Final pdf for web 17th june 13 by Open Media Network

Journalists who mafia dons call

The new IITian

RS 35 17 j u n e 2 0 1 3

“SPOT–FIXING” What’s happening in police interrogation rooms right now

l i f e

a n d

t i m e s .

e v e r y

what is an indian HIPSTER?

w e e k

Open Mail | editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor Manu Joseph managing Editor Rajesh Jha Deputy Editor Aresh Shirali Political Editor Hartosh Singh Bal creative director Divya Saxena Features and Sports Editor Akshay

Sawai

Senior Editors Kishore Seram, Haima Deshpande (Mumbai) Mumbai bureau chief Madhavankutty Pillai deputy political Editor Jatin Gandhi Books and Arts Editor Elizabeth Kuruvilla associate editors Dhirendra Kumar Jha, Rahul Pandita assistant editors

Anil Budur Lulla (Bangalore), Shahina KK, Aastha Atray Banan, Mihir Srivastava, Chinki Sinha Special Correspondents Aanchal Bansal, Lhendup Gyatso Bhutia (Mumbai), Gunjeet Sra Assistant Art Directors Tarun Sehgal, Partha Pratim Sharma SENIOR DESIGNER Anup Banerjee photo editor Ruhani Kaur assistant Photo editor Ritesh Uttamchandani (Mumbai) Staff Photographers Ashish Sharma, Raul Irani Editorial Researcher Shailendra Tyagi asst Editor (web) Arindam Mukherjee Associate publisher Deepa Gopinath Associate general managers (advertisement) Rajeev Marwaha (North

and East), Karl Mistry (West), Krishnanand Nair (South) Manager—Marketing Raghav Chandrasekhar

National Head—Distribution and Sales

Ajay Gupta

Ankur Kedia

I am not being regressive here or defending India as not being regressive, but I believe that Mallika Sherawat shouldn’t have said what she said about so-called Indian culture on a foreign platform [via an interview to Variety at Cannes] because it won’t change anything (‘Regression Multiplied By Two’, 10 June 2013). She behaved just like an attention seeking baby. Every country’s culture is different and it takes generations to change a Every country’s culture culture. It cannot is different and it takes happen overnight or over a few decades. generations to change Remember that a culture. It cannot America was also happen overnight or plagued with racism in over a few decades the 1900s, and it was a big issue. It has been able to reduce that slowly, but a gap between Blacks and Whites still exists in some areas. Even in India, women are not treated inferior to men everywhere. True, it is so in most places, but still, as I said, it will take time to change.  letter of the week

regional heads—circulation D Charles

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

R Rajmohan

All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner is prohibited. Printed and published by R Rajmohan on behalf of the owner, Open Media Network Pvt Ltd. Printed at Thomson Press India Ltd., 18-35 Milestone, Delhi Mathura Road, Faridabad—121007, (Haryana). Published at 4, DDA Commercial Complex, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017. Ph: (011) 30934199; Fax: (011) 30934162 To subscribe, sms ‘openmagazine’ to 56070 or log on to www.openthemagazine.com Or call our Toll Free Number 1800 300 22 000 or email at: subscription@openmedianetwork.in For corporate sales, email ajay@openmedianetwork.in For marketing alliances, email alliances@openmedianetwork.in For advertising, email advt@openmedianetwork.in

Volume 5 Issue 23 For the week 11—17 June 2013 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers cover photo Photograph by Ashish

Sharma; Clothes from ‘Bhootsawar’ line by Nitin Bal Chauhan

17 june 2013

Misplaced Priorities

rahul pandita’s ‘The War We Are Losing’ (10 June 2013) is an incisive article. The lines, ‘At the state administration level, the problem is the same—of misplaced priorities. The Chhattisgarh government has put up a swanky cricket stadium recently in Raipur, but Dantewada reels under a 60 per cent shortage of health services staff’, say it all. 

Student of the Year might be a terrible movie, but it is commercial cinema in which everything is shallow and stereotypical.’ This is the equivalent of saying that the viewing public simply watches a film but then takes nothing away from it. If that were the case, then how could it be said that Dostana was influential but not Student of the Year? 

alok

What’s the Point?

this article is highly contradictory (‘Karan Johar’s Gay Revolution’, 20 May 2013). If, as the writer notes, ‘Dostana brought into common usage a term for a gay relationship in India. Before that, there were only derogatory labels’, then what is being expressed is that even mainstream films have an impact on the general public. Yet, earlier in the article, it states: ‘Critics look for meanings where there are none, activists look for slights.

Felix

Level Playing Field

this refers to ‘A Classic and its Afterlife’ (27 May 2013). I was reading another book on cricket—Ramachandra Guha’s A corner of a Foreign Field. It runs a touching account of Palwankar Baloo and his brothers, ‘untouchables’ by birth who rose to prominence, Baloo becoming the first star cricketer of the native game and Vithal captaining the Hindus (upper-castes included) to their first glory against British teams.

Juxtapose this with the prevailing stigma professed by the Hindu caste system in early 20th century India. Mercifully, sports’ ability to exorcise widespread racism finds many patrons.  Chiranjoy Chowdhuri

Silly Indians

it’s good that the 13th-century mindsets of most Indians are being revealed in various ways (‘Soft Brains, Hard On’, 3 June 2013). Mulling over mannequins may be majorly silly, but then Indians are majorly silly too. Consider this: probably more than 90 per cent of all Indian youth are marrying within their caste/language and other identities and go for spouses chosen by their parents after astrological matching; the marriage of course proceeds with an overdose of rituals and drunken dancing on the streets; perhaps 95 per cent of youth have physical relations with only one person in their life—their spouse.  Sachi Mohant y

Spilling the Truth

one could probably say that it was not an appropriate platform for Mallika Sherawat to spill the truth about the state of women in India, but she was candid about it (‘Regression Multiplied by Two’, 10 June 2013). Why should we try and cover up by saying that India is not regressive? Everything, right from the way a man stares at you on the road to the scant respect they have for women, screams ‘Regression’.  Aishwarya

open www.openthemagazine.com 1

Humourless in Hyderabad cackle cacophony

A laughter club is banished from a national park for disturbing animals

Laughter is really not the best medicine, especially for animals—at least according to the Andhra Pradesh Forest Department, which has ordered a laughter club evicted from a national park, reasoning that it disturbs animals. The KBR Haasya Yoga Club meets daily at KBR National Park, a piece of lush forest in the heart of Hyderabad. Recently, they were told to take their laughter out of the park. Forest officials told them that the loud sounds were scaring away birds and animals.

Hyderabad

17 june 2013

Members of the club were not amused and have contested the ban as an infringement of their fundamental rights. Club member OA Seth says regular doses of willful laughter can help cure or control lifestyle diseases, depression, anxiety and cardiac disease. “The Forest Department’s objections are completely unreasonable. We have the right to de-stress ourselves by laughing out loud and nobody can stop that,’’ he adds. The 350 acre park straddles Banjara Hills and Jubilee Hills, two prime zones of real estate,

and is managed by the state Forest Department. It is home to 600 species of plants, 30 varieties of butterflies, 140 bird species and some reptiles. Forest officials say some of that fauna could be affected by the loud laughing. The laughter club has moved a plea against the eviction in the Andhra High Court and recently got a stay order. The Court directed officials to earmark an area of the park premises for the club’s members. However, the Department has indicated it will contest the order. It says

that the Wildlife Protection Act bars people from making loud noises, including laughing, inside any national park. An officer incharge of the park says that “though the court has asked us to demarcate a spot for club members, there is no scope to do such a thing under the law.’’ The club has for the time being shifted to a vacant plot of land near the park, but will not relent in its struggle to assert the right to have a laugh. What remains to be seen is who will have the last one. n Anil Budur Lulla

open www.openthemagazine.com 3

harsha vadlamani

small world

contents 6

angle

Jiah Khan’s suicide

22 cricket

How the police caught the bad guys

open breakfast

Arvind Kejriwal talks to Manu Joseph

politics newsreEL

Minority neglect

Prithviraj Chavan: too clean for his own good

32 cover story

What the hell is a hipster anyway?

Would You Eat Your Password? Sick of remembering all the passwords and authentication information needed to access data, Regina Dugan, a Motorola executive, proposed a solution at the recent D11 conference—pills and tattoos. “Authentication is irritating. So irritating that only about half the people do it, even though there’s a lot of information about you on your smart phone,” Dugan was quoted as saying in a Discovery News report. One of the ideas Motorola presented was the ‘vitamin authentication’ pill—a small tablet containing an electronic chip. After you swallow this tablet, your stomach acts as an electrolyte for the chip’s battery, powering it and making the entire body an authentication token, which can be activated by touch. Dugan herself had an electronic tattoo, printed on her skin like a barcode, that enabled authentication. How Motorola plans to market this technology is unclear. n

B O D Y M E M OR Y

The Mars Rat There is a rat on Mars! Or something that looks like one. A photo taken by NASA’s Curiosity Rover, shows what appears to be a rodent crouching between two rocks. Blogger Scott Waring, who writes for UFO Sightings Daily, has floated a conspiracy theory that NASA flew a rodent to Mars in order to test if it would survive on the planet. He suggests that NASA kept it secret for fear of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “Why would they not tell us about it?” Waring asked. “Because the squirrel would be expected to die eventually and that would get PETA to fight against them in a court.” People may not take the news seriously—researchers say it would be hard for a rat to survive on cold Martian land—but they can tweet the rat at his Twitter handle: @RealMarsRat. n

4 open

on able Pers Unreasotnhe Week of ■ ■

Micha

el Dou

glas

F o r blaming his cancer on

cunnilingus and not cigarettes We must be compassionate towards the ailing, and Michael Douglas did suffer throat cancer, even if he has been free of it for two years. But attributing it to oral sex, or cunnilingus, as he did in an interview to The Guardian, might be a little off the mark. In theory, it is possible that the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) could have been responsible for his cancer. But there is also the fact that Douglas has been a chain smoker for years, and that tobacco use is an established cause of cancer. Douglas has also been an alcoholic. Perhaps realising the bad turn he’d done oral sex, he later made a statement through his spokesperson saying that he meant HPV can cause cancer, not that it caused his cancer. In response, The Guardian released the interview tape which clearly shows him saying what it had reported. n 17 June 2013

38 EDUCATION

c cinema

The new IITians

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

Salman’s jugaad

The filmmaker who bared himself

a Arthritic village boy turned sexy wrestler

Long Live Vegetarians It turns out veggies are the secret to longevity. According to a report published online by JAMA Internal Medicine, a study of more than 70,000 people found that vegetarian diets may be linked to lower death rates. The results were more favourable for men than women, says Newsdaily. For the study, researchers at Loma Linda University in California assessed mortality within a group of 73,308 men and women through a questionnaire. “These results demonstrate an overall association of vegetarian dietary patterns with lower mortality compared with the nonvegetarian dietary pattern,” the authors of the report said. The study also noted that vegetarian groups tend to be more educated, older, fitter and live a well-balanced healthy life. n

surprise surprise

arts

The legacy of magician PC Sorcar

NR Narayana Murthy had maintained till recently that he would not return to Infosys, which he founded. Then, out of the blue, he was appointed Executive Chairman backspace

“I think, as I said, sitting where I am, looking at the data, I don’t see [a comeback] happening. I think it’s all speculation”

“This calling was sudden, unexpected and most unusual. But then, Infosys is my middle child. Therefore, I have put aside my plansin-progress and accepted this responsibility”

—Narayana Murthy,

quoted in The Mint, 7 May 2013

turn

true life

Respite for the Duchess

quoted on Moneycontrol.com, 1 June 2013

around

The Queen sure is a great employer. Kate Middleton is going to be on official leave from being Duchess Katherine as soon as she is ready to deliver her royal baby. She will make her last appearance as Duchess next week, before she takes some time off. Her last engagement is to name a new passenger hull in Southhampton. Ever since she married Prince William, Kate has been busy travelling the world and playing her part as princess. Many ribbons have been cut and we’re sure her wrist needs rest after all the waving. The British paparazzi must be sad they may not see her till 2014, after she has already had the baby, but even princesses need time to themselves. n

defection

open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

On the Contrary

The ‘Why’ Delusion Let’s stop making silly assumptions about what drove Jiah Khan to suicide M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

what you see on news channels or in newspapers, but the Indian media is still genuine in one respect—most of what they do is done in your service. The sensitivities of Times Now and the wider public are often in tune, even if it is at its shallowest best. If melodrama did not work, Arnab Goswami would not be jumping up and down his seat. That is why the media’s response to anything can be ridiculed, but not ignored. This applies to Jiah Khan’s suicide as well. Headlines on her death were along this line: ‘Fading career or failed love life? Actor Jiah Khan ends life.’ Most people have two questions on hearing about such a suicide: why did she do it and who was responsible? Only policemen and columnists have the ability to spell out the exact answers with the conviction of priests. In Jiah’s case, we are told it could have been a cheating boyfriend, her career going nowhere, or some combination thereof. Bollywood is said to be in some way responsible. Shobhaa Dé wrote a piece in Mumbai Mirror which said: ‘Showbiz is a voraciously hungry monster that devours the unwary.’ It must have taken some effort to cobble these words together, but they do not really mean anything. She also used the example of Parveen Babi, calling it a ‘scarily similar tragedy’. It is not similar. Babi was a schizophrenic, and Jiah, by accounts of her family and acquaintances, suffered from depression. It does not take a psychiatrist to make a distinction between the two conditions. If suicide could be so easily explained, the majority of us would be killing ourselves. There is no reason for most human beings to stay alive, given that we are a desperately unhappy species. Yet only a fraction take such a step. Imagine that evolution is like a magnificent software program, exponentially adding lines of code to itself by the minute. At its core, it has a single word that even viruses are beholden to—‘survive’. Committing suicide demands a phenomenal act of will. You must cut your way through all that evolutionary baggage and then

6 open

getty images

t is entirely justified to sneer at

Too young Jiah Khan, 25, was found dead at her apartment in Mumbai on 3 June. She had hanged herself

smash the command of that one word. The loophole in this is that most suicides are impulsive. But even for that, help is needed from genes. He or she would have to be clinically depressed, which in many cases is a function of DNA. There also needs to be a genetic predisposition towards suicide. A few years ago, Dr John Mann of the New York State Psychiatric Institute found an association of a variant of a gene called RGS2 in people with suicidal tendencies. Many other studies also correlate suicide with genetics. In the United States, the best regarded manual for psychiatry—some call it the profession’s Bible—is Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. When its latest edition was released recently, it proposed that suicide be seen

The question of why Jiah Khan did it or who was responsible for her suicide is secondary, even redundant. A failed love affair or a career reversal could have been a trigger, but then who does not suffer these?

as a sign of a mental disorder. New Scientist ran an article on this last month under the headline ‘Suicidal behaviour is a disease, psychiatrists argue.’ It said that there is ‘mounting evidence showing that the brains of people who have committed suicide have striking similarities, quite distinct from what is seen in the brains of people who have similar mood disorders but who died of natural causes.’ The question of why or who was responsible for Jiah’s suicide is secondary, maybe even redundant. A failed love affair or a career reversal could be a trigger, but then who does not suffer these? Suicide is also legitimate so long as it is an objective and clear-headed decision. Unless you are blinded by absurd religious ideas like your life being God’s property, it is hard to see why a terminally ill patient should not be granted this option. If society comes to accept or regulate suicide, then that could mean better deaths for those who take their lives in horribly painful ways like self-immolation. A Jiah Khan would still not have been a candidate for that. There was perhaps an underlying medical condition that made her do it. Maybe all she needed was a good doctor. n 17 june 2013

“WELCOME TO OUR WORLD”

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SUPER AVENGER II

real

india

A Hurried Man’s Guide to a deadly new virus

To comprehend what could be the greatest threat to mankind’s greatest threat, the movie Contagion is a good place to start. In the film, a new virus wipes out tens of millions of humans in days, and social institutions crumble. The Spanish Flu of 1918 was similar, killing at least 50 million people and affecting ten times as many in only two years.

It Happens

No Hair Splitting With This Politician Kerala CPI state secretary Pannian Raveendran maintains his mane for political gain S h a h i n a K K

getty images

The human race lives in perpetual fear of such pandemics. Recently, a new scare was added to the list. During a speech at the World Health Assembly, Dr Margaret Chain, direcThere have so far tor general of the World been 50 cases of Health Organization, the Middle East Respiratory Synd- said, “My greatest conrome Coronavirus cern right now is the novel coronavirus. We understand too little about this virus when viewed against the magnitude of its potential threat. Any new disease that is emerging faster than our understanding is never under control.” Pantene pro-test Pannian Raveendran stands head and shoulders above the crowd

Uh-oh Chan calls the virus ‘a threat to the entire world’

The novel coronavirus has been named the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) because it mainly affects Middle Eastern residents. Since the first case was confirmed in September 2012, there have been 50 cases and 30 deaths. Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have confirmed cases. Cases have also been reported by France, Germany, the UK and Tunisia. The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention says infected people ‘developed severe acute respiratory illness with symptoms of fever, cough, and shortness of breath. About half of them died. Some were reported as having a mild respiratory illness.’ As of now the virus only transmits via close contact. The worst case scenario is a mutation which would make it considerably more virulent. There is no treatment or cure, and prevention strategies are basic—wash hands often, don’t contact infected people, and avoid touching your face with unwashed hands. n

f you discount film actors and popular artistes, then the most famous hair in Kerala belongs to Pannian Raveendran. This is something of an anomaly because Pannian is a politician. A former Member of Parliament and current state secretary of the Communist Party of India, Pannian’s long flowing hair goes all the way past his shoulders. It has been a hallmark of Kerala politics for four decades, ever since he was a student leader and Hippie culture was in vogue. Times changed but his hair style did not. Now, among an array of balding senior politicians, Pannian’s hair is an anachronism. This is the origin story of Pannian’s hair-do in his own words: “It was the period of Emergency [1975-77] and obviously the season of police excess. Many young men in my native place Kannur had long hair. There was a notorious police sub-inspector, Pulikkodan Narayanan, whose main hobby was to go around town, catch youths who had shoulderlength hair, bring them to the police station and shave a round bald patch in the middle of their head. We could not protest openly against this. Hence, I had decided to let my hair grow like that of Hippies as a

gesture of protest.” For reasons unknown, the officer spared Pannian. “One day I was standing at a bus stop in town with my shoulder length hair. A police jeep stopped nearby. Narayanan got down, stared at me and threatened, ‘Don’t think that I have not seen your hair. You are spared for the time being, but keep it in mind that I will be around’,” Pannian recounts. Hippie styles are long gone, but Pannian’s Pannian did not hair is in change his hair style “in memory memory of the police atroof police cities [committed] atrocities during [the] Emergency.” He maintains his long hair with care, and it has its benefits. “I stand out in any crowd because of my hair. Even in Parliament, I was easily identified,” he says. Even Sonia Gandhi used to greet Pannian by name in the Lok Sabha. “He will not compromise on his hair,” says NN Krishnadas, a former CPM MP who served in the Lok Sabha at the same times as Pannian. “Once, I suggested that he cut his hair, since it didn’t suit him. He refused. He told me it is a symbol of his political determination.” n 17 june 2013

business

Time to Regulate Multi-level Marketers express archives

promises of easy gains, says Sengupta; they place emphasis on the news may have prompted the hard work instead, and force no arrest of Amway India’s chief Bill agent to recruit others. Pinckney in Kerala last fortnight Critics of the Amway model (he was later released on bail), but point out that even if they force this may be an opportunity for no one, their agents are rewarded India to consider the regulation of on the basis of their success with direct sales undertaken by network expansion. Their sales ‘multi-level marketers’ who pitch is mostly about signing up operate as part of a member-getothers, not how useful the member pyramid scheme and are products are. The company holds incentivised to sign more and regular more people on (who must shell recruitment out money to get started). This last Amway India conferences to aspect, according to the cops who Chief Bill showcase how caught Pinckney, an American, Pinckney’s some of its means that such activity should arrest is an agents—mostly be under the purview of India’s occasion to at the top of the Prize Chits and Money consider pyramid—have Circulation Schemes Banning imposing rules become rich. Act. Enacted in 1978, the law’s aim on sales This lures many is to “penalise any scheme where pyramids naïve people, one tries to recoup an investment who do not by recruiting more people down realise how far down the the line”, says corporate lawyer hierarchy they are, to sign up in Deepak Kapoor. the hope of getting rich too. The Amway, however, protests that trouble in India is that the since it operates a network of products on offer are expensive, individuals who sell products of so their market scope is limited value to users, it should not be is this the american way? It’s the top of the pyramid that makes money and their network cannot expand compared to a Ponzi scheme. Even beyond a point. “That is where its member-get-member aspect, of new members,” says Amarnath aspects of cheating and breach-ofthis direct-selling firm claims, has Sengupta, chairman of the Indian Direct trust come in,” says Kapoor, “especially for no malafide intent. And there are other Selling Association. Under the law, those those who cannot get new members and multi-level pyramids in operation too. two conditions—a promise of easy money feel wrongly trapped into buying products “We need a clear exclusion from the Act, and need of new enrolment—are that many allege are much too overwhich essentially penalises any scheme that promises quick and easy money and is necessary for a scheme to be called a Ponzi priced.” All this does deserve regulatory one. Direct selling firms make no scrutiny. n SHAILENDRA TYAGI also contingent upon further enrolment a m way

Chit fund scams in

Steady Downtrend India’s economy has been in slowdown mode since 2011-12 and the latest data suggests that it is still not clear whether its lowest point has yet been reached GDP at Factor Cost

2008-09

2009-10

2010-11

2011-12

2012-13

6.7

8.6

9.3

6.2

5.0

10.5 services

10.0

9.2

8.2 7.1

7.9 Industry 3.6 3.5

4.4 Agriculture & allied activities 17 June 2013

0.1

0.8

Source: MOSPI, Angel Research compiled by shailendra tyagi

T V Mohandas Pai, former CFO and HR

head of Infosys, on the infotech company’s troubles and the return of one of its founders NR Narayana Murthy—with his son Rohan Murthy as his executive assistant —to take charge again

9.8 9.2

‘The culture of a founderled and founder-centric governing model has to be abandoned, since it no longer works’

2.1 1.9

news

reel

negligence

Remember Sachar? The sorry tale of how the Congress has failed Muslims on a key promise yet again dhirendra k jha

T h e P r i m e M i n i s t e r ’ s 15-point programme for the welfare of minorities, unveiled in June 2006, lies in shambles seven years later. The agenda did do its bit to swing Muslim votes to the ruling Congress party in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, but the promises made in 2006 have stayed unfulfilled. The programme remains invisible on the ground, and the whole idea now looks like just another blank shot fired by the UPA Government. The programme—a package of multiple schemes—was drafted to address development deficits in identified districts of minority concentration by providing basic amenities and setting up socio-economic infrastructure. It was announced soon after a committee headed by Justice Rajinder Sachar submitted a report on how badly off and State-neglected Muslims were in India. The report—in the overall national interest of equity—highlighted the necessity of ensuring Muslims equal-opportunity education, jobs and residential options across the country. It also called for State intervention in aid of what it revealed as a religious minority in extreme deprivation. Though the Government did not portray the PM’s 15-point programme as a redressal mechanism in direct response to the Sachar Committee report, it was obvious that the two were interlinked. In any case, this programme figured prominently along with the NREGA in the Congress party’s campaign for the 2009 General Election. The party got the dividends it sought too. However, while the rural guarantee scheme has kept expanding all these years, the PM’s 15-point programme seems to have reached nowhere. Information obtained through a series of RTI applications shows that it never took off in the manner the Government expected its minority supporters to believe. Even half a decade after its implementation, the programme has achieved none of its aims. If information 10 open

on its implementation is sought through an RTI application, all one gets is the blabber of officials and attempts to pass on the buck.

ake the case of Haryana’s Nuh

district in the so-called Mewat region, one of the country’s most underdeveloped minority-dominated areas. According to information provided on 23 April this year by the Mewat Development Authority’s public information officer (PIO): ‘The district administration has not yet constituted a committee for effective implementation of the Multi-sectoral District Plan (MsDP).’ Now, the MsDP is a key component of

All eyes in the Congress appear to have shifted to its hunt for new game-changers in 2014, while the PM’s 15-point programme for the welfare of minorities gathers dust the 15-point programme that was to cover 90 districts across India—identified on the basis of a set of backwardness parameters—that have a large minority population. As per guidelines, the district administration was to set up a committee that would be responsible for consolidating development and welfare proposals made by line departments and other agencies for their approval at higher levels. The committee must also oversee the implementation of various projects under the MsDP and send regular reports to the state administration and Centre. In his response to the RTI application, the PIO of Mewat also admits that the construction work being carried out under the MsDP in the district has been extremely slow and that the Minority

Affairs Ministry has been kept informed about this from time to time. “Mewat is not an isolated case,” says Moradabad-based RTI activist Saleem Baig, who has obtained such information from several parts of the country showing how the PM’s 15-point programme exists only in name. The programme’s implementation is pathetic in Uttar Pradesh, which houses 21 of the 90 districts identified in 2006 for attention. When Baig sought details of the implementation of the MsDP between 2007 and 2012 in Moradabad, one of these 90 districts, the response he got was a shock in itself. Dated 1 March 2013, the reply of the District Minority Welfare Officer of Moradabad’s is curt: ‘No information in this regard is available in the office records.’ When Baig asked for information on the status of the programme in Bareilly, another minority dominated district of UP on the list of 90, he got a reply on 27 February this year from the office of the District Minority Welfare Officer stating that ‘this office has not received any funds under the Prime Minister’s 15-Point Programme for the Welfare of Minorities.’ Baig’s attempt to get information on programme implementation from the office of the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh was also a disappointment. The reply he got from the PIO of UP dated 14 May 2013 lists all the districts in the state where the MsDP is being implemented and advises Baig to seek information from the respective districts. That the state of affairs is pretty bad in UP is confirmed by two letters obtained by Baig through another RTI application. Both the letters are written by YP Singh, joint secretary, Union Ministry of Minority of Affairs, to Javed Usmani, chief secretary of Uttar Pradesh. The first letter, dated 16 July 2012, says: ‘Two main bottlenecks have been observed in the implementation of this programme in your state. First, the Central share of funds 17 june 2013

No Welfare in sight Despite it’s professed secularism, the Congress seems utterly apathetic to Muslim concerns

released by this Ministry to the state government does not reach the districts/ implementing agencies in time. There has been an abnormal delay of more than six months in many cases in the release of the Central share by the state government to the district/implementing agencies. The second bottleneck observed is the lack of involvement by the district administration while sending proposals and in implementation of projects.’ The second letter, dated 7 September 2012, is clearly intended to remind Usmani of delays in the release of Central and state funds by the state government to the beneficiary districts, and again asks for an executing agency for the projects to be decided upon. The letter also reminds him that ‘utilisation certificates have become overdue for the funds released during the year 2009-10 and 2010-11 respectively’. Of the all-India list of 90 minoritydense districts, one is located in the national capital. But the picture of neglect in this district—located not too 17 june 2013

far northeast of the PM’s official residence at 7 Racecourse Road—is no better than elsewhere in the country. This is clear from YP Singh’s letter to PK Tripathi, chief secretary, Delhi. According to this correspondence dated 16 July 2012: ‘For the 11th Five Year Plan (2007-2012) Rs 22.10 crore was allocated for one district of Delhi under MsDP. Out of the total allocation, only Rs 10.99 crore (50 per cent of the allocation) could be released to the state government so far, as the utilisation certificates for the first instalment of the central share of funds for the projects have not been received from the state. To be precise, utilisation certificates […] released during 2010-11 are still pending even after more than one year of release.’ A report in The Times of India on 22 May last year had noted how poorly the programme had progressed in Andhra Pradesh during the six years of its existence (at the time). The report said that since 2006, when the programme was announced, the state-level committee chaired by the state chief secretary

had met only once—in January 2011.

hen the Sachar Committee had presented its findings, there was a stunned sense of reality acknowledgment in minority quarters and much debate on the condition of Muslims in the media and official circles. The PM’s 15-point programme had raised expectations among the deprived that after decades of post-Partition neglect by the State (despite myriad promises), corrective measures would at last be taken. This is believed to have helped the Congress raise its tally of seats in the Lok Sabha—with a surprise showing in UP, for example. But that was more than four years ago, which is enough time for the party to have delivered on its promises. In New Delhi, all eyes in the ruling dispensation appear to have shifted to its hunt for new game-changers in 2014, be it the direct benefits transfer scheme or Food Security Bill. This, even as the PM’s 15-point programme gathers dust. n open www.openthemagazine.com 11

COMMENT nepotism

Remote Mindset The Congress continues to spin the news in favour of the Gandhis, but why do TV networks let it? sandeep bhushan reporters’. Some reported in the mornare on first-name terms with key I t w a s i n 2 0 0 5 that I had my first ings and afternoons (‘downtime’), while Congress functionaries such as Ahmed brush with the dangers that confront others only reported in the evenings Patel. But Patel, the consummate spin every beat journalist covering the (‘primetime’). ‘Insignificant’ low-impact doctor, also has a line with beat reporters; Congress party. An electoral verdict that reporters like this writer were simply they need each other in the demanding year had given the NDA the numbers prised out of the field without any notice, 24x7 news cycle where a single ‘untuin the Jharkhand Assembly. Yet, Sonia especially if a ‘big’ story had to be covered. tored’ line could damage the Congress Gandhi’s handpicked Governor Syed But this was not all. There were those President’s image. It is a tradeoff that Sibte Razi had invited the Congresswho were handpicked to report Congress works well for both. While the lowly backed Shibu Soren to form the state Working Committee meetings and reporter can impress his bosses by government and given him nearly special occasions like an All India claiming he has knowledge of closely20 days to prove his majority—which Congress Committee (AICC) session. I held developments, Patel gets to ensure was enough time to cobble together a was not sent to cover the government by means both ap Hyderabad AICC session in fair and foul. January 2006 despite Congress Razi’s constitutional being my ‘prime’ beat. I was impropriety came in for given no reason; only a mail withering criticism from both arrived from my editor by way the opposition and media, of information to the bureau. with even the Supreme Court Finally, there were those stepping in to advance the who filed field reports from date for the confidence vote. Amethi and Rae Bareilly with But just as criticism mounted, some of the stories even word went around that Sonia finding their way onto the Gandhi was ‘unhappy’ with Congress website. I covered the Jharkhand Governor (the the party for over a year, but ‘unhappy’ High Command was never allowed to report later shifted him to Assam, from either of the constituenwhere he was subsequently cies. Once again, I was given no fired after the CBI booked his reason for this. Jharkhand staff for corrupspin-cycle The broadcast media regurgitates what the Congress dishes out Eventually, I was shifted off tion). But this new ‘angle’ had that beat. A mail arrived one passed me by, though most of fine day saying that my beat had been that Sonia’s image remains unsullied. my other reporter colleagues had already changed. The chief of bureau, who I have And if you work for a friendly channel changed track. Just as I was gearing up no reason to doubt, later told me that and scrupulously adhere to the rules of for another ‘live’ report from in front of she really fought hard to retain me as a the game, he could spring a surprise or Mrs Gandhi’s residence, my boss literally Congress reporter. But the editors would two by gracing your marriage celebrastood before me and ordered me to spin not listen, and she was given no reason for tions—not alone but with Congress the story around ‘Sonia is unhappy’ as a the switch. If they had said I was Vice-President Rahul Gandhi. Recently, theme. I was left with little choice. Sonia incompetent, it would have been another to the utter surprise of journalist had not issued a statement. Yet the story matter, but they did not. colleagues, both made an appearance at had irrevocably changed. The next Nothing has changed over the years, the marriage celebrations of a ‘lowly’ morning, even the print media was full my friends and colleagues on that beat Congress beat reporter, whose stock was of the same spin. tell me. At the end of the day, if there was sent soaring among his network bosses. I realised what I should have known no ‘Ahmedbhai’, the Congress would It has also assured him plum reporting earlier: for the beat reporter, it is simply have to invent him, if only to spin doctor options, including (maybe) a trip with not possible to exercise independent the ‘news’. That’s because the party’s first the PM on his next foreign visit. When judgement while covering such events. it comes to reporting on the Gandhis, this family is an anachronism in the age of The person on the ground does not modern media. The Gandhis remain is precisely how much of the electronic shape the news, at least not in the TV remote and inaccessible. n media functions. broadcast media. At the prominent TV network where I Stories impacting Sonia’s image are worked covering the Congress party, carefully choreographed right at the top, The author is a former TV journalist who there was a whole army of ‘Congress at the level of promoters and editors who now teaches at Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi 12 open

17 june 2013

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I N T E RV I E W

photos ashish sharma

“We Are Not Wedded to Any Ideology”

The eye of the beholder “I am not angry,” says Arvind Kejriwal, “Some of these photographs portray me as an angry person”

Open, in association with the restaurant chain Smoke House Deli, has begun a breakfast chat series. Through these monthly conversations between Open and various public figures, videos of which will be uploaded on our website (Openthemagazine.com), we hope to illuminate our readers’ understanding of politics, people and culture. The inaugural chat on 1 June featured Arvind Kejriwal—the fiery activist and leader of the Aam Aadmi Party, which will contest elections for the very first time this November to the Delhi Assembly—in conversation with Open’s editor Manu Joseph. Here are some excerpts from the conversation (with questions paraphrased for brevity):

Where are you going to contest from? I really don’t know.

(At a public gathering the day after this conversation, Mr Kejriwal announced that he will contest from New Delhi, which is also Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s constituency.)

Can you tell us about your campaign? How is it going to be different?

The content [of the campaign], people already know. I mean, it’s not that we are telling them anything new. People are already fed up of corruption... and price rise in the country. Especially the common man, the middle-class and the poor—it [has] become almost impossible for them to survive now. [In] various places, people are telling us now, they are getting Rs 4,000 a month as [their] water bill, Rs 6,000 a month as [their] electricity bill. If a person is earning about Rs 10,000 [per month], it’s becoming difficult to survive. [In] a large number of cases, [this is] not because the prices have increased but because the bills are wrong and the electricity company [is] not rectifying them. For instance, there is a woman who lives in a one-room jhuggi, and she has got a bill of Rs 36,000 for electricity and Rs 60,000 for water. When she goes to the office to get them rectified... most of the responses are, ‘You first pay off the 17 June 2013

bills and then we will rectify it.’ How are we reaching out to the people? We don’t have that kind of money. Right now, you see—all across Delhi—huge hoardings of Congress and BJP leaders are everywhere... We don’t have any money to put up large hoardings. The only strength we have is the people. The people, in large numbers, are with us. Today there are

“That was our major mistake— we believed in the Government. We thought they would pass the Lokpal bill, that there was no point building an organisation” almost 7,000 volunteers—young boys and girls who have given up their careers, postponed their services exams; software engineers who have taken off from work for two years. There is this guy who is working in our office now; he was working as an engineer in Hong Kong and gave up his job. We see a ray of hope. We see a ray of hope in this party. We are creating something called ‘sthaniya prabhari’. There will be one volunteer for every 25 homes. We are mapping the entire city. Every single street is being mapped. For

every 25 homes, there has to be one sthaniya prabhari whose job [will] be to communicate the message of the party and to be in touch with people. Our target is 1.25 lakh volunteers as sthaniya prabharis, and we have already crossed 75,000. So that is our strength. That is our network. To directly communicate [with] people, one on one—that is how we reach out.

How much money would you need to contest these elections? We will certainly stay below the Election Commission’s [ceiling].

Do you feel that’s possible?

I think it should be possible. I met Meera Sanyal [the banker who had contested the 2009 Lok Sabha polls from the Mumbai South constituency as an independent candidate] day before yesterday. She was telling me that she had the money. She comes from a background where she had money, and she was willing to spend Rs 25 lakh... She said ‘I was amazed that I could not spend more than nine lakh’. And she said that the other contenders actually showed that they spent even less than that, though they must have spent crores of rupees—but that was all under the carpet. She...honestly declared all her expenses and said she [would] only spend Rs 9 lakh. open www.openthemagazine.com 15

Major expenses, I think, in elections are on the last night—the money that is distributed [to] voters and the freebies that are distributed...[W]hat we are also realising is very interesting. The kind of volunteers that we have—none of the parties have any grassroot volunteers. They are completely shallow. Other [parties] have money power. And they hire people. So huge... chunks of money [are spent] on hiring [manpower].

But the campaign as such does not require too much money, does it?

[A] campaign in the sense of hoardings, pamphlets—that, I think, can be managed.

Based on your experience of encounters with politicians and the political system, what is your understanding of the psychology of a seasoned Indian politician? See, there are good people and there are bad people. There are, always, in every area. You [have] good politicians and bad politicians, and unfortunately now, good politicians do not seem to have a voice. For instance, I give you [the] example of Mr Jaipal Reddy. He has [a] reputation for being an honest person all out for the aam aadmi (Facing page) Audience members ask their own questions; (Below) Kejriwal looks pensive after the conversation

and trying to do the right things in the [Petroleum and Natural Gas] Ministry, but he was shunted out.

I will ask you a very difficult question—can you name three Indian politicians you like?

Some of them are coming to my mind... across party lines.

That’s why I said three.

Let me answer this question a little later.

“We realised the only things we had were our honesty and transparency. What we are inside, we are outside. They wanted to rob us of the greatest tool we had” Sure. Can you tell us what exactly happened between you and Anna Hazare? I know you had a difficult relationship, but can you take us through it? You have claimed that political processes should be transparent, but that was one aspect of the movement we don’t know much about. In these two years, we did everything that was possible for us. As far as the struggle is concerned, there was nothing that we didn’t do which we ought to have done, and it became very clear that these political parties will not do any-

thing against corruption. So there was no option left but for the movement to take the next logical step of entering politics. [W]hen it was discussed… I cannot give any details... but Annaji was against entering politics and he said, ‘If we get in, we will become dirty. There is filth inside.’ I told him ‘We have no choice but to wade into the filth’. He said ‘We will become sullied’. I told him, if we get dirty that will be our sacrifice—that we pledged our reputation to get in’. There was this serious difference of opinion... nothing else. I meet him very often and we discuss a lot of things.

A self defeating thing about activism in India is the clash of egos between activists...

That is true. [But] it’s not that the ego is only in the activist. I think there is much more [of it] in the journalist. It is also there in the politician—it’s there in every human being. Every human being has an ego, and that is why we exist. There is always a demand that all [activists] should come together, but I am not in support of [that], because the moment everyone comes together, it will become a problem. But people should come together on issues which are extremely important. At least, that was my experience with [The Right to Information Act]. Many, many people came together.

What were some of your major mistakes?

I think the biggest mistake was at the time of the August movement, when Annaji sat on [his] fast. I believed that when the Government sent that letter to Annaji… we were 200 per cent certain that [the promises in the letter] would be honoured. At that time, there was huge energy all across the country. Many, many people came out. We did not build an organisation. We thought, ‘Why build an organisation?’... It’s a huge task and it has its own politics. We wanted the movement to remain a movement rather than becoming an organisation. We thought [that], by maybe December [or] January, the Government will pass the bill. We thought that the bill will be passed and there is no point in building an organisation. I think that was the major mistake—we believed in the Government. 17 June 2013

Can you tell us about the key moments during the process when you were negotiating with senior Congress leaders and trying to finalise the Lokpal bill?

As soon as they said [a] joint drafting committee [would be] acceptable and Annaji called off his fast, a lot of things started coming out. There was a CD about Prashant Bhushan. When we used to sit in those meetings, every time Mr Kapil Sibal would say, ‘Look, don’t [go] out and say what has happened in the meeting,’ or he would try to sum it up and say that we must reveal only that much. But what we realised [is] that the only things we had [were] our honesty and transparency—what we are inside, we are outside. They wanted to rob us of that, the greatest tool we had. So, whatever...happen[ed] in those meetings, we came out and revealed the details.

They would ask you to tell the public that the meetings were going well?

‘Meetings are going on well’, ‘Issues are being considered,’ etcetera, etcetera.

What is your view of Baba Ramdev?

He is also fighting against corruption... in his own way.

You seem to be kinder to Baba Ramdev, considering all the accusations against him, than you are to seasoned professional politicians... I think I shouldn’t comment on any individual, because if the [Government] has accusations [against a person], they also have all the machinery to investigate. Very interestingly, this government does not investigate—it alleges and accuses.

What is your impression of Narendra Modi? Let people form their impressions.

I think people’s impressions are already clear. Mr Modi says the same thing with a smile. But I want to know your impression. I think forming views about people is not right. I think forming views about ideas is right. I would not like to comment on any individual.

I think you are developing a language of diplomacy... I don’t think it’s diplomacy. 17 June 2013

I want your view on one more issue— reservations. You once stood for merit...

I am not opposed to reservations. There are sections of society who have suffered immensely over the ages, and it’s still not over. There are places in Delhi where untouchability is practised even now.

What is the role of big corporations in the transformation of society?

Let me first clarify some of the allegations against us. Last year we made an exposé… against HSBC, Reliance and others… HSBC was involved in money laundering. We had evidence against them. We got the evidence from income tax files… That night I got an SMS from the editor-in-chief of a very prominent [television] channel in the country saying, ‘So you are a socialist?’ If a corporate indulges in wrongdoing and you demand an honest investigation against that, you are called a socialist. I want to make it very clear: we are not wedded to

any ideology. Second thing: we are very clear that government has no business to be in business. As far as the corporate sector is concerned… trade needs to be encouraged. We want honest businesses. Certainly, the corporate sector has a big role to play in the country. Let me also tell you, barring a few people, most businessmen themselves are victims of corruption and not perpetrators.

Do you feel that the media is more enthusiastic about covering political corruption than corporate corruption?

That is the case. Frankly, many senior journalists and reporters have counselled me, [saying], ‘Ever since you started exposing corporates, your air time has gone down.’ And when I would call them for press conferences they would [say], ‘Hope it’s not about corporates.’

What makes you so angry?

I am not angry. Some of these photographs portray me as an angry person. n open www.openthemagazine.com 17

i m m ac u l at e i s o l at i o n

The Loneliness of Prithviraj Chavan Is Maharashtra’s Chief Minister just too squeaky clean for his own good? haima deshpande

is colleagues do not listen to

him. The opposition sneers at him. With no help from any quarter, his ‘do-good’ mission is being weighed down by forces beyond his control. Not an enviable position to be in, particularly when the person heads the state. Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan is a lonely man. He has no friends at Mantralaya, the headquarters of state administration, or among his cabinet colleagues. Fellow Congressmen are standing by, watching and waiting. Collectively, they all seem keen that he fails. His squeaky clean image, the very asset that got him the top job in the state after the Adarsh-scam-tainted Ashok Chavan made an unceremonious exit, has now become his biggest liability. His image dictates his dealings and has started affecting the overall functioning of the Chief Minister’s Office (CMO), say many in the know of events. In these times of corruption scandals, so terrified is Chavan of any speck of dirt marring his image that he has never allowed anyone close. Physically, too, he is a cleanliness freak, and he keeps his white khadi kurta-pyjama down to his white shoes free of smudges and dust.

nder earlier regimes, it was customary for political touts to ask for and get big favours of chief ministers. But Prithviraj Chavan’s tenure is different. “His antennae are always up,” says a senior functionary of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC), “He just never relaxes. If he is praised for 18 open

his work, he thinks there’s a conspiracy [at play]. When you criticise him, he thinks there is a conspiracy.” In two recent instances of trouble in the state, Chavan’s upright image stood in the way of seeking help from more seasoned colleagues. A 95-day strike by college teachers and a month’s strike by traders—both held state-wide—saw Chavan exposed as never before. He stuck to his guns in both cases and refused to let his cabinet colleagues, many of whom had previous successes in such sticky situations, help him with negotiations. So, everyone else stood aside and

Fellow Congressmen are watching and waiting for Chavan to fail. The Chief Minister’s biggest asset, his incorruptible image, now seems like a liability watched Chavan first act adamant and then buckle under pressure to set things in order. About 36,000 striking teachers held firm on their demand—a relaxation of promotion rules—until the Bombay High Court intervened and ordered them all back to work. The Court was clear: if they did not resume work the next day onwards, they would be charged with contempt of court. This order came as a face-saver for the Chief Minister as it helped break up the agitation. They all got back to work.

In the case of the traders’ strike, all shops in Maharashtra remained closed for over three weeks in protest against the introduction of an LBT (Local Body Tax ), which they said would add to all the paperwork. At one point, the teacher’s strike and that of the traders were being held simultaneously. Though Narayan Rane, the state’s minister for industry, port, employment and self employment, was keen on helping out, Chavan did not show any inclination to let him deal with the crisis. Others too had volunteered to do something. But faced with Chavan’s lack of enthusiasm for their support, they stood back and watched the leader’s helplessness. The traders’ strike led to severe shortages in the market for essentials. Some items were simply unavailable. With Lok Sabha and Assembly elections due early next year, the Maharashtra government was not keen on invoking the Essential Services and Maintenance Act (ESMA) against the striking traders: they constitute an important vote bank. But when Union Minister for Agriculture Sharad Pawar tried to step in, Chavan got angry. Pawar, who heads the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) that runs the government in coalition with the Congress, has been CM himself in the past; he could have helped matters, but Chavan did not want his party higher-ups in Delhi to think that he was incapable of dealing with the problem on his own. Pawar intervened anyway. And the strike ended. Chavan cut his teeth as a politician in Delhi and is said to lack knowledge of the local arena of Maharashtra politics. 17 June 2013

solaris images

has gotten worse. The NCP, now led in the state by an aggressive Ajit Pawar, is working hard to eclipse the Congress and emerge as the single largest party. Then, there are the NCP’s dalliances with saffron forces such as the Shiv Sena and BJP at the civic and municipality levels. To the Congress’ discomfiture, the NCP and these parties even run a few civic bodies together.

the high command’s choice Prithviraj Chavan (above) has Sonia Gandhi’s confidence, but is that enough?

Though he has tried to learn, the wily ways of his party men have created newer problems. He may have been the toast of Parliament’s Central Hall as a junior minister in the Manmohan Singh Cabinet, but in his home state, he is being increasingly regarded by Congressmen as a liability. While the Congress High Command is keen that Chavan keeps his job and leads the party into the electoral fray, Congress heavyweights such as Rane, Patangrao Kadam (forests and environment minister), Manikrao Thakre (MPCC president) and Balasaheb Thorat (revenue minister) have all been dragging their feet. They are all contenders for Chavan’s post themselves. “Collectively, they all want him to fail. If he is a success, he may return as Chief Minister, and that is certainly not in their interest,” says a Congress MLC who has been close to many CMs. 17 June 2013

Even NCP ministers have been non-cooperative with Chavan. Ever since his appointment as CM on 11 November 2010, the NCP has had a bad spell. On a zealous anti-corruption drive, Chavan wasted no time in trying to set various corruptionridden ministries right. When RTI activists started raising queries related to ministries held by NCP leaders such as irrigation, water supply and public works, and these queries made their way into the public domain, the state’s Deputy Chief Minister and NCP leader Ajit Pawar complained privately that it was all Chavan’s doing. The equation between the CM and his deputy has been fraught with tension, with two power centres operating within the same government—often at cross purposes with each other. As Assembly polls near, the mistrust and one-upmanship between the NCP and the Congress

or the 67-year old Chavan, chief ministership has become a burden, say Congress seniors. A mechanical engineer from BITS Pilani and MSc from University of California, Berkeley, he started his career in politics when Rajiv Gandhi took over as India’s Prime Minister. That was the era when technocrats found favour with Gandhi, and Chavan’s academic achievements and political pedigree got him into the PM’s inner circle. His father Dajisaheb Chavan had been a Lok Sabha member for 17 years, someone who’d served in the Union cabinets of Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi. When he died, his wife took over his political legacy and kept the Karad seat (in Maharashtra) with the family for another 16 years. She was the first woman to head the Congress unit in the state. In 1991, she stepped aside for her son. In 1999, after he had an open feud with Sharad Pawar, Chavan lost the Karad seat (which he’d won thrice before) in that year’s General Election. In May 1999, Pawar split the Congress on the issue of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin and set up the NCP. At the time, a peeved Chavan had said Pawar was only a regional leader. It was a slight that Pawar—a PM hopeful—never forgot. He ensured Chavan’s loss of the Karad seat, which the family had held for 36 years. In 2002, Chavan joined the Rajya Sabha, a seat he had till he assumed charge as CM of Maharashtra eight years later. Finding a safe Assembly seat for him was difficult. No state leader wanted to vacate one for his election to the legislative body. It was only at the last minute that Sanjay Dutt, a party loyalist (an MLC not to be confused with the filmstar), made way for Chavan to take his seat. Most of Maharashtra’s politicians have used money, muscle power and caste calopen www.openthemagazine.com 19

culations on their way up. In contrast, Chavan has been a technocrat wonderkid who caught the High Command’s attention. His calculations have been about aircraft instrumentation and designing audio recorders for anti-submarine warfare (in his US stints). This alienates a lot of his fellow politicians. That Chavan is a man of the globalised era is evident in other things as well. For his image management, he once sought professional help. Fed up of negative press coverage, last year he even hired a Delhi-based public relations agency to project his ‘achievements’ positively, but had to call it off after he was accused of wasting taxpayer’s money. Ironically, Chavan found it easier negotiating with opposition MPs when he piloted the Nuclear Liability Bill in Parliament, than he now does dealing with MLAs in his home state. The popular impression that the CM is easily distracted and keeps moving from one subject to the next has not helped him either. His communication skills have been questioned too. When he took over as CM, he was accused of not being fluent in Marathi. To prove critics wrong, he has spoken only in Marathi in the state since. “Speaking Marathi is not enough. He has to think like a Marathi manoos (son-ofthe-soil). He has spent all his time in Delhi. He does not know Maharashtra well. Rane saheb is the best person for the state. The party needs an aggressive person to win elections. Madam [Sonia] ko galati pata chalega election ke baad,” says a supporter of Narayan Rane. “If I am asked to help, I will,” Rane told reporters during the traders strike. He wasn’t asked and he did not help. Despite being CM, Chavan seems unable to forge personal equations and work his way round the maze that statelevel politics can be. “He is paranoid of getting tainted by corruption. He checks every file that comes to his desk and reads every page. He does not trust any of us. He makes everyone read each other’s files. It is paranoia. There are definitely work delays,” says a bureaucrat who has spent over two decades in government service in different capacities. Bureaucrats call him ‘a one man show’. “We think he’s biting off more than he can chew,” says an IAS officer who has worked in several departments of the government. 20 open

f Chavan can count on one thing

against his detractors, it is that the Congress High Command has sent out signals that it values his opinion. So the numerous trips by CM aspirants to Delhi, which were a common feature when Vilasrao Deshmukh and Ashok Chavan headed the state, have reduced considerably. In electoral terms, the High Command is banking on Chavan’s clean image in an election that will see corruption as a major issue. But the CM’s paranoia has created administrative inertia. All major infrastructure projects are behind schedule due to delays in procuring permission from the CMO. Though last year’s Mantralaya fire took place in June 2012, the rebuilding work of the fire-ravaged offices is yet to be completed. It took over six months for the CM to grant the requisite permissions for the tendering process. Not even

While corruption is unacceptable, many of the state’s voters say, staying clean should not amount to an interruption of every aspect of active governance half the work is done. As a result, all the departments are scattered across the city—so ministers, department secretaries and their staff do not operate in close physical proximity. For example, the state’s Education Minister Rajendra Darda has an office at Jawahar Bhavan at Charni Road. The secretary of this department, JS Saharia, works at Mantralaya, about 6 km away from Darda’s present office. Half the staff of this department goes to an office in the St George office campus, which is 3 km away from Mantralaya. The other half sits at Mantralaya. The CM heads the Urban Development Department (UDD) and is stationed at Mantralaya. His secretary Srikant Singh occupies an office at the Cr2 Mall at Nariman Point, about a kilometre away from Mantralaya. While half of the UDD’s staff works in an office at the World Trade Centre at Cuffe Parade, the rest is at Mantralaya. Meanwhile, the state’s new airport

project at Navi Mumbai is yet to take off, though Chavan has shown keen interest in it. Another ambitious project which has been extremely delayed is the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link Road. Sources say that the project is just not moving forward. This is despite getting ‘viability gap’ funds of Rs 2,000 crore from the Central Government. The viability gap refers to the difference in cost that is borne by the Centre for projects that are not financially viable but are needed. This project is slotted under the Urban Development Department headed by Chavan. The overcautious nature of the CM’s dealings has spelt losses for the construction industry as well, as he has been delaying clearances for new townships, new rules on the permissible floor space index (FSI), and suchlike. Since his predecessor Ashok Chavan faces a probe for his involvement in the Adarsh Housing Society scam, the CM is exercising particular restraint in this sector. This has put off builders, many of whom are moving out to other states such as Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and even Uttarakhand up north. And there are other areas of neglect. Despite protests by women’s organisations and activists, the State Women’s Commission remains headless. Since it is a political appointment, the CM is reportedly not keen on getting involved in the tussles of groupism that exist within the Congress over the issue. At a time when crimes against women in the state have seen an increase, this neglect comes across as apathetic. Several development corporations and development boards remain headless too, as Chavan does not want to risk a controversy over an appointment. All said, the government will have a tough time projecting any achievements for the state’s electorate to consider. While corruption is unacceptable, many voters say, staying clean should not amount to an interruption of every aspect of active governance. Ironically, for the man who was the glue that bound various ministries to the PMO when he was a minister-incharge in Delhi, Chavan has been unable to build a team of trusted lieutenants as a chief minister. Achieving party unity alone may be too much to ask of him. A pity. n 17 June 2013

trail

Anatomy of a scandal ap

How the police got a fix on the spot-fixing scam. And what’s happening in their interrogation rooms right now Shantanu Guha Ray

shwin Aggarwal— Tinku Mandi

to neighbours and friends—was fast asleep when cops assembled outside his Adarsh Nagar residence in northern Delhi on 19 May 2013. There were no sirens. The PCR vans slowly drove in, as the red-and-blue beacons lit up the narrow road. For someone waking up at that hour and looking out the window, it would have been surreal. It was 0455 hours, and the cops did not want 22 open

unfolding drama (Top) N Srinivasan loses his BCCI presidentship, while MS Dhoni’s wife has been quizzed by the police about her alleged closeness to Vindoo Dara Singh; (above) Gurunath Meiyappan out on bail

to alert the neighborhood where Tinku Mandi was a much-admired figure. His neighbours considered him God-fearing and someone ‘who would help anybody at any hour.’ It had been almost six months that the cops had information that Aggarwal used to run a mini telephone exchange of a little over 100 numbers from his home. Calls to Dubai were routine. The guard at his house saw the cops and opened the gate. Aggarwal was woken up, taken into custody and driven away. As the police made their way out of the house, they counted the number of cars in the compound: an impressive nine, a mix of Indian and foreign makes. Aggarwal’s arrest sent alarm bells ringing across the country. Bookies went underground. Some with visas on their passports took flights to safer destinations in Southeast Asia like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Some even drove off to Kathmandu and stayed put there, waiting for the heat to subside. Meanwhile, the Delhi Police had Aggarwal to interrogate. He had been in touch with arrested bookie Ramesh Vyas, and told the police that he was in touch with some players participating in the Indian Premier League (IPL) as well. He eventually managed to get bail from a Delhi court, but was called in by the Crime Branch of the Mumbai Police that wanted his custody to question him, chiefly about his links with bookie Jiju Janardanan, which was vital to file a chargesheet against the Rajasthan Royals pacer S Sreesanth. There were genuine reasons for the bookies arrested in the IPL spot-fixing scam to be worried. Not just about interrogation by the cops in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata—the three prominent cities where raids took place—but about incurring the wrath of bookies in Pakistan and Dubai. According to Himanshu Roy, joint commissioner of police (crime), Mumbai, Pakistani bookies control Indian bookies. “If a punter places a bet and wins, the bookie has to pay him,” Roy says in a telephone interview, “If the punter loses, he has to pay the bookie. And the cash flows to Pakistan, Singapore, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur through hawala operators.” In normal circumstances, a final settlement between punters and bookies 17 June 2013

would happen only after the IPL season’s end. “Each bookie maintains his own book and bets are accepted till the last delivery of the final match,” says Roy, “In this case, the books were closed after the bookies were arrested. Now, not only will winning punters ask for their share of the money, but losing punters would also [refuse to pay].” The bookies who had fled following the nationwide raids are in serious trouble. “They have to pay the punters who placed and won bets. Now that they are arrested and their books closed, the bookies do not know how they would generate all that money,” says Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar. Also, punters who lost bets would refuse to pay up on the argument that they would have bet till the last ball was played to recover losses. But that did not happen. Some, like the Jaipur brothers, Pawan and Sanjay Chhabra, owners of Jaipur’s

Bookie ring sources say that major players are usually signed on at least 4-5 months before an IPL season. Nothing is done on phone or mail. Agents meet them at secret locations famous Motison Jewellers, were smarter. They operated under the names of Pawan Jaipur and Sanjay Jaipur. But before they could be picked up for interrogation, the brothers cleared their books within a flash and fled to Dubai on 17 May 2013. That was a week after Sreesanth and two other cricketers of the Rajasthan Royals were arrested by the Delhi Police from a hotel in Mumbai and a nationwide crackdown began on bookies and big punters. The Jaipur brothers had been on the police radar ever since the world’s richest cricket league was started by Lalit Modi, but no one touched them. But now, things were slowly surfacing. Inderjeet Singh Bindra, Punjab cricket’s strongman and former president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (he was president from 1993 to 96), told cops in Chandigarh that there was a “definite link” between these two bookies and a

woman who was seen in the company of Suresh Raina, a current member of the Indian cricket team who also plays for Chennai Super Kings. Bindra claimed that at the rime—July-August 2010 in Sri Lanka—the Sri Lankan cricket board had offered all CCTV footage to the BCCI. The incident, reported by London’s Sunday Times, was instantly denied by BCCI President N Srinivasan and India skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni. “I would like to ask N Srinivasan how long would he keep sweeping scandals under the carpet?” asks Bindra in an interview over the phone from Chandigarh. In Delhi, SN Srivastava, special commissioner of police, confirms the escape of the Jaipur brothers but says that investigations are at a “crucial stage” and the recent arrest of bookies—especially six who’d been picked up in Goa—has provided the police vital clues. “Some of the big ones have escaped but we have enough on the plate to solve cricket’s biggest jigsaw puzzle,” says Srivastava. Officers of the Delhi Special Cell have already interrogated Navneet Kalra, a businessman who owns restaurants and optical stores, on his alleged links with bookies abroad. Kalra was released after two days of questioning by the cops, who do not reveal what Delhi’s top punter had confessed. Kalra is well connected in Delhi’s corridors of power and has often been seen with owners of IPL franchisees and senior cops. Last year, giving him company during IPL matches were Delhi’s then police commissioner B K Gupta and a relative of the owner of a north Indian IPL team. An Old Game

Last year, on the inaugural day of the fifth edition of the IPL, intelligence agencies had alerted the Mumbai Police about a meeting of bookies in the city. The meeting was one of the biggest, claimed the agencies, and had taken place at The Hilton in Nariman Point. For two days over a menu of whisky, Darjeeling tea and snacks, the bookies finalised their gameplan. One of the main bookies, Nagpur Ghoda, even had an Excel sheet with names of cricketers. The clandestine meeting was held to exchange such names and determine shares in the booty. Ghoda was known open www.openthemagazine.com 23

for his appetite for multi-crore bets and women. The 2012 IPL saw a slew of last-over wins. These were not uncommon in this T20 format, but the frequency of full tosses and short-length deliveries had raised everybody’s eyebrows. It’s just that there was no evidence yet that players were playing for bookies. Bookie ring sources say that major players are usually signed on at least 4-5 months before an IPL season. Nothing is done on phone or mail. Representatives meet them at secret locations, many of them overseas, to strike deals. “I cannot talk of specifics—we do get and react on alerts,” Roy tells me. Conservative police estimates put the total amount gambled during the justconcluded IPL at Rs 80,000 crore. Delhi Police Commisioner Neeraj Kumar says that he will name three more cricketers, in addition to the three already behind bars, for actively participating in spot-fixing during the IPL’s sixth edition. “You will soon hear their names,” he promises. According to a person aware of the facts of the Delhi Police’s investigation, the three cricketers who will be named are a fast bowler and spinner, both from a Western Indian franchisee and a young cricketer of a north Indian franchisee who was a part of India’s World Cup U-19 winning squad. The first round of arrests had sent both the IPL and Delhi’s mandarins of the game into a tizzy. Those in panic included a couple of politicians connected with cricket. Both had rushed to popular temples to propitiate deities and save their skin from what could soon become Indian cricket’s biggest scandal. One, driven in an SUV by a Page-3 regular, went to the popular Banke Bihari temple in Mathura, Uttar Pradesh, while the other took a flight to reach the Shri Nathji temple in Udaipur, Rajasthan. They Are Singing

The police continue to learn a lot from Gurunath Meiyappan, the former CEO of Chennai Super Kings who was arrested—and is now out on bail—for his alleged connections with bookies like Vindoo Dara Singh, a small time actor and son of India’s most famous wrestler. 24 open

Guru’s involvement rattled everyone in Chennai, where he resides. Srinivasan, Guru’s father-in-law and former president of the BCCI, called up his image management agency in Delhi to ask why the CBI was at his son-in-law’s doorstep. He was reportedly told that the agency did not have a political mandate to probe the case. Interrogated by cops of the Mumbai Police Crime Branch, Meiyappan, once an owner and now—by India Cements’ claim—just an honorary member of the CSK team, has admitted his links with bookies. What he has always denied is being an owner of the team. Asked by investigators how come an honorary member was hobnobbing with the side, Meiyappan retorted: “So what? Even Shilpa Shetty’s mother and sister dance with the team on the grounds. What’s wrong with my presence in the dugout?” Before his questioning, say the police,

It is reliably learnt that Mumbai Police officials are also tracking what they consider ‘unusual movements’ in Ranchi, the hometown of Indian cricket captain MS Dhoni a defiant Meiyappan had asked that he be allowed to be by the CSK’s side for the final at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens. “They need me; you must let me go. You could even sit [with me] in the dugout. I am not an ordinary person,” he told investigators, even informing them how his ancestors had started Indian Overseas Bank and that his AVM Studio in Chennai was as iconic as RK Studios in Mumbai. He was not aware that the BCCI’s disciplinary committee had already decided to suspend him. Perhaps no one told him. Meiyappan told the cops that his advice was important for the CSK because the IPL final was on the 11th day of Indian cricket’s biggest ever mess. He even explained the relevance and power of the number 11 in astrology, and offered examples of what he did astrologically to help CSK win matches. In one match, he said, he had pushed 45 diehard CSK fans

to wear green shirts and not the mandatory yellow before cheering the side. CSK won. Also, during the IPL bidding process, it was he—claimed Meiyappan— who had advised the big boss, Srinivasan, not to bid with round figures and add some more money so that it looked like a figure with a decimal. “The decimal is important because it denotes where you stop with the big cash, and whatever comes after the decimal is what you can still offer to throw,” he told police officers. Did honorary members attend such auctions? A cop wanted to know. Meiyappan had no answer. In another part of Mumbai, the son of the former BCCI president pooh-poohs Meiyappan’s grand claims, saying that his brother-in-law has been “lying through his teeth”. “He has been in betting for long, and it will be very difficult for him to escape now,” alleges Ashwin Srinivasan, the 44-year-old estranged son of the former BCCI president. According to him, Meiyappan’s links with bookies are “a very old habit he nurtured during his golf outings”. Meiyappan knows he is in trouble. He has already admitted his links with Vikram Aggarwal, owner of Radisson Blu and Fortune Select Palms in Chennai, and that both knew Uttam C Jain, a top bookie in the city. Records of calls from Meiyappan to Jain have already been traced. Jain, arrested on 23 May, has admitted his links with Meiyappan and VIP gamblers in Chennai. Ashwin, it is reliably learnt, has agreed to testify against Meiyappan, and if need be against his father, both of whom he has claimed had good connections with bookies based in Chennai, Delhi, Mumbai and Dubai. Initially, the police were not keen on dragging Srinivasan’s son into the case, but got interested when Ashwin claimed he was intrigued by his father’s decision to refuel his private aircraft in Dubai. He wanted the police to probe his father’s golf partners in India and abroad. The investigations are far from over yet. Not just Meiyappan, it is reliably learnt that Mumbai Police officials are also tracking what they consider “unusual movements” in Ranchi, the hometown of Indian cricket captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni, whose wife Sakshi has already been questioned because of her 17 June 2013

alleged closeness to Vindoo Dara Singh. Cops in several Indian cities, especially in small towns, claim that are working on a number of leads. In Ranchi, investigators have found an interesting link between one of the two deputy chief ministers of Jharkhand, Sudesh Mahato, a close friend of Dhoni, and one Vishnu Aggarwal, a businessman who lives in a region between Jhalda and Chandil in Jharkhand.

shazid chauhan

linking up Restaurateur Navneet Kalra with cricketer Shikhar Dhawan at a party he hosted for Virat Kohli in 2010

Should It Be Legal?

Allegations of spot-fixing in the IPL have prompted the Indian Government to consider a specific law against rigging matches. They have also raised the question of how the country’s law on betting applies in such cases. But legal experts say this is a grey area and has never been clearly addressed by a court. “[Betting] laws differ from state to state and even the police are not very clear about it,” says Mukul Mudgal, a former chief justice of the Punjab & Haryana High Court who has suggested that betting in all sports be legalised. This, he is confident, would raise licensing and tax revenues. Legal experts in India say the law on betting has evolved piecemeal. The country’s first ban on gambling was implemented in 1867 through the Public Gambling Act. It was applicable to the erstwhile United Provinces, East Punjab, Delhi and Central Provinces. The Act effectively outlawed gaming houses, ‘where cards, dice, tables or other instruments of gaming are kept or used for profit’. However, betting was allowed on games of ‘mere skill’—though the law did not define ‘skill’. Then came the Bengal Public Gaming Act, 1867, which also banned public gambling and ownership of a common gaming house, but permitted betting on horse races. Then came the Bombay Prevention of Gambling Act, 1887, which had similar provisions. After Independence, all states had the right to set their own rules 17 June 2013

on gambling and betting. Most states followed the Public Gambling Act that permitted betting on games of ‘mere skill’, but none bothered to define it. Some clarity eventually came through a Supreme Court judgment in 1968, which called the card game Rummy one of skill ‘because the fall of the cards has to be memorised and the building up of Rummy requires considerable skill in holding and discarding cards’. This was followed by another landmark SC judgment in 1996 on the legal status of betting on horse racing in Tamil Nadu. The Court ruled that a game of ‘mere skill’ was ‘mainly and preponderantly a game of skill’. Notably, the Court had called horse racing a game of skill. ‘We have no hesitation in reaching the conclusion that horse racing is a sport which primarily depends on [a] special ability acquired by training,’ said the judgment. ‘It is the speed and stamina of the horse, acquired by training, which matters. Jockeys are experts in the art of riding. Between two equally fast horses, a better

trained jockey can touch the winning-post.’ The upshot was that betting on a horse race could not count as gambling in India, though the Court was clear that such bets had to be placed only on the premises of a race course. “No one has raised this, and, as a result, this issue has never been discussed. It has never come before the court. So, there is no ruling on it,” says Vikrant Pachnanda, a lawyer and managing editor of Indian Law Journal. According to Vidushpath Singhania, one of India’s top experts on sports and sportbetting law, “If the court has said horse racing is a game of skill, there is no reason to hold that other sports are not games of skill. Cricket needs a lot of skill.” Most would agree with that. Last month, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci) called on the Government to regulate—rather than ban—betting on sports as a measure to reduce cases of match-fixing and money laundering. ‘It will benefit the exchequer because the Government is losing up to $3.5 billion annually in taxable revenue through illegal betting in sport,’ said Ficci in a statement. In its view, the cash generated by a tax on such gambling could be used to fund sports development, apart from welfare schemes and infrastructure development plans. The Champions Trophy now underway in England will see an all-time low in betting from India. With bookies either being questioned or away trying to escape the police dragnet, players from teams would also be wary of answering calls from unregistered numbers. Most players, punters, bookies would have acquired new numbers and phones. And for the first time in years, a toplevel cricket tournament would probably be played cleanly. n open www.openthemagazine.com 25

c lo s e c a l l

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Chhota Shakeel Callingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

The IPL spot-fixing scam has again brought the disparate worlds of gangsters and reporters together Akshay Sawai photographs by ritesh uttamchandani

ome media reports on the IPL

scandal have hinted that not everyone in the mob involved in cricket gambling sports a tika on his forehead or plays for an IPL team. These reports suggest that the ringleader of the operation is none other than India’s most wanted gangster, Dawood Ibrahim, himself. To verify this, a reporter of The Times of India sent a text message to Chhota Shakeel, the gangster’s second-in-command. Shakeel rang the reporter back and denied their gang’s involvement. “We have grown now; we have left those days far behind,” Shakeel is quoted as saying in the paper. “We are into real

estate and other white businesses. Bhai does not want this haraam (ill-gotten) money coming out of betting.” Shakeel goes on to complain about media reports that have linked Dawood to the scandal. “There are some channels that are putting our gang’s name into police officers’ mouths. It’s easy for news channels to do that as we do not get a chance to deny it. And news channels want our name so that their TRPs go up and they can… make a big impact.” TRPs. Stories. Impact. It’s newsroom jargon rolling off the tongue of a criminal. No surprise, given how media-savvy gangsters have become lately. But it does

on the mob beat (L-R) Baljeet Parmar; Tarakant Dwivedi; Prabhakar Pawar

arouse curiosity about the gangster-media relationship. What is it like to interview a don? What kind of interactions do a gangster and reporter have?

n a Friday evening in Mumbai, a

man in his fifties with a grey stubble and oval dark glasses leans against his car outside Shreejee’s restaurant near Oshiwara Police Station in Andheri. He is Baljeet Parmar, a veteran crime reporter who has dined with underworld dons and even faced their fury. Parmar claims to have had meals with Dawood Ibrahim. He was also shot at once from close range by Chhota Rajan’s men. After we shake hands, Parmar leans on me for support during the short walk from the car to the restaurant. It is not the damage caused by the attack that makes him do this. “I twisted my foot,” he says. Shreejee’s is a typical Udupi restaurant, complete with the clatter of spatulas and sizzle of dosas on hot pans as background noise. Parmar doesn’t take off his glasses even after we take our seats. He says he rarely does. He orders tea and begins to tell his story in Punjabi-accented English. “I interviewed Dawood, Vardarajan Mudaliar, Haji Mastan [among others],” he says, “I have travelled with these people, had meals with them…” Parmar is originally from Chandigarh. He came to Mumbai in 1976 to try his luck with films, which didn’t work out, and became a journalist at the start of the 1980s. But it was his interim job, as chief of security at Holiday Inn hotel in Juhu, that gave him the exposure that would help him as a crime reporter. “Holiday Inn and Sun n’ Sand were the two hotels where many film and underworld parties would be held. I got to meet and observe people there. Film personalities, underworld dons, cops…” Parmar says he quit for reasons beyond his control, and became a reporter for The Free Press Journal. Back then, Parmar lived in Mumbai’s Antop Hill area, where Vardarajan Mudaliar (aka Vardabhai) was active as a gangster. Mudaliar was Mumbai’s most feared don in the 70s and early 80s, and Parmar saw the way he dotted the area with illicit liquor joints, brothels and hutments; he even had illegal roads laid. Parmar started writing about all this, and that’s how the don asked to see him. One open www.openthemagazine.com 27

of their exchanges during the meeting went something like this. Parmar: “Aren’t you worried the cops will get you?” Mudaliar: “Do you read Hindu granths (texts)?” Parmar: “Not much.” Mudaliar: “The books say each of us has come to this life with a return ticket. When the time comes, we all have to go. I’m not scared.” Parmar: “If you say you do good work, why is everyone scared of you?” Mudaliar: “Are you scared of me?” Parmar: “No.” Mudaliar: “Why?” Parmar: “Like you, I also have a return ticket.” The above exchange—as Parmar recalls it—broke the ice between Parmar and Mudaliar. Parmar got a defining story, his first interview with a don. The conversation shifts to Dawood Ibrahim, who Parmar claims to have met almost 20 times (but not even once after 1992). He speaks of a 1988 meeting in Dubai that was set up by a rival-turnedfriend of Dawood. Parmar was staying at Hotel Astoria, from where Dawood’s driver Sajid picked him up in a maroon Mercedes. “It was a huge car with a satellite phone,” says Parmar. “After picking me up, his driver called him and said he would reach the office in seven-and-ahalf minutes. That’s exactly how long it took. I remember that.” Asked if he felt apprehensive about meeting such a dangerous man, Parmar says, “No. By that time, I had met many underworld people.” The Dawood he remembers is a man dressed in white who was a slave to Cartier: Cartier cigarettes, Cartier lighter, Cartier pen. Parmar says Dawood served lemon tea in small cups. “He apologised for the cups, saying they had to be small as he had to drink about 80 a day with the various people who came to see him.” Dawood wanted to discuss the allegedly negative media coverage he was getting for something that another gangster, Sharad Shetty, was responsible for. As they spoke, a hefty man arrived and sat beside Parmar. No introductions were made and the conversation continued. Dawood asked Parmar what he thought of Sharad Shetty. “Haraamzaade log hain,” Parmar said, and delivered a 15-minute 28 open

rant against his gang. After he was done, Dawood told him that the man sitting next to him was Sharad Shetty. Dawood then reprimanded Shetty. Parmar seems to sense that some parts of his stories may seem too wild to be true. “What I’m telling you,” he says, “is something I have also written in my columns over the years.” Also, he says he never shrank from telling off mobsters when he had to. Nor did he take favours from them. “To have contacts is an asset. But contacts can’t change to links. That’s dangerous.”

Balakrishnan is a plump man with

a cheerful disposition and passion for music. But his geniality belies the almost 35 years he has spent tracking some of Mumbai’s most sinister elements as a reporter for The Times of India. “Crime was considered an entry-level beat, but organised crime is an integral part of Mumbai, its economy and its society. If you report on Mumbai, you cannot ignore its underworld,” says Balakrishnan one Saturday morning in his office in Chembur. Bala, as he is known, has had his share of controversy and defamation cases against him. He says that organised crime grew in Mumbai in the 1960s with gold smuggling, which boomed after the Government of the time clamped official gold imports to save foreign exchange, giving smugglers an opportunity to meet demand. Maharashtra’s prohibition policy resulted in a market for illicit liquor too. Then, in the late 70s and early 80s, gangsters turned their attention to real estate in Bombay. Mudaliar was a key player then. “I grew up in Matunga. Vardabhai was from there too,” says Bala, “He was virtually the king of Bombay.” But Mudaliar led a modest life. “He sat on the floor, although his guards would be hovering around. Criminals, cops, ordinary people looking for help would go to him. I have seen DIG-level cops touch his feet,” says Bala, who first met Mudaliar as a curious youngster and later gained access as a journalist. “What I got to see was a nexus between the underworld and the police and politicians,” he says, “Also, the charitable side of the underworld as well as its dangerous side.” Asked if knowing a don personally ever compromised his objectivity, Bala

says, “Not at all. [The underworld] also respects it. But never carry tales. Never pass on information to cops, unless it is about anti-national activities. My phone has been tapped many times by the police. But the police are sometimes so dumb that they would ask me, whose very phone they were tapping, for the meaning of some words or code names used in the conversation. But yes, I’d inform the cops if I hear of something that threatens national security. I’m an Indian first, then a journalist.” Is mob recrimination a worry? “If you are discreet and tactful, you’ll [be okay].” Bala says that Mudaliar’s empire began to crumble because a Maharashtra politician wanted control of crime and aided the emergence of a monster called Dawood Ibrahim. “The Dawood phenomenon didn’t just happen,” says Bala. “He had police and political backing. Subsequently, the fortunes of this particular politician came down. And another politician co-opted Dawood. This politician is the real don of India,” he claims. Journalists are sometimes accused of glorifying criminals. And it is true that they experience a rush of blood in their interactions with the underworld. Making contact with the forbidden has a thrill to it, Bala admits: “Not everyone had access. You did. They gave you information. They tried to get information out of you. They tried to plant stories. But overall, I found more honesty in the underworld than in politics or business. If they gave their ‘zubaan’ (word), they kept it.”

arakant Dwivedi alias Akela is a

sturdy man with close-cropped hair who works for Mumbai’s Mid-Day. In 2011, he had a harrowing experience when he was arrested for a story he had written the year earlier for his previous employer, Mumbai Mirror. It was about water leakage ruining weapons acquired post-26/11 for the Railway Police Force at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. Arrested under the Official Secrets Act on charges of trespassing, Dwivedi spent five days in jail. It is perhaps experiences like these that have shaped his approach to work. “For me, it is a source of livelihood, nothing more. The only person I’m answerable to is my 17 june 2013

editor,” he says when we meet in a conference room at his tabloid’s office. Differences with his family made Dwivedi leave home in Uttar Pradesh for Mumbai. Journalism came his way by chance: a Hindi publication in Mumbai’s suburb of Ulhasnagar named Ulhas Vikas had a vacancy, and he took it. He later worked for Do Baje Dopahar and Navbharat before making his way to Mumbai’s top tabloids. When Dwivedi speaks, he often rocks in his chair, tilts his head back, and shuts his eyes. He is acutely aware of the voice recorder on the table, and asks me to switch it off from time to time. He says he has had plenty of direct interaction with underworld dons. The first don he met was Arun Gawli. It was in the late 1990s. Dwivedi was with Navbharat. Having heard that Gawli was going to contest elections, he went to Dagdi Chawl, Gawli’s residence, to confirm this news. Anyone was allowed entry to Dagdi Chawl, he says, as long as there was a legitimate reason to see Gawli. The hard part was the wait. “They watch you as you wait. And they make you wait because they’d rather you go away. The wait is also designed to make you drop your plan in case you have any.” What struck Dwivedi about the meeting with Gawli was the terrace of Dagdi Chawl. “The terrace has a garden, with dummy animals and a small waterfall. It’s like being in a jungle.” A jungle with a snooker table. When Dwivedi finally met Gawli, he was somewhat disappointed. “He is a slight man, weighing 50 kg or thereabouts,” he says, “I thought if I hit him, he’d fall.” This surprises me: for, in pictures, Gawli looks small but sinewy, a man whose slap could turn you into an instant astronaut. I ask Dwivedi if he is sure of what he’s saying. “Yes,” he says. “When I met Gawli, I thought, ‘Don aise bhi hote hain’ (a don could be like this too). But he had a huge TV in his room. These are common now, but were not back then. Now, that was don-worthy.” Dwivedi says he has met or spoken with other gangsters too. He feels little 17 june 2013

fear, he says, because he is originally from UP, a state where if you didn’t carry a knife or gun to college, you didn’t matter. But he says interactions with the likes of Dawood have become rare since the Mumbai bomb blasts of 1993. Till then, the underworld was mostly involved in making money and fighting among themselves. But with those serial bombings, Dawood turned into a terrorist. “You can’t talk to him directly anymore. You have to go through a mediator,” Dwivedi says. “Also, when MN Singh became police commissioner of Mumbai, he frowned upon reporters directly contacting gangsters.” In the rare event that Dawood now has to speak to someone, he might call on a third person’s phone in an area like

Dawood asked Parmar what he thought of Sharad Shetty. “Haraamzaade log hain,” Parmar said. After he was done, Dawood told him that the man sitting next to him was Sharad Shetty Nagpada or Pydhonie to conduct the conversation—indirectly. And what are the kind of things he says? “Bhai, kyaa haal hai? Zara iske baaare mein kam likho…” (Brother, how are you? Write less about this). Asked for a little-known detail about Dawood, Dwivedi says, “He used to love Girgaum Chowpatty and wanted to replicate it in Karachi.”

ome crime reporters avoid all con-

tact with gang leaders, preferring to get their information from the police instead. They see the notion of the underworld allowing you journalistic space or respecting unspoken ground rules as naïve and romantic. They believe the underworld is plain ruthless and cite the

murder of Mid-Day crime reporter J Dey as its most recent evidence. “You should not get too close, you should not be perceived as being sympathetic to a certain gang. Even perception is enough [for a rival gang to turn vindictive],” says Lekha Dhar Rattnani, one of the first women crime reporters in India. She covered the beat for The Free Press Journal a few years in the early 80s. She never met Vardarajan Mudaliar, for example. But she says she got veiled threats from him. “Someone or the other would say to me, ‘Look, they know you are writing this or that’,” remembers Rattnani. “I told my editor, Virendra Kapoor, about the threats. He said that the paper was behind me and encouraged me to keep working, as few women were doing what I was. Also, my sister was in the police. That made me feel safe.” Prabhakar Pawar, crime reporter of Saamna, the Shiv Sena mouthpiece, is also clear about taking a safety-first approach. Sitting in his air-conditioned and wood-panelled cabin under the sleepy gaze of an oversized close-up of Bal Thackeray, Pawar says, “You meet underworld people and they soon ask you for favours… ‘Tell the police to go easy on this guy’, ‘Give us information.’ When you refuse, problems begin.” Pawar lists out names of journalists who paid a price for their interactions with the underworld. “Suresh Khanolkar, who ran a publication called Khatarnak, was murdered. The editor of a publication called Raazdaar was murdered. J Dey was murdered. Baljeet Parmar was attacked. Jigna Vora went to jail. A few others went to jail as well. So there is a history—and I was very clear: I got my stories [by] talking to the police.” Pawar cites a Marathi proverb to make his case: “Sheli jaate jiva nishi, khaanaara mhanto vaattad.” Roughly translated, it means the lamb lays down its life, but the person eating it grumbles the meat is rubbery. The proverb could be interpreted in several ways. What Pawar means, perhaps, is that such a sacrifice is not worth it. For all your courage and efforts to get the truth, all you get are complaints. n open www.openthemagazine.com 29

Artsy Kids? Angel Bedi, 22, the artist behind The Filmy Owl, says her versatile style and free thought make her a hipster: “There are days when I’m hipster, and I like to dress that way, go to quaint markets, hang out at obscure bars, but I avoid being classified in the category because of its pretentious lot”

q u e st

IN SEARCH OF THE INDIAN HIPSTER What is it?

GUNJEET SRA and AASTHA ATRAY BANAN Photographs by ashish sharma

dayan Chakravarty, a 29-year-old creative director with ad-agency JWT, is sipping his second glass of beer on a Saturday afternoon to cope with a hangover from the previous night’s party that got “out of control”. The party was at his one-bedroom apartment overlooking the ruins and lake of Delhi’s Hauz Khas village. He is trying to explain what a hipster is, but it is easier to say what a hipster is not. “No hipster would classify themselves as one. If they did, they would be some South Delhi pricks trying to streamline themselves,” he says. Among other things, what makes Chakravarty a hipster is that he wouldn’t walk down to the nearest grocery shop to pick up something as routine as eggs and bread for breakfast. He has an inherent distaste for anything to do with the normal, the mainstream. “What’s the point of being and doing everything like everybody else? One has to keep looking and graft oneself to new cultures,” he says. When he was a student, Shardul Sharma, now 33 years old, would go to Delhi’s Chor Bazaar to buy T-shirts for Rs 20 from a pile of clothes. They had been sent over as charity all the way from the United States and had somehow found their way to the markets of Old Delhi. When the internet was still young, he would often log on to Pitchfork, a website that some consider the last word on independent music. It introduced him to bands such as The Stooges, The Kinks and The Fall. The last of which led him to read The Fall by Albert Camus–a novel about a man’s fall from grace. Sharma hadn’t realised all this made him a hipster until he visited the Wikipedia page for ‘Hipster’. He figures his stock market job would’ve disqualified him for the label. But he seems to fit the bill. He has a room full

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of LPs and wears band T-shirts with skinny pants, vintage Adidas sneakers and big geeky glasses. He likes what he calls ‘alternative’ music and movies. Amit Malhotra, a 26-year-old graphic designer, is so averse to technology that he hand-writes all his documents. He also has the geek glasses and satchel that are the staple of hipsters. He is obsessed with vintage art and fashion; most of his clothes are from thrift shops. He wore a dhoti to the London Fashion Week. He doesn’t label himself a hipster because he doesn’t want to align himself with the majority. “The hipsters here follow trends like their life depends on it and that is completely wrong. You can’t be a hipster if you have to make a conscious effort,” he says.

one of those who use the term ‘hipster’ seem entire-

ly clear about what it means. According to the aggregate wisdom of Wikipedia, to which Sharma turned for clarity, ‘hipster’ refers to ‘a subculture of young, urban middle class adults and older teenagers that appeared in the 1990s… associated with independent music, a varied non-mainstream fashion sensibility, progressive or independent political views, alternative spirituality or atheism/agnosticism, and alternative lifestyles’. This is such a wide definition, it sounds like a complicated way to say ‘non-conformist’. The hipster emerged as a cross-subcultural figure in the late 1990s out of ‘neo bohemia’ which was defined by sociologist Richard Lyod as a culture of artists who primarily work in bars, coffee shops and rock clubs while proopen www.openthemagazine.com 33

Creative Types? (Clockwise from above) Graphic designer and vintage-obsessive Amit Malhotra at his flat in East of Kailash with friends; copywriter Amish Sabharwal with girlfriend Ankita Dash at Delhi’s hipster-hub, Hauz Khas Village; the curiosities that populate Angel Bedi’s home; actor-musicians Imaad Shah and Saba Azad at their shared flat in Mumbai

viding an unintentional milieu for ‘late capitalist’ commerce in design, marketing, web development and the so-called ‘experience economy’. It has now turned into a movement influenced by a range of subcultures— from hippie to punk to beatnik to grunge. In his essay What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation, Mark Greif, professor of literary studies at New School university and founder-editor of the magazine n+1, writes that the contemporary hipster ‘emerges out of a thwarted tradition of youth subcultures, subcultures which had tried to remain independent of consumer culture, alternative to it, and had been integrated, humiliated and destroyed.’ Books have been written about this phenomenon in the West, but based on observation, a hipster is a person who sneers at Dan Brown, wears vintage clothing, doesn’t care who forms the government, doesn’t care if God exists, who eats organic food and drinks chamomile tea. Hipsters read Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller and Oscar Wilde, watch films by Wes Anderson, Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap, and listen to bands most people wouldn’t have heard of. 34 open

Or they might not do any of these things, and find other ways of not being part of the mainstream. The 26-yearold stylist Jill D’Souza, for instance—who used to live in Mumbai and now lives in Varkala, Kerala—starts her day picking flowers for a surf and yoga resort, and gets free surfing and yoga lessons in return. She listens to vinyl records and likes typing on a typewriter instead of using a computer. She mainly listens to Indie bands like Of Monsters and Men and The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger. She has just finished reading Osho’s The Essence of Yoga. You would usually find her dressed in skinny jeans, a faded vintage tee and maybe a flower in her hair. She isn’t religious, she says, but believes in the Universe as a Whole. “I don’t ever read the newspaper or watch the news.” A big part of the hipster lifestyle is to look like one. A 2009 article in Time offers this advice: ‘Take your grandmother’s sweater and Bob Dylan’s Wayfarers, add jean shorts, Converse All-Stars and a can of Pabst [beer] and bam—hipster.’ Designer Ruchika Sachdev’s idea of hipster style is to “wear shoes that may be ugly. Or a T-shirt with Indian graffiti. To me, a hipster is a creative person who expresses themselves with their clothes,” she says. 17 June 2013

ritesh uttamchandani

“I would wear high-waisted trousers, [or] a bomber jacket with a skirt, and that’s hipster to me. I don’t like to stereotype myself.” The line between alternative and pop culture can get fuzzy, though, and hipsters may go back and forth. 24-year-old Tej, well known in Delhi’s underground music circuit, returned from Boston in 2011 and has been urbanising obscure locales and pubs for parties for the ‘underground’ scene ever since. “People don’t want to go to clubs; they’d rather go to obscure places and liven them up because what we are essentially doing is making it a community rather than a public space,” he says. The island-style parties he organises usually last till the early hours of the morning and are really just musical gigs by acts that play EDM (electronic dance music) or Dubstep. Neither of these music forms is open www.openthemagazine.com 35

Partiers? Designer Nitin Bal Chauhan organises ‘Fashion People Nights’ to publicise his clothing line Bhootsavar, inspired by the dance and music culture that has taken hold of urban youngsters in India

generally associated with hipsters, but both are popular with the set, in Delhi as well as Mumbai. “These two cities are the leading markets for cool, so that [cool] becomes like a pendulum constantly swinging between the two,” says Tej.

dayan Chakravarthy says it is natural that the mainstream looks at hipsters with aversion. “People are somehow frightened by people who know more about things,” he says, “It is a culture where the Gucci T-shirt you have spent your whole life trying to afford really amounts to nothing.” Ankita Dash, 22, was the subject of much ridicule for her choice of clothes while she was studying at Delhi University’s Hindu College. “People had these vague perceptions about me, based just on the way I looked,” she says, “There is no place for people who are truly different. Mostly, people feel threatened by things that are not like them.” A recent poll conducted by Public Policy Polling in North Carolina, USA, asked 571 voters ‘whether they thought hipsters made a positive cultural contribution to society or whether they just ‘soullessly appropriate cultural tropes from the past for their own ironic amusement,’ and found that ‘23% of voters said they made positive cultural contributions while nearly half—46%— went with soulless cultural appropriation… 27% of voters said they thought hipsters should be subjected to a special tax for being so annoying.’ 36 open

What is stranger than pop culture’s disdain for them is the amount of irritation shown for hipsters by hipsters themselves. The whole point of being a hipster is to avoid classification, but if everyone starts doing the same ‘alternative’ things, they form a category. Someone who deliberately behaves like a hipster cannot, by definition, be a hipster. But an increasing number of young people in India are dressing the same and talking about the same things. The last place you should see a hipster is in a mall, but if you walk into a Zara, you will find that it is a hipster refuge. “In Delhi, hipsters are basically rich kids, or people [who are] bored with their life and want to do different things. Almost like hippies, only, with an iPhone,” says 25-year-old software engineer Bhoomika Chabbra. Chabbra’s lifestyle involves a lot of yoga, an emphasis on organic food and a borderline obsession with spiritual healing. “I think my basic urge to declass myself stems from the fact that, on the outside, I have a very conformist life and am expected to toe the line. But I would never call myself a hipster. That is too juvenile.” What she calls an urge to ‘declass’ is a need to make choices starkly different from what she perceives as the largely conformist hand-to-mouth notions of how life ought to be. Chakravarty says the hipster bubble has burst, “the main issue being that there is a lot of unintelligent kitsch doing the rounds. Everybody wants to be a hipster and nobody realises the irony of it.” So what should a non-hipster emulate in a hipster if not the look and tastes? “They should try and emulate free thought and realise that eve17 June 2013

rything is not about materialism.” This is ironic coming from someone who works in advertising, owns a Macbook and has a seemingly consumerist lifestyle. It is easy to spot a fake hipster, says copywriter Amish Sabharwal, as he adjusts his vintage batman T-shirt and sips coffee at Mocha Arthouse in the DLF Promenade Mall in Vasant Kunj. “I don’t try to be eccentric,” he says, “I am just that way, and it’s great when people give you importance just the way you are. Being eccentric is now a business— unless you endorse yourself as a cool, arty, trend-spotting kind of fellow, nobody is going to take you seriously.” ‘These self-absorbed, attention-starved, talentless, pseudo-creative, wanna-be city types have sterilised, homogenised and erased any real culture,’ wrote the anonymous blogger behind Diehipster.com before he quit his blog because he ‘just couldn’t take it anymore’.

or Sharma, the true hipsters were arty kids in 1960s

America who were poor but still stylish—they bought old clothes from thrift stores. He himself bought LPs because CDs were too expensive. “I listened to a few obscure bands thanks to the internet and my tastes developed out of that. It happened organically. Not like today, when people try to be hipster.” He adds wryly that LPs are now expensive, and that thrift clothing has become extravagant ‘vintage’ clothing. “You found the original Adidas shoes only at flea markets abroad. But then Adidas realised the market for it and started Adidas Originals…You now get the same shoes for Rs 5,000. Being a hipster has become a rich kid’s fancy. They buy the skinnies, listen to that music and call themselves hipster. It’s all become commercialised and that’s what the true hipster is against. They don’t use Apple products and [don’t] drink coffee at Starbucks. I can’t even be called a hipster, because I work in the share market! I am not arty.” To be a true hipster in the world we live in, one would have to give up all the luxuries technology offers. Would you give up Instagramming that beautiful sunset? Most hipsters would not, and that somewhat defeats the whole premise of being one. Fashion columnist and brand consultant Sujata Assomull Sippy says giving up technology is impossible. She also says the hipster trend will never be mainstream in fashion because, “to be totally hipster you need to be androgynous and super fit, and most Indian women are pear shaped.” According to her, the only area where hipster fashion is really booming right now is Indian wear. “It makes you sexy without trying too hard. In order to follow that trend, you have to wear low-rise saris, lungis and dhotis.” When we meet, Tanvi Bhatia is wearing green frog earrings that are literally leaping out of her ears. The 26-yearold visualiser says all that comes to mind when she thinks of hipsters in Delhi are “whiny pseudo-intellectuals ob-

17 June 2013

sessed with themselves and trying to look cool.” She says her self-expression through clothes is the opposite of her shy personality. She doesn’t want to be called a hipster but admits her beatnik influences. “Yes, I read Kerouac, but I also read Murakami. I would classify myself as a cleaner hippie,” she says, playing with her pet cat in a design studio in Gurgaon, near Delhi.

here is one line of thought that even fake hipsters are not such a bad thing. That line is articulated by musician Mukul Deora. Deora has released two alternative music albums, Stray and What Heart, and is now producing a film based on Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger. Like many other hipsters, he too says a hipster does not want to be categorised as a hipster and feels that he, at 32, is too old to be one. He says the label is used by those who

“No hipster would classify themselves as one. If they did, they would be some south Delhi pricks trying to streamline themselves”, says advertising creative Udayan Chakravarty don’t understand what a hipster is, but also that there is nothing wrong with people terming themselves hipsters because it’s a good thing for Indian society. “The main problem is that we don’t have alternative cultures. So if we are diversifying and people are experimenting with alternative stuff, why is that a bad thing? Growth always comes from the fringe scene. How is one thinking differently, consuming differently? That’s what India needs. As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘All progress depends on the unreasonable man.’” Imaad Shah and Saba Azad, who form the electro funk band Madboy/Mink and are also a couple, make a similar argument. They say that all counterculture eventually becomes mainstream culture, diluting it, and that words like ‘hipster’ are coined by outsiders looking in. “In India, especially, there is such a mix of people, thanks to our culture. I may like reading modernist poetry by Ezra Pound, but also Urdu and Marathi poetry,” says Imaad. “I don’t think there is anything called the Indian hipster,” says Saba, “Just wearing skinny jeans doesn’t cut it.” Their music, which is influenced by funk, swing and blues, is about making people dance. They listen to music on vinyl and spend their days working on obscure samples, always looking for that classic sound. Imaad is reading non-fiction on cinema right now, while Saba is reading Kerouac’s On the Road. Both agree that the book is pretentious. “It’s trying too hard,” says Saba, “I just read Tropic of Capricorn and I think [Henry] Miller is the original hipster writer. Kerouac’s just a cheap version.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 37

stalin ramesh

campus minority (Clockwise from above) Shruthy Suresh; Monika Shukla; Sarneet Broca; (facing page) Suneet Choudhary

transition

The New

IITian

How a changing India is re-engineering the DNA of its fabled nerd: a little too fast for some and much too slowly for others Siddhartha Gupta and Madhavankutty Pillai photographs by raul irani

here is a reason that Shruthy Suresh, 21, a final-year student of Biotechnology at Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, is going abroad for a PhD in cancer research: some years ago, she suffered a blood cancer scare. A

17 june 2013

series of tests turned out positive, and then a few weeks later, another set of tests contradicted the previous reports. “Something must have gone wrong earlier,” she says, “but it shook me enough to decide what I would pursue.”

Shruthy will soon be heading for University of Texas in the US. It was hard to get her parents’ permission. Her family is conservative, and she had joined IITMadras simply because it is in Chennai and 15 minutes away from her home. Her open www.openthemagazine.com 39

parents are letting her go to the US on the condition that she returns to India and gets married by 25. She would have to marry a suitable boy of the same caste. However, she says, “I am not going to let anything ruin my PhD.” The Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) to get admission to an IIT is extremely hard to crack, given that there are only 9,000 seats available each year for about half a million aspirants. Students who get into an IIT as undergrads usually start preparing for the test right after class 10, some even before that, and then spend all their waking hours on it. Rakesh Meena was late to this bleary-eyed party. He only found out about the IITs when he was in class 12. Of a Scheduled Tribe in Sakrawada in Kota, Rajasthan, he is the son of a farmer who had only studied up till class 10 and had battled a mental illness for years. Rakesh was spotted by a coaching institute that conducted a test in his school to award scholarships and train students for the JEE. He took a year off just to study for it, and was ranked No 38 all-India on the Scheduled Tribe list, which secured him a seat at IIT-Kanpur. In his final year now, Rakesh’s progress towards a BTech degree has been steady, his first year’s Cumulative Performance Index of 5.2/10 having risen to nearly 7 today. He has already landed a job at IBM Global Business Services that will pay him Rs 4 lakh per annum. It is money he is in dire need of. His family is heavily in debt. It began with a loan of Rs 1 lakh taken for his sister’s marriage. “After that,” he says, “it was droughts, then my tuition fees here at IIT-Kanpur, then the fees for the coaching of my younger brother, who managed to get into IIT-Roorkee, and then some money for our house.” And yet, when he told his family about the job offer, they were disappointed that he did not get a government job.

hruthy and Rakesh represent groups whose presence at IITs was once nearly negligible. Girls, once so few that the heads they turned were a major hazard in labs, are now almost 10 per cent of all students. And reserved category students, once hardly noticeable, are now present in numbers large enough for caste tension to make itself felt on campus. “Especially after the [Other 40 open

Backward Class] reservation four years ago, I have seen students staring at those from reserved categories as if they’re outsiders,” says an IIT student. The unsaid assumption, he says, is that “these are people who have kataoed (overturned) you, there is less space in hostels, there are fewer books, there are fewer faculty members to give them attention, [and that] the quality of the class has gone down”. Almost every aspect of IIT life has changed, be it social, cultural, economic or academic. In some ways, students are no different from those in earlier times. They are still the most intelligent of India, at least when it comes to their IQ. They choose IIT because they have the brains to get in, and not necessarily because they have an interest in engineering. Most do it to satisfy their parents. Even after they get in, a majority see the institute as a placement agency. Underriding all this is the single overwhelming idea that once you get into an IIT, the world will roll out a lifelong red carpet for you. And it does. According to Shiva Prasad, a professor of physics who is also the Dean of Academic Programmes at IIT-Bombay, one of the reasons IITs got this aura was the decline of university education in India. When he was doing his higher secondary in Varanasi in the late 60s, only one student of his class took the IIT entrance test. “There were many students in that batch who were better than him,” he says, “But they never appeared because they thought the engineering college in Varanasi was equally good. IITs were well known but people were not dying to get in.” Anubhav Mangal, a fourth-year student at IIT-Bombay, belongs to a family of IITians. His father is an IIT-Delhi engineer, and his sister an IIT-Roorkee degree holder. Anubhav was ranked around No 4,000 in the JEE, which he says was way below his expectation; anxiety had

For the bulk of students nowadays, the objective of an IIT education is a good placement in a high-paying job that requires no training as an engineer

got the better of him on the day of the test. In IIT-Bombay’s hierarchy of academic pursuits, an MSc in Chemistry is right at the bottom. He had done very well in all the other engineering entrance tests he took and could have had his pick of streams. But when he started asking around, everyone told him that IIT was the best insititute to join not just for academic excellence but for the overall environment: the research that takes place, for example, and the quality of peers. “Now, after three years here and knowing what friends do in other engineering colleges,” he says, “I know what they were saying was actually true.” When Anubhav’s father got admission to IIT-Delhi in the early 70s, he went for the mandatory counselling at the institute to find out which subject he could take. He wanted electrical engineering, but the counsellor said that he wouldn’t get it. His father said, ‘Thank you’ and got up to leave. “By then, about one minute had passed,” recounts the son, “That counsellor told him to wait and then it became a long conversation... The point is that IITs were a lot less serious and hyped at that time. Now, no one is going to walk out of that room.” For the bulk of the student population nowadays, the objective of an IIT education is a good placement in a high-paying job—consultancy, finance and other stuff that requires no training as an engineer—at a private firm in need of smart people. Anubhav says he has recently grown fond of his focal subject of study, Materials Science, and wants to continue with it. Even so, he says one part of him is bent on taking the campus placement route to a good job. It would depend on a lot of factors. He is doing an internship at Deutsche Bank and this will tell him whether finance interests him. He will also see whether his Masters of Science applications get accepted by some prestigious institute like MIT or Stanford in the US. If they do not, he will probably give up Materials Science for a non-core career (in IIT lingo, ‘core’ is one’s subject of specialisation). Also, he doesn’t like the idea of going abroad—which is unavoidable if he wants to stick to his core. But most students, says Anubhav, are not like him. “Typically, by third year, people are clear whether they want core or non-core,” he says, “There are very 17 june 2013

few who switch from core to non-core and vice versa.”

tudents also exhibit a degree of cynicism towards their academic environment. The reasons they cite for this are falling academic standards, dissatisfaction with professors and an overall lack of practical relevance of their course material. The student intake of India’s five original IITs has gone up from 200250 in the 1980s to 800-1,000 per institute today. The faculty and facilities have not been able to keep pace. The studentteacher ratio has worsened over the years and nothing has been done to reverse it. Dr Vivek Verma, assistant professor at IIT-Kanpur, is alarmed by the level of indifference on display in his class. “After all the effort I put in to prepare [my teaching] material,” he says, “the least I look forward to is an enthusiastic and interactive session.” It disappoints him. Students often come late and he occasionally finds them asleep or busy with mobile phones. “They’re quite unapologetic about it.” After four years of academic life, Suneet Choudhary, 22, a fourth-year student in IIT-Delhi’s Department of Mathematics, is certain that his education will have no role to play in his career. “There is no practical application of whatever I have studied in the kind of work I am interested in doing later,” he says. “I don’t really care about my department any longer. IIT-Delhi has given me what it could.” Choudhary’s father is a lecturer at MNIT, Jaipur; his brother, an alumnus of IIM-Lucknow. He took up Mathematics after a budding interest in the subject and his family’s insistence that he study in Delhi. As the semesters rolled by, he found his department biased towards research and out of tune with the demands of companies that make campus visits to hire Maths students. This lack of utility explains his loss of interest in studies, he says. His attendance has dropped sharply. In this, he risks flouting IIT-Delhi’s 75 per cent minimum attendance rule and being penalised for it (a grade point loss). But Choudhary considers it a risk worth taking, since it also grants him time to pursue other dreams. “I am an entrepreneur,” he says. “I am working on a ven-

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Suneet, who is busy on a venture, risks flouting IIT-Delhi’s attendance rule. But he considers it a risk worth taking. “I am an entrepreneur,” he says ture with two of my batchmates, and we are in the process of having it funded.”

hilai is a small town. Everyone usu-

ally knows what everyone else’s kids are doing, and there is fierce competition among parents and kids alike. Monika Shukla, who is from a middle-class Bhilai family of nine, says this phenomenon is what turned her competitive. She was interested in both Biology and Mathematics. Her JEE rank was above No 1,000, and it got her into IIT-Kharagpur’s Department of Biotechnology. “I loved Biology, but I wasn’t entirely sure of the next step to be taken at that point,” she says, “And my father wanted me to take up engineering, so I went that way.” Over the four years of her BTech, Monika kept up her determination to outperform others. She landed a couple of well-paying internships—at Dublin City University after her second year and Goldman Sachs after her third. Goldman also offered her a job, which she accepted. The money that she earned during her internships and her two-year tenure at Goldman paid a part of her own tuition fees at IIT and also the fees of her younger siblings. That aside, she has bought her family a new air-conditioner, among other things. The past few years have been the proudest of her life. She is currently a fellow at Young India Fellowship Program, a one-year Delhi-based postgraduate programme in Liberal Arts and Leadership run in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania. From engineering and biology to liberal arts, what explains her switch? “At Goldman, I felt I was getting typecast as a coder, and I wasn’t really interested in it,” says Monika, “Also, my professional and personal growth was not as satisfactory as it once was. Since I was good at my work, my manager wouldn’t be very keen to approve of any interdepartmental transfers that I wanted, which made

progress difficult for me. The [liberal arts] programme seemed promising because I felt it could give me a broader set of career options to choose from.” Dr Pramath Sinha, founding dean of the Indian School of Business (ISB) and an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur, says that today’s students are more confident of what they can achieve because they have super-successful role models among the IIT alumni. “During my time at IITKanpur, the first IITians were just in their forties,” he says, “Today, when you look around, you see plenty of IITians who have gone on to do really good work across different fields. My guess is that this has played a huge role in opening the minds of students.” The question of taking up a job versus going for higher studies is a major point of deliberation for students. Over the past few years, an increasingly large proportion have opted against higher studies. Or even going abroad. In the early 2000s, Professor Prasad left IIT-Bombay to go on deputation for five years to head the Indo French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research in Delhi. When he returned, one of the things he noticed was that the number of students going abroad had fallen. Earlier, he would write seven or eight recommendations a year for those who wanted to study overseas. Over the past three years, he has not written a single one. “A larger fraction of students are looking for jobs within the country,” he says. Professor Prasad observes that firstyear students often ask him what they should pursue to get a larger salary or why they should take up a course with no job-market utility. “I tell them that everything you do in life is not business,” he says, “For example, you don’t go to a movie asking what it’s use is; you go just for entertainment. Similarly, education has to be done for education, because there is a pleasure in learning new things.” The lure of the job market, however, is hard for students to resist. Many of them take up jobs right after they graduate. The annual pay packets offered by consultancies, banks or companies such as Schlumberger and ITC Ltd go into seven figures. This, rather than overseas, is where the money is. Those who do go abroad now go chiefly for academics. Anant Govind Rajan, a open www.openthemagazine.com 41

getty images

music band to play. A lot of people felt you can get better and cheaper Indian bands,” says Anubhav, “Now debates like that have started.”

core concern Student intake at IITs has gone up, but the faculty and facilities have not been able to keep pace

final-year student at IIT-Delhi, will leave for MIT in a few months to pursue his PhD. “It isn’t the research facilities so much as the lack of infrastructure in our institutes that bugs people,” he says. “Look at our hostels. Is an improvement in my living conditions while I pursue my PhD too much to ask for?” Shruthy Suresh, who wants to do cancer research, says that although Indian institutions such as the IITs or Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology are good places to work, she wants to pursue research at the best place possible. “I am not saying that such facilities aren’t available here, but the limited funding for this kind of research and lack of flexibility and freedom with respect to research work... are why I want to go to the US.”

is the editor of IITBombay’s campus magazine Insight. The most popular article ever published in its history, he claims, was about a new gay support group called Saathi. “We got 20,000 unique views or something like that,” he says, “A lot of students were fine with the support group, a lot of students were like ‘Kya chal raha hai’ (what’s going on)? Some faculty members were also against it at a personal level, but they did not oppose it because they realised it was important for it to be there.” While IIT students are still apolitical, debates on campus issues have been nubhav

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Gender mingling is still discouraged by the authorities, an attitude that students say is utterly anachronistic in a fastchanging world off campus pushing old boundaries. Recently, something interesting happened with Mood Indigo, IIT-Bombay’s cultural festival. Usually, there are two overall coordinators of the festival who are selected from the Mood Indigo team. They always win because no one else contests. Last year, however, a third person stood for election to a post. “He had done nothing and knew nothing about Mood Indigo,” says Anubhav, “I had made his manifesto for him. Even I knew nothing about Mood Indigo. We just randomly picked up good points to put in. He didn’t do any campaigning and just went to one wing to canvass votes. He still got huge support. He lost, but got a lot of votes for no effort whatsoever.” The election sparked off a debate within the Mood Indigo team. Usually, the team decides what events would feature in the festival. This time, they have sent out a questionnaire across campus to survey the opinions of IITians on what the festival’s aim should be and what kind of events it should have. “For example, a lot of its budget goes into getting a foreign

big debate across all IITs in recent

times has been the policy of restricting boys and girls from entering each others’ hostels. At IIT-Madras, previously, girls were allowed into boys’ hostels from 9 am to 9 pm, and boys weren’t permitted into girls’ hostels at all. After a few reports of harassment and complaints from parents, interaction between boys and girls was restricted last year to the visitor’s lounges, and that too only from 9 am to 9 pm. A blanket ban was not imposed only because of stiff student opposition to such a harsh measure. Things are no better at IIT-Delhi and IIT-Kharagpur, where gender mingling is still discouraged by the authorities, an attitude that students say is utterly anachronistic in a fast-changing world off campus. That is not to say that students can be relied upon to promote gender equality and be liberal. Being female on such a heavily male-dominated campus—with ratios as poor as one girl to 14 boys—is sometimes difficult. Sarneet Broca, a final-year student at IIT-Delhi, was the first female president of its indoor sports club, which had an even worse gender ratio than the rest of the campus. “That in itself was difficult enough,” she says, “When I tried to contest for the position of Institute Secretary for Sports Council, I faced a lot of informal opposition just on account of my being a girl. Of course, they didn’t let me take the post.” “Trophy treatment” by boys is “almost an unspoken law” on the campus of IITMadras, says Shruthy. “I just can’t seem to get rid of the stares,” she says, “But I don’t really care anymore. I have been seeing this for four years now.” So even as things change for IITians, they often stay the same. Consider the choices in Shruthy life. They are paradoxical. She has an uncompromising ambition to study the most modern advancements in science related to cancer, even as orthodox concepts like caste and parental approval for marriage shadow her personal life. Progress that races ahead with remnants of the past in tow. n 17 june 2013

between the sheets

great expectations

How can someone else know what you want in bed if you don’t?

ast week, I had a strange conversation with a kid cousin I’m particularly close to. I’m her shield against parental missiles and the antidote to colony aunties’ stings. Every major life decision is discussed with me before going to battle with her parents. But for some strange reason, we’d never discussed sex. Until last week. A few months ago, her parents introduced her to a lovely young man. A few weeks ago, they got engaged, and by year-end, my kid sister will be on her honeymoon. Which means we can no longer pretend she’s too young for sex. So I took her out for dinner, ordered pitchers of Sangria (in case she told me something I really needed to forget by the morning), and asked her to spill the beans. Had she tested the goods before placing the order? If not, did she have a POA to find out? She had no answers. Because, as it turns out, my kid sister wasn’t pretending—she truly did believe she was too young to have sex. “I don’t know, man. I guess I always thought it would be romantic to save myself for marriage. I want the first time to be magical.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her what first times outside of Mills & Boons are like. The confused fumbles. The mental acrobatics involved in getting the time (not too soon, not too late), the distance (of condom from hand) and the speed (at which the equipment needs to go in) right. No one tells you that. No one warns you that if you’re not doing Pilates, the first time can seem like an advanced physical education class, the kind you were so desperate to avoid, you prayed you’d get your period. To this day, I don’t know why I bothered to have a second go at something that had been mildly uncomfortable and mostly disappointing. I hoped my sister’s dreams of a magical first time relied on a better plan than my own. They didn’t. “We’ll be married, dude. He’ll know what to do,” she told me confidently. I was horrified. Where had she gotten this unfair and unrealistic expectation that a stranger would know what to do to her body better than she knew herself? Had my never-masturbated-before-because-what-if-I-hurt-myself sister, without knowing it, admitted that she, as a woman, didn’t feel intelligent enough to know her own vagina? That a man would know it better? It’s a good thing I’d

sonali k

ordered all those pitchers of Sangria. For the next few days, I kept replaying our conversation in my head. In a strange way, it made perfect sense. I’ve often wondered why so many women I know are so dissatisfied with their sex lives. Were so many men really so bad at it? It had been convenient to think men were too selfish to care about what women really wanted in bed. But what excuse do women have for not making the effort? Again, I’m reminded of my first time. After our first clumsy attempt, I took it upon myself to figure out what had gone wrong. With the determination of a 19-year-old who thought she was going to get married and make babies with the boy she’d lost her virginity to, I attacked Google. I would make Mission: Enjoy Sex a success. The first step was to learn everything I could about the machinery I was dealing with. I thought that would be the easy part. I’d paid attention in biology and knew what everything was supposed to look like. The day I actually looked, I fell off my carefully positioned chair. As it turns out, the textbooks had been lying. I looked nothing like the diagrams. Everything looked indistinguishable, way more complicated than I’d expected. For a while, I felt like a freak of nature. Maybe this is where it starts, this mistaken belief that someone else must know our bodies better. We put our faith in science, then family, then pop culture, and finally, a man—but never in ourselves. Do we ever truly believe that we know what’s best for us? Not to be defeated, I decided to indulge in a gynaecological photo-fest and learnt that we’re not all factory manufactured. Since one size doesn’t fit all, perhaps we’d all benefit from a little self-exploration. Perhaps our sex lives would be a whole lot better if we allowed ourselves to find out what our bodies liked, instead of dumping all the responsibility on some poor sod’s shoulders. Over the years, I’ve learnt that sexuality isn’t static; it’s a wildly zipping graph. And only you can pinpoint your exact location on the spectrum—that is, if you let yourself find out. n

Had my sister admitted that she didn’t feel intelligent enough to know her own vagina?

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Sonali K was holding on to her virtue, and then she fell in love...with several men. She drinks whisky, not Cosmopolitan 17 June 2013

mindspace true Life

Speak My Language

O p e n s pa c e

Ranbir Kapoor Deepika Padukone Salman Khan

n p lu

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani Hangover Part III

61 Cinema reviews

Logitech UE Boombox ‘Ladies World Heart Federation’ Automatic Collection Creative MA 930 Headphones

Tech & style

Regenerating Bones with Clay CO2 Makes Arid Region Greener Child Abuse and Cortical Changes

Science

The Sadness of M Night Shyamalan

cinema

Rituparno’s Renaissance

o b i t ua ry

The Magician’s Daughter

a rt s

How I Write: Kishwar Desai

books

Arthritic, Wrestler, PETA Hunk

46 64

raul irani

chhoo mantar How Maneka Sorcar has tweaked a magical legacy 52

true life

Peta’s Sexiest Man Alive The story of how an arthritic village boy who was laughed at became a celebrity wrestler with a cause Mihir Srivastava

“D

ara Singh has come to fight.” This is how five-year-old Sangram Singh was ridiculed by young wrestlers when he expressed his desire to be one like them. As a child, Sangram Singh alias Sanjit Kumar suf-

fered from debilitating arthritis and was confined to a wheel chair. This condition “robbed me of my childhood,” he says. Born into a poor agrarian joint family in Haryana’s Rohtak district, Singh went on, through sheer grit and against all odds, to represent

India in various International competitions. He is now 28, a model, and has to his credit a film—Dharna Unlimited— that didn’t trouble the box office much. He won India’s first wrestling reality show. He has now acquired celebrity status. He is invited to schools to give

jet set Singh has promised himself that he’ll take his parents to New York some day

ritesh uttamchandani

motivational talks to impressionable children. He has pledged the donation of his organs after death. Life seemed to have come full circle when recently he was offered the part of Dara Singh in a biopic on the wrestling legend. Due to his chronic arthritis, doctors had ruled out a normal life for Singh. He was dejected, but the only option left was to try. He was adamant. He started by forcing himself to stand as long as his shaky legs could support him. As weeks went by, he could stay standing longer. His capacity to bear pain, he realised, also increased. He would try to stand holding a bucket full of water. His perseverance was transforming into strength in his limbs. His confidence, too, was growing. By the time he was in his early teens, he had won the battle against arthritis. In Singh’s village, there is a wrestler in every family. It’s a privilege no one wants to miss. His older brother was a wrestler, but when a freak accident left him impaired, Singh decided he would become the family’s wrestler. His mother was supportive, and so was his brother, but his father’s lack of support was explained by his lack of faith in Singh. “My mother would hide a glass of milk for me every day,” he says, something virtually impossible to do so in a joint family of paltry means. Every day, he would walk 10 km to the village dangal to practice. There was no turning back.

reclaim itself. As an example, he cites his own miraculous recovery from a debilitating aliment. He claims to have cured himself of arthritis by following diet rich in dairy products and including a regular intake of gooseberry, aloe vera, black pepper and other herbs readily available in nature. He would also get a regular massage with sesame oil. “One day I will write a book on naturopathy,” he says, restating his belief:

Singh isn’t evasive about his humble beginnings. He has made

assets of his liabilities. At showbiz gatherings, he speaks in Hindi. This is not a compromise, but an assertion—he knows it adds to his

rustic sex appeal.

He is honest, and politically correct to a fault. His wisecracks border on clichés, but he makes them with

“I

promised myself that I would fly my parents to New York one day,” he tells me, when we meet at a coffee shop in Delhi’s Khan Market. He orders fresh juice with a firm ‘no’ to a cup of coffee. He returns the glass of water because it is too cold for him to drink. He is not being finicky, he explains— food makes a man; it’s not just about what you eat, but the way you eat it. “Nature cures,” he insists. He is a pure vegetarian, and has great faith in naturopathy. He follows his routine and diet with religious fervour. The body, he believes, has an immense capacity to cure, repair and fight diseases—a good diet helps the body

17 June 2013

conviction “nature cures.” Last year, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) nominated him the ‘sexiest man alive’. A vegetarian, he has even posed nude to promote the cause.

espite representing India at var-

ious international competitions, Singh didn’t have enough money. He

is demanding of life: good food, good clothes, a car, and a constant struggle to do something that would redeem him. For him, redemption meant material well-being. It was time for him to go professional. “I didn’t have money to treat the injuries I sustained while fighting,” he says. He participated in mud wrestling fights—mitti ka dangal—where the winner could make anything from Rs 2,000 to 20,000 per fight, depending on its severity and the reputation of the opponent. He liked fighting for money; it honed his fighting skills and provided a ready supply of cash. He fought so he could pay for the treatment of injuries, and sustained even more injuries trying to. This approach wasn’t sustainable. He broke his knee and was out of business for months. Yet, thankfully, he managed to collect enough money to give his ambition wings. He flew to Russia in 2007 to train in Greco-Roman-style wrestling for five months. He became a better fighting machine. What he had learnt from India’s age-old wrestling tradition was sharpened by these modern techniques of wrestling as a competitive sport. He was ranked among the top ten professional wrestlers in the world, and was recently conferred with an award for the World’s Best Professional Wrestler by the South Africa-based World Wrestling Professionals (WWP). This was highlevel recognition and success. He is a record holder, he informs me, for tossing a man the most number of times—36—in a minute. Later that year, he travelled to Dubai for a fight. He won the fight, some cash, and an offer to play a lead role in 100% De Dhana Dhan, a reality wrestling show made for Indian audiences. The show changed the circumstances of his life. Its shooting took place in Johannesburg, South Africa; Singh hobnobbed with the glitterati. He did two more reality shows: Big Toss and Survivor, the internationally famous show where contestants are left on an island to survive the elements, construct shelters, build fires, find water, scrounge for food and do whatevopen www.openthemagazine.com 47

pravin talan

AU Naturel Vegan, health-nut, organ donor, a believer in natururopathy and PETA’s ‘sexiest man alive’

er else they must to survive for around 45 days. Singh survived the gruelling reality show for 45 days, losing 15 kg of weight and his wrestler’s bulk in the process. It was a blessing in disguise. He now looked athletic, suitable to play a lead role in a Bollywood movie, and not just a hulking wrestler who would most likely be cast as the villain’s man Friday. Model Veena Malik proposed to him on the sets of Survivor, tantalising the grapevine. But by then, he had found the love of his life. He lives with modelactress Payal Rohatgi in Mumbai. They are an odd couple. A rural lad with good looks—he resembles Sylvester Stallone, his role model, a bit—makes a home with a glamour girl in the city 48 open

of dreams. Some call this oddity opportunistic. “It is not a marriage of convenience,” Singh clarifies, “We are not doing each other a favour.” They are together because there was no other way. He is not an underdog, either. He has 45,000 plus followers on Twitter, while Payal has only 25,000. He also has a following on Facebook that would make many celebrities look the other way. He regularly posts wisecracks.

esides being an organ-donor and a mascot of vegetarianism and naturopathy, Singh is also big on charity. He has formed an NGO, Love n Courage, which aims to offer love to disabled children and give courage to women.

He wants somebody to write a book on him and make a movie on his life. This might seem boastful, but Singh is convinced his life is his message. There was a lot of push-and-pull. The ride to Mumbai was not easy. He walks through the world of glamour flaunting his earthy rusticity, still a wrestler at heart. His strong foundation, a deep connection to his family, supports the weight of his ambitions. Having worked on his diction, he is now fairly articulate in English, but is not evasive about his humble beginnings. He has made assets of his liabilities. At showbiz gatherings, he speaks in Hindi. This is not a compromise, but an assertion—he knows it adds to his rustic sex appeal. He wears his honesty on his sleeve, and is politically correct to a fault. His wisecracks border on clichés, but he makes them with conviction. That he acts on his words is perhaps what sets him apart in an arena of patent shamsters. Before he moved to Mumbai two years ago, he was an employee of the Delhi Police. In Delhi, a daily visit to Lodi Gardens, where the rich, famous and influential go for evening strolls, was a must. It inspired him. He would arrive late in the evening in his golden coloured Maruti Wagon R, with two loaves of bread that he would feed ducks with. They seem to know him, waddling to the shore of this Lodi Gardens pond upon hearing his voice. Then he would do his customary jog and body weight exercises. This was his quality time with himself. Not much has changed. He still wears tight jeans and a body-hugging shirt that emphasises his muscular frame, with polished boots. His stride has a certain lethargy. Walking towards his car after our meeting, he says, “In Bollywood, one has to perform all the time, on and off the sets. I am playing my part.” Those laughing faces that ridiculed him as a child are still vivid in his memory. “Those laughing faces visit me, motivating me to change. I am not a laughing stock,” he says. “They keep me going. I have miles to go before I sleep.” n 17 June 2013

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Books How I Write

The Hermit After years of putting off a lifelong passion, Kishwar Desai finds she must shut herself off from the world in order to write—but the world still seeps into her writing GUNJEET SRA

ishwar Desai gave up news for fiction in 2010, when she quit journalism to write her first novel, but continues to address issues relevant to contemporary Indian society. Her novels—centred around Simran Singh, an independent middle-aged woman with a penchant for investigating social injustice—are well researched and tend to bear an eerie resemblance to real life. Her first novel,

Witness the Night (2010), tackled female foeticide; her second, Origins of Love (2012), was about commercial surrogacy in India; and her latest, The Sea of Innocence, deals with sexual violence. Through her writing, she attempts to voice issues she feels are significant, yet not discussed enough. Here, she talks about what it takes to be a writer and of choosing rape as a subject in a country roiled by sexual violence: getty images

Many journalists start out aspiring to be writers, yet seldom make the transition. Did you aspire to it or was it spontaneous?

I had wanted to be a writer much before I became a journalist. That was when I was around 10 years old, and because I was a voracious reader, I used to read the encyclopaedia at home... if I couldn’t find anything else. I read the collected works of Oscar Wilde and much of Tagore, though I don’t know how much I actually understood. I also read Harold Robbins and other things I wasn’t supposed to. I spent a lot of time on my own, and most of it was spent reading and writing. I actually think I was a much better writer in my teenage years than I am now. Everything was so fresh and exciting, I suppose. But then I fell in love with cinema and wanted to make films, instead of which I became a journalist and eventually joined TV, where I spent around 20 years. I wrote a play that got an award while I was a TV anchor, and was very tempted to go back to writing. But in those days it still paid very poorly compared to TV, and it seemed foolish to give up recognition and money. Till one day, I woke up—around seven years ago—and realised that perhaps I should do what had come so naturally to me when I was a child. And so here I am. I have no idea why I didn’t do this earlier—except that I was seduced by the visual medium.

Like many Indian women, you have grown up around gender violence and sexism, and like any author, you derive your fiction from personal experience. How hard is it to disengage and write about rape topically?

I must point out that I have had a fairly lucky life, in that I have faced minimal sexual harassment, compared to other horror stories I have heard. In fact, most of the places I worked and lived in were wonderful. So a great deal [of 17 june 2013

what] I write about is either based on research—that is, other people’s experiences—and of course, my own imagination. I... try to put issues like rape and sexual violence into a contemporary context. I think we need to do more of that in our literature, cinema and art. Rape and sexual harassment often happen in situations where you think you are safe, and often the perpetrators are people you trust. Very few of them come looking like Bollywood villains, laughing evilly and saying ‘Main teri izzat lootne aaya hoon (I have come to plunder your honour).’ Which is why, in all my three books, terrible exploitation does take place, but always disguised as ‘normal’.

What made you write about rape? Were you writing The Sea of Innocence when the Delhi Gang Rape happened?

This topic was chosen three years ago, when I first thought of the Simran Singh series. I had been horrified at the escalating number of attacks on women, and wondered why more was not being done to stop it and why it wasn’t becoming a national issue. The book had already been researched and was actually written last year [by] August. But when I was doing the final edit in December 2012, the horrific attack on Nirbhaya, as we know her, happened in Delhi. I felt I had to include it in my novel because, eerily, the time line of my novel was also [set in] December. It would be quite normal for the protagonist Simran Singh, a social workercum-detective... hunting for a missing girl in Goa, to be troubled by it. Thus, I made it part of the narrative.

Rape and sexual violence in India—even with all the media coverage, legislative changes and discussion—are still topical, in the sense that they’re always under the radar, only resurfacing when a new incident occurs. What do you think could be a solution to this? It can only be resolved when tough action is taken against rapists. Recently in the UK, a man has been found guilty of having... raped and murdered a fiveyear-old child. He has not confessed to the rape, but has still been given a life sentence. The case has been very public—within months, the sentence 17 june 2013

was delivered. It sends a very strong message. In India, we have all these tough laws; what we don’t have is action. I do not doubt that the killers of Nirbhaya will be condemned. But it will happen when the Government finds it politically useful—possibly closer to the elections, or [when it needs] to simply bury some bad news. Otherwise, there is no reason why the fast track courts could not have reached a conclusion by now. My only fear is that the case might have [been] bungled up by the police.

The protagonist in your novels, Simran, is a strong feminist icon—from her irreverence to her unconventional choices. Does she embody qualities you relate to? What were you thinking when you created her?

I think she was a character I missed very much in literature coming out of India. She is a stroppy, spunky woman with a sense of humour and a zest for life—and she is not a victim. You are right; she is a feminist icon in many ways. And yet, she is very human and foolish as well. She is always falling in love, is a flawed person, but is altruistic. She is the kind of person I would love to see more of in real life and in literature as well as cinema. Yes, she is unconventional, but I think all women have a bit of Simran Singh in them. And that is why I have found that, all over the world, people treat her like a ‘real’ person. They can relate to her— both men and women. In fact, men tell me that they wish they could find more women like her in reality.

You write with much emotion and clearly feel for your cause. Do you expect your readers to take something away from your books?

Oh, definitely. I do hope that the books start a discussion...To begin with, we must break the silence. If a girl has been molested, there is no shame in seeking justice, and [in] everyone else trying to help her. Women must come together to help other women, not condemn the woman who has been raped... If the police or judicial system falters, we must speak up about it, as [we did] in December. So perhaps my books [can] help push this change… But I hope that first and foremost, people will read

it like a novel, and then, hopefully, be motivated to change things.

Of the three Simran Singh novels, which was the toughest to write and why?

Each one is tough in its own way, because crime novels are much more complex than ‘normal’ novels. In crime fiction, all the pieces have to fit, so the plotting is very intensely thought through. Characters cannot be obviously villainous and the good guys cannot be all pure either. Perhaps Origins of Love, my last novel about the rent-awomb industry, was the toughest—because I had chosen to do it in two time zones, and each chapter was about a different character, so I had to make elaborate charts to make sure the trajectory was alright. But I wouldn’t say it was tough; I would say it was challenging, and therefore it was fun. I am one of those perverse people who enjoy doing difficult things. If anything is too easy, I get bored! Strange!

How long do you spend on a novel? Do you isolate yourself or give yourself timed working hours?

I normally spend a few months researching the book, if not longer— sometimes it is years—and then I give myself a deadline to complete the actual writing. Usually, it is driven by the expected publication date, or the date my agent would like it by. I find I write best if I am at home and not engaged socially. So when I am writing, I cut myself off completely. The Simran Singh novels have all been written in the space of a month or two... I do nothing but work on the book till the first draft is complete. Then, of course, it goes for editing and various queries come from the editor, and accordingly some tinkering takes place. But the narrative of the book remains unchanged. Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt was non-fiction, but was written in the same manner... While I did take frequent breaks [while] writing that book, the last few months were very intense, and quite isolated. I find that people misunderstand that self-imposed isolation. But there is no other way for me than to just hunker down and write. n open www.openthemagazine.com 51

arts Cut in Two She may be a magician, but PC Sorcar’s daughter Maneka Sorcar just cannot make gender discrimination disappear Aanchal Bansal

he beats pick up pace, the music gets catchier, and Maneka Sorcar is in the middle of a vanishing act when the lights in the hall go out. In a few seconds, one realises that this is one of Delhi’s summer power cuts and not part of the magic act. After a couple of uncomfortable minutes spent in the dark, the electricity is restored, the music and lights come back on, and Maneka, who was to reappear coiled in a box, is back on stage. She is visibly flustered, and fumbles, trying hard to smile. “And I forgot that we live in India,” she says, then switches back to her cheerful and comical avatar, reminiscent of her father PC Sorcar Junior who had left for a short tea break in the wings just before the lights went out. She hops about the stage, several assistants in tow, and tries to revive her audience’s good humour, cracking jokes just as her father would. The vanishing act is successful this time and she reappears out of a locked box amid the delighted wows of children and knowing smiles of parents who have seen this act performed earlier by Sorcar Junior and his father PC Sorcar Senior. As the ninth inheritor of the Sorcar family legacy, Maneka continues the show, happy to fill in the moments when her father, now 67, needs a break. Her next act, however, is anything but cheerful. The stage is dark, bathed in a dreary red. Maneka walks up, this time in a dark yet shiny costume, with the gait of a ringmaster. She has four male assistants, who take commands issued by her through hand gestures and eye movements, to manoeuvre a giant fan. She starts this act with a prelude to set the tone. “I am a Sorcar, but I am also a woman—perhaps the only known female magician in India and among the few in the world,” she says, moving 52 open

on to undertake the apparently perilous task of walking through the giant whirring blades of the fan. “Many told me not to attempt this, as it is very dangerous for a woman. I still did, and you will see how a woman can do it,” she says. As she slices through the blades, she gets a burst of thunderous applause from the audience. While she celebrates 100 years of Indrajaal—a production first put up by her grandfather Protul Chandra Sorcar—with a month-long show in the capital with her father Pradip Chandra Sorcar, Maneka also has a solo show called Maya Vigyan to her credit. The 135-minute solo production had made its debut a couple of years ago, and with parts of it gradually finding

“While my father has a combination of female and male assistants, I only have male assistants. This is to reiterate the fact that I am a woman,” says Maneka their way into Indrajaal, she seems to be finally finding space for herself in this predominantly male arena. Many of her acts during the show straddle issues of gender inequality and the commodification of women, and this appears to be part of her motivation as a stage performer. While making a statue of Venus disappear, she quips, “In India, we never appreciate the beauty in the nudity of Venus. For us, she is only nude. So I have sent her back to Rome... she belongs there.” In a city whose people are not known for their sensitivity towards women, this gets her another round of applause. Maneka bows in gratitude.

“I

think there have been few women in this field as they are considered softer,” she says after the show, as she and others of her family (including PC’s wife Jayshri) sign autographs backstage and pose politely-if-wearily for photographs with fans. Most conversations are in Bengali. Gleaming in costumes studded with stones and glitter—designed by Jayshri, who made an appearance in PC’s final act in which she slices his body into two parts—the trio stick together. The eldest of PC’s three daughters, Maneka, 33, says that magic was always an inherent part of growing up. While she has an MBA from University of Ohio in the US, she says that she preferred the stage to a lucrative job offer that her degree got her. While her two sisters Mumtaz and Moubani dabbled in magic and took on careers in acting and modelling, Maneka has been assisting her father since she was a child and now as a partner in several shows. As partners, they often engage in jugalbandis, the highlights of their shows. Some of these acts involve making the Taj Mahal disappear and cycling on water. There was once a time that she would dress up as a little boy for many of her father’s shows. Being the successor of the Sorcar tradition was a serious concern for Maneka when she married US-based engineer Sushmit Ranjan Haldar, someone she’d known since her time as a student in the US. Before the wedding last year, there were reports of the two families discussing Maneka’s future as a magician and the question of her retaining her family name. Since Maneka could not live in the US, Haldar moved to Kolkata with his family. “ I have the most supportive husband [possible],” she says. 17 june 2013

raul irani

nothing dark about this art It’s all about entertainment of the masses; here, the Sorcar family marks 100 years of the magic show Indrajaal with a performance in Delhi

After Maneka’s slice-through-thefan act, Sorcar Junior appears on stage to perform his X-ray eyes trick. Before that, a few words of praise for his daughter: “This was a very dangerous act that requires great skill. I am very proud of my daughter and must say that she is a befitting successor to our legacy,” says the magician, his silk turban-with-a-feather giving him the look of Air-India’s Maharaja. It is her mother, though, who is her inspiration, says Maneka, since she was always fascinated by the costumes she would design for her father’s shows. Jayshri joined her husband’s group when she replaced a female assistant during a show in Japan in 1972— a trip that was also their honeymoon. The hapless assistant, it seems, was way too slow in blindfolding Sorcar Junior for his X-ray eyes act. 17 june 2013

On being asked if the aggression displayed in Maneka’s act was an attempt at having her performance stand out from his, which is friendly and cheerful, even comical, Sorcar Junior invokes Ma Durga. “Women are soft yet they can be commanding and aggressive if need be,” he says. “While my father has a combination of female and male assistants,” says Maneka, “I only have male assistants. This is to reiterate the fact that I am a woman. I am claiming my spot in a male dominated space.”

s the Sorcars pack up for the day,

the wings of the stage resemble a warehouse with over a hundred assistants moving contraptions of all sorts around. A parent who has just secured an autograph of Sorcar Junior for his

six-year-old daughter tells the organisers that he grew up on Sorcar’s shows and wanted his daughter to enjoy the “few remnants of innocence left in this commercial world”. Maneka, who overhears this conversation, smiles with satisfaction. While her grandfather Protul Chandra Sorcar turned the ‘k’ in their family name into a ‘c’ to make it look a little like ‘sorceror’, she says that the popular association of magic with the dark arts is wrong. “Anything that is magic today becomes science tomorrow,” Sorcar Junior chips in. He adds that the famous Sorcar act called ‘Water of India’ first found a reference in Mughal Emperor Jehangir’s Jehangirnama. “Unfortunately, magic in India was relegated to fakirs and fake gurus till my grandfather revived it as a skill and performance art to entertain the masses,” Maneka says. n open www.openthemagazine.com 53

CINEMA The Alternative World of Rituparno Ghosh The filmmaker who allowed himself to appear naked on the silver screen Myna Mukherjee

“W

hat is more important? The way we actually live our lives or the way we really want to?” asks reel life Ritu, the protagonist in Aar Ekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story). Real life Ritu, Bengali arthouse cinema director/writer/actor, agent provocateur and my friend, probably echoed the same question in many an existential moment during his all too short life. I remember his saying once in an interview that of all his characters, the one he felt closest to was Binodini, played by Aishwarya Rai in his adaptation of Chokher Bali (Dust in the Eyes). Binodini stood on a threshold of social transformation as she struggled for social acceptance as a widow after the British had legislated widow remarriage in the face of countrywide resistance. Rituparno felt a strong sense of identification with the tragic isolation of someone caught in the half-light of legitimacy. It was this isolation perhaps that made him one of the most sensitive Indian directors of recent years. In a society with inequalities so deeply entrenched, he put across the struggle of being a human being—swallowed by desire, choked by experience, trapped by social expectations—with lyrical melancholy. And like all accomplished tragedians, he was the master of the dark poem, the kind of poetry that only comes through when bleakness is almost unbearable. In the 21 years since he made his first film, Rituparno was part of over 24 films. He directed and wrote over 21 of them, and acted in his last three releases as the lead. His films have won over 18 National Awards, and have travelled widely across the international festival circuit. He is acknowledged as the central figure in the late 1990s’ renaissance of Bengali Cinema that broke what was otherwise a bleak period. Best known for emotional dramas, 54 open

his career spanned genres as diverse as children’s films (Hirer Angti, 1992) and murder mysteries (Shubho Mahurat). At a time when cinema was centered around the ‘Hero’, Ritu chose to make film after film about women. Unishe April and Titli, with Aparna Sen and Konkona Sen, both explored the tensions and intimacies of a motherdaughter relationship. Bariwalli won Kirron Kher a Best Actress National Award for her portrayal of an ageing spinster in a decrepit house in a state of slow decay. Dahan explored the apathy and misogyny of society around victims of sexual assault. Ritu was always willing to take risks. From incest to infidelity, he invested the hitherto sacrosanct middle-class

Over many late night conversations with him, I came to understand what courage and conviction were. I realised how difficult it must have been to ask producers to take risks Bengali family on screen with narratives that had been wiped off cinematically in the sanitised blaze of mainstream depictions. In Utsab, Dosar and Shob Choritro Kalponik, he explored complicated, damaged and often flawed human relations in a sensitive but unsentimental way. Rituparno was willing to break cinematic norms as well. For example, Dosar (Companion), a tale of an unfaithful marriage in the afterlight of an accident, was shot completely in black-and-white. Shob Choritro Kalponik departs from linear narrative and descends into surrealism as a stunningly beautiful Bipasha Basu is interrupted in her infidelity by her poet husband’s death, an event that leads her to

re-interrogate her entire relationship with him. Inspired by Bengal cultural icons Satyajit Ray and Tagore, Rituparno’s films helped define the next generation of Bengal New Wave cinema. He paid tribute to Rabindranath Tagore by reinterpreting three classics: Chokher Bali (which won him the Locarno Best Film Award in 2003), Nauka Dubi (a period film) and his most recent release Chitrangada. By the time I came to know him, Rituparno Ghosh was a star director and had earned the reputation of being something of a diva. His Hindi film Raincoat, featuring Aishwarya Rai and Ajay Devgn, had established him as one of the few to cross over from regional cinema to Bollywood. Other mainstream Hindi actors like Manisha Koirala and Bipasha Basu had also worked with him. He had hosted two celebrity chat shows, Ebong Rituparno and Rituparno and Co, in which he addressed his guests fondly as tui (an intimate ‘you’). His most telling moment on TV was when he publicly scolded Mir, a well-known mimicry and standup artist. Mir had in the past used Ritu as material for his comic routine. Ritu shamed him on national television in that one show, asking him if he realised how prejudiced he was in poking fun at effeminate men. Ritu himself had always been effeminate, but he slowly claimed his queer self in public spaces. His flamboyant turbans, kohled eyes and flowing robes earned him notoriety and a grudging respect in Kolkata’s art appreciation circles. It was his city, one that ‘could neither ignore nor embrace him’, in his own words. I was curator at the I-View film festival in New York when we invited Aar Ekti Premer Golpo for a screening. I had been following Ritu’s films for years and was already a fan. Yet, we were especially excited about this film. It was 17 june 2013

india picture

androgynous Approach Rituparno Ghosh (1963‑2013)

the first time Ritu was to act in a movie, and that too, in the role of an openly gay filmmaker. The film’s director was Kaushik Ganguly, but it was Ritu’s story. His involvement in every frame of the film was well known. Discussing pre-festival logistics with Ritu was difficult, to say the least. But all that became inconsequential the day we, the programming committee, saw the film. There was no one in the room who did not understand how momentous that film was in its representation of queer life. It felt as if his entire career had led up to the courage it took to make that one film. 17 june 2013

Rituparno made Memories in March and Chitrangada after that. These dealt defiantly and unapologetically with the exile of homosexuality, with retribution and, finally, redemption. Each was an intense exhalation for queer audiences. In the deafening din of mainstream heteronormativity and the trite stereotypes that are often the only representation of a largely silent and invisibilised community, here was cinema that made them belong. There was desire, pain, complexity, beauty, isolation and finally poetry. In his specificity of representation, he created cinema that was universal.

Over the many late night conversations I had with him over time, even as we discussed such things as what he should wear on the red carpet, I came to understand what courage and conviction were. I realised how difficult it must have been for him in the current climate of commercial safety to ask producers to take risks on his films; to ask actors to stretch themselves and take that leap of faith with him; and to let his own self appear unveiled and so vulnerable on the silver screen. Every story of his was personal, no matter how fictional. I wept when I heard he’d left. n open www.openthemagazine.com 55

CINEMA The Curious Case of Manoj Night Shyamalan Hollywood’s black sheep talks about his reputation and fears—and of filmmaking as therapy NIKHIL TANEJA

ttempting to fathom what exactly it was that caused Manoj ‘Night’ Shyamalan to go from being a darling of critics at just 29— an Academy Award nominee for Best Director and Best Screenplay for The Sixth Sense in 1999—to being one of the most loathed and despised directors of his generation, is almost as much of a struggle as trying to understand some of the plot twists in his sci-fi-suspensethriller dramas. Having broken out in mainstream Hollywood with The Sixth Sense, which not only bedazzled critics with its ‘twist ending’ but also became a worldwide smash hit, making over $600 million on a relatively small budget of $40 million, Shyamalan received offers to write and direct films of franchises like Indiana Jones and Harry Potter and was hailed as ‘The Next Spielberg’—no small achievement for even the most versatile of directors, and Shyamalan was only three films old at the time. For Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002), which followed The Sixth Sense, critical reactions were mostly positive, and even if there was some dissent over his trick endings and laboured creation of ‘atmosphere’, their box office numbers were enough to make Shyamalan invincible in the view of film studios. Everyone loved Shyamalan, a first generation Indian-American boy from Mahe, Puducherry—or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, depending on which side of the world you were rooting for him from—who loved to scare and surprise audiences in equal measure, and was bloody good at it too. Trouble began with The Village (2004), about a village turning inward in terror, in which Shyamalan’s trademark ‘twist’ ending not only fell flat, but failed so spectacularly, it moved the late legendary critic Roger 56 open

Ebert to remark that, ‘To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes.’ Other American film critics followed suit, and soon, there was such a clamour for Shyamalan’s fall from grace, it seemed almost as if the entire critic community had been anxiously awaiting such a movie, just so they could pounce on him for trying to be too Hitchcockian for his own good. Shyamalan didn’t help matters by defiantly defending his movie in interviews to all and sundry, nor by creating and violently killing off the character of a smug movie critic in his next film, Lady in the Water (2006), in which

“Misconceptions of me can sometimes be not great for the movie. With my name attached, audiences get the wrong impression...what they feel my name means might be a little bit off from what I’m making” Shyamalan himself plays a visionary writer whose ideas are so momentous they inspire presidents and change the course of the world. In future interviews, Shyamalan would laugh whenever the topic was brought up, calling it tongue-in-cheek, but critics found the film singularly unfunny and unintelligent, and hated it with both their hearts and their pens. That hastened Shyamalan’s downward spiral, and though all his films, barring Lady in the Water, have turned a profit, everything he’s touched since has been a critical disaster, with his last film, The Last Airbender (2010) being called ‘The Worst Movie Ever’ by Entertainment Weekly. But Shyamalan

has marched on, undeterred, even producing the indie horror flick The Devil, which was publicised as being ‘From the mind of Manoj Night Shyamalan.’ Shyamalan has never admitted that he’s made a mistake with any of his movies, reasoning that his films take time to find their place in history after preconceived notions around them have passed. It’s hard to say whether he is unfairly castigated by biased critics and audiences, or, as Collider.com puts it, ‘if he’s delusional, narcissistic or just super defensive’. Ahead of the release of his next film, the Will Smith-starrer After Earth, which releases in India on 7 June, Shyamalan answers questions about critics, his family and his ‘obsession with fear’. Interview excerpts:

Did working with global star Will Smith change your approach in any way? How is After Earth different from other movies that have been sold on your name and under your sub-genre?

You know, it’s a great advantage to have a partner who can help define the movie, and when we sell the movie, all I’m looking for is to define the movie in the most accurate way possible. That’s always my goal. And when it’s generally just me at its helm, misconceptions of me can sometimes be not great for the movie. Because with my name attached, the audience... get[s] the wrong impression. Where I am concerned, I make all types of movies, but what they feel [my] name means might be a little bit off from what exactly I’m making. But this time, I had the opportunity, with Will [Smith], to define the movie perfectly. I was very excited to have this, and we’ll see when the movie comes out, but my hope is that the expectations and the movie are much more in line...and that thereby, the 17 june 2013

reuters

The Introspector “Why do I have this grey feeling when I wake up? What is this about? Am I not balanced?”

immediate reaction would be a very positive one.

Some of your films, like Unbreakable, may not have opened to widespread acclaim, but went on to become cult hits. But in the last couple of years, there seems to be a lot of negative buzz around your name, even before a movie release. Do you think this is because audiences have come to expect a twist ending in every movie, and are disappointed when you fail to live up to their expectations? Maybe. I don’t know. There are a lot of theories (laughs)...I believe that, with time, the context of the movies change. If you have a conversation about any movie of mine, let’s say The Village, you’re going to have a very different conversation with a hundred people today than you would have had with a 17 june 2013

hundred people on the day it opened. Getting away from expectations and getting away from the context that each movie is born into has been a really positive thing for my movies. Once my movies are away from that, they are seen as the stories they were meant to be seen as, rather than second guessed for twists. With After Earth—at the end of the day, it’s a father-son story at the centre. You could do this as a play on stage. That was my goal and my hope for the movie. All the razzle-dazzle and [computer graphics], the creatures and all the other stuff was just the tapestry on which I did the drawing. But the drawing is just a personal story. With each of my movies, I aspire for them to be cross-genre. It’s always a drama and

something else, but the problem is that they usually release it as a ‘something else’ and that’s where all the expectations come into play. In my heart, they are all dramas.

This is your second film with a massive budget. With the number of superhero movies and kind of global box office openings such ‘event’ movies get, are you getting to make the kind of films you want? Is there pressure from the studio or even from the audience to make event movies? Is that why you have moved away from your more intimate films? No, no. I try to write about things that I’m going through. I have two teenage daughters and a small daughter, and so I have all these feelings of letting go of my kids, [letting them go] out into the

open www.openthemagazine.com 57

world, into the dangers that they may face, and I’m constantly thinking if I’ve taught them well and [if] I get to keep whispering advice to them. It’s a very vulnerable moment where the roles shift a bit, from complete protector to letting them go out into the world and become their own person. So, when I look at my movies later, each of them should be a kind of a diary of where I was at that time as a human being. After I know what I personally want the movies to be, then come things like scale, budgets and release dates. If you choose to make a summer movie, then you have to compete at a certain level of muscularity. So my last two were summer movies and I’m probably going to make smaller movies the next couple of times.

What is it about fear that fascinates you so much that you’ve spent such a huge part of your life exploring it?

I think ‘fear’ is a genetic thing that was built in us to keep our species alive longer, but I don’t know if it’s a great thing for us as individuals anymore. I think it’s very stifling with regard to growth. It has so many negative aspects to it. When we fear things that we don’t know, we ascribe to [them] a negative value. If we don’t know people from [an alien] country... we fear them. If we don’t know about a job [in] another city... we are scared we might not do well there. I think fear isn’t conducive to personal growth. It’s always something I’ve struggled with myself and I’m generally a very fearful guy. So my movies are all kind of dissertations on that subject of: ‘Does anybody else have these questions about whether our involuntary mechanism for fear is a good thing or not?’ I also think of all my movies as therapy—you try to work something out emotionally. Maybe that is what all art is to the artist. I’m trying to say something, I’m trying to understand why I feel this way. All the things I make movies about are still there. Maybe they’ll never go away. It’s just [a] conversation about why I feel scared, why I’m fearful. I get very angry with myself for constantly living in a state of apprehension. You know, ‘What will 58 open

happen when the movie opens?’ ‘Oh my gosh, will they like it?’ ‘Will they be mad at me?’ ‘Will it be a success?’ That is ridiculous. I’ve gotta stay in the moment.

Since your films have a lot to do with spirituality and have often featured children in central roles, I’m curious if there was a particular incident or phase in your life that got you so keenly inclined towards this ‘dissertation’, as you call it. Was there? I don’t know if there was a particular incident. There are certainly plenty of incidents...[when] I got scared or there was something dramatic that happened when I was a kid, but I don’t know if there was any one incident that sent me on that trajectory. Being an overly sensitive kid, I think, was part of the equation. I was always scared to be alone. My parents knew I

“I’m generally a very fearful guy. So my movies are all kind of dissertations on that subject of: ‘Does anybody else have these questions about whether our involuntary mechanism for fear is a good thing or not?’” was always terrified when they left me by myself at home, because my imagination would go wild. I heard every single noise and imagined it was some killer coming into the house. Every single noise was wrong. So there would be somebody breaking into the back door, climbing on the roof, ghosts... and all these thoughts. The same thing happened in adulthood too, which was such a waste of my energy and time. The few... things that did go wrong in my life weren’t such a big deal—you dealt with them. The father in After Earth is trying to teach his son that fear is a liar. He’s saying, ‘If you can see that fear is a choice, you also see that you have options every single time.’ Fear is an obsession for me. The two obsessions in my life are: a) Why do I have this grey feeling when I wake up? What is this about? Am I not

balanced? It’s there every single day for a minute, and then it goes away... What is my subconscious saying to me? So I make movies like Unbreakable that talk about that weird feeling, about ‘why am I not at peace here?’ And, b) the other [obsession] is fear.

Could that fear stem from having been raised a Brown kid in America, especially at a time when there weren’t many Indians there?

I think you hit it on the head! It’s White people I’m scared of (laughs). I’m just kidding. You may be right, actually. The sense of isolation, the lack of examples, [of] older kids you can relate to—you don’t have that kind of guidance. Feeling alone tends to evoke fearfulness. Feeling different from others can evoke that as well. I still didn’t face issues as much as my dad did. He was the first of his family to become a doctor and he chose to come to the US. At that time, in the 60s, it was not, you know, the most openarmed place. I’m not sure if I’m as courageous as him. I know the ups and downs that he went through in his life. He took them hard and he now has perspective, and that’s what he’s given me, by talking to me now about how he felt and what went through his mind when he was doubted a lot by a lot of people. Before he retired, his office was in the not-great area of Philadelphia, so he was treating more... lower income people in this little brick building. And sometimes we went on Saturday mornings and the windows would be shattered and we would see spray paint. I was a kid, but the image of him with his hands in his pockets, staring… he was hurt, you know, this was his life. You feel like there’s no place for you, and yet he made good. I feel proud that, as an extension of me, now he can have perspective and success. I remember the first time he got out of the car at my premiere and saw his name 20 feet wide on the marquee. I remember his face. I was doing press, and I looked down the red carpet and he gave me a thumbs up, and I felt in some way it was like fulfilment for him more than it was for me. n 17 june 2013

co2 causes about 20 per cent of Earth’s greenhouse effect; water vapour accounts for about 50 per cent; and clouds account for 25 per cent. The rest is caused by aerosols and minor greenhouse gases like methane

Can Clay Rebuild Your Bones? Yes, nano-clays modified with amino acids can coax new bone growth

CO2 Makes Arid Regions Greener

getty images

science

s we age, our bones become weaker. They fall prey to illnesses like arthritis. They are also rather brittle and prone to fractures. Depending on the severity of injuries, they can of course be fixed, and joints replaced. But people then often spend their remaining lifetime with a limp, or worse, in a wheelchair. However, can human bones be re-grown? According to a new study, they can be. A team of US researchers from North Dakota State University have found that they can use nano-sized clay to regenerate human bones. According to the study, clay structures can be modified with amino acids—the building blocks of life. These modified nano-clays can thus coax new bone growth. The nanosized clays are used to design scaffolds that can mineralise bone matter such as hydroxyapatite. The nanoclays perform a dual function. While they enable the scaffold to bear load as the bone regenerates, they also impart bone-forming abilities to the scaffold. This scaffolding is composed of bio-degradable components. While it assists cells in generating bone, over time it dissolves and gets 60 open

absorbed into the body. The study, which was published recently in Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A, was conducted by Dr Kalpana Katti, Dr Dinesh Katti and Avinash Ambre. The have been working in the field of bone replacement materials for over a decade. According to the authors, their discovery is the result of a longsustained effort involving simulations and modelling. They write in the journal: ‘Earlier, in our prior work on polymer clay nanocomposites (PCNs), we have developed a unified theory on the mechanisms of mechanical property enhancement in these composites with addition of nanoscale clay particulates. This theory is based on an ‘altered phase model’ which is developed through extensive experimental and multiscale modelling (molecular dynamics to 3D finite element modelling) efforts. Here, we incorporate the results of the theory into design of new nanoclay based biopolymer hydroxyapatite nanocomposites for bone tissue engineering applications.’ They state that their findings hold significant promise for the future of regenerative medicine. n

A study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide ‘fertilisation effect’ has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010. Focusing on the southwestern corner of North America, Australia’s outback, the Middle East, and some parts of Africa, scientists at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Canberra developed and applied a mathematical model to predict the extent of this CO2 fertilisation effect. They predicted that foliage would increase by some 5 to 10 per cent given the 14 per cent increase in atmospheric CO2 during the study period. Satellite data confirmed an 11 per cent increase in foliage. n

Child Abuse and Cortical Changes

A study, published in American Journal of Psychiatry, shows that sexually abused and emotionally mistreated children exhibit specific changes in the architecture of their brain that reflect the nature of the mistreatment. Using brain scans, researchers found that parts of the somatosensory cortex associated with nervous system responses to female genitals were significantly thinner in women who were victims of sexual abuse in their childhood. Similarly, victims of emotional mistreatment showed a thinning of the cerebral cortex in specific areas associated with self-awareness, self-evaluation and emotional regulation. They speculate that this thinning of the cortical sections may set the stage for the development of behavioural problems in adulthood. n 17 june 2013

boombox is a portable cassette or CD player capable of receiving radio signals and playing music at relatively high volume. Other terms for boombox are ‘ghetto blaster’, ‘jambox’, ‘boomblaster’, or ‘Brixton briefcase’, some of which are slang

tech&style

Logitech UE Boombox This music machine is for those who dig deep bass and retro looks gagandeep Singh Sapra

‘Ladies World Heart w Federation’ Collection

Price on request

Rs 21,995

The ‘Ladies World Heart Federation’ Automatic Collection is a series of four unique and beautifully designed models from Frédérique Constant to support the ‘Hearts of Children’ campaign. The models—two stainless steel and two rose gold plated—are inspired by the FC-310 automatic winding movement, providing accuracy, reliability and durability, with 38-hour power reserve and 60 metres water resistance. n

hough available since December 2012 in other parts of the world, Logitech’s Ultimate Ears Boombox has finally made its way to India, and its sound quality is simply amazing. You can look retro without the worry of tapes and CDs, as this one can be paired with any Bluetooth enabled device, and in case you want to plug in a non Bluetooth device, you can do that too. The boombox has eight custom tuned drivers—4 active speakers, and 4 cones that work as radiators—that deliver pristine music whether inside a room or out in the open. With its metal finish and retro getup, it looks great in any setting. The only plastic you see is the blue side panels, and sadly there are no other colour options here. One side has big volume control buttons, and the other sports a power button, Bluetooth connectivity button, an Aux 3.5 mm audio port and a charging port. The Bluetooth connection is easy; press the button on the side, select the boombox on your iPod, iPhone or your MP3 player, and once paired, 17 june 2013

it is ready to play music. The boombox has a battery that is designed to last up to 6 hours of play. The audio output is rich, filling and surrounding, and there is enough bass to ensure people are up and dancing. The boombox, with its sculpted aluminium handle, is easy to hold and light enough at just about 2 kg to carry on your shoulders. The Ultimate Ears Boombox can pair with up to eight devices. It can also pair and simultaneously play music from three devices, so if you want to try your hand at mixing, or just want to play tracks one after the other from different phones and MP3 players, you have it all set to roll. Everyone can take turns at belting out the hits, and you wouldn’t have used Bluetooth this way before. To some, the price may seem out of place, especially because Bose has its Sound Wave Link in this price bracket. But if you care for high bass and retro looks, the Ultimate Ears Boombox is a cooler option, though travelling with it will be a bit cumbersome. It’s just too big. n

Creative MA 930

Rs 7,999

Powered by tiny micro drivers that are just 6 mm, these headphones deliver quality audio for your entertainment on the move and voice calls. It is an ergonomic design, and a convenient one-button inline microphone lets you answer calls, or pause / play music on your Android smartphone. The earphones’ in-ear noise-isolation provision allows you to enjoy music or your conversations without unwanted noise. Creative also bundles an adapter that splits the single 3.5 mm jack into a microphone and headphone jack if you want to use this with your computer. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

Smile for the c amera Ed Helms, the actor who plays accident-prone Stu in the Hangover movies, is actually missing a tooth. The black gap in his smile isn’t just make-up. Helms told People magazine in 2009 that he has an implant in place of an adult tooth. So that toothless grimace you see in the movie? ‘It is totally real.’

Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani A film as rootless and rife with loose ends as the pretty people in it ajit duara

o n scr een

current

The Hangover Part III Director Todd Phillips cast Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms,

Zach Galifianakis, Ken Jeong Score ★★★★★

or, deepika Cast Ranbir Kapo Koechlin Padukone , Kalki kherji Mu n Director Aya

his is a rootless film. There is

nothing wrong with the casting or performances, but you can’t contextualise the characters. Director Ayan Mukherji’s previous film, Wake Up Sid, did not have this problem. It was set in Mumbai, and the city became a character in the film—a beautiful rainswept city, a place with easy-to-get jobs but impossible rentals, a city to be independent, anonymous and terribly lonely in. Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani just drifts around in the global song-and-dance village of Bollywood. The most interesting person in the film is a high-spirited girl named Aditi (Kalki Koechlin), but you are told nothing about her. Why does she look European? How does she speak such good Hindi? Is she of mixed heritage? Even on the most important day of her life—the ostentatious Karan Johar marriage production—we don’t meet her parents. Was she born of immaculate conception on a Hindi film set? 62 open

The story is about Aditi, Avi (Aditya Roy Kapur), Bunny (Ranbir Kapoor), and Naina (Deepika Padukone). They went to school together, though Naina, a medical student, was always the serious one. But they’re back together now, trekking in the hills of Manali. Much bonding later, the peripatetic pals go their separate ways. Bunny travels the world as a photo-journalist. Avi owns a bar and drinks a lot. Aditi mellows and settles for a rich, doting, boring husband (Kunaal Roy Kapur). By this time, Naina should have qualified as a doctor. Has she dropped out of med school? No answer. Still, some of the conversation is well written and there is an emotional core in the midst of all the drifting. The writing has a conscience and soul. The film is liberal and tolerant. Its observations on the nature of friendship are sweetly put. But it just drones on and on. So you switch off and stare at the beautiful people. n

The Hangover series is based on the principle that under the influence of hallucinogens, you lose your inhibitions, and that can be very funny in a vulgar sort of way. And if alcohol is combined with these drugs, prescribed or otherwise, even a near-death experience can be hilarious. The first film in the series really tripped out on this idea and was largely set in the West’s adult Disneyland—Las Vegas. The second was set in the East’s sexual Disneyland—Bangkok. This third film goes back to Las Vegas, but the only one tripping is Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) who has escaped from a prison in Bangkok and is keeping up his criminal escapades. He is flying high on heroin and the only genuinely funny scenes in the film involve him. His friend Alan ( Zach Galifianakis) refuses to take the anti-psychotic medication he is prescribed, but is not so funny. Part III is just not crazy enough. It is periodically amusing, but is missing the rollercoaster effect that leads to laughter hysteria. There is plenty of action in the film, but it is of the usual kind, with stunts and special effects. The trademark of the Hangover series is the bizarre—something completely off the wall. This one doesn’t have it. n ad

17 june 2013

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Sizzle After the Fizzle

With Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani having hit bullseye at the boxoffice despite tepid reviews, the film industry is already keen to pair Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone together on screen again. The actors, who hadn’t been cast opposite each other since Bachna Ae Haseeno in 2008 (possibly because of their infamous real-life break up), shared a scorching chemistry in Yeh Jawaani... and it’s no surprise that greedy producers want to cash in on that. An Imtiaz Ali project starring Ranbir that was reportedly shopping around for a female lead may now have its casting sorted, sources say. There are also murmurs that Karan Johar—who couldn’t decide who, between Katrina Kaif and Anushka Sharma, would be better suited to star opposite Ranbir—may now be eyeing Deepika for his own directorial venture: an elaborate Partition-set period romance with a large ensemble cast. The two young actors themselves are not unaware that their chemistry has gotten the industry excited, and they’ve apparently decided they won’t just accept every offer that comes their way. Deepika, who has recently wrapped Chennai Express with Shah Rukh Khan, and is currently filming Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Ram Leela with boyfriend Ranveer Singh, has told friends that she and Ranbir will work together “sparingly” but only on “special movies”.

Up Close and Privileged

It might be a while since it happened, but that doesn’t mean we can’t laugh about it. Crew members working on Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger last year already had a fair idea of what to expect from their leading man Salman Khan— mood swings and tantrums, rewriting dialogues on set, and a general disregard for discipline, punctuality and professionalism. Yet, it had too often been proven that his films become blockbusters in spite of the chaos they are to film. And hence, apparently, everyone from producer Aditya Chopra downwards had decided to ‘adjust’ to the actor’s working style in order to get the movie made. On one occasion, however, the crew—particularly cameraman Aseem Mishra—reportedly threw their hands up in help17 june 2013

lessness when Salman’s indifference threatened to ruin the movie. On this particular day, it turns out, the actor showed up late to set and began rushing the unit to wrap his scenes as quickly as possible. When he was informed that different magnifications of a particular shot had to be taken, and therefore camera lenses would need to be changed for every set up, the actor came up with a solution that baffled the camera department. According to an eyewitness, Salman asked Aseem not to change lenses for each set up, and instead offered to change his own position for each different magnification. “I’ll just come closer to the camera when you want to shoot a close-up; I’ll walk away further from the camera when you want a wider take,” he is said to have announced, much to the shock of everyone around. Kabir Khan is believed to have jumped in to broker a compromise. In the end, Salman was so adamant on leaving early that no set ups were changed, but his outrageous solution wasn’t taken either. Instead, the team apparently shot everything in close-up.

Jhappi Jilters All

Film industry folk are apparently avoiding calls from a star wife, who has reportedly been urging friends to “help out” her family. The lady in question has appealed to friends’ emotions, asking them to step up during this “difficult time for our family” and repay the largesse and generosity her husband showed them in better days. The desperate missus is specifically believed to be targeting friends of her husband—filmmakers and actors—who collaborated with him on successful projects. Her husband, an ageing star, currently going through a bad patch legally, was famous for helping friends during trying times, but was also notoriously unprofessional and is known to have bankrupted more than one producer. Many of his friends, who insist they owe no allegiance to the actor’s wife, are believed to have made excuses and got off the hook. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

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Speak My Language

by r au l i r a n i

Shyam Rudra Pathak has been protesting outside the Congress headquarters in Delhi for over six months, demanding the use of Hindi in the High Court and Supreme Court. Pathak is arrested every night, taken to Tughlaqabad Police Station and released the following morning. He chooses to protest at 24 Akbar Road because he hopes Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ruling party will take notice sooner or later

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17 june 2013