‘Daddy’. They spoke to me in Hindi sprinkled with English. Sitting on my mother’s lap, I read newspapers in English. English was everywhere in the world I grew up in, and continues to be an inextricable thread in the texture of every day I live in Bombay and in India. English is spoken on the playgrounds, and we tell folk tales in it, we riddle each other and joke with each other in it, and we make up nonsense verse and nursery rhymes and films in it. Along with many other languages, it is spoken in the slums, on the buses and in the post offices and the police stations and the courtrooms. English has been spoken and written on the Indian subcontinent for a few hundred years now, certainly longer than the official and literary Hindi that is our incompletely national language today... If Hindi is my mother-tongue, then English has been my father-tongue.

I write in English, and I have forgotten nothing, and I have given up nothing.

Just as absurd as the notion that Indian writing in English isn’t a major strand of Indian literature is the idea that there isn’t anything of consequence taking place in Indian languages other than English. Every major language in this country has writers who have created indelible masterpieces. Every major language has had its fair share of innovators and writers who have pushed creative boundaries as far as they can go. Many of these masters find a place in this anthology.

The major problem that will persist for the foreseeable future where Indian literature is concerned is this—great literature 1 december 2014

created in one language is often inaccessible to readers in other languages and there doesn’t seem to be any practical way to deal with the problem. I will talk here only of the difficulties of translating literary work from the other Indian languages into English (as I have no real knowledge of the problems faced by publishers, readers and writers who are trying to translate works into their own languages). Let’s start with the fundamental problem—the impossibility of making an exact translation that reproduces every nuance and wrinkle of the story in the original language, but that is at the same time a smooth read without awkward, clumsy passages in the language that the book or story has been translated into.

This is something the world’s greatest translators, to varying degrees—whether it is Gregory Rabassa in Spanish or A. K. Ramanujan in Tamil and Kannada—are agreed on. The best they can do is what Rabassa (whose translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude won Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s unqualified admiration) puts in the following way: ‘There’s a musicality that underlies a book, and I think that if you can move that into English, you can catch it and you’ve got it.’

In this country, compounding the problem is the fact that very few translators who are capable of making outstanding translations actually ever do so—it is simply not worth their while, either in terms of recognition or monetary compensation. Unfortunately, for as long as sales of translations remain small, as has been the case for decades now, it is hard to see this situation becoming better. Maybe if a large-hearted philanthropist—without an agenda and a real interest in Indian culture— decided to fund world-class translators to work with writers in the various Indian languages, to sculpt great translations of our finest stories into other languages, things might improve, but until that happens, we’ll just have to muddle along as best we can. What this means, in real terms, is that we will need immensely talented writers and translators to voluntarily undertake to translate books or stories. And we will need more organizations like Katha, which has done extraordinary work in the field of translation, to spring up. It would also help if government organizations tasked with publishing translations imposed more quality control on the books they put out.

Just one last comment about the selection before I wind down. What was it that I was looking for in the stories?

Why did I like these ones, and not others? At first glance practically every form of short fiction is represented in this selection—humorous sketches, carefully plotted stories, domestic dramas, Chekhovian slice-of-life stories, stories that revolve around a single unforgettable character, ghost stories, vampire stories, erotic stories, fables, satire, adventure stories, stories that can be read by both young adults and adults, science fiction, fantasy, political stories, stories within stories… But if you look closer you will find that the majority of the stories have a vivid sense of place and an exceptionally strong voice. Many of them are rooted in classical Indian forms of story-telling or unselfconsciously use Indian myth and legend in their narratives. In addition, they possess in great abundance the Indian sensibility I was referring to earlier. There is 1 december 2014

nothing ersatz about these stories. In them, you will encounter an India that is sharper, clearer and imprints itself more deeply on your consciousness than anything you will find in real life. This is what serious literature is meant to do, and that is the hallmark of these stories across genres.

For the past few months I have been building a memory palace. This is a mnemonic device invented by the Romans and Greeks centuries ago to help people retain masses of information. If you’re a fan of Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock, you have probably seen him construct a memory palace to organize clues to help him track down a killer.

The concept is simplicity itself. All you will need to do is imagine a structure in your mind to which you attach whatever information it is that you want to remember. My memory palace is modelled on an actual palace—the opulent former residence of the Maharaja of Mysore that I remember from a visit when I was in college. I have a hazy recollection

As absurd as the notion that writing in English isn’t a major strand of Indian literature is that there is nothing of consequence taking place in Indian languages other than English that it sprawled over acres of land and had a lot of white marble in every room; I didn’t much care for the waste-paper baskets made of elephant feet and the numerous shikar trophies on the walls, and on the floors. My memory palace, unlike the maharaja’s palace, has onyx wastepaper baskets and modern Indian masters on the walls (cost is no object, naturally). Also, unlike the actual maharaja’s palace, this one has an unlimited number of rooms. Some of the rooms are dimly lit, and the others are dark (which indicates that there is no activity going on within them). When I enter any of the rooms that are faintly illuminated, the entire room blazes with light. At the same time the room begins to hum with activity, with various characters engaged in all manner of actions. Each of the lighted rooms represents a favourite Indian book, story or poem—collected on a long journey that began with the absorbing and mystifying books I read on my grandfather’s jasmine-wreathed verandah. It is the place I call home. n

This is a shorter version of the introduction from A Clutch of Indian Masterpieces: Extraordinary Short Stories from the 19th Century to the Present, edited by David Davidar; Aleph; 544 pages; Rs 795 open www.openthemagazine.com 43

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Behind the Camera Geetu Mohandas, director of India’s official Oscar entry 52

The mark of a genius

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o p e n s pa c e

Deepika Padukone Emraan Hashmi

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Kill Dil John Wick

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McIntosh MHP 1000 Breitling Chronospace Military BenQ RL2240HE Gaming Monitor

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TECH & ST Y L E

Paranormal activity How love affects the brain Sealed with a kiss

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SCIENCE

Slacker comedy at its best

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R o u g h CUT

The Book of Gold Leaves

by Mirza Waheed Playing it My Way: My Autobiography by Sachin Tendulkar with Boria Majumdar

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books

Geetu Mohandas and her turn as a director

cinema

Rameshwar Broota

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mindspace

Geetanjali Thapa in a still from Geetu Mohandas’ Liar’s Dice

art

The Descent of Man Rameshwar Broota’s examination of the male anatomy poses questions about vulnerability and brutality, the ravages of age and time, and the very essence of existence By Rosalyn D’Mello

W

E were never meant to know the truth behind the final work made by Jonas, the protagonist in Albert Camus’ story The Artist at Work. Mired by a string of successive achievements, and reluctantly in possession of an ever-expanding circle of invasive onlookers, Jonas finds himself shorn of the privacy he urgently needs in order to paint. Finally isolating himself in a dark, dingy attic, desperate to escape the cruelty of his omniscient audience, he starts to work on a canvas again. Deciding it is finished, he descends a ladder to return to the world, then faints. Camus eventually reveals to the reader the content of this masterpiece—a blank canvas with a word that reads uncertainly in translation as either ‘solidary’ or ‘solitary’. This contingent ambiguity links the story to the overarching title of the 1957 collection in which it had been anthologised, Exile and the Kingdom, and, in a curious, backhanded, circuitous way, serves as an excellent metaphor for Visions of Interiority: Interrogating the Male Body, the ongoing retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) that marks 50 years of Rameshwar Broota’s artistic practice.

The nexus between Camus and Broota isn’t founded simply on the affinities between his solitary subjects and the figure of the self-exiled Jonas, it extends to the trope of the corporeal being of the artist inflected and infected by the psychological. After having 46 open

subjected his body to solitary confinement, Jonas faints. A similarly dramatic incident seized Broota when he first began to withdraw into his own body, using it not as muse but subject, during the beginnings of his experimentation with the inherently aggressive technique of excavating the figure from a paint-layered canvas with the sharp edge of a blade; one he came upon by chance, in 1978, when he used a knife to erase a daub of paint he had mistakenly applied to a canvas. ‘The Archaeology of Experience,’ is what art historian Ella Datta has termed this process that is unique and integral to Broota’s practice since the early 80s, annotating it as a kind of ‘yogic sadhana’, a ‘mystical search for the nature of truth in tune with his meditative nature’.

Broota stood near a mirror one day, and began to intensely paint his form, ‘from morning to evening’. The nature of his technique required that it be performed within two to three days after the many layers—typically silver, ochre, burnt umber, modified tones of black—had been applied while they were still wet. Broota proceeded to extract the figure by scratching the blade into the textured layers, relentlessly lacerating stratums of paint to arrive at the revelation that realistically mimicked his form. When he slept the first night, he woke up shaken by a violent dream. The gestures of his wakeful life had trespassed into his dreams. “It was as if I was scraping my own body,” he says in an interview.

It is within this cusp between the artist’s inner life and its corporeal manifestation that Broota’s figurative beings are animated. Where Michelangelo illustrates the creation of Adam by picturing a bearded god, held aloft by a vehicular unit of angels, about to touch the clay-moulded fingers of his masterpiece that has possibly already had life breathed in, Broota posits the Darwinian theory of man’s descent; seemingly superimposing onto his male figure all the mutative stages of his evolution, so that the singular moment of signification is in fact the product of lineage. Like Adam, fashioned in God’s image and likeness, the male figures in Broota’s Man series are primordially naked, but unlike the first occupant of Eden, they are not born innocent, and are obsessively devoid of female company.

After the satirical Ape series of the 70s, excellent excerpts from which punctuate the non-linear retrospective, Broota’s artistic inclinations moved away from social critique towards an interrogation of the self; a progression from the exterior to the interior, from the narrative-minded to the more autobiographical. The feminine, with its suggestion of sensuality, is an absent other. “I cannot see the female figure injured,” Broota says in defence of his dogged refusal to represent the female body. “I cannot inflict the same violence on her. My wife says I’m more of a feminist than she is.” But excuses aside, Broota’s most vehement explanation 1 december 2014

ashish sharma

Rameshwar Broota

for persistently interrogating and excavating the male figure is a humble one.

He has “not said enough about man”.

Broota’s interrogation of the male figure assumes the form of the X-Ray; it is developed as a meditative imaging of man’s skeletal structure. It is also impelled by what art critic Richard Bartholomew referred to as ‘plastic surgery’ when he exposed the affinities between the work of Jeram Patel, Himmat Shah, Ambadas, and Jagmohan Chopra in whose hands ‘art was a sharp instrument’. ‘They want to cut, to make an incision, to make the surface open up. They want to draw blood, and to cure, if they must cure something or the other, by a process of cleansing… They burn, carve, blister, emboss; they allow viscosity to create its own meander, space to suggest its own structures. They are concerned with what you can view, and not with what you will value. And though their images are related to the past experiences of man, experiences which have made man what he is today, they also anticipate in a metaphorical sense and physical sense the shape of things to come,’ he posits in an essay titled ‘Plastic Surgery and X-ray in Recent Indian Painting’.

When the essay appeared, in 1964, Broota had just graduated from Delhi College of Art, taking up the role of head of the department of art, Triveni Kala Sangam, a position he still holds 50 years later. Bartholomew saw Broota as a member of a new generation of printmakers that emerged in the mid-60s, along with his then wife Shobha Broota, Paneer Selvam, and members of Group 8, including Anupam Sud, Paramjeet Singh, Jyoti Bhatt and Lulu Shaw; he even has a photograph of a young, bearded and lanky Broota seated beside a bespectacled Sud in printmaker Kanwal Krishna’s art classroom in Modern School, New Delhi. But despite being an active contributor to the larger thematic being explored by this avowedly new generation, Broota seemed to prefer being a loner. Even during his encounters with the Delhi Shilpi Chakra, he sought to absorb rather than actively participate. “I was a listener,” he says. “What’s there to 48 open

(Facing page, top to bottom) The Long Unending Story, oil on canvas, 1971; Diagnostic Center, pencil on paper, 1972; (Left) Metamorphosis VI, oil on canvas, 1986

discuss in painting? You absorb what you see, there’s nothing to really talk about.” Artists like Jagmohan Chopra, Rajesh Mehra, K Khosa, and art critic Keshav Malik were among his friends.

Broota’s earliest work in the retrospective is his 1963 Self Portrait that reveals a 22-year-old man with a cursive moustache and evasive eyes. The title of a 1969 painting perhaps exposes his own artistic dilemma about which direction to proceed in. What To Do, a 70 inch by 100 inch triptych featuring three variations of the same emaciated male body, possibly a labourer, seems wedged between his evolving Ape series and his emerging inclination towards the nakedness of the flesh. He chose the satirical path, and his paintings in the early 70s were sardonic depictions of the ever-widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Anatomy of that Old Story (1970) is the most literal exposition of this humanist endeavour, featuring a bikini-clad ape grinning fiendishly over the prospect of a full plate as two scrawny figures on the right, caricatured versions of Khosa and Broota, are aghast; in fact Broota’s painted counterpart is hungry to the bone. In his own words, the Gorilla or Ape series “tried to depict a pre-human reality typified by a terrifying brutality.”

However, towards the late 70s, his focus began to shift towards the interior, and 1 december 2014

his figures assumed both solidity and solitariness, the monochromatic effect served to minimise distractions, so that after the archeological excavation facilitated by the nicking of the blade, what emerged was fragile, flickering light; the possibility of a soul.

Monumentality of scale was integral to Broota’s continuing interrogation of the male body. Pointing at Runners, a 1982 work that was among collector Kiran Nadar’s very first purchases, Broota admits to thinking of his subjects according to size. “This subject demands scale,” he says. “If it was 40 inches by 40 inches, it wouldn’t have the same effect.” It explains why his total output is limited to 300 paintings.

In his more recent work, the intensity of scale is most prominent as the large canvases depict not whole bodies as much as abstracted parts, surface

I cannot see the female figure injured.

I cannot inflict the same violence on her. My wife says I’m more of a feminist than she is Rameshwar Broota

wounds, perforated skin, stigmata.

They are traces “suggestive of man”, of what is “left behind” or “disappeared”, “fossilised space.” They represent, according to Broota, “man and his fate, like his existence when civilisation is wiped out.” They hint at suffering and pain while simultaneously proffering the possibility of ecstasy. The solitariness of man is compounded in this synecdochic process of isolating a fragment of the body.

Visions of Interiority: Interrogating the Male Body restricts itself to Broota’s paintings, omitting both his photographic oeuvre and his experiments with filmmaking, and allowing for a greater study of his meditative exploration of male corporeality; its repulsiveness, its lure, its yielding to weight, its evocation of brutality, its messy cartography of veins, its inner being reflected as light. They prove what the late Malik wrote in 2011: ‘It is himself that, in truth, Rameshwar Broota remakes. He has been forever making and remaking himself in an effort to surpass himself.’ n Rosalyn D ’Mello, former editor-in-chief of Blouin ArtInfo India, is a Delhi-based freelance writer. Visions of Interiority: Interrogating the Male Body, Rameshwar Broota: A Retrospective (1963–2013) is on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Saket, until 20 December 2014 open www.openthemagazine.com 49

Geetu Mohandas

victoria will/invision/ap

CINEMA

The Lives of Others Geetu Mohandas, director of India’s official pick for the best foreign film Oscar, on what drew her as an actor to the other side of the camera Shahina KK

‘L

ife is not all about Physics.’

Among the hundreds of messages in her inbox, this was the most precious one for Geetu Mohandas, director of Liar’s Dice, India’s official pick for the Oscar in the Best Foreign Language Film award category. The message was sent by her Physics teacher in school. Mohandas rates herself an average student who never received accolades or attention from teachers, and Physics was her undoing; it made young Mohandas feel she was not good enough. When she got this message after her film was chosen for the Oscars, it felt like the only validation that really mattered.

“Now I am confident that I can even teach my daughter Physics,” she opens up during the conversation.

Mohandas does not think that life is all about filmmaking. She was among the celebrities who staged a protest last month in Kochi in solidarity with the struggle of Adivasis demanding the restoration of their land. Neither a filmmaker nor an actor can stand aloof in the face of hardships that human beings face, she believes. Her two films as director reflect her philosophy, and are a closer look at the extraordinary lives of the country’s ordinary masses and their struggle for survival.

The child artiste-turned-actor-turned filmmaker started her film career at the age of four in a Malayalam film Onnu Muthal Poojyam Vare (From One to Zero) in 1986. Mohanlal had the lead role. She won the hearts of Malayalam filmgoers as ‘Deepa mol’, a widow’s daughter who lives a lonely childhood looking for her father’s love in an anonymous telephone caller. As she looks back at the film, for which she won the state award for the best child artiste in 1986, she describes it as “unbelievable”; “I was a very moody child.

Everyone in the team had to wait for my mood swings. I don’t know how they made me do that role,” she says.

1 december 2014

She has some vague memories of the making of that film. “I do remember, they made me sit in front of a big mirror after prompting me with the dialogues. I remember delivering the dialogues to myself in the mirror. It was nothing like merging with a character and acting. I was only mimicking what I was shown.”

The memories of being handled by elders in the process of making of a film helped Mohandas in her first directorial venture , the short film Are You Listening, which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2010 and gained international acclaim. The film depicts the imaginary world of a fouryear-old girl born blind, set against the fast changing world around her. Her

a young woman from Chitkul village in Himachal Pradesh, and her daughter Manya. Both embark on a journey, leaving their native land in search of Manya’s missing husband, a migrant worker in Delhi. Along this journey she encounters Nawazuddin, a free spirited Army deserter who helps them get to their destination, though with his own selfish motive in mind.

“This is a simple story which has a political undercurrent,” says Mohandas of her movie, which throws light on life’s complexities for India’s working class and the ramifications of migration to urban spaces. “Migrant workers in the country exist only as statistics in this era of globalisation.

Their lives are undervalued, their

Becoming a director was always my dream, but it has become a reality because of Rajeev Ravi’s presence in my life” Geetu mohandas zest and fascination for life is communicated through a fly and a cat that are part of her imaginary world. “Hasna was a kindergarten student at a blind school in Aluwa. She was an extremely brilliant girl and was internally very strong and steady despite being blind. I think I had the patience to handle children in both my films because of the memories of being part of a crew in which everyone was so caring and loving,” she recounts.

The short film set her off towards making a feature film, a dream she had cherished for long. The script of Liar’s Dice had been ready even before the making of Are You Listening, but there was the usual hurdle that young filmmakers face: the raising of finance.

The recognition she received for the short film gave her access to an international film circuit that made Liar’s Dice possible. The film follows Kamala,

relationships are not counted.”

“I did not give detailed instructions to the actors. I had a skeletal script and I explained them the situations. They have done [their roles] in their own style. I am lucky to have brilliant actors like Geetanjali Thapa and Nawazuddin Siddiqui who were capable of doing it their own way. It was an organic way of making a movie—which I enjoyed thoroughly,” she says. And she wasn’t too worried about how it would be received. “I did the movie and completed a long cherished dream, the rest comes as it may.”

Liar’s Dice had stiff competition on its way to the Oscars, and beat 29 other films, including Mary Kom, Shahid and Queen. Mohandas and her team have already won accolades for Liar’s Dice across prestigious festivals like the Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Sofia open www.openthemagazine.com 53

jeff vespa/wire image/getty images

Geetu Mohandas (left) with the lead actors of Liar's Dice, Nawazuddin Siddiqui (middle) and Geetanjali Thapa

I did not give detailed instructions to the actors. I had a skeletal script and I explained the actors the situations ” Geetu mohandas International Film Festival, Bulgaria.

Geetanjali Thapa, who plays the film’s lead role, has won the National Award for best actress, and Rajeev Ravi, the cameraman, co-producer and Mohandas’ husband, won the National Award for cinematography. “Becoming a director was always my dream,” Mohandas says of their partnership, “but it has become a reality because of Rajeev Ravi’s presence in my life. I had the passion and drive, but he was the person who truly guided me. I met him at the age of 19, and I must say that I grew up with him. I honestly believe that he has really shaped me.”

Rajeev Ravi, an acclaimed cinematographer and director, graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. His cinematography career began with Madhur Bhandarkar’s Chandni Bar (2001). Ravi had assisted directors in a couple of Malayalam films before he headed for Bollywood, where he has worked with Anurag Kashyap. He shares his wife’s philosophy on the need for political cinema. Mainstream Hindi cinema, Ravi says, offers nothing that is challenging: “It is easy to find a place in Bollywood and make money, but it is not what I want to do.”

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In Ravi’s view, Liar’s Dice is an attempt to cinematise the lives of ordinary people—their everyday struggles that better-off India knows little of. The Sundance Festival, on its official webpage, hails the film as one that ‘examines the ominous undercurrents in contemporary working class India, allowing the locations themselves to play a key role in the story.’

M

ohandas took a lengthy break from cinema after she starred in a couple of Malayalam and Tamil films as a child. Her parents did not want to interrupt her education. She went on to study in Malaysia and Canada as her father was posted abroad. She attributes her interest in art and culture and theatre to those years and the system of education she was exposed to. She made a comeback in cinema at the age of 20 in a Mohanlal movie, Life is Beautiful, directed by Fazil.

She is not apologetic about her dalliance with commercial Malayalam films. “I enjoy all sorts of films. I don’t believe in the division between art-house cinema and commercial cinema. As an actor, I have to do what my director wants,” she says candidly.

Even while she was in the limelight as an actor, Mohandas was already dreaming

of making her own films. She wanted to be on the other side of the camera. “I would rather give orders than take them.”

She started off as a script writer before graduating to direction. Since early childhood, the atmosphere at home was about self-expression, reading and writing. “My mom used to write letters, that was the mode of communication. Whenever we had some quarrel, she used to write letters that would begin with, ‘Dear daughter…’ and she would keep them here and there in the living room or kitchen. Her letters ignited my passion for writing,” reveals Mohandas. She wrote her first script at the age of 16. “I still have it with me; it is more like a synopsis of a feature film.” Going through it again now, she realises how deep her passion for filmmaking was even as a teenager. One memory that she cherishes from her growing up years is a meeting with poet Kamala Das. She was in class 9 and had to interview a writer as part of her project work. She chose Kamala Das. “She talked to us for almost 45 minutes, about love and relationships, which was so inspiring. I was studying in a school in Kochi. I wrote a very detailed note on the meeting with Kamala Das. The teacher was worried and admonished my father to keep an eye on the kind of books I read. She told my father that I was writing in a way that a girl of my age was not supposed to. My father did not agree with her and told her that he was proud of his daughter.”

Mohandas, the filmmaker who hates film reviews, interviews and media hype, believes that your cinema is your statement. Even for Liar’s Dice, she is not planning any promotional gig and is sure that the film will speak for itself.

She is generally reluctant to give interviews because the media is always interested in private affairs, especially that of women. “I am often asked questions like whether I cook well and how I manage time to take care of my family. These interviewers never ask men such questions. It is strange, my culinary skills have nothing to do with my cinema,” she concludes, with her usual mix of off-handed frankness and practical wonder. n 1 december 2014

books A Miniaturist’s Offerings Mirza Waheed’s second novel, in the finest romantic tradition, depicts love amidst conflict in Kashmir MAHESH RAO Her freedom of movement has been further restricted by the deteriorating situation and she is conscious that vigilante boys may begin to dictate to her the kind of veil she Mirza Waheed must wear. Her swim is a compulsion and a quest. She knows Penguin Books India | 320 pages | Rs 499 she will return home but in the moments that she allows herself to drift downstream, the city and the world beyond it open up to her, for once revealing endless possibilities. arly in journalist Mirza Waheed’s second novel, As men disappear from the streets into training camps over there is a reference to Kashmir in the imagination of the border and the Indian Army’s interrogation Hindi cinema, a place where couples in shikaras recline chambers, the conflict continues to reverberate around against cushions as the tender verses of a song spool out over the city in Waheed’s striking prose. For the first time, Faiz’s a misty lake. As the narrative unfolds, it is this old-fashioned Pandit neighbours begin to contemplate life away from the sensibility that Waheed seems to look to recapture.

Valley. There is escalating anxiety within the family of a buSet in war-torn Kashmir, like his debut The Collaborator, the reaucrat who has complied with orders from his seniors. Was novel begins with Roohi, a beautiful Sunni woman, noticing he really unaware that his cooperation would be seen as an a young man in the courtyard of a Sufi shrine opposite her act of collaboration and betrayal or was this wilful blindness? house. Roohi, we are told, ‘wants a love story’; the man is Faiz, Waheed skilfully creates richly textured scenes steeped in the youngest son in a formerly wealthy Shia family, who melancholy. From copper plates that are edged with has turned away from the ‘neat school, college, governmentcalligraphy to men who smoke their cigarettes in halves, job ladder’ and instead paints pencil boxes for a living, from the ‘Love is Pain’ signs on autorickshaws to the picture to contribute to the dwindling household income. A of the Almond Garden on a bank calendar, his eye for detail practitioner of the ancient papier-mâché art of naqashi, he is impeccable. Faiz’s craft is also beautifully rendered: when also has intricate plans for a mysterious painting he hopes painting a night sky, he ‘washes his brush for every new star’. will be his life’s great work. The story of the romance between The novel presents, however, the odd frustration too. At Faiz and Roohi is in some ways conventional: the danger of times there is a forced tenor to the dialogue, and occasionally parental opposition thrums in the background, secret we are led to the verge of a complexity that threatens to assignations are arranged with the help of a young sibling, detonate on the page but then goes no further. For instance, letters are written, and moments are snatched among sacks of there is a prickly delicacy on display in the conversations incense sticks in the cellar under the shrine. But then there between Major Sumit Kumar, who is in charge of the soldiers are separations and, later, a surprising development. occupying the school, and its principal. We are offered a The real power of this novel, however, lies in the shifts that tantalising glimpse into the mind of a man who has become underlie the tale of the two young aware of his power: ‘Major Sumit Kumar feels both shame lovers— the transformation of Kashmir and anger… a darker voice says he could geraint lewis/writer pictures/ap and, more particularly, the neighboureasily have this woman thrown out, hoods of Srinagar, into a desperate barred from the building… have her battleground. Dozens of bunkers and arrested.’ But here the exploration stops, checkpoints appear on maps of the city; though their conversations continue. in gardens, the sound of machine gun The Book of Gold Leaves offers a fire replaces birdsong; soldiers delicate portrait of the complexities occupy schools, turning their latticed faced by a community under siege. A windows into sandbag embankments; sense of despair, rage and tremendous corpses float past in lakes and canals. waste rises through its accumulation There is a continuous, highly effective of fine details—what it leaves us with sense of trauma as these events surface is a strong impression of the few ways in a world where ‘a Persian couplet is in which attempts at happiness can be intertwined with a forest vine’. In one seized in the darkest circumstances. n of the most arresting passages in the Mahesh Rao is the author of book, Roohi walks fully clothed down Mirza Waheed The Smoke is Rising the steps of the ghat and into the Jhelum.

The Book of Gold Leaves

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RK Dayal/Express Archive

books

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Sachin Tendulkar in 1993 1 december 2014

The Man, the Mind and the Game Here is a cricketer who was too young to consume the bottle of champagne he received upon winning his first man-of-the-match honour. The legend of Sachin Tendulkar in his own words MINI KAPOOR Playing It My Way: My Autobiography

Sachin Tendulkar with Boria Majumdar Hodder & Stoughton | 486 pages | Rs 899

I

t is difficult to roll one’s mind back to a time when Sachin Tendulkar was not already a legend. And it is more difficult yet to figure out the ways in which the legend of Sachin prevents us from getting into his skin. I, for one, have never been able to shrug off the confusion of an early summer day in Multan, bewitching city of saints, during India’s Test tour of Pakistan in 2004. Close of the day’s play and India were clearly on their way to a historic victory. Rahul Dravid, standing in as captain for an injured Sourav Ganguly, had declared the innings at 675 for 5, a declaration that took all of us by surprise because Sachin was then batting on 194. But this was Team India, a new look and purposefully-minded team remodelled after the recent match-fixing scandal, and it was constantly breaking out of the comfort zone of a more lackadaisical sporting culture. It seemed odd for Sachin to be left stranded six short of a double century when victory was certain and the remaining time was abundant, but we willed ourselves to believe that this was a statement of intent: nobody’s milestones would be allowed to detain India in their pursuit of victory, not even the great man’s.

In any case, the moment was Virender Sehwag’s. He had reached the first Test triple century by an Indian, and at play’s end we waited in the press room for him; he was the player of the day and would by protocol come by for a chat.

Imagine the buzz when Sachin too turned up. What a story!

Here was Sachin offering himself up for a grilling. There was an edginess about him, and even as he lauded his mate’s record, he did not deny that he was “disappointed” about not getting to his double. Yet there was reticence over posing the question about the timing of the declaration too forcefully; even though Sachin, uncharacteristically, had opened up. It soon became clear that very few of us, a huge media party on a ‘discovery of Pakistan’ tour, wanted him to. A sports editor

tapped me on the shoulder and sternly whispered, “Stop asking him questions.” Ultimately the overall mood in the room prevailed: to keep Sachin from saying too much.

Not that he would have said more than he meant, but that moment has stayed with me. What brought him to the press conference that day? What did his declaration say about India’s regard for his records, for his obvious and deservedly special place in the squad? What did his public display of petulance betray about his expectations of his team? Was it a sense of entitlement? Or was it raw hurt at being stunned into falling short in full public view, and for no reason that could have a bearing on the team’s eventual fortune? Could the most special player so casually be denied a double century? Or had there been a plan that he, in fact, had misunderstood? More starkly yet, could it be that India and Sachin were now on parallel tracks, the one getting on, workmanlike, and the other playing for the record books?

To be sure, Sachin never approached even that rather polite show of hurt or disappointment ever again. And, of course, his career provides a ledger that shows he was never, not once, extraneous to the team’s gameplan. And now—a year, almost to the day, since his retirement from cricket—it is not just that there is no sign to be found in the stats that he played for anything but the team. It is, more importantly, evident that Sachin’s records have been, in effect, Indian cricket’s accomplishment. For long stretches, his innings were all that mattered on India’s scorecard. His stamina raised Indian cricket’s profile. And the dynamic by which the man was the team’s essence and equally a presence apart from the team, is one that still has to be articulated. But these were not questions we could trouble Sachin with. He gave an honest and outstanding account of himself on the field, and it did not feel right to ask for more. We did even think to ask for more. Those questions were for us to argue over, not to be posed to him.

It is thus that Sachin’s autobiography has created a vacuum where none previously existed. The book gives an account of his application and staying power, the training sessions with “Achrekar Sir”, of season upon season of remaining fighting fit and focused on the match at hand for 24 years of international cricket. Here is a cricketer who was too young to consume the bottle of champagne he received upon winning his first man of the match honour! And by the

I will go out on a limb and say that without the moral centre Sachin provided, Indian cricket could not have weathered all the crises it did

1 december 2014

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Ben Radford/Allsport/Getty Images

Sachin Tendulkar in Lahore, 1989

time he retired, he had seen out generations of Indian cricketers. It is really the strength of the book, its success in conveying what such a great career is made up of: unwavering discipline and dedication to play out each match in that moment, year after year. The records came because this extraordinary sportsperson served cricket by being true to the field, whatever the opposition, stakes or context, by making every innings count. Playing It My Way conveys this, the tears, the joy, the pain, the sportsmanship.

At times the autobiography appears to be a cascade of match reports, but that was—is—Sachin’s life. Cricket was the organising principle around which all else fell into place.

Forget the records, the hundred centuries in international cricket, the turns with the ball that demolished the opponents, his morale-boosting presence, his consistent contribution to the brains trust. What made him exceptional—and here I will go out on a limb and say that without the moral centre he provided, Indian cricket could not have weathered all the crises it did—was the code that he had internalised.

This internalisation came early on, in the training as a pre-teen, living with his aunt and uncle to cut the commute, and the most touching part of the book is his recollection of crying all the way home to Bombay after a disap58 open

pointing innings in an under-15 match. His sleepwalking is well-known, but the passage about his roommate Sourav Ganguly during the 1991-92 Australia tour being startled upon waking up in the middle of the night to see him shadow-practise still makes you pause in amazement. As does his recollection of celebrating the 2011 World Cup victory with his wife Anjali by retiring to their room, putting flowers behind their ears and dancing, the party soon enough bringing his teammates together into a tribute. These are little, gentle moments, and they are precious as in them you can almost hear him, carefully choosing his words.

But in walking us through his years, Sachin also opens up gaps in his life story, making us sit up and demand more than we would otherwise have thought to. On Multan, for instance, he recounts his chat with Dravid, during which he shared his disappointment: ‘Rahul said that the call was taken with the interests of the team in mind. It was important to demonstrate to the Pakistanis that we meant business and were keen to win. I wasn’t convinced… I said to him I was batting for the team as well. Yes, I had scored 194, but the 194 was meant to help the team and it was my individual contribution to the team’s cause.’

And then: ‘I reminded him of what had happened in Sydney less than a month earlier, when we had both been batting on the fourth evening and Sourav had sent out two or three messages asking when we should declare and Rahul had carried on batting. The two situations were comparable and, if anything, the Sydney declaration was far more significant and may have cost us a Test match and series victory. If Rahul was so keen to show intent here in Multan, he should have done the same in Sydney.’

Thereafter, the incident is closed off with an assurance to Dravid that it would have no bearing on their relationship, and indeed with a concluding line about their friendship. But look at the intriguing lines of inquiry about team effort and individual targets he leaves us with, an inquiry integral to his career profile. It is thrilling as a cricket fan to be alerted to these questions—but we don’t get Sachin’s interior dialogue.

So it is with Greg Chappell’s controversial coaching stint, Sachin’s own experience of captaincy, Kapil Dev’s coaching, the match-fixing fallout, IPL’s effect on cricket and the BCCI’s functioning. We just don’t get to walk through these subjects with him in an involved manner, and the promise of hearing his story as he lived it goes unrealised. We didn’t demand to know. But now that Sachin mentions all this and more besides by way of drawing the arc of his career, we need to find out. After all, he brought it up. n

The most touching part of the book is his recollection of crying all the way home after a disappointing innings in an under-15 match

Mini Kapoor is a Delhi-based writer 1 december 2014

rough cut

Slacker Comedy at its Best How Sulemani Keeda takes a wonderfully angular look at Bollywood Mayank Shekhar

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he central paradox of filmmaking in Mumbai is that the audience, more often than not, punishes the producer for making a ‘good’ film. What’s worse, nobody knows which ‘bad’ film will work! The beauty of an idea on the other hand is that everybody can have one. You don’t need professional writers for it. Unlike most film industries in the world, cinema in India is rarely, if ever, funded by state sops or scholarship grants. It works on the basic algebra of revenues—from theatres, television broadcast and DVD rights—minus costs equalling profits.

A constant tussle then between the ‘creative guy’ (who perhaps has a great story to tell) and the ‘money bag’ (who has no money to lose on someone else’s dream) is natural.

Both of them have very separate ideas of what a film should be. This produces the most Bollywood humour offscreen.

You only have to hang out with ‘filmies’ in Versova and its vicinity to realise that the conversation inevitably centres on this ‘crazy meeting’ with a producer/financier/ casting agent/son of an actor. After a while, it stops sounding funny. The world is what it is. Show-world is no different.

Sulemani Keeda (releasing 5 December) in that sense is a strikingly witty and a phenomenally funny film on the periphery of Mumbai’s entertainment district, where nearly everyone, I guess, is from Delhi! At any rate, most are from outside Mumbai, from middle-class homes, living alone or in shared apartments, paying massive rents for seriously small rooms. Their location indicates whether they’ve found some luck yet. They could be graded further by the coffee shops they frequent—Versova, Oshiwara or JW Marriott; bars they go to—Shankari or WTF in Andheri. Writer, musician types can be found at open mic nights in Bandra. The house ‘after-party’ scene is more democratic. Everybody’s welcome so long as you bring your own booze. It’s a city where love is A still from easy to find. The night is usually Sulemani Keeda young. So are its inhabitants.

The two screenwriters in Sulemani Keeda lead similar lives.

It takes a certain kind of keeda to also churn out scripts, not knowing whether any of them will become films. They go doorto-door attempting to land a suitable producer. The script for them is a bit like washing powder ‘Chamko’. I say this because the

1 december 2014

film also fondly reminds me of Sai Paranjpye’s Chashme Buddoor (1981), which was about happy-go-lucky, unemployed blokes ‘struggling’ on the campus of Delhi University. Struggling to make it in cinema, I suppose, may not be too different, except the exams to pass aren’t standardised and some of them are patently ludicrous. They make for better stories still. Those who’ve tried their luck usually have a book or script waiting to be written—on their own life in Mumbai and the oddballs they met. God knows, scores of films with varying budgets have been made on the Mumbai film industry. Almost all of them have been spoofs of what’s already a spoof. Few bothered to watch those films.

A common perception in Bollywood is that movies on the movie industry don’t work. I suspect this has something to do with our associating movies with magic. Nobody wants to see what’s really inside that hat. It kills the fun.

Sulemani Keeda is what you might call a ‘Versova indie’ (as oxymoronic as that term sounds). It is a super low budget film. Producers have put their own money in it. The debutant director, Amit Masurkar, has spent enough time in Mumbai and movies to know what he’s filming. The lead actors are Naveen Kasturia (a popular face in TV commercials), Aditi Vasudev (who’s grown into a fine talent since her debut in Do Dooni Chaar), and Mayank Tewari (who’s a screenwriter himself). The film is partly a ‘mockumentary’, although it also aspires to be ‘mumble-core’—a genre of flicks shot outdoors with secret cameras where only the leads are actors; reaction shots of the public are real (MTV in the US makes some fine mumble-cores; otherwise, think Sacha Baron Cohen).

But more than anything else, Sulemani Keeda is a ‘slacker comedy’ about two slackers, rather than artistes, who take themselves too seriously. Naseeruddin Shah once told me if there was a genuine film made on the life of people in the film industry, the powers-that-be wouldn’t let it see the light of day.

If they did, nobody would believe those stories. That’s probably an insider’s account. An outsider’s take, like Sulemani Keeda, requires only putting a camera before two strugglers and everything just becomes so naturally funny! n Mayank Shekhar runs the pop culture website TheW14.com open www.openthemagazine.com 59

science

nuts and bolts The amygdalae are almond-shaped groups of nuclei in the temporal lobes of the brain that are involved in the processing of memory, decisions and emotional reactions

Paranormal Activity A group of researchers prove that ghostly apparitions are just illusions of the mind

How Love Affects the Brain

W

hy is it that humans sometimes report a ghostly presence?

Why do we on occasion feel someone lurking when there is no one around?

Rationalists often claim that this is just the mind playing tricks; and a new study proves that much of it is indeed an illusion of the mind.

According to a study conducted by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and published in the journal Current Biology, the sensation of a ghostly presence is usually felt when the body experiences extreme conditions—for instance while mountaineering—or by people who suffer from neurological problems.

The researchers claim that ‘ghosts’ are probably just an illusion created by the mind when it momentarily loses track of the body’s location because of illness, exertion or stress.

The researchers set up an experiment in which volunteers’ movements and brain signals were mixed up. In the first part, the brain scans of 12 individuals with neurological disorders who had reported experiencing a paranormal presence revealed that all of them had some 60 open

A study published in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience has shown that the brain’s ‘threat response’, which is regulated by the amygdala, is lowered when individuals are first shown pictures of others receiving emotional support or affection. ‘A number of mental health conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are characterized by hypervigilance to threatening information,’ said Dr Anke Karl of Psychology at the University of Exeter. ‘These new research findings may help to explain why, for example, successful recovery from psychological trauma is highly associated with levels of perceived social support individuals receive.’ n

form of damage in the parts of the brain linked to self-awareness, movement and the body’s position in space. In the second part of the experiment, 48 healthy volunteers who hadn’t reported experiencing any ghostly presence were blindfolded, and asked to manoeuvre a robot with their hands, while another robot traced the same movements on their backs. When both sets of movements took place simultaneously, it created the illusion that the volunteers were caressing their own backs. But when there was a delay, the volunteers claimed they felt they were being watched and touched by one or more ghostly presences. One third of them reported feeling the presence of invisible people being close to them, with some even claiming they felt the presence of four ghosts.

According to the researchers, the experiment affected the brain functions related to self-awareness and perception of the body’s position.

They claim that when a person feels the presence of a ghost, it is really the brain miscalculating the body’s own position and identifying it as someone else’s. n

Sealed with a Kiss

According to a study published in the journal Microbiome, a 10-second kiss transfers about 80 million bacteria from one partner to another. Researchers from two institutions in the Netherlands (Micropia and TNO) performed the study on 21 couples, first asking them to detail their kissing behaviour, including how often they ‘intimately’ kissed (read ‘french kissing’), and then taking swab samples of the microbes in their saliva and on their tongues. In a controlled experiment, one member of each couple consumed a probiotic drink before kissing their partner; researchers found that the amount of probiotic bacteria in the receivers saliva rose threefold, leading to the estimate of 80 million transferred bacteria. n

1 december 2014

ultra quick responses GTG, or gray-togray, is the time it takes for a single pixel on a monitor to change from grey to white and then back to grey.

In the context of BenQ’s monitor, this allows for fast transitions with minimal smearing

tech&style

McIntosh MHP 1000 For a full-bodied listening experience, these are a must for audiophiles gagandeep Singh Sapra

Breitling w Chronospace Military

Price on request

$2,000

L

isten to your favourite track on the MHP 1000 and you realise the many notes and nuances that you missed. Ensuring tonal quality with a full-bodied listening experience, these half-kilogram headphones may feel heavy, but are a pleasure to use.

The aluminium and black leather design coupled with meticulous engineering make these headphones free of fatigue to wear and use. The closed design isolates external noise to give you a fully immersive listening experience. The earpads, like the headband, are made of premium natural soft leather.

On the inside are 40 mm diameter, 3-layer compound diaphragm dynamic transducers that feature a viscoelastic centre layer, powered by 1 december 2014

a Tesla annular neodymium magnet motor assembly to give you a full frequency response from 5 Hz to 20KHz, and a nominal pressure level of 97 db to 122 db.

The headphones have a nominal impedance of 200 Ohms and hence will require a headphone amplifier to be used.

Though McIntosh ensures that the MHP1000 will work with any of its legacy headphone amps, it recommends that the MHA1000 (roughly $4,500) be used.

The MHA 1000 uses McIntosh’s unique Autoformer technology to produce three impedance ranges of 8-40, 40-150 and 150-600 ohms, so that you can also use other headphones.

Featuring a Headphone Crossed Director that McIntosh calls HXD, it allows high-quality recordings to be reproduced as though on conventional speakers. The MHA1000 also features four digital inputs and can decode files up to 32 bits and 192 kHZ. The MHP1000 comes with two stereo connector cables: a 1 metre, 3.5 mm, and a 3 metre, 6.3 mm version. Both feature gold plated custom designed connectors for a perfect fit and a lossless connection.

Though these are the first headphones by McIntosh, the MHP 1000 showcases 65 years of the firm’s history with crystal clarity and a price that is just about right for the serious audiophile. n

The Chronospace Military electronic multifunction pilot’s chronograph combines a black steel case with an extremely rugged fabric strap, making it the ideal companion for the most extreme conditions. It is powered by a SuperQuartz™ chronograph caliber ten times more accurate than ordinary quartz and chronometer-certified by the COSC (Swiss Official Chronometer Testing Institute). It also comes with a sturdy and comfortable black steel mesh bracelet. n

BenQ RL2240HE Gaming Monitor

Rs 10,000

A gaming monitor that offers both speed and accuracy, the RL2240HE from BenQ has a 1 millisecond GTG response time, allowing fast moving action to be rendered smoothly without smearing or ghosting. It has an exclusive RTS Mode that offers better visibility in darkened areas (designed for games like StarCraft II and DotA II). Flicker free technology and an all new ‘black equaliser’ ensure total visibility. The monitor features an HDMI input, a DVI-D as well as standard DSUB [VGA] connectivity. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

the chicken farmer with other eggs to hatch Ali Zafar, the filmmaker from Pakistan who played a chicken farmer in his Tere Bin Laden, is not just also an actor, he is a music composer, singer-songwriter and a painter as well. He once worked as a sketch artist at Lahore’s Pearl Continental Hotel; and his first album Huqa Pani was a huge hit

Kill Dil It has a few witty lines, but its predictable plot and forgettable characters let it down ajit duara

o n scr een

current

John Wick Director Chad Stahelski cast Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist,

Alfie Allen

Score ★★★★★

nveer Singh, Cast govinda, Ra , Ali Zafar Parineeti Chopra Ali d aa Sh r to ec Dir

F

ortunately, Kill Dil is just a take-

off on the title of the Tarantino movie, Kill Bill, and not its content. Had director Shaad Ali done a stylised version of ‘B’ grade exploitation cinema in India, the result might have been quite disastrous. But, as it is, Kill Dil is a fairly conventional narrative of a gangster falling in love, trying to turn over a new leaf, then finding it impossible to sever relations with his former profession and associates.

Dev (Ranveer Singh) and Tutu (Ali Zafar) are hitmen who execute ‘suparis’ for their gang lord, Bhaiyaji (Govinda). The boys were orphans, raised to be killers, and are paid well for the hit jobs; well enough to frequent expensive night clubs.

This is where they meet Disha (Parineeti Chopra), a rich Delhi girl who, ironically, does social work connected with reforming criminals.

It is a plot that becomes easy to predict, yet is held together by some witty one-liners. Dev and Tutu are

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uneducated and are poor English speakers, but have the gift of the gab, and charm the jet-set crowd that Disha moves in. She is amused at first, especially by Dev’s naive text messages, and starts dating him.

Of course, it is a relationship that is headed nowhere because Bhaiyaji is keyed in to the social life of his hitmen and will not let his best supari man cross over and turn legitimate. The tale is evidently an old chestnut, but the persona and performances of the central characters keep the film ticking along for a while. Govinda has not lost the timing and flair of his flamboyant delivery of lines, nor has Ranveer lost his wackiness.

But in the end, there is nothing you take home from the movie—not a scene or character that is memorable, not a song you can hum, nor any visual composition that stays imprinted on your mind. Kill Dil is a movie that flits past multiplexes without too much of a flutter. n

It is hitman week at the movies.

‘John Wick’—the name is repeated ad nauseam in the film, so that you remember it for the sequels that are going to appear—is a hitman. Correction, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is a retired hitman. He got married, settled down, then lost his wife to cancer.

While mourning, he receives a cute little dog by courier service. Apparently, his late wife had arranged to have the doggy sent to help him cope with the aftermath of her death. But within 24 hours, Wick is beaten up, the dog clobbered to death, and his classic car, a 1969 Mustang, is stolen by the Russian mafia.

The subsequent carnage that Wick embarks on is a blood-soaked body count in the hundreds, only relieved by two characters. One is the cleaner, Charlie (David Patrick Kelly), whose job is to arrive with his van after a slaughter, pick up the bodies and clean up the place. The other is the suave manager (Lance Reddick) of a posh hotel reserved only for hitmen and catering only to their special needs.

John Wick pays for these services with gold coins, like a medieval assassin, but the audience will have to pay for this gladiatorial sport by cash or card. n AD

1 december 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

The Burden of a Serial Kisser

Emraan Hashmi is complaining—half jokingly only—that no matter what film he does, his producers can’t help cashing in on his ‘serial kisser’ reputation.

Take the case of Ungli, in which he plays the leader of a vigilante group that has decided to teach a lesson to anyone who makes life hard for the common man. Producer Karan Johar and writer-director Rensil D’Silva inserted a scene in the movie (and also in the film’s trailer) that unapologetically references the actor’s sleazy on-screen image.

Shooting for this scene, incidentally, was an unusual experience for the actor, he explained to me. “Normally, the director films a kissing scene when we’re at least 20 days into the shoot so that there’s already a comfort level established between the actors.”

But in the case of the snog in this film, Emraan revealed that he was introduced to the actress on the very day of the shoot. “It was a one-night-stand sort of scene, and I didn’t know her. We had to go at it then and there. I never saw her again because that was her only scene in the film. I don’t even remember her name,” he confesses, evidently embarrassed.

The image, he says shrugging his shoulders, is one that he’ll likely carry to his grave. “Believe me, I’ve tried telling my directors that ab kuch naya socho; log thhak gaye hain iss image se. But they don’t listen.”

The Devotion of Suspect Eager Beaver

Deepika Padukone, currently shooting Shoojit Sircar’s Piku in Kolkata with Amitabh Bachchan, appears to be circling her next project. Turns out the actress has her heart set on Agent Vinod director Sriram Raghavan’s adaptation of Vikas Swarup’s bestseller The Accidental Apprentice.

Raghavan—who is right now neck-deep in postproduction on his latest thriller, the Varun Dhawan-Nawazuddin Siddiqui starrer Badlapur—has reportedly met DP and discussed the film in some detail. The actress has apparently said she can jump into the project in October next year after she’s wrapped Piku, Imtiaz Ali’s Tamaasha, and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani.

Shrewdly mixing up her films— looks like she’s applying the ‘one for me, one for them’ approach— Deepika has had another good year 1 december 2014

after the blockbuster 2014 she enjoyed. Finding Fanny had industrywalas singing hosannas to her willingness to experiment with roles, and with Happy New Year (like with Chennai Express), she has shown that she can make her presence felt even in commercial blockbusters that typically tend to be hero-centric.

Unit hands working on Piku reveal that DP was rapt in conversation with Kahaani director Sujoy Ghosh when he dropped in on the set in Kolkata recently. Ghosh has said he was visiting his Aladin star Bachchan senior, but there is speculation that he may have been discussing his next project with Deepika.

That project is the adaptation of the bestselling Japanese novel The Devotion of Suspect X, which is likely to star Saif Ali Khan and will be produced by Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Films. Interestingly, no heroine’s name is attached to the project yet, which possibly explains the rumours.

Debt Management in B-Town

A leading action star, notorious for charging a hefty fee for starring in every movie he makes, is in the news currently for his latest film—one he appears in and has produced too.

The movie has collected a paltry Rs 28 crore in its first week—a new low for the usually bankable star.

The film’s lifetime theatrical collections are expected to peter out at a shockingly dismal Rs 30 crore.

The film’s failure may not hurt the A-lister personally, but has certainly left a hole the size of a football field in the pocket of the film’s ‘real’ producer and financier. Industry insiders have revealed that the film was put into production after the star— who allegedly lost Rs 15 crore in a gambling bet with the financier— agreed to give him 15 shooting dates in exchange of the money he owed him. The financier set up the project (which the actor produced under his own banner), invested a sizeable sum in the movie, made use of his IOU with the star, and got the movie made.

He’s now poorer by several crore, while the star has paid off a debt without so much as dipping into his pocket. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

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The Mark of a Genius

by S i d d h a rt h D h a n va n t S h a n g h v i

The most striking thing about Thomas Keneally is how lightly he wears his genius. The author of the deadly serious and incredibly moving Schindler’s Ark (adapted by Steven Spielberg to screen as the multiple Oscar winning Schindler’s List) came out to Goa a few weeks ago. My friends Raj and Dipti Salgaocar hosted him at supper in Vasco. At drinks, under an autumnal sky of crystal clarity, a beautiful young lady invited him to dance. “Bollywood dancing,” she phrased it. He gamely agreed. The French bombshell and the decorated Australian novelist swirled on the lawns to Kabira. He was a day short of his 79th birthday. He had another scotch.

Later, he told me his granddaughter taught him one of his life’s greatest lessons. At the opening of a centre in his name and honour, she gave the name plaque one good look and whispered to her celebrated grandfather: “You got to be kidding.” Genius. Wear it lightly.

Because your grandchildren are always there to remind you it’s all a joke.

(At dinner, in Goa, as the picture evidences, Keneally had the ladies charmed).

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi is the author of The Last Song of Dusk and honorary director, Sensorium 2014, a festival of arts, literature and ideas hosted at Sunaparanta, Goa

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1 december 2014