OPEN Magazine 8 December 2014

NAIDU’S SINGAPORE-IN-ANDHRA

SURVIVORS’ TALE HELL ON THE HIGH SEAS

l i f e

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8 D e c e m b e r 2 0 14 / R S 4 0

Why Aatish Taseer is the most distinctive voice of his generation Excerpts from his new novel

THE ETERNAL HARAPPAN SCRIPT TEASE

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Volume 6 Issue 48 For the week 2—8 December 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover photo Raul Irani

8 december 2014

KR Srinivasan

The death of 15 women in Bilaspur district of Chhatisgarh after undergoing sterilisation surgeries at a government organised family planning camp not only sent shock waves but exposes the pathetic state of free medical camps organised across the country for the unsuspecting underprivileged section of the society (‘Anatomy of a Medical Butchery’, 1 December 2014). It is baffling that the state health minister It is baffling that the instead of owning responsibilty for the state health minister fiasco puts the blame instead of owning on a doctor and susresponsibilty for the pends him. One fiasco puts the blame wonders if suspension on a doctor and of one doctor is enough suspends him punishment for a crime of this scale. The fact that 83 surgeries were done by one doctor within a span of five hours without making the mandatory background checks of the patients, tells the sorry state of affairs in such free camps where meeting the targets are given priority rather than rendering quality medical assistance to the needy. As choice, quality and accountability, pre-requisites for family planning are given a go by, United Nations has rightly summed up that this incident is a great human tragedy. There are other instances of medical camp disasters, like patients losing eyesight after undergoing free cataract operations. It is high time state governments put stringent measures in place to avert deaths or other post-operation complications in future.  letter of the week Our Shuttlers’ Big Smash

this refers to ‘The Dragon Slayer’ (1 December 2014). It speaks volume about the talent of our shuttlers, as beating Chinese players in their own den is considered impossible since China keeps producing champion players in this sport like an assembly line. By defeating the greatest player to play this sport in his own backyard, our national champion Srikanth Nammalwar Kidambi has done us proud. Saina Nehwal also added one more medal to

Give Nehru His Due

both gandhi and Nehru, wouldn’t have joined an enemy’s enemy to win our own war of independence. In the hindsight, it would perhaps be a fair assessment to say that both Germany and Japan deceived Nehru (‘The Clever Panditji and the Emotional Netaji’, 24 November 2014). Nehru had a better understanding of international relations (in this aspect one shouldn’t be eager to jump to conclusion on the China debacle). Not to forget, even after Mahatma’s death, Sardar Patel didn’t walk out of the Congress or alienate Nehru from the party. To say that ‘Nehru merely bided his time and came out trumps’ is to show one’s complete ignorance of Nehru’s contributions and a deliberate attempt to undermine him.  SL Mehra

Modi’s Men

her growing tally of championship wins. After winning the Chinese title, Kidambi went on till quarter finals in the Hong Kong Open, which is a testimony of his prowess.

Saina’s and his victories must spur the level of the interest in the game in the young generation, and corporatisation can help this game just as it has for other sports like hockey and kabaddi. We can produce more champions by strategically investing more in the game.  Bal Govind

this is a well researched and well written article (‘Axis of Power 2014’, 10 November 2014). Modi has been a fine judge of men and the fact that he continued with Raghuram Rajan, a UPA appointee was indeed a well thought out move. Rajan’s advice on deregulation of fuel prices when international prices were plunging turned out to be a master stroke. One day, years later, someone will write about the trio—Modi, Jaitley and Amit Shah—and how they took a country from UPA-led depths to NDA-led heights. It will be an epic bestseller.  Chandra Reddy

open www.openthemagazine.com 1

The Mother of All Complex Cases Kerala HC will soon decide if a woman who has a child through surrogacy is entitled to maternity benefits Who is eligible for maternity benefits? A mother. But then who is a mother? That should have been a clear enough answer but in an age of surrogate, foster, biological and commissioning mothers, it can get complicated. The Kerala High Court is now having to decide whether a woman who got her child through surrogacy is entitled to maternity benefits.

P Geetha, who works as a deputy general manager with the Kerala Livestock Development Board, is the 8 december 2014

mother in question. She has filed a writ petition in the High Court saying that maternity benefits are being denied to her. After trying 20 years to have a baby through In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF), she and her husband finally decided on surrogacy. They found a surrogate mother in Hyderabad who delivered on 18 July 2014 and the baby was handed over to them on the same day. The next day, Geetha applied for 180 days of maternity leave to take care of the newborn. Her office, however, refused to

acknowledge her motherhood on the grounds that ‘it was not normal’. They told her that she could go on leave without pay. That’s when Geetha went to court.

“This is a violation of fundamental rights provided by the Constitution. Neither the Maternity Benefits Act nor the maternity rules of the department say anything about the standards of ‘normalcy’ of being a mother.

Maternity leave is the lawful right of any mother irrespective of the way she

conceived,” says advocate Thushara James, who represents Geetha. She argues that the objective of maternity leave is to get time to take care of the newborn child and in that respect, it does not matter if it is a surrogate baby.

The arguments in the case are over and the Kerala High Court is expected to give an order soon. There is no precedent regarding maternity rights of mothers who have babies through surrogacy in India.

The verdict will set a new benchmark. n Shahina KK

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illustration by anirban ghosh

small world

contents

12

34

congress

pirates

Where are the big guns?

8 6

21

Hell on the high seas

28

open essay

hurried man’s guide

The lady India loved to hate

24 mim

The rise of Asaduddin Owaisi

Insurance Amendment Bill

andhra

Naidu’s dream city

cover story Aatish Taseer: An Indian original

saints of the week FATHER CHAVARA AND SISTER EUPHRASIA

The Chosen Ones Two 19th century religious figures from Kerala were recently canonised by the Pope Lhendup G Bhutia

A

as ‘venerable’ by the Pope. Then comes the relevance of miracles in the 21st century. saint in the Roman Catholic faith Should the Church still look for candideal-clincher—the proof of a candidate’s is someone of extreme holiness and dates that appear in dreams and cure sainthood or, more accurately, the ability sanctity. On Sunday, India got two individuals of tumours? Or should the more direct channels with God, both 19th to perform miracles. Vatican lawyers, emphasis remain solely on the good work theologians and medical experts sit century members of the Syro-Malabar they put in? Chavara was a visionary together to vet and identify miracles. A Catholic Church in Kerala. Father priest and social reformer. He ensured single miracle gets the candidate as far as Kuriakose Elias Chavara and Sister beatification. Two miracles get her or him that every church in Kerala established a Euphrasia, were recognised as saints by sainthood. The entire process of canonisa- school nearby. He pushed for not just Pope Francis at a special canonisation secular education for Catholics, but also tion can take centuries. In the case of mass. The only other member of the for children of other communities, Chavara, Alphonsa had testified how he Syro-Malabar Catholic Church to be especially from disadvantaged families. appeared before her twice and cured her recognised as a saint so far was Saint He reportedly fought for appointing of an illness. He is apparently also said to Alphonsa, fondly called Alphonsamma, have helped cure the squint eye of a young Kerala priests as Bishops instead of who was canonised in 2008. There was foreign missionaries and also founded the girl. The family of a carpenter in Kerala much celebration over the news in India. claims that after praying to Euphrasia, the first Catholic religious congregation for The media claimed that canonising the men and women in the country. The CMI, bone cancer that the carpenter was two was a hat tip to the vitality of Kerala’s which he founded, has over the decades diagnosed with miraculously disapcontemporary Catholic community and peared before surgery. In another case, she set up several educational and charity its long and pedigreed history. Chavara organisations. Euphrasia on the other apparently cured the tumour in the neck was a priest from Kuttanad in Kerala’s hand, fondly referred to as the ‘praying of a seven-year-old girl.

Alappuzha district. Born in 1805, he mother’ for dedicating her life to prayer, What is up for argument is the founded the congregation of Carmelites spent her life helping and of Mary Immaculate (CMI).

GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/Getty Images counselling people. Whether or Euphrasia, born 70 years after not to bestow them with Chavara, lived between 1877 sainthoods should depend and 1952. She spent most of her entirely on their work. life in the confines of a convent A case in point is the story of in Thrissur.

Mother Teresa, a deserving saint What is of peculiar interest, whose sainthood, if ever however, is the process of bestowed on her, would be a PR recognising a saint. First, an coup for a much-maligned investigation on the candidate’s institution. The campaign for life is carried out, after which a her sainthood is still stuck at report is prepared and submitthe stage of beatification. One ted to the Bishop of the area. On miracle has been recognised, getting his approval, it is sent to although challenged by the Congregation for the Causes doctors, and her second is still of Saints in Rome. Those Pictures of Father Chavara and Sister Euphrasia on the scarf of an Indian priest awaiting confirmation. n deemed worthy are recognised

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archaeology

An ancient script tease

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The definitive biography

a cinema

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N Srin

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f o r wanting to contest the

election for the post of BCCI chief It must take a man of spectacularly tough skin to ride out a betting scandal as large and infuriating to the public as the one the Indian Premier League (IPL) has been accused of. But N Srinivasan, the sidelined president of the BCCI and the current chief of the ICC, on whose watch the betting and the spot-fixing scandal took

63

Atul Bhalla: Artist of the aqueous

place and whose son-in-law, Gurunath Meiyappan was found participating in this betting, is not just unfazed but also wants to run for the post of BCCI chief again. And what is more, he is widely expected to win the election. According to the former chief of BCCI, since the Justice Mukul Mudgal report on spot-fixing has found nothing incriminating against him, he should be allowed to contest. This particular spin he was spreading in the media didn’t go down too well with the Supreme Court which had to bluntly tell him that he has not been given a clean chit.

And that there was conflict of interest between him being the BCCI chief and owning an IPL team something that people have been screaming hoarse about for years. A two-member special Bench said, “You can’t make a distinction between BCCI and IPL. IPL a is a by-product of BCCI.” Maybe at least now, Srinivasan will get the message. n

Aamir’s profit motive

After coming under pressure from the Allahabad High Court, the Aligarh Muslim University has opened its Maulana Azad Library to female students TRAN S FOR M ATION

“The issue is not of discipline, but of space. Our library is packed” — Zameer Uddin Shah, Vice Chancellor, AMU, to The Times of India, 11 November 2014

‘All students, including girls, have been allowed access to the Maulana Azad Library from the current session itself’ — Zameer Uddin Shah in writing to the Allahabad High Court, 25 November 2014

turn

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

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

art

Saif Ali Khan’s lost edge

p

around

raul irani

His Past Continues to Shadow the Present

Manmohan Singh’s never-ending trials 8 december 2014

W h i l e s t e p p i n g d o w n , former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had hoped that history would be kinder to him than the contemporary media. But the ghosts of the scams under his watch, especially that of the coal allocation scandal, refuse to go away. A special court has asked the CBI why the former Prime Minister, who also held the coal portfolio, wasn’t questioned in the case. “Don’t you think examination of the then coal minister was necessary in the matter?...

Don’t you think his statement was

necessary to present a clear picture?”

Special CBI judge Bharat Parashar asked the agency. The CBI officer replied, “The then coal minister was not permitted to be examined,” though officials from the PMO were probed and it was found that the coal minister’s statement was not required. The CAG had said that the UPA government’s allocation of coal blocks during the period 2004–09 may have cost the exchequer thousands of crores. Now, signs of Singh’s great hopes coming true are getting bleaker by the day. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to the contentious Insurance Bill The much-debated Insurance Laws Amendment Bill (2014) seeks to raise the ceiling on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in insurance from the current limit of 26 per cent to 49 per cent. The firm will remain under the management and control of the Indian partner who will thus have the right to appoint the majority of directors, and control management and policy decisions.

Private sector insurance companies stand to gain immensely if this happens. The amendment is expected to bring foreign investment to the tune of Rs 23,000 crore and also attract The amendment more capital from is expected to current overseas partbring foreign ners. Presently, there are investment to the about 24 private sector tune of Rs 23,000 insurance companies crore for the operating in the life and private sector non-life segment in India.

manish swarup/ap

This amendment can only be done through a Bill which has to be approved by both the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha. While it was expected to be cleared in the ongoing Winter session, this Bill—pegged to herald one of the first big economic reforms by the BJP government—has hit upon a hurdle, with the Opposition not ready to pass it. Parties like the Trinamool Congress and Shiv Sena are already hinting at ganging up against the Bill.

Parliament House, New Delhi

Further delays are anticipated, particularly because the government is in a minority in the Rajya Sabha.

The Rajya Sabha Select Committee, appointed in August at the insistence of the Congress, has now asked for an extension till 12 December to further examine the Bill and perhaps buy time to placate the opposition. Once the committee presents its report, the Bill will have to be cleared by the Lok Sabha.

Interestingly, the Amendment was essentially scripted by the UPA government in 2008 but met with stiff opposition from the NDA. The tables have clearly turned now. n

All Smoke, No Fire Instead of a ban on loose cigarettes why not just stop all production M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

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ven if you are in extreme pain from a terminal disease you can’t go to a medical shop and ask for morphine because, it is assumed, you don’t have the ability to self-medicate or you could misuse it. A prescription from a doctor is a must. But when it comes to cigarettes, despite overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that it leads to cancer, anyone can go and buy it off a street corner.

In India, studies show the biggest cause of cancer being tobacco, accounting for 40 per cent of all cancers. In rural India, this is in the form of mouth cancer because they chew tobacco. In urban India, it is lung cancer because of cigarettes and beedis.

And yet, as was evident in a reply by the Health Minister to a question in Rajya Sabha this week, we have a strange strategy towards eliminating this risk. This is what the minister said, “The expert panel constituted by Ministry of Health & Family Welfare has inter alia, recommended prohibition on sale of loose or single stick of cigarette, increasing the minimum legal age for sale of tobacco products... The Ministry has accepted the recommendations… .” Soon this is expected to come into force.

There is an underlying contradiction here. The rationale of prohibition on sale of loose cigarettes is to prevent youngsters from getting addicted.

They are believed to not have enough money to buy a packet and, being denied the solitary cigarette, will thus not be able to experiment. Fair enough. But consider also the other measure that the government is planning—of increasing the minimum age of smoking.

If people below a certain age can’t smoke because the law says they can’t be sold cigarettes in packets or singles, the logic of banning sale of loose

cigarettes becomes redundant. One contradicts the other if laws are followed in India. And if laws are not enforceable, then both become irrelevant.

Why not directly stop all production and sale of cigarettes, beedis and tobacco in its edible forms? Because the state gets revenue in tens of thousands of crores from taxing it.

Also, there is the argument that shutting down the sector will lead to large scale unemployment of those working there.

To understand why this appeal to greed and empathy does not work, use the Murder does same logic not go away elsewhere for because the other killers. state bars it, Assume the government but it sends wants to finish the message off the underthat this is a world but society that instead of does not putting them in jail, decides that allow it they will first take the knives away, then after five years their guns, then their mobile phones so that they can’t operate effectively and so on. But that is not how it is done because tolerating crime means sanctioning it. Murder does not go away because the state bars it, but it sends the message that this is a society that does not allow it.

So long as cigarettes are legally allowed to be sold, its use is sanctioned, even if you have a rider of personal responsibility. We could hold the other end of the liberal pole and say that people have free choice to consume anything, so long as they know the risks. It is an honest position but then you will have to legalise brown sugar too. n 8 december 2014

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open essay

By Bennett Voyles

the lady india loved to hate The fall of Robin L Raphel and an old diplomatic peeve

E

arlier this month, news leaked out that counter-intelligence agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had searched the Washington DC home and State Department office of veteran diplomat Robin L Raphel, on suspicion that she had taken classified information out of the department.

Bennett Voyles If these events mark the end of is a Berlin-based Raphel’s 35-year diplomatic career, it observer of global will probably be noted with more regret trends. He was in Pakistan than India. Raphel has been formerly with The a controversial figure in Indian foreign Economist policy circles for the last two decades Intelligence Unit because of a perceived pro-Pakistani tilt in her multiple terms of service as a senior US diplomat in the region.

Raphel, 67, has not been charged with a crime, but in October, her security clearance was revoked and her contract with the State Department not renewed, according to The Washington Post. An FBI investigation is continuing.

Raphel’s experience in South Asia goes back to the late 70s, when after a stint as a CIA analyst, she joined USAID in Islamabad, Pakistan. In 1978, she returned to the United States and joined the US Foreign Service.

An ex-husband, Arnold Raphel, served as US ambassador to Pakistan from 1987 until his death in the same 1988 plane crash that killed President Zia ul-Haq, but Robin Raphel did not serve in South Asia again until 1991, when she was named the political officer at the US embassy in New Delhi.

In the summer of 1993, shortly after the election of her old friend Bill Clinton—they had met while studying the same year in the United Kingdom (he was at Oxford, while she was at Cambridge)—she was tapped to become Assistant Secretary of State for the South Asian bureau.

Raphel’s relationship with Pakistan seems to have been mutually friendly from the start. After the raid earlier this month, a spokeswoman at the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said that Raphel had always been “a good friend to Pakistan.”

In one interview, Raphel claims to have a similar fondness for India. From the Indian side, however, it was more or less a matter of hate at first sight.

Things did not go well from the very beginning of her high-profile role as the Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, when at an off-the-record briefing in October 1993, she told the reporters that the US viewed “the whole of Kashmir as disputed territory, the status of which needs to be resolved.”

This had been the US position going back to Truman, according to The Limits of Influence, a history of US foreign policy on Kashmir by Howard B Schaffer, but no one ever said so in public. Where John Malott, the interim head of the Clinton Administration’s

new South Asian bureau, had danced around the Kashmir question as was traditional, Raphel stated it bluntly.

This news set off a firestorm in the Indian press and some headshaking back in Foggy Bottom, according to Schaffer.

Indian policy watchers saw this as a major change in policy, and a tilt toward Pakistan. American diplomats, meanwhile, wondered why she had walked so boldly into the sensitive area, and gone so far beyond the standard American line that Kashmir was a matter for the Pakistanis, the Indians, and the Kashmiris, to work out together. It was like walking into a minefield with no hope of reward for the heroism, one Foreign Service officer told Schaffer.

Until 1997, when she was appointed Ambassador to Tunisia, Raphel repeatedly said that she had not said anything that was not US policy, but most Indian foreign policy watchers never forgave her for it, particularly as it was followed up by other measures that the Ministry of External Affairs didn’t like, including a 1996 arms deal with Pakistan, outreach to Sikhs, and an effort to develop diplomatic ties with the Taliban in Afghanistan in part in order to build an oil pipeline to Pakistan—efforts that earned her the nickname ‘Lady Taliban’ in the Indian press.

Her next professional foray back to South Asia occurred eight years later, when after her retirement from the State Department in 2005, she took a job with Cassidy & Associates, a prominent Washington lobbying firm that retained her to represent a number of foreign governments, including Pakistan.

Raphel’s work on the Pakistani account made her return to the State Department in 2009 as a member of Richard Holbrooke’s South Asian team somewhat controversial.

Critics saw the appointment as a breach in the young Obama Administration’s pledge to stop the revolving door between government officials and lobbying firms. However, Raphel’s defenders noted at the time that the wording of the rule actually contained an exception for technical experts and foreign service professionals, and the appointment survived the headlines.

One Georgetown University foreign policy scholar in Washington argues that India’s long-standing grudge against Raphel is misplaced. In Fair’s view, Indians were right to be angry about the US South Asian policy, but mistaken about where to put the blame. “Looking back, the policies towards Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan were wrong,” says C Christine Fair, an assistant professor in the Center for Peace and Security Studies (CPASS), within Georgetown University’s Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service.

“As a straightforward, plain speaking female, we are always seen as being abrasive whereas similarly ‘articulate’ men are seen as doing their jobs. So yes, I think the personal animus this issue has taken has a gendered element,” says Fair.

The late Richard Holbrooke made

Raphel’s work— including efforts to develop diplomatic ties with the Taliban for an oil pipeline to Pakistan—earned her the nickname ‘Lady Taliban’ in the Indian press

8 december 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 9

Robin L Raphel during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on Capitol Hill in 2004 mark wilson/getty images

similar statements to Raphel’s on Kashmir, but isn’t remembered in a similar way, she notes.

Like Raphel, Holbrooke had a reputation as a blunt, not-verydiplomatic diplomat, but this bullheaded quality tended to endear him to others. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said of Holbrooke that “If Richard calls you and asks you for something, just say yes. If you say no, you’ll eventually get to yes, but the journey will be very painful.”

“Holbrooke had more heft, said similarly wrong-headed things about Kashmir and got none of the flak she has,” Fair notes—even though he made his statements in 2008 and she made hers 18 or 20 years before.

In any case, Fair argues that it’s wrong to pin the blame for the policies on Raphel. “For some reason, many Indians want to personalise their anger. In fact, this is misplaced. These policies came from the Bush Senior and Clinton White Houses,” she says.

But one former State Department official disputes that. “As a general matter, on foreign policy issues that are not the leading issue of the day in Washington, officials at the level of Assistant Secretary of State and higher have considerable discretion in making decisions as to US relations with foreign governments,” he said. “The President, and even the Secretary of State, have so many issues on their plate[s] that they inevitably have to delegate considerable leeway to the Under Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries.”

That can change, however. “If Congress or important interest groups push back aggressively against what the Under Secretary or Assistant Secretary is recommending, that can change,” he says. “But the default is considerable discretion, at the Under Secretary and Assistant Secretary level, on that vast majority of foreign policy issues that are not the leading issues of the day in Washington.”

For her part, Raphel saw her vilification as the result of efforts made by India’s Ministry of External Affairs and some 10 open

old South Asia hands at the State Department, and second, cultural misunderstanding.

“I am not a stuffy diplomat and I know what I am talking about,” she said in a 1997 interview to India Abroad magazine, “and I talk straight and at the end of the day most people appreciate that. I don’t suck up to anybody, and I mean not to anybody at home or abroad. That’s not my style, and in India where there’s a bit of tradition of obsequiousness, they get a little confused about that.”

She also had few kind words for the Ministry of External Affairs. “I like Pakistan, I like India, I like South Asia,’ she declared. ‘In India, I like the colour and the texture and the sensuality of the place and the interestingness of the people, except the bureaucrats, who in my experience are not worth the time of day.”

A

s for insinuations that Raphel has been caught spying for the Pakistanis, Fair describes the rush to accuse her as “appalling,” and chalks it up to Indian frustration with US policy and sexism, not evidence.

One source of India’s misunderstanding about the role Raphel actually played may have come from herself and her frank assessment of her own abilities and achievements.

In that same India Abroad interview, Raphel said she had won the appointment to the South Asian post not because she was a friend of Bill’s from his Oxford days but because “in terms of the qualities people were looking for, which was imagination, leadership, not the same old mindset… I was the automatic choice.”

She also seemed pleased with how it had all gone. Looking back at her performance, she said, “If you talk to someone who really knows the issues, this administration realizes that they are indebted to me for holding the South Asia account and keeping it and trying to get attention on to it.” n 8 december 2014

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INNOCEAN-001/12

photographs by raul irani

AN Aatish Taseer’s new novel

INDIAn is a modern classic on being Indian

ORIGINAL

By S PRASANNARAJAN

Theword

for history in Sanskrit is itihasa, the way things were.

When, half way through Aatish Taseer’s new novel, Toby, Sanskrit scholar and classicist, gives us a little grammatical explanation of the word, it sounds as if the reader is being reminded of the historical as well as the civilisational backdrop against which the existential drama of the characters is being played out. Sanskrit—let’s ignore Smriti Irani for a while—here is language as ancestral intimacy, bonding and a memory of time, and in a novel that so effortlessly passes through the crooked alleys of Indian politics, it bridges the cracked present and the abandoned past. It is not that such authorial intervention is needed to sense the Indian ideal on which this novel, itihasa indeed in its structural expansiveness, is built. You may have to go back to his last two novels to realise how deep is Taseer’s entrapment in the idea of being Indian. In The Temple-Goers, this is what a writer who could have been Naipaul (and such a writer appears in The Way Things Were too) says about India: ‘In fact, it could be said that there is almost no other country, certainly not one so vast, where the countrymen are as acquainted with the distant reaches of the land through their pilgrimages as they are in India; perhaps no country where poor people travel more. They think nothing of jumping on a bus or train, for two or three days, to journey to Tirupathi in the south or Jagannath in the east. And this way, the religion itself is like a form of patriotism.’ The narrator of The Temple-Goers, daringly called Aatish Taseer, is in a constant struggle not to be an outsider in such a place caught between the temptations of modernity and the tensions of tradition, though his ways of being an Indian are more sophisticated. It is a journey of the classical mind. In his second novel, Noon, stretching from a Delhi where the stirrings of a national transformation are already discernible to a Karachi of morbid moralism, a personal quest becomes an interrupted meditation on cultural as well as political identity. The quest becomes bigger and more ambitious

“This book came out of a

feeling of euphoria at the rediscovery of classical India in my own life.

There were moments when that excitement was like an animating force behind the narrative”

in his new novel; it becomes a passage to the deepest recesses of India of the mind.

It begins with a homecoming, a son’s return to India with his father’s body. It is a time when Modi is the conversation, and certain parts of Delhi, of Sunday brunches and lazy reminiscences, are kind of historyproof. For Skanda, a Sanskrit scholar, this journey is a foray into a world that shaped his own cultural sensibility—a world where, in another time, his parents were the leading protagonists in a drama in which the personal was played out on a political stage, beginning with the Emergency and ending with Ayodhya. What follows in a dual narrative is a family epic set in the upper class drawing rooms of Lutyens’ Delhi that, in its evolutionary spasms, turns into a dramatisation of the idea of India itself—its sophistication and its crassness, its perfections and its pathologies. And it is Sanskrit, an aesthetic shared by father and son, that magnifies the overwhelming sense of being Indian that runs through this novel. When I mention this to Taseer, he tells me: “I had been looking for that sense of Indianness for many years; and I found it in a strange way, through Sanskrit. I can still remember that morning, five or six years ago, when, at the Oriental Institute at Oxford (irony of ironies!) I read aloud my first ever words of Sanskrit: Brhad-asva uvaca. Brhadasva spake. Such a little thing—so commonplace in epics— but it went through me like a chill. I had the feeling of being spoken to over the ages. And the words, though simple, were full of Indo-European resonance, full of a shared history of sound and meaning: asva, cognate with the Latin equus, is related to such words as equerry and equestrian. And uvaca, the perfect form of the verb vac, to speak, is cognate with the Latin vox and vocare, from where we have words like voice and vocal. So, you see, even this little fragment, when unpacked, conveyed a sense of history. I didn’t know all this at the time, of course: I was simply responding with a child’s excitement to the sound of the language; but I must on some instinctive level have sensed its deeper resonance.”

I

t is Skanda’s father, Toby, half foreigner and the

brainy Raja of Kalasuryaketu, who is the one who carries the resonance across the pages with the elegance of a renaissance mind. When we first meet him, he is delivering a lecture on the creation of poetry, dwelling on the rage and the subsequent sorrow of the first poet, Valmiki: ‘Known among poets as the adi-kavi—the first poet, a Sanskritic Caedmon, if you will—he is the first to recognise, twenty centuries ago, that, however much poets wish not to cause pain, there is no poetry without pain, no poetry without pity. And from here on, in the Indian imagination, soka—sorrow or grief—comes to be fused, both conceptually and phonemically, with sloka, poetry! It is this, and nothing besides, that we consider to be the birth poetry.’ This passage, in a way, summarises 8 december 2014

Toby’s own conversation with India—an idea that animates him, and a reality that crushes him. His story will turn out to be one of the romantic as outcast.

This is the man who, on a drunken night in the Oberoi coffee shop, just after the Emergency was declared, climbs onto a table and announces a reward of £1,000 to any man willing to assassinate Indira Gandhi. In the closing pages, the falling mosque in Ayodhya demolishes an India he has all along been romanticising, an India shaped by his Sanskritic sensibility. ‘There was never a man who knew more about India and, yet, knew India less, than Toby. He was like one of those men who fall in love with the idea of a woman, while all the time insulating themselves from her reality.’ But his alternative is a beautiful state of mind, the poetics of the outsiderinsider, a piece of classicism in a vastness of crassness.

Says Taseer, “This tension between India, as idea, and India, the reality, is central to the novel. It comes up again and again, as does the question—so shrill in our times—of what really means to be Indian. Who has the monopoly on authenticity? Who is in possession of a true knowledge of the past?” This novel, Taseer tells me, “came out of a feeling of euphoria at the rediscovery of classical India in my own life.” Toby embodies this excitement.

“Once he glimpses the genius of ancient India, he is never able to look at the modern country he sees around him in the same way again. The contact with the past transforms his relationship to what remains of old India in presentday India,” Taseer tells me.

T

he woman Toby seduces and then marries, Uma,

brings the classicist closer to the possibilities of modern India. Uma, perhaps the most evolved character in the novel, is more than about the pleasures and privileges of Delhi’s original high society, which, by the way, provides some great set pieces choreographed with comic precision. In a novel of layered narrative architecture, she is the life force around which a family drama of elemental passions and epic humiliations unfolds. If memory is art’s alternative to history, the pages that capture the days of fear and hatred after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination are the testament of the living as a memorial service. It shatters the cosy certainties on which Uma’s family thrived for so long in a cosmopolitan city. The anti-Sikh Delhi riots of ’84 make Uma’s brother, the one who gets to read Toby’s mind correctly, an outsider. It is a protest and withdrawal when the brother abandons the city he thought was his. It was political violence that sets the marauders against the Sikhs. The writer of The Way Things Were is haunted by his political inheritance—Mrs Gandhi, the Delhi riots, Ayodhya... “How can I not be! The drama of these years—bookended by the Emergency and the demolition of the Mosque—is real. At home: the Emergency; Mrs Gandhi’s defeat and return to power; the creation of Bhindranwale; his death in Blue Star; Mrs Gandhi’s as-

8 december 2014

“I used to feel such a sense of embarrassment about being an English writer in India. But it was something that I grew less as I was exposed to Sanskrit. I began to see the history of these languages— the Indo-European languages , at least—as a shared history”

sassination. Abroad: Mullahs in Tehran; Soviet tanks in Kabul; Bhutto’s head in a hangman’s noose. The return of religion, of conservatism. Of Reagan and Thatcher.

All this, and we are not even half way through! It was very near to me, you know: my father (the late Salman Taseer) was in jail under Zia, my mother (Tavleen Singh) was covering these things for the Indian papers. She was coming home with stories about what was happening.

This was my direct material,” Taseer tells me. History, merciless elsewhere and redeeming in some places, is an echo, a flash and a rude intervention in this novel— it is the stylus that alters the script, as if she is the knowing child of destiny, taking everything in, and a part of her being incomprehensible to others. And others, in a Taseer novel,form a menagerie of types, caricatures and some originals, all at home in any high class Delhi drawing room.

So I ask Taseer: “Delhi of a certain vintage, its class mannerisms and attitudes, comes alive so naturally in your book. Memories of growing up?”

“It is hard for me to conceal my contempt for the people I grew up amongst. There was an outward veneer of sophistication about them, but it was very thin: they were in fact shallow and stupid people. Many of them went into politics. Some became chief ministers, one a prime minister, others senior ministers. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely nothing. They had seen the world when few could; they had been to the best schools; but none of it had any impact on them. They never tried to understand why some societies worked and others didn’t. They were disgusted by the people who had

“It is hard for me to conceal

my contempt for the people I grew up amongst. There was an outward veneer of sophistication about them, but it was very thin: they were in fact shallow and stupid people”

brought them to power. And they either left them roughly as they had found them or they looted them, squirrelling away money, diamonds, and flats in Knightsbridge.

Nothing makes me happier now than to see that the age of this class of person is over. The drawing rooms of Delhi have been emptied of influence. And it’s a wonderful thing.”

“You get it so real. Reminds me of Rushdie’s Bombay.”

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“Yes. This must be what Coetzee means when he says: ‘there is no mere landscape.’ Delhi, at some point, became a landscape of my imagination. It can happen.

You mention Rushdie and Bombay; I can think of others.

Bellow and Chicago, Joyce and Dublin. It takes a certain kind of city at a certain point in its development, doesn’t it? Delhi is definitely at that point. The little world that I grew up in—of privilege and influence—has been completely exploded, encircled, turned inside out. The cities within the city have been stitched together with infrastructure. A new urban whole has come into being.

There are subcultures in Delhi; there are immigrants; there is something of an intellectual life. It’s quite a significant moment.”

“Do the people in your life, or people you know, always run the risk of getting into your books? I couldn’t help spotting a few here. “ “Apparently they live in mortal fear of that. But I don’t think I do it anymore than anyone else. I just get caught more often. No one should take it personally. It’s never out of malice, but out of curiosity and interest. And there is very rarely a direct match; more often than not there are multiple models for a single character. Only rarely does an old aunty get dragged off her sofa in Lutyens’ Delhi and thrown—Sikh husband, Marxist parents, great corpulence and all—headfirst into my novel without a paddle. But these are rare moments of playfulness.”

And Maniraja, businessman, political impresario, and Hindu nationalist, is a type. We can’t miss him. He is the man who replaces Toby in Uma’s life. Set against Toby’s passivity, what Uma thinks is the inherent weakness of an egghead, Maniraja is a man of action and volatility— and of kinetic vulgarity. It is always someone like Maniraja who finances the projects in civilisation. The debris of the demolished mosque in Ayodhya is the ideal foundation on which he will rebuild his civilisation.

The two men in Uma’s life are two variations of India at play in this novel. There is nothing ‘practical’ or ‘sensible’ about the hopelessly romantic Toby. Maniraja is so fiercely confident that he can rebuild the India vandalised by the enemy—he believes in the brightest tomorrow. Even as Uma migrates from the sophistication of Toby to the brashness of Maniraja (Skanda’s Claudius), she keeps her ‘enigma’ intact—and she remains so till the last page. In a parallel narrative, Skanda, now immersed in his own love story featuring Gauri, a Delhi girl, becomes the living link between these two versions of India. Skanda is the child of memory, steeped in the knowledge that his ancestral story is the story of a nation as well. It is a “classic” novel, in true spirit of the world.

“Yes,” says Taseer, “but it also subverts the traditional novel. There is a second narrative in the present, which acts almost like a framing device. There is quite an interesting variation from the idea of omniscience. Who is telling the story. Skanda is no Nick Carraway and yet he seems to be responding to the unfolding of the story. There is that 8 december 2014

pressure of the past against the present. This is what I was aiming for. I tried many times to write the story straight— an old fashioned novel set between 1975 and 1992— but I couldn’t. It was only when I found my frame—this thin, very still narrative in the present, under which the past seethes—that I was able to get my material to move.”

“In the end, India remains an argument unresolved, but you, as a writer trapped by her, have not abandoned hope.

Have you?”

“Probably a lot of writers feel trapped by their place, doomed to certain material. I’m thinking of those frantic letters of Dostoevsky to various family members from Europe. ‘I must absolutely return to Russia’—he writes from Florence—‘here I will end by losing any possibility of writing for the lack of my indispensable and habitual material—Russian reality (which feeds my thoughts) and the Russians.’ I feel the pretty much the same way about India. It’s a difficult relationship, full of anxiety and frustration, but it feeds me as a writer. The West doesn’t work

on me in the same way; I can’t read the faces; I can’t fill in the blanks; nothing suggests itself to me. In India I feel alive as a writer. It’s not about hope, really; it’s my place, that’s all.”

His words match his work, which is such a rare achievement in a place where the formulaic small novel is what makes the Indian imagination in English drearily provincial. Once in a while, an event breaks the idyll. The Way Things Were is one such event, drawing its power from an idea that never ceases to be a cultural astonishment— India. Aatish Taseer’s itihasa is one of India’s finest moments in fiction.

For the full text of the interview with Aatish Taseer visit: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/ modi-must-provide-an-intellectual-alternative From Open Archive: Aatish Taseer on learning Sanskrit: http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/art-culture/ahistorical-sense

E X C E R P T

T

he Creation of Poetry lecture was, half out of principle, half out of habit, always the first Toby gave on landing in India. He delivered it that June afternoon in Delhi at the India International Centre.

‘In his rage,’ Toby said, ‘Valmiki curses the hunter from Nishada. “Adharmo ’yam iti,” the twice-born sage says.

“This is unjust. Since, Nishada, you have, at the height of your passion, killed one of this pair of kraunchas”— curlews!—“you shall not now live for very long.”

‘The curse of an angry sage,’ Toby continued, ‘is nothing we have not seen before in Epic. But what happens next is unprecedented: it is what makes this among the grandest openings to any work of literature.

Because, within moments of uttering his curse, Valmiki regrets his terrible words. The question,’ Toby breathed, ‘is why? Why does the author of the Ramayana regret cursing the man from Nishada who, in killing the male of this pair of birds, has shattered his reverie and caused him such grief?’

The lecture came usually to Toby without mental effort; with such ease, in fact, that he feared he sounded mechanical. But that afternoon, despite the familiar subject and audience of friends, he was unable to concentrate.

His gaze kept finding its way back to her.

And she seemed to notice. Her large

8 december 2014

liquid eyes seemed to return his look; there was a trace of movement in her lips.

‘We are not told,’ Toby said, trying hard to focus his thoughts, ‘Not told why he regrets his curse. But in what follows we are given an important clue. For, in the next instance, Valmiki utters what we consider to be the first verse of Indian poetry. “Fixed in metrical quarters,” the sage says, “each with a like number of syllables, and fit for the accompaniment of stringed and percussion instruments, the utterance that I produced in this access of soka, grief, shall be called sloka, poetry, and nothing besides.’”

Toby looked long at the audience, and, coming now to the end of his lecture, said, ‘He regrets his curse, I feel, because he knows that his grief at the killing of the bird—grief, he feels interestingly, not for the dying bird, but for its mate, the hen, whose song turns to a piteous lament—has set free his inspiration. It is the dirty secret of his art. Known among poets as the adi-kavi—the first poet, a Sanskritic Caedmon, if you will— he is the first to recognize, twenty centuries ago, that, however much poets wish not to cause pain, there is no poetry without pain, no poetry without pity. And from here on, in the Indian imagination, soka—sorrow or grief – comes to be fused, both conceptually and phonemically, with sloka, poetry! It is this, and nothing besides, that we consider to be the birth of poetry. ‘ open www.openthemagazine.com 17

I

n India, the use of English could, at times, come to feel

like a performance in itself. People came to listen to it as people might come to listen to music in other places.

In a country so accustomed to high languages, to benedictions and mantras, whose sound itself was beneficial, it was no great matter that not all of what Toby said was understood. It was a ritual. And once completed, the IIC intellectuals, with their yellowing beards and bad teeth, were keen, after a bit of late-afternoon English, to get on with the other elements of the ritual: the vote of thanks, the bouquet of gladioli, the tea and the samosas.

A few stayed behind to ask Toby questions. ‘But, Raja saab,’ one old man in a Himachali cap said, ‘you have said nothing about 1857?’

‘Should I have?’ Toby asked.

The man gave him a wink and a smile. An elderly lady, breathless from her walk up to the stage, said pointedly, ‘So, Mr Ketu, you have learnt Sanskrit then.’ This was not a question. And she seemed not at all uncomfortable by the silence it produced. An old bureaucrat, in beige and brown, cut in, with a burst of raucous laughter, ‘Well, Raja saab, the return of the native, eh?’

From out of this fusty crowd, Toby felt a hand, soft, dark and jewelled, clutch his. He knew immediately whose

‘I suppose you’ll be saying

next that there was no destruction of temples. Vijayanagara not destroyed. Vedic culture not Indian culture; the Aryans came from elsewhere. That’s what you want to say, no? India zero, a big fat anda? No?’

hand it was. But he caught only a glimpse of her. She was beautiful. Her eyes bigger, mistier and yet more melancholy than they had seemed from the stage. She had long black hair and was dressed in a green chiffon sari, with a single emerald edged with diamonds around her neck.

She said, ‘I hope I’ll see you later tonight at Bapa’s.’

Then—adding, ‘That was amazing, by the way’—she pressed his hand and withdrew quickly.

He was so overcome he had not been able to reply, and, when finally he was able to get away and go out to look for her, he was detained by an unusual man, a man who stood out at first glance.

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Toby was in a hurry, but there was something arresting and assertive in how he had stopped him in his tracks and introduced himself in the corporate way, energetically shaking his hand while at the same time presenting his card. Toby at the time recalled thinking, This is someone completely new. The ring of Hessonite on his fingers, the little moustache, the slightly unhealthy pallor of skin, had all suggested one kind of person. But his careful, accented way of speaking, his beautiful clothes and shoes, and... and, well, his intensity, the fire in his eyes, singled him out, as someone who, in Toby’s considerable experience of India, was utterly unfamiliar.

And he seemed ready to assault Toby with his question: ‘The Ramayana, Professor Ketu, or should I say, Raja saab: what is it to you? Myth or history?’

Had Toby, in a hurry to find the woman in the green chiffon sari, answered this man’s sincere question with a fudge, an intellectual swipe? Perhaps. He had said, with a smile, ‘Why not stick with the Indic definition? Of Itihasa! Which is a compound, as you know, iti-ha-asa, and when broken down, means, literally, The Way indeed that Things Were. That covers everything: talk, legend, tradition, history...’

‘That’s very glib, Raja saab,’ the man said. ‘But that doesn’t answer my question, does it? Do you regard it as history, in the sense of it having all really happened, of Ram having really existed, or would you say it was myth?’

‘These things, especially in an Indian context, are not so easy to classify. And I’m not sure it’s so important...’ ‘Oh, it is important! If tomorrow you told a Muslim Muhammad did not exist, he would consider it important.’

‘What I was going to say was I’m not sure if it’s important for these things to meet a Western standard of what is historical or not. Which is maybe too limited for the Indian context. People, after all, have all kinds of ways of thinking about their past, and the important thing is to discover how they saw themselves, rather than how we see them today.’

It was an academic’s answer, and Toby’s interrogator sensed its safety. ‘Let me ask it more simply, Raja saab: do you, as a professor, believe that such a man as Ram ever existed, the way Jesus—’ ‘Jesus is not a historical—’ ‘OK, fine. Muhammad, Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare...

I don’t care. Do you believe that there was ever a king in India called Ram?’ ‘There may well have been one. But no—by the standards you are applying, he is not historical. But neither, as you mentioned, is Jesus nor the Buddha—’ And here there was a crack in his interrogator’s composure. His eyes swelled round and white in his head; his lips trembled.

‘Buddha, Ram not historical? Shit Muhammad historical?’

Anger came now to Toby too.

‘What do you want me to say? Mr... Mr...’ He glanced at 8 december 2014

the card in his palm. ‘Why don’t you just come out with it?’ ‘You people, you have a full agenda. In league with those Islamic shits—’ ‘You stop that. Don’t you dare use that kind of language—’ ‘I suppose you’ll be saying next that there was no destruction of temples. Vijayanagara not destroyed. Vedic culture not Indian culture; the Aryans came from elsewhere. That’s what you want to say, no? India zero, a big fat anda? No?’ ‘Vijayanagara,’ Toby said, interrupting firmly, ‘where, incidentally, I’m headed myself in a few days, was destroyed. And we know that because the Muslim historians, who you despise so much, have recorded it. As for the Aryan migration, which, if it occurred, occurred thirty-five centuries ago, you should ask yourself why it bothers you so much? What is this obsession in India with origins? This need to have people spring from the ground. Thirty-five centuries is a long time. Longer than the histories of Greece and Rome. Why is it in India alone that the mere suggestion that the Aryans might have come from elsewhere causes such discomfort? Can you tell me that, Mr—?’

Before he could look at the card, the man replied, ‘Yes, I can, Raja saab. I’m not ...’ He hesitated; his lips were dry, a fragment of spittle clung to them, ‘I’m not afraid to take

things head on. I can tell you just why. It’s because you....’

Here, again, he paused and—as if wanting, now at this bitter end of the conversation to make amends—took the trouble to correct himself. ‘They, the white man and the Muslim,’ he said, taking Toby by the hand with his two hands—not now the corporate shake—‘made us believe we have nothing of our own!’ Then, making to go, he added, ‘Raja saab, please: if I have said anything untoward, forgive me. And if I can be of any assistance to you at all, during your stay in India—these are delicate times!—do not hesitate to be in touch.’

With this, he swung round and vanished ahead of the small crowd of people leaving the IIC. Toby, seeing his card face down in his palm, turned it over. Mahesh Maniraja, CMD Mani Group. It was a name he would have cause to remember.

Evening fell. A queue – people clad in beige, cream and white, with the occasional green and red of a sari— formed before a table draped in satin; the clatter of crockery merged with the clamour of human voices, and the drone of insects. Toby knew a sudden feeling of confusion and melancholy.

The auditorium had been full of his friends but they were gone now. Only Tripathi, who had been with him since the airport that morning, when he landed from

india today group

Indira Gandhi mobbed by journalists after the declaration of Emergency

8 december 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 19

London, remained. He now approached.

‘Raja saab,’ he said, ‘your friends Mr Mohapatra and Gayatri madam told me to tell you to come this evening to Bapa saab’s in Sundar Nagar. They’re all having dinner there. They said they were sorry for having to run off in a hurry, but their father was among the politicians arrested last night, and there are a million things to be tended to.’

‘I know, I know. I was meant to be staying at Nixu Mohapatra’s house on Aurangzeb Road. He was going to give it to me for the summer, in return for my flat in London. But he’s not going to London now. It seems like everybody is here all summer.’

‘Have you made alternative arrangements?’

‘Yes. My friend Viski Singh Aujla is going to give me a discounted room at the Raj for as long as I like. Well, until, I finish my textbook, at least.’

Tripathi smiled, and, seeing some disappointment in Toby’s face, but unaware of its cause, he said, ‘I think everyone’s been a bit thrown off with this Emergency business. It’s all been very sudden.’

Toby feigned interest, but the antics of the modern Indian state left him cold. It was such an anxious and clumsy entity, now invading alpine kingdoms, now abolishing the princes, now spoiling the skylines of temple towns with concrete water tanks. Emergency, immujency, immjunsi. He had heard the word, fresh both in sound and meaning, ricochet around the city all day, acquiring new significance as it moved.

Driving in from the airport, he had seen sandbags in the shade of trees still festive from their May blossoming. In the dead white light of that June day, he saw men, Jats invariably, in olive-coloured uniforms, their handsome faces beaded with sweat, take their positions behind barricades. He had observed the blue metal barrels of guns cast their blank and cyclopean gaze over the still and scorching streets. It had been a day of stealth, and heat, and the crackle of radios, whispered conversations in darkened shops and houses. A day without newspapers, save for a few—where the government had forgotten to turn the power off.

‘Will it last long, Tripathi? This Emergency?’

‘Who can say, Raja saab? At the moment the elites are most affected, the newspapermen, the politicians. The public, the truth be told, are quite relieved. They feel there’ll be some proper governance for once.’

‘It’ll be bad in the long run, Tripathi, you watch. This kind of thing always is.’ They stood like that for a while, the occasional IIC member, tea and samosa in hand, giving a little bow or a smile as they went past.

Observing the descent of evening over the IIC, and the park at its rear, ornamented with tombs, Tripathi muttered, ‘Go-dhuli.’ ‘Yes!’ Toby said, feeling his spirits lift a little at this reference to the earth-dust hour, so resonant in poetry.

He had intended to say something about it in his lecture. But he had forgotten. Rifling through his reference cards, he handed Tripathi one dated 26 June 20 open

1975. Tripathi put on his spectacles and read aloud in a low murmur, ‘The majestic sun is setting bringing on gracious night... here, carrying their water pots, are the sages returning in a group ... their bark-cloth garments soaked with water... the smoke, pearly as a dove’s neck, carried by the wind... the trees all about... seem to have grown dense; the horizons are all lost to view... ’ ‘That is my India, Tripathi,’ Toby said, when Tripathi looked up. ‘A place of sages returning home in the evening, of smoke visible from their sacrifices; of trees filling, as they do here, with the sudden violet density of dusk. This, for me, is the real India, the India that lives on.

Not this shabby Sovietic state the witch and her son want to shove down our throats. ‘ ‘Careful, Raja saab,’ Tripathi said, and laughed. ‘You’ve only just arrived.’

‘The hell I care. By what I gather, I have more friends in jail than out. But, listen, Tripathi, we’ll have some good times together now that I’m here.’

‘Will you stay for a while this time?’

‘Maybe,’ Toby said with a grin. ‘Maybe for a long while.’

Toby feigned interest, but

the antics of the modern Indian state left him cold. It was such an anxious and clumsy entity, now invading alpine kingdoms, now abolishing the princes, now spoiling the skylines of temple towns with concrete water tanks

Then, recalling the secret cause of the elation he felt, he said, ‘Tripathi, tell me: did you see that lady sitting next to Isha Singh Aujla? The one in the green sari?’

‘Viski saab’s wife?’

‘Yes. No, I mean. Not her, but the one next to her.’

‘Her sister? Mishi madam, I think.’

‘Mishi? Is that her name?’

‘No. Uma, I believe. Odd choice of name for a Sikh girl.

Punjabis, I tell you! They give a girl a name like Uma, then call her Mishi. Ishi and Mishi!’ Tripathi said and laughed.

‘Why? Some problem?’

‘No, no, nothing.’ n Excerpted from The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer, Picador India, Rs 699, 565 pages 8 december 2014

POLITICS

Out of Sight They were the big guns of the UPA Government, and the most sought after in Delhi once. Where are they now? By Kumar Anshuman illustrations by anirban ghosh

O

nce upon a time these were the men who ruled the country. But the last election decimated the Congress and left most of its top rung out in the cold, unemployed in high politics. Many have returned to the practice of law, while some are trying to save the planet.

Others are trying to fit themselves into the new political dispensation; and there is even the odd one out, trying his hand also at writing songs.

Kamal Nath

Aside from him, only Jyotiraditya Scindia survived the BJP landslide in Madhya Pradesh. One might have imagined Kamal Nath being rewarded for his victory, but he found himself sidelined. A nine-time member of Parliament from Chhindwara, he had hoped to be named the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha.

Instead, the high command gave that privilege to Mallikarjun Kharge, leading Nath to angle for the position of Chief of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC); Kerala MP KV Thomas pipped him to that post. Nath has been sulking since then, which is one reason it is hard to spot him nowadays in Parliament. He half-heartedly campaigned during the Maharashtra Assembly elections, and was also missing from the 125th Nehru birth-anniversary celebrations. He had in fact been in Delhi, but left for Madhya Pradesh a day before the conclave.

8 december 2014

Jairam Ramesh

He was once one of the speechwriters for Rahul Gandhi and a key election strategist as well. But then came Rahul’s disastrous interview with Arnab Goswami. Since the prince himself is above criticism, a fall guy was needed—and Jairam Ramesh found himself cornered.

Currently, he spends more time in Bangalore and Hyderabad than in Delhi, and thanks to his earlier stint as environment minister, he remains busy giving speeches on green issues at different forums. In the past month, he has delivered two lectures each in Chennai and Bangalore, also finding enough time to write columns on the same subject. So much time devoted to saving the planet means he can’t spare time time for the party—and vice versa. Ramesh was not present at the two-day conference the Congress organised to mark the 125th birth-anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, where Rahul Gandhi delivered the concluding speech (to no one’s surprise, one that was not written by Ramesh).

He also rarely visits the Congress war room at 15 GRG Road, which used to be his haunt. In September, he did go there but it was to collect his books. open www.openthemagazine.com 21

Anand Sharma

Anand Sharma seems to be the lucky one. The party high command recently elevated him over the heads of senior members to the post of deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. He is quite active as the party’s senior spokesperson and often addresses the media on foreign affairs and trade related issues. And while many other senior leaders skipped Nehru’s 125th birth-anniversary celebrations, Sharma played a key role in the organisation of the conclave. From finalising the list of invitees to parleying with foreign leaders, even to deciding the agenda for the event, Sharma was in the thick of it all. He was seated on the stage throughout the function, along with Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Others are obviously irked by his standing but Sharma is the family’s favourite man.

P Chidambaram

As Finance Minister between 2004 and 2008, Chidambaram steered the economy credibly, but then failed abjectly to repeat that performance during his second stint in the role. However, the savvy politician read the way the political winds were blowing, choosing not to contest the polls this year. Now he is a full time lawyer once again, appearing occasionally in public to make shocking statements in the vein of ‘a non-Gandhi could aspire to be party president some day’. He has shifted base to Chennai but visits Delhi at least once a week, mostly on legal work. Being a successful lawyer is more fun than being in Opposition, and perhaps that is why, when he had to choose between attending Nehru’s 125th birth-anniversary celebrations or representing Shardul Shroff in the Amarchand Mangaldas law firm dispute in the Mumbai High Court, he chose the latter. He is also appearing for the Anil Ambani-owned BSES power company and offers legal consultancy to the BCCI as well.

A K Antony

When the former Defence Minister was asked to look into why the Congress got such a drubbing in the Lok Sabha elections this year, his report, submitted in August, blamed anti-incumbency, the BJP for their high voltage campaign, and many factors other than the Gandhi family. That should keep him in the Congress’ good books, but Antony’s health is not keeping pace, restricting his party activities. He shuttles between Delhi and Kerala, but didn’t attend the conclave organised for Nehru’s 125th birth-anniversary celebrations. When in Delhi, Rahul Gandhi occasionally visits him, showing Antony’s still-hallowed standing within the family. Admirably, after the new government was sworn in, Antony immediately requested that a smaller house be allotted to him and all security around him be removed. Home Minister Rajnath Singh politely refused the latter request.

OPEN www.openthemagazine.com 3

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8 december 2014

Sushil Kumar Shinde

Manish Tewari

Manish Tewari’s dip in fortunes began even before the elections.

He wanted to change his seat from Ludhiana to Chandigarh, but was denied. He then refused to contest on health grounds, further alienating himself. Tewari is now being sidelined by the Congress, to the extent of being barred from speaking on behalf of the party after he suggested that there was nothing wrong in the former Chief Justice of India, P Sathasivam, being appointed Kerala governor.

Tewari turned defiant after these events, and still makes his views public and also writes columns for newspapers. He resumed his law practice in July this year, but is not seen much in court; however, he visits his home state Punjab often.

His days are made up of meetings with clients, while evenings are reserved for writing and meeting friends. One of the advantages of being out of power is that one suddenly has more time than one knows what to do with.

Salman Khurshid

Once out of office, Salman Khurshid quickly applied for renewal of his bar licence and started practicing law full time.

But he remains involved with the Congress, and as spokesperson, is always on call when the party’s communication cell wants him on the air. He is seen regularly at both the Congress office at 24 Akbar Road and the corridors of the Supreme Court. He did surprise his party men, however, by appearing as a defence counsel to seek bail for the godman Asaram Bapu. He was also responsible for Tehelka’s former editor TarunTejpal getting bail.

Khurshid’s days are spent in court and the evenings at meetings and discussions with clients. Uttar Pradesh Congress leaders don’t mind him being occupied with legal matters, because it prevents him from meddling in the state.

8 december 2014

Sushil Kumar Shinde is still recovering from his shock defeat from Solapur in the Lok Sabha polls. At one point of time, before the Maharashtra Assembly polls, he was being considered as a possible replacement for Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan. But Shinde reportedly expressed his unavailability even before his name could come up for discussion. He spends more time in Maharashtra than Delhi now. Earlier in November, Shinde visited the Tirumala Tirupati temple with his family before leaving for the US for a surgery. Shinde has always been close to Sonia Gandhi and remains so, but with age catching up, he is said to be keen on an advisory role as a Congress Working Committee member rather than being active in party affairs.

Kapil Sibal

One of the top lawyers in the country, Sibal has returned to the practice after losing the election for the Chandni Chowk constituency. One day he flies to Kolkata to appear for the Birlas, the next day he argues in Delhi High Court on how a pleasure condom is different from an ordinary one. The latter has to do with a government order, which puts a cap on the price of condoms by marking them as essential drugs. Appearing for his client, Reckitt Benckiser, Sibal argued that condoms may be ‘of common use but pleasure condoms are not for the common man.’ He also made news when it became known that the house he had rented in Jor Bagh costs him Rs 16 lakh per month. He uses it mostly as an office. Sibal is giving legal advice to BCCI chief N Srinivasan these days, and there is also a rumour doing the rounds that 2G scam accused Shahid Balwa is trying to retain his services. After all, Sibal was the man who said there was zero loss in that scam.

Besides law, Sibal is also pursuing his passions for poetry and song writing. In September, he launched a music album with A R Rahman and Lata Mangeshkar. He is expected to write more songs as well. n

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POLITICS

Not a Minor Player

Why Asaduddin Owaisi of MIM is India’s fastest-growing Muslim political leader

by Kumar Anshuman

raveendran/afp/getty images

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ne day, Asaduddin Owaisi is at

Javkheda village in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district in a show of solidarity with Dalits after three members of a Dalit family were brutally killed in October. The next day, he addresses a meeting of his two MLAs and supporters in Mumbai. The morning after, he leaves early for Hyderabad to attend another meeting of party workers. Owaisi, a Member of Parliament and president of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM), is a busy man nowadays, after the Maharashtra polls unexpectedly bagged him two seats in the state’s Legislative Assembly. The MIM is now being talked about as the main claimant—potentially—of Muslim votes in India. To that end, Owaisi is planning electoral forays in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. This is seen as a threat to parties that rely on Muslim support, such as the Congress and the Samajwadi Party.

Owaisi projects himself as the only leader who is serious about issues that affect Muslims. The secular parties, he argues, have only used them as a ‘vote bank’. And if the recent Maharashtra election results are anything to go by, many Muslim voters see merit in this allegation. His ascendance could imply a reduction in the Congress’ overall vote share, and the Grand Old Party’s anxiety on this count is apparent. Every day, some Congress leader or the other accuses Owaisi and his party of being in secret collusion with the BJP and RSS. “With MIM in [the] fray, secular votes will get divided and that will definitely benefit the BJP,” says Congress General Secretary Shakeel Ahmed.

Owaisi is unperturbed by such charges.

“The problem is, if I am communal, I need to take a certificate from the BJP; and if I am secular, I need to take a certificate from Congress. Those who accuse me forget that I was very much with them till recently, and only when they let us down, I have moved alone,” he says. The biggest worry for the Congress party is the upcoming Delhi Assembly polls. Of the eight seats the party got in December 2013, five were won by Muslim candidates, and in areas dominated by the community. There are around 10 Assembly constituencies in Delhi where Muslims make up more than a quarter of the

electorate. If the MIM fields candidates in Delhi, it might drastically alter the contest for minority votes. “The partymen believe that post Maharashtra, we can go everywhere and perform. But we are not in a hurry,” says Owaisi.

It was in the recent Maharashtra elections that Owaisi’s party made its debut in an electoral arena beyond its home turf of Hyderabad, Telangana.

The party put up 24 candidates and managed to win two seats, one in Mumbai and another in Aurangabad. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. The MIM finished second in three places and was third in eight. The party was proud that it got almost 1 per cent of the state’s total votes by contesting only 24 of Maharashtra’s 288 seats. “This speaks for the support we are getting from the people,” says Owaisi.

There are several factors contributing to the party’s rise on the national scene. It reflects the growing ambition of Muslims to gain direct political representation in line with their numbers. Muslims constitute around 14 per cent of the country’s population; in states like West Bengal, Kerala and Assam, they are onefourth of the total or more. But their representation has been declining with every election. In the Lok Sabha elected by the 2004 General Election, there were 34 Muslim members. In 2009, the count went down to 30, and this year, it has fallen to 22, less than 5 per cent of the House strength. “The myth of the Muslim vote bank has been busted after the 2014 General Election,” says Owaisi. “From four states—Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra and Karnataka—which account for around 120 seats in the Lok Sabha, I am the lone Muslim MP.” The MIM’s growing influence is also a threat to regional parties that depend on a caste-religion matrix of appeal. In Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party succeeded largely by combining Muslims and Yadavs as a vote bank. So did Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar, a state where the ruling party, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal-United, preferred to break a 17-year-long alliance with the BJP (over the latter’s choice of Narendra Modi as its PM candidate) as part of a sustained effort to woo Muslim voters. The Trinamool Congress in West Bengal depends on Muslim votes as well. open www.openthemagazine.com 25

Asaduddin Owaisi (right) with his brother Akbaruddin

Owaisi says these regional satraps are losing their halo among Muslims, who, unable to see much material progress in their situation, are getting increasingly disillusioned, identifying them with tokenism like the wearing of skullcaps or holding of iftaar parties during Ramazan.

“The Muslim of today has moved beyond it. Like any other youth, they too have ambitions and want answers to several questions related to their community.

We encourage them to get the answers through the democratic process,” he says.

The frequency of Hindu-Muslim riots in UP ever since the Akhilesh Yadavled Samajwadi government took power is also making minority voters look for options. The UP regime, perhaps betraying anxiety, has not been letting Owaisi visit the state. “I was invited by local people once in Azamgarh and next in Allahabad. I was denied permission both times. I am an MP who can speak in Parliament but am not being allowed to speak in a state of this country,” he says.

F

ew beyond Hyderabad know that

the MIM is older than many current political parties, even the BJP. It was banned in 1948 and its leader Qasim Rizvi sent to jail. Rizvi left for Pakistan

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after his release in 1958 and handed over the party to Abdul Wahid Owaisi, Asaduddin’s grandfather. After Abdul Wahid, his son Salahuddin Owaisi took charge of the party. He became an MLA four times and got elected to the Lok Sabha from Hyderabad in 1984. The MIM has held this seat since then. In 2004, Asaduddin replaced Salahuddin as the party’s Hyderabad candidate, and since then, he has won it thrice. Before the recent Assembly polls, the MIM was not even recognised as a regional party since it did not fulfill the requirement of getting at least 6 per cent votes. It achieved that only in June 2014, after winning seven Assembly seats in Telangana.

The party is principally run by

There is a limit to how far the MIM can go with only Muslim support, so it is trying to appeal to Dalit voters as well

Asaduddin and his younger brother Akbaruddin, an MLA. They are a study in contrast, though; while Asaduddin is the party’s sober face with rational arguments and facts on Muslim marginalisation at his fingertips, Akbaruddin is the poster boy for Muslim radicals who are stirred by emotive issues. The combination works to appeal to all sections of Muslims and that is also a reason for their success. Akbaruddin is known mostly for the hate speeches he has delivered over the past ten years. On 22 December 2012, for example, while addressing a rally in Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh, he’d said, “Twentyfive crore Indian Muslims need only 15 minutes without the police to show 100 crore Hindus who is more powerful.” He was arrested and spent 40 days in prison before being released on bail. Akbaruddin refuses to talk about the speech. “I am concentrating more on state affairs of the party,” he says. The matter, his elder brother adds, is subjudice and best left at that. “We are as democratic as anybody else in Indian politics. We are seekingtherightsofMuslimsanddeprived sections through their participation in democracy. You may hate us or blame us, but we are here with a politics that serves the cause of the untouched, deprived and oppressed,” says Asaduddin.

There is a limit to how far the party can go with only Muslim support, so it is trying to appeal to Dalit voters as well.

Asaduddin’s visit to Ahmednagar, for example, was part of that strategy. “We are not only a Muslim party. Out of the 24 tickets we gave in Maharashtra, five were to non-Muslims,” he says. This is a formula that will be adopted when the party contests other elections. On whether MIM would join a non-BJP alliance at some point, Asaduddin Owaisi says, “That would depend upon the assurance from these parties of Muslim participation and welfare.”

The MIM’s ideology might be inherently divisive, since it uses identity as a criterion for the focus of its welfare concerns, but it is beginning to yield results for the party. The litmus test, however, will be the Delhi Assembly polls.

Should the MIM make a mark, it will be yet another sign that minority electoral politics in India is being rewritten. n 8 december 2014

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DIDI’S DEADLY GAME

A reckless Mamata Banerjee reduces Islamist terror to a Centre-state dispute

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ne of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s numerous idiosyncrasies is that she goes to sleep in the wee hours of the day. The CPM goons who assaulted her on the fateful 16 August of 1990, she says, couldn’t destroy her determination to fight them to the finish, but managed to alter her “body clock” forever just by trying to render her inactive as a leader. Lalu Alam, among the CPM activists who attacked Banerjee, fracturing her head so badly that she spent a month fighting for her life in a Kolkata hospital, later apologised publicly for the near-fatal lathi blow. It took him 21 years to do so, the time it took her, coming back from the brink, to reshape West Bengal’s destiny by throwing out the state’s 34-year-old Left Front government.

No doubt, Banerjee is a consummate politician without parallel. Everything about her has an air of drama and disbelief.

She first caught national attention at the age of 29 as a giant slayer: she won the 1984 Lok Sabha election defeating CPM veteran Somnath Chatterjee. She grew rapidly under then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s mentorship, continually taking on state Congress leaders who she alleged were a B-team of the CPM. Never a careerist, she had no qualms about quitting high-profile ministerial positions at the Centre, first when she was in the Congress camp and later in the BJP-led coalition. She didn’t blink before breaking off with the Congress and launching her own party, the Trinamool Congress, to take the CPM head-on in 1997. The risks she took were huge, but luck finally favoured her. Banerjee is now the first woman Chief Minister of a state where the Left was considered undislodgeable. Her unlikely success has been thanks to her resolve. She hasn’t been the type to charm the Bengali Bhadralok, the Kolkatacentric elite that often squirms when she speaks in English. Her demeanour embarrasses them. She is always hot under the collar, prone to making simplistic remarks. But her peculiar ways have helped endear her to the rural Bengal populace, once the backbone of CPM’s support base.

But all the charisma hasn’t got in the way of her naivete. Whenever criticised, she would sulk, refusing to entertain opinions other than her own. To her, it’s all black and white—black being her opposition, be it the CPM or BJP. This attitude has taken her places, with powerful allies at the Centre often yielding to her tantrums just to keep her in a coalition.

8 december 2014

Ever since coming to power in 2011, in a resounding victory over a Left alliance that once seemed unshakeable, Banerjee has been a dictatorial leader, allowing no dissent within her party. Even mild criticism has evoked extreme responses from her. As a party member tells me, “Didi thinks she is infallible, like God.” Generous and warm in private chats, Banerjee is ruthless and moralistic in public. The manic behaviour of her years as a street fighter often surfaces even when it comes to governance.

Almost all her rivals, including the late CPM patriarch Jyoti Basu, have described her as “mad”, and Banerjee herself has done nothing to downplay the perception. The label has stuck.

While she seems fine with it, her sensing of conspiracies in issues as pressing as terror and corruption borders on the subversive. She has vehemently denied charges against her party in the multi-crore Saradha ponzi scam even while a suspended party lawmaker, Kunal Ghosh, accused her of being a beneficiary of the scheme and termed her a coward for taking to the streets to protest reported efforts by the Centre to frame her in the case. Her defiance appears to betray acute desperation at being under the Central scanner. For someone who battled the formidable CPM, she perhaps knows only too well that taking recourse to anarchism would yield results only when there is a groundswell of support in her favour.

Evidently, she doesn’t have any this time round. She would do well to realise that when it comes to combating terror— West Bengal’s border districts have become a haven for Bangladesh-origin Islamists plotting to overthrow that country’s Sheikh Hasina regime—there is no option but to take cohesive action. The ruling BJP at the Centre may have political designs on the state, but to not cooperate wholeheartedly with efforts to comb the state for terror modules bent upon manufacturing bombs and offering arms training defies common sense.

Banerjee is under fire for patronising allies of Bangladesh’s Jamaat-e-Islami. If she believes that being soft on radical Islamists will help her pull in votes from West Bengal’s Muslims, who account for a quarter of the electorate, she is only making it easier for her rivals to capitalise on the frustrations of majority Hindus. She has already earned a bad name by trying to set off a Centre-versus-state debate over the issue of tackling terrorism. By continuing to be so supremely imprudent and inflexible, she is digging her own political grave. It is a shame. n open www.openthemagazine.com 27

Dream city

Women sow maize seeds in a field outside Thullur in Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur district

Another Day in Paradise V Shoba travels through Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur district where 29 idyllic villages are set to make way for Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu’s promised capital city of Singapore-in-Andhra photographs by harsha vaDLamani

S

ince early November, a minor artery connecting

the hamlets of Krishnayapalem and Rayapudi in Andhra Pradesh’s Guntur district has been witness to a remarkable spectacle. Every day, for the past month or so, this strip of road parallel to the river Krishna has been flooded by dozens of luxury cars flying like magical arrows to their destination: the new, promised land of Singapore-in-Seemandhra. Stranger things have happened since Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu unveiled grand plans for a sprawling, ‘world-class’ capital on the riverfront. From men in starched white shirts gazing lustily at a sea of paddy to real estate deals thrashed out on the hoods of SUVs, this highway of dreams cutting across the proposed trapezoid capital territory has seen it all in the short span of a month.

In Venkatapalem, a temporary structure perched at the lip of a field of maize and painted an arresting shade of blue advertises the services of Sri Vengamamba Real Estate, one of many brokerage agencies to have mushroomed in the district.

Across the road, to the north where the river runs less than 2 km away, are the fields of gold, fertile enough to bear three crops a year. “Till recently, the fertility of your land was the sole measure of your prosperity in these parts,” says K Ishwar Reddy, a partner in the venture. “An acre of land by the riverside fetched about Rs 70-80 lakh until a few months ago. But land that lay far south of the river where you could grow just one crop a year was worth Rs 10-15 lakh an acre,” he says.

Naidu’s proposal to pool over 30,000 acres of land from 29 villages south-west of Prakasam Barrage—a dam and a road bridge connecting the Krishna and Guntur districts at Vijayawada—

boys to pay for the honour of white-washing a fence, he is wending the imagination of a people bound to the land by dangling before them the bait of Progress: a capital with three inner circles, ring roads and highrises, that they must help build.

Over 100,000 people are estimated to be living within the proposed capital territory—bounded by Prakasam Barrage in the north-east, Borupalem in the north-west, Pedaparimi in the south-west and the temple town of Mangalagiri in the southeast—and less than half of them are landed farmers, estimates Dr G Gangadhar, a former Congress spokesperson and BC Jana Sabha State President. Many have already struck a Faustian bargain with the government to pool their lands in exchange for jobs, development, and a 1,000-sq-ft residential patch in the capital. Others are holding out for ‘a better package’. “It is the landless and the families dependent on one or two acres for their livelihood who will be the worst affected,” Gangadhar says. This section of society has gone largely unrepresented at negotiations between villages and a government panel led by Tadikonda MLA T Sravan Kumar that is touring the region.

Late one evening, we drive down a tapering road framed by silhouettes of swaying palms to join a crowd gathered under a shamiana in Uddandarayuni Palem, a village in Thullur mandal, about 20 km from Vijayawada, that has inveighed against land pooling. “Let us usher in a suvarna yuga (a golden age),” urges Nannappaneni Rajakumari, a Telugu Desam Party leader and one of its most effective spokespersons. “You have to make some sacrifices. But if you do, we will build a capital so fine that the people of Telangana will be left searching the state for Andhrites, for everyone would have moved here.”

An astute businessman, Naidu is selling the dream of trundling about an air-conditioned office to farmers who toil in the sun for a megacity appears to have levelled these differences. “Now any land in the vicinity of the capital is worth a uniform Rs 1.21.5 crore,” says Reddy, conducting his business in the shade of an Indian coral tree. Reddy and his partner R Ramakrishna Rao are farmers whose primary occupation these days is to buy and sell land on behalf of “doctors and engineers from Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam”, besides small investors who, they say, are increasingly approaching them in groups to buy parcels of land around the capital territory. When all this is over, Rao would like to manage a bar or a restaurant in the new city. “We are people of the soil, but we are willing to sacrifice some of our land so that our children may study and enjoy all the modern luxuries we never had,” he says.

‘Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else,’ wrote Italo Calvino in his novel Invisible Cities, where a Venetian merchant and a Tartar emperor exchange notes on imaginary cities. They may well have been talking about Naidu’s grandiose vision for a capital. An astute businessman, Naidu is selling the dream of trundling about an air-conditioned office to farmers who toil in the sun. Like a Tom Sawyer luring 30 open

Assurances are made in the heat of the moment—jobs for everyone, all tractors to be put to good use, grievance redressal—and the virtue of a government that is ready to defer its paradisiacal dreams till the harvest comes home is paraded for good measure.

Choreographed applause follows. Next up on stage, in a Nehru jacket and fashionably nerdy glasses, is Murali Mohan, an actor and the TDP MP from Rajahmundry in East Godavari district. “More than 75 per cent of the people are ready,” he tells us. “The rest will come around. We hope to complete the process of pooling in a year.” Interestingly, Mohan’s Jayabheri Group was accused of irregularities in real estate deals in Hitec City, Hyderabad.

Metres away from this chorus, insistent whispers call out to us from a pool of darkness. “The banana needs another 16 months to fruit and they are talking about giving up our land in a year?” says N Suresh, in a wispy voice. “A couple of weeks ago, I went to 200 houses in the village and asked people if they were willing to give up their land; 162 of them voted against it.

We staged a sit-out along with farm workers,” says the farmer.

Most people in the village will remain impervious to Naidu’s seductions, says Rajendra Kumar Jonnalagadda, a software engineer in Hyderabad whose family cultivates seven acres in 8 december 2014

Businesses in the main square of Thullur put up signboards offering real estate consultancy services

Uddandarayuni Palem. “This is the land that funded my education. It fetches a few lakhs of rupees every year. I don’t see my parents ever giving it up for anything,” he says. The youth of the village, now scattered over the face of the earth, plan to mount a campaign against the capital.

In five years’ time, the capital’s eight-lane ring roads may rip through some of these fertile tracts, skyscrapers may overhang the river where shy birds warble evening songs among the low bushes today, the green stubble of paddy and the fecund banana plantations will have made way for growth of a different kind.

P Sudhakar Rao, a TDP supporter and a chartered accountant from Uddandarayuni Palem, says he would like to see the city named NTR Nagar. “We look forward to the day when we won’t have to go to Guntur and Vijayawada to buy clothes, jewellery and appliances. We will have access to good medical care right here,” he says, on the sidelines of the meeting.

Others fear there will be no place for them in a gentrified city.

News of the meeting with the government panel has sent the SC Colony of Uddandarayuni Palem into a tizzy. The Madiga settlement with a population of 1,200 hasn’t much land to lose, but there is a sense of incarceration, of livelihoods being at stake. Most residents of this colony of hutments and dark streets are farm labourers and shepherds. Katari Bujji, a 23-yearold who grazes his 40 sheep and eight buffaloes in the grasslands by the river, is a worried man. “They are saying on TV that the city will be like Singapore. I have not seen Singapore. I don’t know what will become of my animals,” he says. “We live a free life. When there is no food in the kitchen, we go to the sugarcane fields and forage for food,” says Nagarathnam Pamidipati, 60, who earns a living de-weeding the vegetable patches nearby. “In a big city you have to think about safety. And everything including food will be expensive.” It is a capital being built by the landed Kamma community, for other Kammas, alleges Kathi Padma Rao, a Dalit ideologue from Ponnur, a town south 8 december 2014

of Guntur. “Landless Dalits and OBCs are going to migrate en masse unless industry is established this side of the river, generating ample employment,” he says.

The riverfront. A rolling terrain wrapped in mists at dawn, it is a montage, revealing itself in pieces: patches of green watered by slobbering brooks, rocky beds strewn with garbage, lush alluvial plantations, blocks of private cottages. Cocks crow feebly and men squat by the bushes in the semi-darkness of Rayapudi, where the village road crosses the highway to Amaravathi, the ancient home of the Satavahanas and one of many towns on the Krishna considered for the capital, and dismissed. Here, a path cuts through fields of banana, cauliflower and sugarcane, ending abruptly at the river, an opaque sheet occasionally rippling with the wind. Clay diyas and flowers from a puja last evening litter the steps leading into the water.

In the distance, framing the gray horizon are anchors of land amidst the endless river. Called lankas, some of these islands are farmed, others enveloped by dense mangroves. Abdul Rafiq’s house is the closest to the river—it draws a meager crowd of tourists—and his wife is boiling a kettle of water on a wood stove to make tea. He sits on a charpoy, watching the news on television. “Mornings here are always pleasant,” he says, in Hindi. “But for how long—once you start dumping the wastes of a city into the river, how can we live here?” His family—his mother, two brothers, a sister, and three children—makes Rs 3-4 lakh a year from a two-acre patch where they grow just about everything: turmeric, banana, guava, carrot and onion.

“There is nothing like this soil or this weather, in all of Andhra,” says Rafiq, 30, shaking his head.

Rayapudi also has a fishing community of about a hundred families, each dependent on the river for its daily catch—sheelavathi, bochu, jalla and bommidayalu—worth Rs 100-200. The fish have been dwindling of late, perhaps due to the pesticide runoff from the farms, says Krishna Dharmadi, 45, untangling open www.openthemagazine.com 31

It is a capital being built by the landed Kamma community for other Kammas, alleges Kathi Padma Rao, a Dalit ideologue from Ponnur a fine-meshed yellow net on a rocky platform by the river. The country boats moored nearby seem to quiver with the repeated thuds of a woman washing clothes. Development could be the way out of a life of poverty, the fishermen say. “The fish will fetch double the price in a city,” points out Ramarao Akula, 35.

“Besides, we are ready to give up fishing and relocate if we got employment.” Here, among the most dispossessed, hope surfaces like bones through skin worn thin.

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prakash singh/afp/getty images

aidu’s capital pitch has come as a windfall of sorts for

one village in particular. When Y Achaiah was posted to Thullur as sub-inspector of Police from Narasaraopet, it was just another obscure village, 25 km from Vijayawada. “I hadn’t even heard of it,” he says. But for the fact that there were fewer rowdies disturbing the peace here, he hadn’t been thrilled.

That was until a month and a half ago, when the VIPs started to descend on Thullur. “Next thing I knew, this village was set to be the heart of the capital. Now there are proposals to upgrade the police station, taking the number of staff up from 25 to 60,” says Achaiah, his manner that of a man in the thick of the action.

Thullur, with its mom-and-pop stores, its pasty-faced statues of Nehru and NT Rama Rao, and its two bustling chowks, is bracing for the biggest change since the mobile phone.

Furniture shops and greengrocers have turned realtors and put up importunate billboards. Eateries are doing brisk business. Children in uniform skip to school, revelling in the conviction that the earth must now revolve around Thullur.

Kiran Dewari, a Rajasthani who runs a tea shop in the village, says things heat up at around noon, when businessmen and real estate prospectors start trickling in. “Thulasi Theatre, across the street, is a meeting place for bigwigs,” he says, pumping hot masala chai from a steel flask. “Naturally, I sell more tea these days. At least 30 per cent more than normal.” Twenty-six-yearold Sharif Sheikh, who hawks vegetables at his father’s shop, is thrilled with the salvo of attention being lavished upon his village of less than 10,000 people. “I had never thought in my wildest dreams that Thullur would be part of the state capital,” he says. “Singapore tak chala gaya apne gaon ka naam (the name of our village has reached Singapore).” Sheikh always dreamed of a government job and had even considered moving to a city after graduation. “Now, the jobs are coming to Thullur,” he says.

In Krishnadevaraya’s times, the village used to be called Tandavarevupatnam, claims a village elder, Gadde Sambasiva Rao, sitting under a tree overlooking a dried-up lake. Rao is happy to pool his three acres of farmland, which he lets out to a tenant, for the sake of the capital. In the freshly-tilled fields outside the village, the sun seems to beat down on a harsher reality. Half a dozen Lambadi women, scarves around their heads and shirts worn over their saris, are sowing maize in straight lines across two-and-a-half acres. They are paid Rs 100 32 open

Chandrababu Naidu wants a ‘world-class’ capital on the riverfront

a day for eight hours of back-breaking work. “When we asked for a Rs 20 raise, the farmer refused. And he has made a fortune selling land,” says Malavath Saraswati, 47. Her daughter, a 23-year-old who studied to be a teacher, is unable to find a suitable job or a husband. “She won’t work in the fields. But an educated husband doesn’t come cheap. By the time Chandrababu Naidu’s capital comes up and she gets a job, my daughter will be too old,” Saraswati says.

These are unreal times, says Mohammad Babu, a corporator from Tadepalli, near the capital zone. He leans against his Alto parked by the side of the road at Sakhamuru, south of Thullur, surrounded by real estate advisers who are hotly debating the worth of a piece of land he is considering investing in.

“The prices aren’t reasonable anymore,” Babu says. “Because most buyers bring black money, wads of cash running into crores. There are no advances or agreements—the deal is over in two days.”

Babu returns empty-handed today, but elsewhere, in Pedaparimi village, an outpost along the border with more political figurines than shops daubed across its central square, Saripudi Sambasiva Rao, 42, is celebrating. He recently sold 1.75 acres of his six-acre holding at a rate of Rs 75 lakh per acre. “I grow chillies and cotton. When a real estate agent from Guntur offered to buy a part of my land, I sold it to fund the education of my two daughters. The elder one, who is in class 12, wants to be an engineer,” he says. His countenance and swagger suggest otherwise. Sporting sunglasses and an orange checked shirt, he looks every bit the nouveau riche who, to paraphrase Ramakrishna Rao, wears shorts and drives an open-top jeep to flaunt his spoils. n 8 december 2014

PIRATES

HELL ON THE HIGH SEAS

As the last of the Indian sailors held by Somalian pirates return home, survivors relive the horrors of being held hostage for years by Madhavankutty Pillai

raul irani

I

t was a little after 9 at night on 28

September 2010 when the general alarm rang aboard MV Asphalt Venture. The cargo ship on its way to South Africa was in the Somali basin and Bhim Sen Singh, the electrical officer who rushed to the quarterdeck area and saw guns being fired, guessed that it was a pirate attack. He went below to the control room, where everyone agreed that should pirates come aboard, they would raise their hands. As expected, a man came holding an AK-47 and they followed him to the bridge where the rest of the crew were assembled. They were told the ship was being taken to Somalia and as soon as its owner paid the ransom, everyone would be freed. “He told us not to worry,” says Singh. That turned out to be an understatement.

On 3 October 2010, the ship dropped anchor near the Somalian coast. It would be four years before Bhim Sen Singh and six others would see India again, a period during which they would be tortured, starved and made to live in animal-like conditions always a breath away from death.

This was not the first time that pirates had held Indians hostages, but two things mark out the story of the seven Indian crew who returned last month, physically and mentally mere shadows of the men they once were. The first was that they were the last of the Indian sailors in captivity in Somalia. The second is that they should have been released three years ago when the ship’s owner did pay a ransom, but, unusually, the pirates didn’t keep their word. While eight others had been freed along with the ship then, these seven were held back at the last minute.

Once anchored in Somalian waters, it wasn’t an easy time for Singh. “Everything on the ship runs on a generator. The diesel

“People were talking about the loss to shipping and insurance companies. No one was talking of the condition of seafarers” CHIRAG BAHRI Regional Director for South Asia, Maritime Piracy Humanitarian Response Programme

was getting over. Because I was the electrical officer, they would always put a gun to me and ask why there was no power supply,” he says. The generator also kept breaking down. “The batteries had gone and needed to be charged. I had to keep adjusting to keep everything operational.”

Two emergency boats had four batteries and Singh kept them aside without telling the pirates. “I risked my life to keep these batteries. I used them in the last month to run the generator,” he says.

After six months of captivity, the crew learnt that a deal had been made and their release was imminent. The ship’s chief engineer, Bahadur Singh, remembers that day well. Being a senior officer, he had been regularly tortured, a tactic used to turn the crew pliant and also force the ship’s owner to accede to their demands.

“The captain and I were put together in a cabin. Someone would knock on the door and the cocking of the gun would be heard. There was always the fear that they would come in and shoot us,” he says.

The day they were to be released, Bahadur Singh had been in the engine room with his team getting the ship ready. “Parts of the engine, like nozzles and injectors, were being fitted. We were to leave in an hour and a half,” he says.

Suddenly, a few pirates came and started marking out some of them. “They separated us, forced us into a boat, and firing in the air, took us to the shore,” he says. They were herded into vehicles which sped off. Behind them, over the sea, a chartered plane came and dropped the ransom. The ship and a part of the crew left with their freedom.

After some hours, they were let out in a forest and told that they had been kept as trading chips for Somali pirates in Indian jails. The next day a tent was brought for them to live in. “Every few months they would shift us to different places within a two to three kilometre radius,” says Bahadur Singh. Provisions were at subsistence levels. About 40-50 litres of water was given daily for the hostages and four pirates guarding them. Bathing, cooking, drinking and so on had to be managed on that. When it rained, they dug holes and lined these with tarpaulin to collect extra water. For food, they got a little flour, rice and salt.

They would cut wood to cook. “If we 36 open

asked for something, they would point a gun and threaten to shoot,” says Bhim Sen Singh.

Bahadur Singh remembers one hostage, a Sikh, being asked to cut his beard because one pirate thought he looked like a terrorist. The group Al Sabah, an Al Qaeda offshoot, was active there and the pirates were afraid of them. The Sikh refused. “He was tied up as punishment.

We decided that we will not make food,” says Bahadur Singh. The protest worked because the commander replaced the pirate. Once, one of the hostages fell very ill with swollen legs and bloodshot eyes. It was only after a month that he was taken to a doctor in a nearby town. Danger was ever present. The pirates were not trained to use firearms and often fired by mistake.

“There were lots of times when bullets flew by our side or over us,” says Bhim Sen Singh. “We must have killed a hundred snakes there.”

A typical day in captivity was about doing nothing except eat, cook, sleep and pray. “We became silent after some time and no one talked very much to each other,” he says. Time passed; 2010 turned to 2011, and 2012 came and went, then it was 2013. That year, the pirates said they weren’t interested in freeing the jailed pirates in India and asked them to tell the shipping company to pay for their release. But the company, which had already paid a ransom once, was reluctant. Slowly, they began to feel that they would never be free again.

Their first sign of hope was on 17 September this year when Chirag Bahri of the Maritime Piracy Humanitarian Response Programme (MPHRP), an organisation that works to help captured sailors, spoke to them over telephone and asked each one their personal details.

“We realised he was asking to confirm if we were all alive and so something was happening,” says Bhim Sen Singh.

T

he MPHRP is an NGO registered in the UK and came formally into existence in 2011 after there was a spurt in the number of ships captured at sea

by Somali pirates in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

“People were talking about the loss to shipping and insurance companies.

No one was talking of the condition of

seafarers,” says MPHRP’s Bahri.

In India, he started work on this front in April 2012. “We formed a small programme staging group that includes industry, unions, professional bodies like marine engineers... people who are worried for seafarers. We meet once in three months to assess what is the present condition on piracy. We try and see that we are there for every seafarer affected by piracy,” he says.

Bahri had been in regular touch with the families of the Asphalt Venture hostages and understood their anguish—he had been a hostage himself for eight months.

In 2010, he had been a second engineer on a chemical tanker going from Kandla to Belgium via the Gulf of Aden when pirates attacked. The ship, fully loaded, was about three metres above the waters and all the pirates needed to do was hook 8 december 2014

ashish sharma

“Dheeraj Kumar asked us to take his luggage home if we were released.

He said, ‘If I reach home before you I will do something for you. If you reach first, do something for me.’

We never heard from him again” Jaswinder Singh Crewmember, MV Iceberg 1

a ladder. It took them just 20 minutes to board and take control of the ship. They turned it towards Somalia. Once there, a negotiator came on board who assessed the condition of the ship, the status of the owner, what the cargo was, and the nationality of the crew. Based on all these, he arrived at a ransom amount and negotiations started. Bahri says that this can be a gruelling and frustrating exercise.

“If you want to buy a car for which Rs 5 lakh is being asked, you say you are ready to pay four, and then both parties settle for 4.3. But it doesn’t happen like that in Somalia. If the pirates demand $10, the company will say $8. But the pirate will now think, ‘I am stupid, I should have asked more.’ The next day, their demand will be $20. They will keep on increasing it like this.” The strategy of the shipping company then becomes to break the hope 8 december 2014

of pirates of getting anything so that they settle for the minimum. The company will start with offering 10-20 per cent of the initial demand. Pirates, meanwhile, realise that the longer they hold hostages, the more they could make the company shell out. While this tug-of-war goes on, the hostages would crumble mentally and physically.

On Bahri’s ship, food and water soon ran out. The vessel had a fresh water manufacturing system and they modified it to run on stand-by engines to produce three to four tonnes of water in a day. This gave the pirates an idea. In that area there were about 10 vessels hijacked by different groups that didn’t have easy access to fresh water because they couldn’t produce it on standby engines. The pirates aboard Bahri’s ship decided to supply fresh water in barter for other things they needed. “But

we were finishing our fuel by running our generators to make the water,” says Bahri. The depletion made the pirates suspicious because they had no comprehension of how systems worked. “They started beating those who were responsible for the engine rooms. Bullets were fired near the chief engineer’s ears. They put a blindfold on us and threatened to shoot if we didn’t reveal where the fuel was going,” says Bahri. When the crew updated their logbooks, the pirates would poke them with guns to say what they were writing. “Every single minute in captivity is like death near you,” says Bahri.

The machinery started developing hiccups and they were accused of doing it on purpose. The pirates wanted all the light bulbs running at night because they were afraid other groups might attack them. When the bulbs fused, the crew open www.openthemagazine.com 37

g tirupathi rao

“Everything on the ship runs on a generator. The diesel was getting over. Because I was the electrical officer, they would always point a gun at me and ask why there was no power supply” BHIM SEN SINGH Electrical Officer, MV Asphalt Venture

would again get beaten up. “Beatings, torture, pointing guns at us, firing in the air... all this was absolutely normal as part of the daily routine,” says Bahri. Once they were forced to enter tanks where hazardous gases spewed to see if there was fuel in them. “We went without any ventilation; luckily we survived,” he says.

When negotiations hit a roadblock, the torture increased. “They tied our hands and legs together in the back and left us like that for hours. They tied the genitals of one of us. They put the chief engineer and captain in the meat room in minus 17 degrees temperature. They hanged the Master, who was 55 years old, upside down and beat him badly. The chief engineer was thrown into the sea with one leg tied and then pulled up,” says Bahri.

The company paid the ransom in December 2010, dropping it in bags near the ship. It was collected and the pirates distributed it among themselves and went away, leaving the ship and the crew free. The major chunk of the ransom goes to a financier who funds the operation.

“He does not come on board often. Maybe 38 open

three or four times. He appoints leaders on board who call themselves commanders,” says Bahri.

Bahri had injuries all over when he was released and had to undergo physiotherapy for months. “Even now, my fingers tremble sometimes,” he says.

When he came back, he found that his mother was no more; she had passed away from the anguish. It took Bahri a year to recover from the mental, physical and emotional trauma. But then whenever he heard of other piracies in which Indians were held hostage, he would reach out to the families to offer moral support. “They used to come on the media and then I would contact the channels to get in touch and give them support, saying that their son will be okay,” he says. This brought him to the notice of the MPHRP, which was drafting its programme at the time. Bahri helped the organisation out with information such as the contact details of captive seafarers. The MPHRP later asked him to join it and he is now its regional director for South Asia.

Bahri has little to do if the pirated ship happens to belong to a company that cares for its employees. “Our main work starts where the companies do not respond,” he says. In the case of Asphalt Venture, many of the families of the hostages had no income. Bahri coordinated efforts with the Indian Government to get them financial support. He also organised jobs for some of them by liaising with the maritime industry.

The MPHRP also played an important part in getting the hostages released, though it does not directly negotiate with pirates. “We just give humanitarian support. We have partners who support us in different ways. Some of them are professionals in negotiation and we use their services,” says Bahri. And once the released sailors feel they are ready to get back to work, Bahri makes it a point to try helping them again.

O

piracy case that Bahri mentions of how things can go terribly wrong is of the ship MV Iceberg 1. ne

8 december 2014

Jaswinder Singh, who was part of the crew, witnessed the horror first-hand over three years. On 29 March 2010, Iceberg 1 was off the coast of Yemen and Jaswinder Singh was on duty in the early morning 4-to-8 shift. He had gone to wake up the next shift and was coming back when the alarm rang and the pirates boarded. Once in Somalia, negotiations with the owner stretched on and, in between, the pirates came up with another plan of using the vessel as a mothership to capture other ships.

For about two months, they made preparations, getting fuel and speed boats, and then left towards the Gulf of Oman with more than 50 pirates armed to the teeth.

“On the fourth day, we came across a warship that made us turn back. We sailed for two more days and again encountered a French warship. We came back to Somalia and put down anchor,” says Jaswinder Singh.

Talks resumed with the owner, but there was no breakthrough. After a few months, the pirates again decided to head for the sea using the Iceberg as a mothership. The ship’s condition had deteriorated by then. Two anchors had broken off because the sea bottom was sand and didn’t allow a proper grip. Diesel and water were exhausted and the crew would get beaten up for it. When they were planning to sail to another town for provisions, the third spare anchor also broke down. They procured a fourth anchor from another ship, but then there was a fire in the engine. The chief engineer was asked to start the engine but said it was impossible. “They held both his ears and sliced them with a knife. His entire body was awash with blood. We tore clothes and wrapped them around his ears,” says Singh.

Then the fourth anchor also broke and this time the ship drifted towards land and got grounded, increasing the frustration of the pirates. They told the ship’s owner that they were going to remove the kidneys and hearts of the hostages to sell. Singh says one of the hostages, a Yemeni, lost his senses on hearing that and jumped into the water and died. His body was kept in cold storage for three months but then the refrigerator stopped working because there was no electricity.

When the stench got too much, the body 8 december 2014

had to be disposed of at sea.

There was also a hole in the ship and water started leaking from one end below.

Half the crew were ordered to repair the engine and the other half to evacuate the water with buckets. “For two days we worked, but neither did the engine get repaired nor was the water removed because the hole was too big,” says Jaswinder Singh. For 15 days, all the senior members of the crew were beaten mercilessly after that. The chief officer, an Indian named Dheeraj Kumar, couldn’t stand the torture. One night he changed his clothes, collected some food and water and said he was going. “He asked us to take his luggage home if we were released. He said, ‘If I reach home before you I will do something for you. If you reach first, do something for me.’ We never heard from him again,” says Jaswinder Singh.

Dheeraj Kumar is missing even now.

Meanwhile, the generator broke down completely. The ship had finally died on them. They started living on the bridge.

“All we did was make food, sleep, make food, eat, sleep. Everyone got a katori of rice at night and one chapaati in the morning. We just waited,” says Jaswinder Singh. Old pirates left and new ones came in again. They had been there for three years by now.

That December, they began to see movement on land at night with vehicles coming and going. Speedboats also started to move near their ship in increasing numbers. On the morning of 10 December 2012, Singh woke up, did his prayers and went to brush. He saw a white SUV nearby on the shore and eight to 10 people come out. The pirates got alert and into position. He sensed something was going to happen and ran to the bathroom below to hide. On the right of the ship, Singh then saw a large number of armed men. They were from the Puntland Maritime Police Force— Puntland being an autonomous region in Somalia—who had come as a rescue squad. Then there was a rain of bullets that never seemed to stop.

“We were fired on continuously. For 14 days it went on. There was firing from everywhere, including a helicopter and speedboats in the sea. It was a miracle that we survived. Three of us got injured.

We had little food or water and couldn’t

even walk after some time. The pirates made us call our homes to tell the government to stop the firing,” he says. After two weeks, the Puntland Maritime Police let the pirates leave on the condition that the hostages be left unharmed.

Singh has returned to work at a shipping company and says he is a stronger man now. “I have seen so much—a collision and destruction of the ship, two men being shot, beatings, knifings. I have still not cried after my release. Even when I met my family. Not even a tear drop.

Maybe the tears all got over,” he says.

B

ahadur Singh, Bhim Sen Singh and

the other crew of the Asphalt Venture are gradually coming to terms with a life not in captivity. Bahadur Singh, who is 56 years old, first went to sea in 1982 but he is now done with that and is planning to find an onshore job. Bhim Sen Singh says his children are still young and he needs to keep working. He still has 10 months’ wages pending and needs it because the family is hard up.

Bahri says that the recovery of hostages usually happens quickly if their company is proactive about their safe release. He cites an example of the hostages of two ships who were released at the same time last year. One was a good company and the other wasn’t. “In the good company ship, all of them started joining back after a few months at home.

The other ship’s hostages were still running for a job even a year after their return,” he says. He was in touch with the Indian Government and the maritime industry to help them get jobs.

Because of patrolling by navies, Somali piracy has come down of late and no ships have been hijacked recently. But piracy is picking up in West Africa in the Gulf of Guinea in an entirely different form.

“Their main purpose is to siphon off cargo like jet fuel from a tanker and sell it in the black market. It is more violent in nature. If they don’t find the fuel, they might take some senior guys from the ship and ask for ransom. They have started to do that now,” says Bahri. “We don’t know how this will develop. Today they are taking 30-35 days to negotiate and release hostages. Tomorrow it can go to months. Time will tell.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 39

ARCHAEOLOGY

The eternal Harappan Script Tease New findings raise an old question: Do South Indians belong to the Indus Valley Civilisation?

By Lhendup G Bhutia

A

round two kilometres away from the fa-

mous Vittala Temple in Hampi, Karnataka, through a dirt road that few individuals use, one reaches an abandoned area with banana plantations on one side and hills dotted with oversized boulders on the other. Locals tend to leave the caves on these hills alone since it isn’t uncommon to find sloth bears and cheetahs in them.

Around 10 years ago, KM Metry, a Kannada University professor of Tribal Studies who was researching instances of human-bear conflict in the area and visiting sites in search of stone tools used by tribals of the olden days, was walking alone on this dirt road when he saw what he thought was a light scribble on a rock in the distance.

Professor Metry climbed the hill on which the rock stood and started splashing it with water to get a clearer look at what he had spotted. It turned out to be nothing like he had seen before. It was an ancient rock painting, drawn, he says, with some form of vegetable oil, and containing as many as 22 symbols.

He continued to discover similar rock paintings with different symbols around Hampi after that.

Manoj Patil

Dr KM Metry, Professor of Tribal Studies at Kannada University, who discovered what appear to be rock paintings of the Harappan script in Hampi

Despite several attempts to study the 417 identified Indus Valley symbols found on over 4,000 objects, no one has come close to deciphering them

In the following years, his research on Gondi culture and visits to tribal areas in Chhattisgarh convinced him that the rock paintings he had encountered in Hampi were Gondi symbols. This led him to believe what quite a few other scholars also claim—that all speakers of Dravidian languages, and by extension the people who live in South India, owe their ancestry to the Gond tribe. Some years ago, he chanced upon a book by a Gond scholar who argued that the yetundeciphered script of the Indus Valley Civilisation is a combination of Gondi symbols. After several years of persuasion, last month, Metry was able to convince the author of the book, Motiravan Kangale, to visit the spot where he had discovered the rock paintings. Of the 22 characters, Kangale was able to identify and interpret the meaning of five that occur both in Gond culture and the Indus Valley Civilisation. The other characters, Kangale says, were not clear enough to identify easily.

“This is a major find,” Metry says. “Not only does it show that the Indus script is connected to Gondi language and culture, it proves that the modern-day Gond [Tribals] and South Indians are people of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The Harappans migrated from the Indus Valley to South India.”

T

he Indus Valley Civilisation has

puzzled archaeologists and researchers ever since it was first discovered in the early twentieth century. Who were these ancient people who lived along the Indus River between 3,300 and 1,300 BCE? What could have happened to the builders of perhaps one of the greatest 42 open

a n - cient civilisations?

Could they have been wiped out by a flood or a superior military force, as some researchers argue? Or did they abandon the northwest part of the subcontinent because the river they depended upon dried up, or changed course, to migrate to other parts like South India, as Metry suggests?

Most researchers have turned to the tiny symbols and inscriptions on the seals and tablets found at Indus Valley sites for answers to these questions. And therein lies the perplexity. So far, despite several attempts to study the 417 identified Indus Valley symbols that have been found on over 4,000 objects, no one has come close to deciphering the script. Objects bearing it have been found all over, from the Indus Valley sites of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa to far-off places in West Asia. Each object typically has five or six symbols, and these occur in various sequences. Some researchers have even claimed that the symbols do not represent a language at all, and are merely pictograms of political or religious icons.

The likes of Metry and Kangale claim that the ability to decipher the script has proven elusive because no one has attempted to study the script using Gondi symbols and language. They point out how many of the symbols in the script resemble those found in Ghotuls, the traditional learning centres for unmarried Gond youngsters found in some of their villages. They claim that the famous Pashupati seal with the figure of a man with horns echoes the old Gondi practice of wearing a crown of horns for religious occasions. “When you start looking at the script keeping in mind Gondi symbols,

then everything becomes clear,” Kangale says. “It shows that the Harappans travelled via central India to the south, with some of them settling in Central India and a majority of them in the South.”

One of the most interesting projects on the Indus script is being undertaken at Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). In league with researchers from the University of Washington, and using mathematics and computer science, TIFR researchers have been able to establish that Indus symbols constitute a language. The researchers analysed the statistical pattern of the script, calculating the degree of randomness in successive symbols of a sequence, and compared them to non-linguistic systems such as human DNA, protein sequences and also four linguistic scripts—English, Old Tamil, Rig Vedic Sanskrit and Sumerian. They also compared the Indus script to Fortran, a computer programming language. The results, published in the journal Science in 2009, showed that the Indus inscriptions are indeed linguistic in nature, displaying the same level of randomness and patterns as the languages used for comparison, and differing from Fortran and other non-linguistic systems.

According to Mayank Vahia, an astrophysicist at TIFR and one of the researchers studying the script, the theory of Indus Valley people having migrated to South India has very little basis in scientific evidence, and artefacts being found in the South are unremarkable in themselves. “Since the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation were in contact with people from as far as Mesopotamia, exchanges with people from South India are likely,” he says.

In support of their argument, those who propose the migration theory point to the discovery in Tamil Nadu eight years ago of a ‘celt’—a hand-held axe of the Indus Valley Civilisation. A school teacher from Sembian-Kandiyur, near Mayiladuthurai in Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam district, had dug up two ‘celts’ in his backyard. One of them was inscribed with four symbols from the Indus script. But, as Vahia says, “An axe with Indus inscriptions on it has never 8 December 2014

the latter’s southward migration in a paper he presented at the International Symposium on Indus Civilisation and Tamil Language in 2007. He wrote: ‘There is no archaeological evidence of a southward migration through the Deccan after the end of the urban phase of the IndusSarasvati civilization… The only actual evidence of movements at that period is of Late Harappans migrating towards the Ganges plains and towards Gujarat...

Migration apart, there is a complete absence of Harappan artefacts and features south of the Vindhyas: no Harappan designs on pottery, no Harappan seals, crafts and ornaments, no trace of Harappan urbanism… Cultural continuity from Harappan to historical times has been increasingly documented in North India, but not in the South… This means, in effect, that the south-bound Late Harappans

“Not only does it show that the Indus script is connected to the Gondi language, it proves that modern-day Gond Tribals and South Indians are people of the Indus Valley” Dr KM Metry Professor of Tribal Studies, Kannada University

8 December 2014

would have reverted from an advanced urban bronze-age culture to a Neolithic one! Their migration to South would thus constitute a double “archaeological miracle”: apart from being undetectable on the ground, it implies that the migrants experienced a total break with all their traditions. Such a phenomenon is unheard of.’

Nisha Yadav, who has been researching the Indus script with Vahia, points out that even if the rock paintings with the alleged Indus script are ancient, someone could well have imitated the script. “The Indus script has always been small, and found on tablets or seals. The length of the average inscription is five signs and the longest so far found is 17 signs long.

But the size of the symbols in Hampi is large and is 22 characters long. Also, no one has ever found the Indus script as rock paintings.”

Of the 22 painted characters discovered

by Dr Metry (below), five have been deciphered and interpreted by Motiravan Kangale, a Gond scholar

open www.openthemagazine.com 43

Manoj Patil

been [found at] the Indus sites, but even if it were to be genuine, the axe is a movable object and it very likely could have travelled there.”

What is often missed in these arguments is that script and language are distinct from each other. Seals with Indus symbols, in sequences that are different from the Indus Valley’s, have been found in modern-day Iraq and Bahrain, suggesting that the Indus script was being used as part of a different language or information system in those parts (with which there is evidence of ancient trade links).

If an Indus script discovered in South India somehow bears resemblance to a Dravidian language or culture, it does not necessarily mean that speakers of Dravidian languages are descendants of Indus Valley people. The historian Michel Danino rubbishes the theory of

ritesh uttamchandani

The claim of the Indus Valley Civilisation being proto-Dravidian—or even linked to the Vedic age, as some have claimed in the past—has implications for a long-running political debate over Many scholars disagree with the Harappansthe subcontinent’s original as-proto-Dravidians inhabitants. The migration theory, including theory, for example, gels Mayank Vahia and with the theory that IndoNisha Yadav of TIFR Iranians, or Aryans, came from the Caspian Sea area with their Vedic culture and drove the Indus Valley’s Dravidian inhabitants to the southern parts of the peninsula. Up against this is the assertion that Indus Valley was part of a Vedic culture of early Hinduism, an alternate theory that bolsters the claim that Vedic beliefs had their origin in the subcontinent and there had never been an Aryan invasion of north India.

After the discovery of the celt, the then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam was reported to have said at an election rally, in the presence of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, that archaeological findings reveal that Tamils belong to a race of Dravidians who lived in the Indus Valley, and how he himself was a descendant of theirs.

According to Vahia, the Harappans were neither connected to the Vedic age, “An axe with Indus inscriptions has never been found at nor proto-Dravidians who moved to the Indus sites, but even if the ones found in Tamil Nadu South India. One of the chief inconsistenwere genuine, they very likely were transported there” cies of the Indus-as-Vedic theory is the complete absence of references to horses Mayank Vahia astrophysicist, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Indus Valley artefacts, while horses were integral to most Rig Vedic rituals and customs. Vahia says, “The Harappans the Harappans merged with the migrants excavate burial mounds in Rakhigarhi, belonged to the ancient Homo sapiens of Central Asia and then drifted farther an Indus Valley site in Haryana, to find who migrated from Africa as early as east into the Gangetic planes… It is there- parasite eggs that might have once exist60,000 years ago. A part of this group fore more logical to assume that the ed in the stomachs of Indus Valley people. travelled to the Mediterranean and Harappan people and the Vedic people “If these parasite eggs are found, it could lead to something remarkable. We could another travelled along the coast of the merged into a single human group.’ be able to isolate the DNA of their host,” Arabian Sea, and some of them settled in the Indus Valley region. At the end of the says Vasant Shinde, a senior archaeologist nother novel research study and vice chancellor at DCPRI. Ice Ages, the group that went to the is currently being conducted to An earlier attempt to undertake DNA Mediterranean moved east and entered India, where they met the earlier understand who the Harappans were and genome sequencing of skeletons migrants who had come along the seas, and if their descendants could be found in Farmana, another Indus site in sometime around 2,500 years BCE. The living among us. In collaboration with Haryana, had proved unsuccessful since new entrants, Indo-Iranians, composed researchers of Seoul National University the wet acidic soil of the region had the Vedas and later included the learning College in Korea and the Archaeological destroyed all DNA in the remains of the of the Harappans.”

Survey of India, researchers from Pune’s dead. However, earlier this year, the Writes Vahia writes in an academic Deccan College Postgraduate and researchers were able to locate a cattle paper: ‘It seems logical that post 2000 BC, Research Institute (DCPRI) are trying to bone whose marrow appeared fit enough

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“The Indus script has always been small. The length of the average inscription is five signs. But the size of the symbols in Hampi is large and is 22 characters long” Nisha Yadav Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

for study. According to Shinde, the bone appears to be intact, although they can’t identify what exact animal it belonged to or what part of the skeleton it is. “So far, the bone looks good enough,” he says.

“We can’t say what exactly this bone will reveal, but we hope it will be able to tell us something about the connection between the animal and its master.”

While the Indus script still remains shrouded in mystery, and we are as still nowhere close to understanding who the Indus Valley people were or what happened to them, there has been some remarkable progress of late.

Earlier this year, the team led by Shinde discovered two new mounds in addition to the seven already discovered in Rakhigarhi, taking the total area of the site to around 350 hectares. This is much larger than Mohenjo-daro, which was once considered the largest Harappan settlement. “Much of Rakhigarhi is still under a present-day village with around 5,000 inhabitants. So in actuality, it is 8 December 2014

larger than anyone has ever imagined,” Shinde says.

Rakhigarhi, along with other Harappan sites, had been discovered way back in the 1960s. It had always been thought that the ancient civilisation had its origin in Sind, where Mohenjo-daro and Harappa are located, and later spread to distant sites in modern day Haryana.

But archaeologists are now considering the possibility that it was here that the Indus Valley Civilisation first flourished.

“The excavations in Haryana are throwing up really early dates, where the early Harappan phase could go back to even 5000 BCE. We still need to confirm that, but Rakhigarhi looks like the place where the civilisation began.”

The TIFR group under Vahia has also discovered two structures used for astronomy in the Indus Valley, proving for the first time that the civilisation was far from primitive in this field of exploration.

The two circular structures, located exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, at Dholavira in Gujarat’s Kutch district, were initially thought to be servant’s quarters. “It is implausible that an advanced civilisation like the Indus Valley did not have any knowledge of astronomy,” Vahia says, seated in his office at TIFR, surrounded by shelves packed with books on the subject. “Yet, no one had ever discovered any evidence of it. These structures we discovered were probably useful to understand the time of the day and night, seasons, years, and perhaps even longer periods.”

Since having established that the Indus script is neither random nor disorderly, TIFR researchers have also been working on uncovering the subtleties of the script’s structure. They have identified specific signs that begin and end the texts. They have found that the script displays a remarkable uniformity across vast stretches of terrain. They have also found the sequence of Indus symbols used in inscriptions found in West Asia—with whom the Harappans are believed to have had trade links—to be different from those found in Indus

Valley; the same script, in effect, being used to represent a different language.

Since there exist frequently-occurring sign combinations that tend to appear at specific locations in the texts, the researchers have also been able to predict illegible or incomplete text found on broken or damaged objects with about 75 per cent accuracy.

One issue that has posed an obstacle to researchers is the presence of what appear to be composite symbols, or symbols that look like an amalgamation of two or more other symbols. Had the Indus Valley people devised shorthand, or do these composites convey meaning combinations of their constituent symbols?

TIFR researchers, using computational methods, have been able to compare the ‘environment’ (the signs that precede or follow an inscription sequence) of given constituent and composite symbols, and shown that the Indus people did not write in abbreviations, and that since the environments of composite and constituent symbols are different, the meaning of a composite symbol is not the simple addition of two constituent symbols.

Tapping her fingers on a glass table with images of the Indus script, Yadav says, “Gradually, we are learning to understand the structure of the Indus script.

We don’t know what it means. We probably will never know what the symbols are telling us until we discover something like the Rosetta Stone [the stone with a decree inscribed in three scripts, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and ancient Greek, the discovery of which helped researchers translate Egyptian hieroglyphs]. But we are learning its structure, its patterns and sequences. We hope to, with our work, be able to help future attempts to interpret the language.”

At this point, Vahia joins in, pointing at Yadav, who is seated across another table. “The two of us will soon be able to write to each other in flawless Harappan.

But we won’t understand a word or letter of what we are writing.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 45

cinema

Abandoned but not alone

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o p e n s pa c e

Aamir Khan Saif Ali Khan

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Happy Ending The Equalizer

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CINEMA RE V IE W

Vertu Aster Geo.Graham The Moon ASUS DSL-AC68U AC1900

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TEC H & ST Y L E

Are men better navigators?

Debunking ‘wheat free’ myths Higher education, higher stress

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SCIENCE

Urnabhih: A Mauryan Tale of Espionage, Adventure and Seduction by Sumedha V Ojha Victoria: A Life by AN Wilson

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books

Atul Bhalla: Artist of the aqueous

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Saif Ali Khan: Beyond romcoms

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mindspace

Safe and Saif Why Saif Ali Khan should venture into darker alleys 48

cinema

Don’t Play It Safe, Saif The familiar romcom hero Saif Ali Khan has an uncanny ability to pull off surprisingly edgy roles. Can he do it again? PRIYANKA PEREIRA

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aif Ali Khan is currently biding his time like a bull in a bear

market. This was a given after two of his big budget films— Tigmanshu Dhulia’s action drama Bullett Raja and Sajid Khan’s slapstick comedy Humshakals—crashed at the box-office, leaving him high-and-dry as a film star in an increasingly competitive industry.

However, Saif shows no hint of jittery nerves, neither is he afraid of being written off. Perhaps, this is the effect of having struggled as an actor for a long time and having been written off many times. “As long you are enjoying the kind of work you do, it is all good,” he says.

Khan is at Mehboob Studios in Bandra, a popular haunt of Bollywood actors for interviews and film promotions. He has arrived in his sleek red Audi, and the vehicle is making more heads turn than his presence is. He smiles as people gather around his car to admire it. He exchanges hellos with his erstwhile business partner Dinesh Vijan and gets into his vanity van, which is also painted a bright red hue. Red, then, seems a favourite with the Nawab of Pataudi. Or it could be wife Kareena Kapoor’s choice.

He starts rehearsing his lines for a television show as part of a promotional appearance for his just-released film Happy Ending. Unlike many actors, who don’t enjoy the film marketing drill, Saif Ali Khan is taking it in his stride. He is in an upbeat mood, making conversation with almost everyone who approaches him. After his round of official meetings, he invites me inside the van for the interview. His upbringing is immediately evident. He apologises for making me wait outside, stands up to greet me, and sits down only after I have taken my seat. He is very much the person one wishes most famous people would be: unrehearsed, and well-mannered.

Seated amid a heap of national dailies and magazines, his manager shows him the interviews he has recently given. He puts on his spectacles and starts browsing through them. “A good interview is one where the interviewer knows what to leave out from the interview,” he says,

Saif Ali Khan

apparently satisfied with what he reads; a broad smile appears on his face. He says, however, that he has never been a fan of reading his own interviews, but is doing it for a change. Almost all actors like to say that about themselves and yet keep close tabs on how they are projected in the media.

And, like all actors, he’s doing several things at the same time, prepping for his TV appearance, catching up with what the press has to say about him, hurriedly taking in a salad, and putting his mind to answering my questions. He terms Happy Ending a “life saver”. For starters, it is in a zone that Khan is most comfortable with: romantic comedy. “But it is a romantic comedy from the boy’s point of view,” he says. Produced by Khan himself and directed by NRI techies-turned-directors, Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK (with whom he seems to have found a

more experimentation.” Ileana D’Cruz, who co-stars with him in Happy Ending, says, “His audience loves it when he does goofy characters.”

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aif Ali Khan finds himself in an

unenviable position. He’s tried his luck with fail-safe big-budget entertainers and multiplex middle-of-the-road movies. Sajid Khan’s Humshakals was one such big bet that did not deliver the desired results. He has publicly called it a mistake. He smiles and concedes, “There are hundreds of things people tell you when a movie doesn’t work. But things would have been different had the movie worked. For me, personally, I wanted to attempt something new and hence I took it up.”

Khan’s next is Phantom, a Kabir Khan action thriller, and then a film with Reema Kagti called Mr Chaalu, which

Saif Ali Khan with Ileana D’Cruz in a still from Happy Ending

He can do romantic comedies successfully in his sleep, but I really feel his contentment camaraderie, their last film together being Go Goa Gone), it has Saif playing the man-child yet again, a role he has mastered since Dil Chahta Hai (DCH) which released in 2001. “It is good to be back in a familiar area,” he says.

Happy Ending, a romantic comedy that sets out to spoof the genre but plays it safe and is more concerned with being cool than clever, has received mixed reviews. The movie is a typical Saif Ali Khan entertainer, with him playing a mature version of the charming and easygoing romantic hero. It’s light and frothy, will leave a smile on your face, but will also make you wonder if Khan will ever do another noteworthy role or is happy doing the romantic comedy hero, a spot that would seem vacant without him.

Homi Adajania, who directed him in Being Cyrus and Cocktail , feels that his redemption lies in turning a corner.

“He can do romantic comedies successfully in his sleep, but I really feel his contentment will be in exploring a darker space. He has an undeniable talent so I think he should give in to 50 open

sees him return to his comfort zone of romance. So one wonders if there is any space for Saif Ali Khan the actor left—the performer who reads literature and quotes from it but finds himself confined to a box he can’t get out of.

“Currently, I am revisiting classics like Moby Dick and Don Quixote, but I am not sure these will make good films,” he says. He has been sharing notes on Moby Dick with Sriram Raghavan, who is currently making a revenge saga called Badlapur. “Who knows, Moby Dick could be of help,” he winks.

With this Khan, one thing is certain: anything is possible. While unpredictable moves have been his weakness as an actor of late, it was the same trait that was once his greatest strength.

When Farhan Akhtar chose him to play the character of Sameer in his debut venture DCH, Khan was not quite sure if he wanted to do it. He almost did not sign the film because he thought that the role was a small one. It was Javed Akhtar and Dimple Kapadia who sat him down and explained to him the importance of the role.

Khan admits that DCH was a turning point for him. Youngsters identified with Sameer, the new-age, confused and commitment-phobic boy-next-door.

The characters that followed were in a similar mould—Kal Ho Naa Ho, Hum Tum, Salaam Namaste—but his affable charm carried the day, making him the most sought-after romantic hero, a Rishi Kapoor of our times, one who would not be lost in an ensemble cast that included bigger stars like Aamir Khan (in DCH) and Shah Rukh Khan (in Kal Ho Naa Ho). “I am a secure actor,” he says, and has never been bothered about the length of the roles.

A big breakout moment of his career, one that made everyone sit up and take notice, was the role of the scheming, fuming, but heart-rending Langda Tyagi in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara, where he stole the show from Ajay Devgn. In contrast, in Cocktail, one of his most successful solo-hero films, the two actresses had meatier roles than he did. Last year, however, he pulled off another of those surprises that have become his hallmark: he made a 8 december 2014

will be in exploring a darker space” Homi Adajania special appearance in his own production, the so-called ‘zom-com’ Go Goa Gone, as Boris, a Russian zombie-slayer with blond hair and a strange accent.

Even then, he pulled it off in a way few other actors can, earning back his cool cred. Raj Nidimoru, who directed that film (as also Happy Ending), describes Khan as one of Bollywood’s few actors who are willing to listen to something different and go a step further by putting their faith and money in it. Sriram Raghavan calls him an instinctive actor.

Saif Ali Khan entered the industry as yet another star kid. When he made his debut with Yash Chopra’s Parampara in 1992, he was widely expected to exhibit the same talent as his actress mother, Sharmila Tagore. Bollywood was brimming with new faces then. The Khan triumvirate of Shah Rukh, Salman and Aamir had already taken hold of the big screen, and Ajay Devgn and Akshay Kumar had been crowned the new action heroes. Saif Ali Khan not only had to live up to his film lineage, but also make space for himself among the younger crop of actors. He managed a 8 december 2014

few hits, but none too memorable. It was his personal life that was more the talk of the town than his acting. “Back in the 90s, I wasn’t a hero of choice for many filmmakers, and I often ended up doing films where I detested my roles.

Waking up every morning and heading to shoot was a pain,” he recalls. Movie critics too had almost written him off by the time Farhan Akhtar’s debut film came to his rescue.

While his keenness for content over the role’s length became his forte, directors who have worked with him point out that his strength also lies in his effortlessness. “Saif is proficient at making a performance seem effortless and for an actor to appear not to be acting is the greatest asset he can hope for,” says Adajania. He is not a method actor, he adds, but believes in staying on a sharp learning curve. “We actors are like watches. You know how a watch brand keeps making new watches every season. We often wonder why they are making so many watches, but the fact is with every watch they are getting something new into the

market. Similarly as actors, with each film, you have to upgrade, enhance and reinvent yourself,” says Saif.

Reinvention for Saif is a doubleedged sword. Whereas he has evolved rather wonderfully as a romantic hero, and his goofiness still has takers, his experiments with slapstick and action have failed. Does this mean that an actor of his calibre should stick to roles that fit in with what perceptions his audience has of him? Khan ponders this question a little, and then responds. “Audiences are much like parents. Their perceptions grow out of certain expectations. They trust you to give your best, but when you let them down, they become disappointed.”

What matters to him more than the views of his audience is his own will to do a certain film. “I am selfish in that sense,” he states. “When directors or producers offer you a film, you know they have done their homework if that part will suit you or not. So I leave that to them and then go with my gut.”

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onversation on his wife, Kareena

Kapoor Khan, is restricted to work.

He says that the two of them, dubbed ‘Saifeena’ by the tabloids, will not be working together anytime soon. In Happy Ending, she did the cameo of his girlfriend who dumps him right at the beginning of the movie. He is aware that their onscreen pairing hasn’t been very successful. Tashan, Kurbaan and Agent Vinod were all box-office duds.

“Honestly, we are not in a hurry to work together. If a wife who is at home is also with you all day on the sets, I do think that it is a bit too much.” He says they share their views on work-related matters with each other, but in the end choose films that each wants to do. And that’s how it should be, he adds.

When he is not being an actor, he has the role he has inherited from his father, that of playing the Nawab of Pataudi.

But Khan dismisses his royalty. “I have inherited a house and property, and maybe emotionally Pataudi is important to me and I am trying to do something for the place,” he says, “But I am not ‘His Highness’, I am just an actor.” An actor, we hope, who can astonish us again. n open www.openthemagazine.com 51

art

Atul54 Bhalla: A self portrait open

8 december 2014

A Natural Artist Atul Bhalla’s new show continues his conversation with ecology and his lifelong meditation on water RAJNI GEORGE

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chair marooned in a plain of grass that could be in any country; a cloud of fire sighing over the same serene grassland; a man (the originator of this image, it turns out) hugging the ground and, it would seem, consecrating the ground that approaches crushing expanses of stilllooking water. Most striking, a boat suspended surreally, between the sky and a river. The artist won’t tell me how, but it doesn’t, of course, matter; we could be anywhere, or nowhere.

Where we are, however, is close to home: the beleaguered Yamuna.

“If you put a boat in the Yamuna, it won’t flow; the water doesn’t flow after Wazirabad. It goes in circles.

People who see the work understood why I had created a boat that only goes in circles; because the water itself can’t flow,” says artist Atul Bhalla. “The environment has been a concern in my work, though I don’t think of myself as an activist. I’m not a placard-holding, protest- in-the-street kind of guy. I like to consider how we as a culture perceive water from the point of view of art. On the riverbank, when we go to a restaurant, we ask, ‘Ek bottle pani de doh !’” He laughs at the necessary ironies.

The piece is one of the most arresting in a series called Deliverance, showcased at his latest show, Ya Ki Kuchh Aur!, at the capital’s Vadehra Art Gallery. In it, Bhalla displays photographic and video works created from 2012 on that include chiefly three projects: Inundation in Hamburg, Germany, Deliverance in New Delhi, India, and Contestation in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“Deliverance is part of a multiproject series I did, called The Wake. We have other works coming in,” says Bhalla.

“I engaged with traditional boatmakers; I found them north of Gorakhpur, to make this boat. The boat is now a

8 december 2014

permanent installation at the Heritage Transport Museum in Manesar. It hangs over the reception area, with a café underneath; you can actually think of the café as under water, as the boat is upstairs!” Bhalla spent 2013 working with the craftsmen to craft a boat with twin rudders, which birthed detailed documentation of the endangered culture and craft of the Mallah community. In Contestation, Bhalla used three months in Johannesburg at a residency in 2012 to focus on the large-scale privatisation of land and resources; thus the chair, placing humans very obviously within the context of their struggle with the land and with South Africa’s power and racial politics. And in What will be my defeat?—II, part of the Inundation series, Bhalla uses the river Elbe to immerse the artist literally and metaphorically, as the river merges with the sea.

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ingle-minded artist of the

aqueous, Bhalla continues to address the politics of water, in his dialectic with water wastage and consumption; he is part of a contemporary set of Indian artists who are engaging with modern sociopolitical issues in an immediate, accessible manner. Through video art, installations, sculpture, photographs and paintings, he has created a thoughtful and thought-provoking body of work over two decades. “Atul Bhalla’s work engages with some of the most compelling urgencies of our time— water, and the ecological, historical and economic contexts of our relationship to water,” says critic Ranjit Hoskote.

“Bhalla, along with Ravi Agarwal, Arunkumar HG, Amar Kanwar, Sheba Chhachhi and a number of other artists, is at the forefront of a cultural inquiry into the war that humankind has

unleashed on the natural world, as the only species committed to destroying rather than sustaining its habitat.”

A marked cultural neutrality can be said to qualify much of Bhalla’s work. It can also be surmised that this may have kept him from a larger role in the canon, but it has also brought him quiet, steady recognition: shows at the Aicon Gallery in London, the Sepia International in New York, the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) in Spain and the International Video Art Biennial in Israel, as well as many shows at home, at smaller institutions in Mumbai and Delhi’s Triveni Kala Sangam and Lalit Kala Academy.

Bhalla’s engagement with New Delhi and its water resources are significant, as he encourages viewers to look deeply at their context within urban spaces. Questioning the control, commodification and pollution of water, he has alchemised some of the most mundane debates around water, looking intensely at its physical, historical, spiritual and political relevance. Thus, a personal exploration turns public; a local context moves to the global stage. The bleak, almost autumnal quality of Inundation is typical of his kind of exploration; lone, rangy, understated.

A plain-speaking, no-nonsense kind of person, Bhalla is an unlikely artist, in the stereotypical sense of the word; when he speaks about his work, in clear, unsparing terms, it is with the precision of a tradesman. “I am not a camera-carrying kind of artist,” he says.

“I use a small digital camera. Something is staged, something has been done to it, but it is more than that.”

“It all started out in 1998, when the public first invested in me. They realised what my medium meant to me,” says Bhalla. He began with open www.openthemagazine.com 55

traditional painting and then moved to photography, that accessible yet enigmatic terrain of novices and masters. How was the transition? “From 2001 to 2004, I didn’t do anything. This was the transition period. I did the first performative photo work then.”

What is a photo performance? “It’s me acting within an environment.

People accuse me of not having people in my work; here, the attempt is to turn the camera on myself. I’m putting the gaze of the camera on myself. I’m turning the ‘voyeuristic, violent’ gaze of the camera on me. I’m shy, that’s why I take pictures of myself.”

Is this hiding, in one sense? “No, it’s not a question of hiding, it’s a question of losing yourself.”

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halla’s works (which he may spend two years on individually) often begin with literature, as much as they do with life. “In Shanghai, I was listening to water, crouching in the middle of the street. You Always Step in the Same River is the title of that show. The idea is that if I’m stepping in the Yamuna, I’m also stepping into the same river that runs in China. And, I was using the work 56 open

of Jung Chang.” He uses the terms ‘red’ and ‘black’, used to refer to Communists and non-Communists, as he details his involvement with the great narratives of China’s revolutions and identity authored by Chang, among them her family autobiography Wild Swans and a biography of Mao Zedong. Everything is connected, of course, like the universal water body. “After the Cultural Revolution, a lot of names changed; just like in Delhi where you have Dhaula Kuan, Hauz Khas, Khari Baoli—where is the kuan, khas, baoli?”

A member of KHOJ International Artists’ Association, Bhalla works from a studio in Janakpuri, and now teaches

Questioning the control, commodification and pollution of water, Bhalla has alchemised the most mundane debates around water

Deliverance, archival pigment print back-mounted on dibond, 2012

three days a week at Ashoka University, which has just started its first Master’s degree in Art. “I’ve been teaching a long time,” he says. “I was teaching high school for 17 years before the art boom; nothing sold then.” The big sales came at last, and now, at a pivotal point in a slow-burning career, Bhalla is showing in New York in March and talking at New York University and several other universities.

“My work is in the documentary mode but it is not a documentary itself. Be it the boatmaking or me carrying a chair around an African landscape, these are very corporeal experiences for me,” says Bhalla. “I need to be there doing it, sometimes again and again. You keep going on in what you do. A lot of people miss out on this journey in art. The work is also about craft, material, and all of this becomes part of the journey that you’re on.” n Ya Ki Kuchh Aur! is on view at the Vadehra Art Gallery, Defence Colony, New Delhi, until 20 December 2014 8 december 2014

books Love, Sex and Satraps A courtesan-turned-spy frolics in Pataliputra, revealing Mauryan mischief ARSHIA SATTAR

Urnabhih: A Mauryan Tale of Espionage, Adventure and Seduction

Sumedha V Ojha India Ink, Roli Books | 350 pages | Rs 350

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s the explanatory sub-title of Urnabhih states, Sumedha V Ojha’s story of palace intrigue and military conspiracy is set in the 4th century BCE, at the dawn of the Mauryan period, with a young Chandragupta doing whatever it takes to establish an empire in the northern regions of the Subcontinent. The protagonist of this tale, littered as it is with handsome, virile and skilled warriors, is a dancer. More correctly, she is that fabled creature, a ganika, a highly sophisticated courtesan of ancient times, fit to share the company of noblemen and kings. She is their equal in terms of refinement and intellectual training, but often, she surpasses them in native cunning and the instinct to survive.

Our ganika, Misrakesi, comes to Magadha from Ujjain to avenge the death of her equally gorgeous and skilled sister.

But before she can make her killer move, she is persuaded by the ‘Acharya’ (no prizes for guessing who that might be) to become part of the Urnabhih, his spiderweb-like network of spies that lurk within the newly usurped kingdom as well as outside it.

Misrakesi embarks on a journey that takes her from the sheltered Apsara Sabha that she creates for the entertainment of Magadha’s finest to the kingdom of Kaikeya, teetering on the brink of chaos as its aged monarch lies dying. Along the way, she falls in love and has a lot of earth-shaking sex but she manages to ensure that the Acharya’s complex plans—to elevate the charismatic goatherd Chandragupta to Samrat of Jambudweepa—bear ripe and abundant fruit.

Ojha has a fluency and ease with the historical material that she manipulates in order to tell this rollicking tale. The Greeks, like the overthrown Nandas, hover in the background, not yet a spent force. The Sungas have been assimilated into the new administration by the young Maurya, ably advised by Chanakya. The formidable empire with its base of loyal satraps has yet to cohere around a single, undisputed monarch—all this is part of the fourth

century history we know. Ojha’s solid research, the exuberance of her writing and her clear passion for the period allow her to animate and actually render clear this period of murky turbulence, churned as it was by many contenders for power. She does this by creating believable (if excessively heroic) characters set against a backdrop of entirely plausible conspiracies and intrigues.

The fact that we see this male world through the eyes of a woman is, for me, a compelling narrative strategy. Choosing the courtesan, the woman who belongs to no one, who is simultaneously inside and outside social structures, is a master stroke. Misrakesi can have the courage and the adventures of a warrior, the contrivances and intelligence of an advisor and the ambition of a courtier on the rise, but as a ganika, she remains eternally seductive, eternally ambiguous, all things to all people at all times.

Ojha’s author’s note tells us she was born in Patna and therefore, she returns to her roots to tell us a story set in Pataliputra—the jewel of the East, a thriving and conniving metropolis in a sea of less alluring urban settlements. Further, she says that she has a ‘cherished dream of writing to bring the beauty and nuances of ancient India before the world’.

I’m not sure that Ojha is on her way to mission accomplished when early on, she writes such sentences as: ‘The date of the marriage has been fixed for one month from today, during the shuklapaksha, on the auspicious muhurat of the Shiva-Parvati vivaha’. Even by Ojha’s liberal reckoning, in a book that she sprinkles with Sanskrit words, a single sentence like this one requires two glossary entries. Nonetheless, Ojha has a good story to tell and she tells it well.

Prominent on the back cover of the book is a box that tells us that the book is ‘soon to be a major TV production.’ That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, this story is headed straight for the small screen—and there’s already a sequel in the works.

From your favourite chair, in your own living room, you can look forward to bevies of bejewelled ladies, battalions of topless men and a multitude of opulent palaces as Misrakesi’s adventures in love and power continue. n

We see this male world through the eyes of a woman—a compelling narrative strategy. Choosing the courtesan, the woman who belongs to no one, is a masterstroke

8 December 2014

Arshia Sattar is a teacher, critic and the author of abridged translations of Kathasaritsagara and Valmiki’s Ramayana, as well as Lost Loves: Exploring xxxxxxxxxx xxxx Rama’s Anguish open www.openthemagazine.com 57

books Bringing Back the Queen AN Wilson’s majestic biography rehabilitates the much misinterpreted Victoria BURHAN WAZIR

Victoria: A Life

AN Wilson Atlantic Books | 642 pages | £25

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or post-war Conservative politicians in the United

Kingdom, the Victorian era conjures a rapture of morality and empire. Prime Minister David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ has its roots in the 1800s. The former Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, pre-eminently keen in alluding to all matters carnal, has described Victorianism as an ‘inner fantasy’ for Tories. And the Ayatollah of modern British Conservatism, Margaret Thatcher, once said of the era: “Those were the values when our country became great, but not only did our country become great internationally, also so much advance was made in this country.” We can only speculate how the Iron Lady would have acquitted herself in the presence of the Empress of India.

Alexandrina Victoria’s reign of nearly 64 years is both the longest in British royal history and the most prolonged of any female monarch. For most observers, however, she exists in black and white, in her imperial final years; or, as a frowning ogress dressed in widow’s weeds. Indeed, she is both present and absent. For, after the passing of her husband in 1861, Victoria undertook a prolonged seclusion. The Times called her ‘the Great Absentee’. A notice was even placed on the railings of Buckingham Palace, offering the residence for sale or let. Who was the real Victoria? Whoever she was, she certainly would not recognise the cloak of piety which dresses her legacy after her time. But now, AN Wilson’s new and elegant biography of Victoria makes an authoritative case for rehabilitating the queen from dowager status. Victoria: A Life is not history as revisionism, nor do its 650 pages unearth any new treasures from the royal archive. Instead, its subject emerges as both playful and sullen; flirtatious and stern; petulant and calculating. She is, as Simon Schama once wrote, ‘the Sentimental Sovereign’.

Alexandrina Victoria—taking her mother’s name was an afterthought; she was originally to be called Georgina—was born in 1819 into a nation recovering from the Anglo-French wars. Unlike the majority of Elizabeth II’s reign, where former British realms have turned into republics, Victoria’s rule cannot be separated from its European context of expansion and empire. She grew up as an immigrant in London, and her mother spoke imperfect English. For all of her adult life, Victoria would fill her journals with German

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and English prose. Life for many of Victoria’s subjects was unfair. The middle classes—an increasingly important section of the population—had no vote. In every branch of government—including the courts, the Church, the judiciary and local authorities—nepotism and bribery were rife, as well as loans. The landed gentry both owned and administered the country. Writes Wilson, ‘Britain in those days was very far from being a democracy. It was governed by an oligarchy of aristocratic, landowning families.’ Victoria’s rule also coincided with sweeping electoral reform, the fires of republicanism in Europe, fighting in the Crimea, Prussian military expansion, the American Civil War and the industrialisation of the United Kingdom. The Napoleonic conflicts had also exacerbated periods of famine and unemployment. On 16 August 1819 in Manchester, a crowd of 60–80,000 gathered in St Peter’s Field to listen to the radical reformist Henry Hunt. Local magistrates ordered the cavalry into the crowd and in the violence which followed, 15 people were killed and around 700 wounded. Throughout Victoria’s career, bloodshed would amplify bloodshed not only in England and Ireland, but in colonies as far as India.

Previous biographers have noted that Victoria was no modernist, nor was she a liberal. Decade after decade, she would utilise the power of the crown to her advantage. She was served by 10 prime ministers in total and would outsmart nearly all of them. Parliament’s failure to consult her on army and navy appointments would lead to terse correspondence. Politically, she was a Tory who abhorred radicalism in any guise. She also had a strong aversion to the burgeoning feminism movement. In 1870, Victoria told William Gladstone of her revulsion at the thought of female medical students. Yet despite her traditionalism, by the end of her reign, British democracy had flourished and would ensure the survival of the modern constitutional monarchy.

Victoria’s politics extended only as far as Europe or the United States. Wilson makes little comment about her opinions on British interventions in the Middle East and Asia.

She deplored the tide of rising violence in India, but noted the strategic and economic importance of the country as a defence against Russian imperial interests. In her time, spices and jewels were shipped to London in abundance. She counted a number of Indians as friends. She had one Indian goddaughter—Princess Gowramma of Coorg—and helped raise Duleep Singh, the last Sikh Maharaja of Punjab. Both were raised as English children and converted to Christianity at an early age. One of her most enduring relationships was with Abdul Karim, the son of an Agra-based doctor. Karim arrived in London in 1887—the year of her Silver Jubilee—to teach 8 december 2014

Victoria Hindi and Urdu. He was, she said, a “thorough gentleman”. But, appalled by the ‘munshi’ who cooked chicken curry, daal and pilau, the royal household went as far as to threaten mass resignation.

Away from the royal court at Osborne House, Wilson is more revealing on the complicated German connections which dominated Victoria’s life. At the time of her birth, Germans existed as the subjects of princedoms and duchies. They were united in the 1860s through the efforts of Otto von Bismarck. By the time of his death in 1898, he had overseen the overhaul of the German war machine and the creation of a reich. That this unification would—after Victoria’s death—lead to the disastrous Great War was not foreseen. Germany would D e Agostini/Getty Images also give Victoria her most profound relationship— with her husband, Prince Albert (Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel—of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha).

They married in 1840 at the Royal Chapel in St James’ Palace. He was tall, striking and confident in his abilities.

She was, in her own words, “rather small for a queen”.

The marriage was an obsession for her, and she was inconsolable when he died in 1861 of a suspected typhoid fever. She blamed her son Bertie—he had been conducting an affair with an actress— for the tragedy. She never forgave him. Furthermore, she mothballed the Blue Room, the site of Albert’s passing. Clocks were stopped at 10.50 pm, and his final glass of water remained untouched.

Her household worried she had become insane.

Wilson is at his strongest when discussing Albert’s achievements. He was, says the author ‘the only member of the Royal family in recent memory, or perhaps ever, who deserves the name of genius.’ Albert here is a liberal and modernising force. His achievements include his work as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the expansion of the royal art collections, the foundations of Wellington College and the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1951. The Prince Consort also founded the Natural History Museum, the Royal College of Music, the Royal College of Art and the Science Museum in South Kensington. Critics at the time labelled the area ‘Albertopolis’. Albert was an egalitarian who was motivated by the arts, science and the alleviation of poverty. Having endured the collapse of European monarchies, he viewed England as a Darwinian experiment in democracy. In 1849, 8 december 2014

Wilson tells us he wrote to his brother Ernst saying: ‘At present the democratic and social evils are forcing themselves on the people. The unequal division of property and the dangers of poverty and envy arising therefrom, is the principal evil. Means must necessarily be found, not for diminishing riches (as the communists want) but to make facilities for the poor. But there’s the rub. I believe this question will first be solved here, in England.’

Most historians have always expounded the theory that Victoria’s was a life in redux. Her time as Queen is reduced to two acts: her marriage to Albert and the colourless period of widowhood, depression and withdrawal which followed his death until her own passing. Wilson rejects this consensus. Victoria was married for only 20 years and while she was undoubtedly devastated at the loss of Albert, men such as Lord Melbourne, Lord Salisbury, Disraeli and John Brown orbited her like satellites, he recounts. In this erudite and absorbing biography, which vividly chronicles the forces which shaped the United Kingdom at the height of empire, Wilson never interprets the lessons drawn from Victoria’s life by her descendants. She exists in isolation, if not always in splendour. Victoria would be succeeded by the Prince of Wales—according to the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘the fat little bald man in red’. Kipling described Edward VII—who became King when he was 59 years old—as a ‘corpulent voluptuA portrait of ary’. To Henry James, the playQueen Victoria, 1887 boy prince was an ‘ugly’ omen for ‘the dignity of things’.

The most accurate comparison to Victoria is, rather, Queen Elizabeth II, who will likely surpass Victoria’s milestone reign in 2016. Elizabeth has ruled over a modern, post-war state. Her monarchy allows no isolation from public view. The macabre tabloid ghosts who haunted Diana Spencer—and the charges of callowness directed at the House of Windsor in the wake of her funeral in 1997—have spurred the inhabitants of Buckingham Palace into transparency and confession. Elizabeth now occupies our shared content world of Facebook, Twitter and parachute jumps with Daniel Craig. Her approval ratings poll consistently higher than most of her prime ministers. Queen Victoria would undoubtedly approve. n Burhan Wazir is the editor of Qulture.com. He has previously worked for The Observer and The Times open www.openthemagazine.com 59

science

wheat, oat and rice Wheat has the highest protein content, oats the highest fat content and rice the highest carbohydrate content. However, the nutritional value of these grains differs very little

Are Men Better Navigators?

Yes, according to a study that takes an evolutionary perspective

Debunking ‘Wheat Free’ Myths

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According to a University of Warwick study, other than for the 2 per cent of the population with a specific gluten or wheat intolerance, the scientific evidence behind many of the most popular wheat and carbohydrate free diets turns out to be surprisingly thin and selectively. The researchers emphasise that whole grain products are undoubtedly good for health, and given their multiple beneficial aspects, could easily be described as a super food. And that it might be possible to argue that they are superior to many other fruit and vegetable super foods since they have multiple modes of action and provide both short- and long-term health benefits. n ccording to a new study, men

developed a better navigational ability to serve an evolutionary purpose—to travel farther and have children with more mates. The study claims men developed better spatial skills because men may have wanted to mate with women in different regions to spread their genes further afield, to reduce inbreeding or simply because their culture allowed it.

For the study, which was published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, researchers studied two north-western tribes in Namibia, the Twe and Tjimba tribes. Members of this tribe travel widely on foot and have a liberal sexual culture, where it is socially permissible for members to have affairs with individuals they are not married to. Members of these two tribes, according to the researchers, cover around 120 miles of terrain a year and the men are known to regularly mate with women in the regions they cover.

The researchers made around 120 men and women from the two tribes undergo spatial and navigational awareness tasks, from matching 60 open

pictures to faces to pointing out locations on a map. They were then asked about how many places they had visited in the past year, how far they had walked to each place, and how many children they had.

Not only did men perform significantly better than women on the spatial and navigational awareness tasks, it was also found that the men travelled more widely than the women. The researchers also found that among the men, those who performed better on the tasks, not only travelled more widely, they also had children with more women. In comparison, among women, no such link between spatial abilities and how much they travelled and how many children they bore was found.

According to the researchers, men developed spatial and navigational abilities better than women so as to have multiple mates. They write in the journal, ‘These findings offer strong support for the relationship between sex differences in spatial ability and ranging behavior, and identify male mating competition as a possible selective pressure shaping this pattern.’ n

Higher Education, Higher Stress

The higher your level of education, the greater your earnings and sense of ‘personal mastery’, but researchers at Toronto University say that well-educated people are also more likely to encounter overwork, job pressure, and work-versusfamily conflict. And, in turn, each of these stressors actually undermines mastery.

The researchers used the Canadian Work, Stress, and Health Study, a national sample of Canadian workers, to measure proficiency, or mastery. “In fact, stress in the workfamily interface poses the biggest threat to Canadians’ sense of mastery,” says Professor Scott Schieman. The study also found that workers who engage in more work-family multitasking feel a lower sense of mastery due to the conflict generated by the two roles. n

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synodic period It is the time required for a body within the solar system, such as a planet or moon, to return to the same or approximately the same position relative to the Sun as seen by an observer on Earth. Our Moon’s synodic period equals 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2.9 seconds

tech&style

Vertu Aster An ultra luxury smartphone with a powerful processor

Geo.Graham w The Moon

Price on request

gagandeep Singh Sapra

$6,900

It is a unique watch that combines a flying tourbillon with a highprecision retrograde moon-phase perpetual function, the cycle being calculated on the Moon’s exact synodic period for a duration of 122 years. At the end of each synodic period, the Moon jumps back to the beginning of a new moon-phase cycle. This moon phase will require adjustment once every 122 years. n

ASUS DSL-AC68U AC1900

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rom its hand brushed sound bar with concentric racetrack detailing, to its hand-polished ruby key that calls the concierge, this Vertu model makes an impressive style statement.

Its 4.7-inch full high definition 437 dots per inch screen is protected by a single 117 carat 5.1 inch piece of 5th generation solid sapphire crystal.

The Vertu Aster’s body is of hardened titanium, with an exquisite leather trim. And it weighs just under 200 gm.

The Aster features a super fast Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 Quad Core processor running at 2.3 GHz, and Android 4.4, Kit Kat version.

The Aster has 64 GB of internal storage, and a battery that gives 15 hours of talk time. With Quad Band GSM, LTE and dual band WiFi, you don’t have to worry about connectivity. To recharge its battery, the

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Aster uses a microAB USB connector, which also supports USB On-The-Go to add external storage.

The Aster comes bundled with a headset, but just in case you are in the mood of taking a call on the speakerphone or just enjoying a movie, its HiFi 11x15 mm stereo speakers support Dolby Digital Plus surround and put out some wonderful acoustics for this small package.

There is also Bluetooth 4.0 on board for wireless headsets.

At the back of the phone is a Hasselblad-certified 13 megapixel camera with twin flashes, while the front features a 2.1 megapixel camera for those video calls or selfies.

With the Aster, you get access to Vertu Life that gets you access to invitation-only events, closed door shopping experiences and exclusive clubs meant only for the elite. n

Rs 18,740

The DSL-AC68U AC1900 router comes with a built-in ADSL/VDSL modem, so you can hook up your broadband cable directly into this router. It also features a USB 3.0 port that lets you share files via an external hard drive, stream media and even use a 3G/4G dongle for backup in case your broadband connection is down. Asus uses a dedicated processor that offers better coverage on both wired and wireless devices, while ensuring a 1,900 megabits per second throughput for streaming 4K videos . 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 enlightened t win The look of the character who plays Yogi, Saif Ali Khan’s twin brother played by Saif himself, in the film Happy Ending was inspired by music director Pritam. Yogi is a jobless drifter with words of wisdom. Pritam has composed the music score of many other Saif movies like Love Aaj Kal, Cocktail and Agent Vinod

Happy Ending A dull romcom and an even duller parody of the genre, this film falls dead flat ajit duara

o n scr een

current

The Equalizer Director Antoine Fuqua cast Denzel Washington, Marton

Csokas, Chloë Grace Moretz Score ★★★★★

Z, an, Ileana d’cRU Cast Saif Ali Kh KOECHLIN I LK GOVINDA , KA DK imoru, KRISHNA Director Raj Nid

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his movie is ‘Murphy’s law’ applied to cinema—‘Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.’ Not only is Happy Ending the most deathly boring romantic comedy you will see, but it has the gall to present itself as a lampoon on the genre. It is a film about how a dead broke writer in Los Angeles turns into a hack for a Bollywood romcom and how his own life parallels the corny story he writes.

Yudi (Saif Ali Khan) wrote his last book a while ago and needs money, so his literary agent introduces him to Armaan (Govinda), an ageing Hindi movie star who is in LA for story ideas, a face-lift and a six pack. Yudi is quickly signed on to write a romantic film, but never having fallen in love himself, needs to know how it’s done. So he stalks a successful writer of mush called Aanchal Reddy (Ileana D’Cruz), listening to her book readings and pretending to be a fan of her drivel.

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The attraction between the two is not instant, but Yudi decides to date her anyway for personal and professional experience in matters maudlin. The result of this relationship made in romcom heaven is a script which is finally shot in Mumbai—altered beyond recognition. But, dear God, there is nothing remotely happy about Happy Ending. Saif and Ileana put you to sleep the instant they meet, and each chapter of their love deal, titled and numbered on screen, is sheer torture—a suffering only to be relieved should they be given the Indian ‘Golden Raspberry’ awards.

But there is yet another turn of the screw. Every now and then, the Yudi character converses in unintelligible blather to an older and wiser alter ego (Saif again). It makes you wonder if the actor has lost all judgement in selecting roles for himself. This movie is the nadir of Saif’s image as a romantic hero. n

Before it goes into overdrive, this movie has a quiet first half hour that is absorbing. Denzel Washington creates a very attractive character in Robert McCall, a diligent hardware store worker in Boston, helpful to his colleagues but a bit of a loner in his private life. He is a voracious reader and is presently in the middle of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, a book whose meaning he explains very precisely to a hooker he meets at a coffee shop.

Of course McCall has another life he has left behind, and this comes unexpectedly back into focus when the hooker he befriends is brutally assaulted by the Russian mafia who own her.

That’s when you know that he was once with the CIA doing ‘Black Ops’ and is a trained assassin.

Washington has a screen presence and a voice that is magnetic. It can turn the clichés of an action film into moments of thoughtful decision-making. With another action star, The Equalizer would be a slaughter movie without distinction, but here there is a conscious effort to use him in the way Clint Eastwood was handled in the Dirty Harry vigilante series of the 70s and the 80s. In fact, that image is cut and pasted here onto a new enemy, the Russian crime syndicate.

This action film is worth a watch. n AD

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Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Aamir’s Profit Motive

Sometime last year, Aamir Khan reportedly said ‘yes’ to starring in debutant director Nitya Mehra’s film that his Dil Chahta Hai producers Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani had brought to him. Star of the moment Deepika Padukone was quickly attached to the project, and the first-timedirector-to-be instantly became the most envied person in Bollywood. But it was within a matter of only a few weeks that the hottest film on the movie calendar suddenly became a no-go project, when Aamir Khan detached himself from the film. The producers subsequently lost Deepika Padukone too, who apparently found her enthusiasm for the film waning after Aamir’s exit, and who promptly went on to sign Piku and Bajirao Mastani, two films that would keep her busy for the next year. Farhan and Ritesh’s Lakshya star Hrithik Roshan’s name was next floated for the film, but it appears they were unable to suitably excite the actor about this timetravel love story. Only months ago, Ek Villain star Sidharth Malhotra was finally signed on to take the male lead, and Katrina Kaif roped in to star opposite him, with Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions now co-producing it alongside Farhan and Ritesh’s Excel Productions banner.

Contrary to loose talk that Aamir dropped out of the project over creative differences and script issues, it turns out that remuneration was the reason the project didn’t fructify with the 3 Idiots superstar. It’s no secret that Aamir likes to come in as co-producer on movies he’s acting in (like he did on Excel’s Talaash in 2012), and industry sources reveal that the actor takes the lion’s share of the profits. That’s not an unusual practice in a predominantly star-driven industry—and a practice followed by the majority of A-list male stars including Akshay Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan. And while Farhan and Ritesh were reportedly happy to split the pie with Aamir, what they couldn’t agree to was letting him have the 80 per cent share that he was apparently asking for. Sources close to the Excel honchos reveal that the deal was so disproportionate that it prompted one of them to joke that they were happy to be co-producers on the film, but not line (salaried, mid-level) producers.

Aamir and Excel promptly parted ways, but amicably so.

8 december 2014

No Longer a Safe Bet

While on the subject of Farhan and Ritesh’s Excel Productions, there is gossip doing the rounds that another one of their projects may be in hot water. This is Talaash director Reema Kagti’s next, currently well into pre-production, slated to star Saif Ali Khan and Kangana Ranaut.

The disastrous opening and box-office performance of Happy Ending last week seems to have put a cloud over the project. Industrywalas are saying the makers cannot possibly put the film into production with Saif, who now has four colossal back-to-back turkeys to his name.

Given the actor’s inability to command even a respectable opening for his latest, questions are being raised about his future in the business and the merits, if any, of investing in his films.

The failure of Happy Ending is no doubt the most crippling blow for the star, still grappling with the failure of Agent Vinod, Bullett Raja and Humshakals. “Those were experiments for Saif. He was testing the waters in genres he hadn’t worked in before. But Happy Ending is exactly the sort of romantic comedy that is his comfort zone. If the audience won’t come to see him in this kind of movie, is he really still a star?” asks one trade analyst, rather harshly.

Convenient Fiction?

Is this just the handiwork of a male star notorious for spreading false stories about his dalliances with co-stars, or is there some element of truth to the rumours of a link-up between this young pair currently working together for the first time? The unit of a hotly anticipated film has been buzzing with stories of how the two stars ‘became close’ during a recent overseas shooting schedule.

They reportedly went to movies, often in a group but occasionally as a couple, spent a lot of time in each other’s trailers, and have developed a particularly ‘touchyfeely’ friendship on the set.

No problem with any of this… except that the actress is reportedly in a ‘happy’ relationship with another young male star. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

Abandoned but Not Alone

by r au l i r a n i

Mistri Lall, 62, along with his 80-year-old mother Sukhvinder Kaur at Guru Vishram Vridh Ashram, run by Dr GP Bhagat, in Badarpur, Delhi. Lall and his mother were left by his elder brother at a gurdwara. Since then they have been living at this special old age home for senior citizens along with others who have been abandoned by their families. “I have no complaints, as I still have my mother with me,� Lall says

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8 december 2014