Final pdf for web 19th aug 13

INDEPENDENCE DAY SPECIAL

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Amitabh Bachchan Aruni Kashyap Vikramaditya Motwane Soha Ali Khan Aatish Taseer Sudhir Mishra Amruta Patil Amitava Kumar Prasoon Joshi Ayushmann Khurrana Nandita Das Anuradha Roy Manoj Bajpayee Sabyasachi Mukherjee

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Going Home

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

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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 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

B Venkat

Well said, and well argued (‘The Patriotic Ant Bully’, 12 August 2013). Where does ‘patriotism’ go when one sees a fellow Indian, who is raped, lying in a pool of blood, begging for help, and is left to her own means?

Why? Because it is apparently quite a headache to get involved? Dear patriotic Indians, don’t you trust your laws? And if you don’t, what did you patriots do to change that? Oh yes, If patriotism has sunk you came out in huge to a level that it has to be numbers with candles coerced or compelled, and laid all blame on politicians—ignoring it is a sign of a huge how your own attitude distrust. It is an indicator encourages this mess. If of the country’s failure patriotism has sunk to a to convince its citizens level that it has to be of its worthiness coerced or compelled, it is a sign of a huge distrust. It is an indicator of the country’s failure to convince its citizens of its worthiness. Patriotism is about morals and having an intention to do the best for your country, at any cost, at all times and in all possible ways. It begins with how much you know about your country and how much you want to change it. It is about taking a realistic stock of things. Those who indulge in violence are puppets or token patriots.  letter of the week

least 20 or more Indian languages? At the very least, we have to give equal importance to these Indian languages: Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Odiya, Telugu. And once you start on that path, others will put forth their demands too, just as when one new state is formed, demands for other states start arising.  Sachi Mohant y

False Virtue

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R Rajmohan

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Volume 5 Issue 32 For the week 13—19 August 2013 Total No. of pages 72 + Covers cover photo

DEA/G Dagliorti /Getty Images

All to Blame for Modi’s Rise

there is a distinct difference between 1984 and 2002 (‘End of Shame’, 5 August 2013). In 1984, the leader of a party died and the party went on a rampage, whereas in 2002, Hindus were burnt in a train and people reacted. Yes, Narendra Modi should have protected minorities. But the way the entire media and other parties went after Modi’ s blood rather than depending on the judicial process made him a hero for many Hindus who felt the Sabarmati attack was not acceptable. Everyone should take responsibility for Modi’s rise.  venkate sh

Babelic Option

clearly, there is no inevitability about English (‘The English 19 August 2013

Non Goddess’, 5 August 2013).

However, the only trouble is this: what do you replace the English language with? Do I hear ‘Hindi’? Well, I bet India’s billions do not all speak Hindi.

India’s linguistic diversity is so astonishing and so unique in the world that it’s probably humanly impossible to grapple with it. Most of the world’s technical literature exists in English. Maybe Germans, the French, Russians, the Japanese and Chinese (and probably the Spanish and Portuguese) have managed to translate much technical stuff of science and engineering and medicine into their own languages. But are we going to take on that vast enterprise of translating all that technical knowledge contained in English into at

forcing what one thinks is right on other people to feed one’s false sense of righteousness is just complete bullshit (‘The Patriotic Ant Bully’, 12 August 2013). Especially for a ‘spritual counsellor & aura reader’. Standing up for the National Anthem is fine.

Respecting something doesn’t make you a puppet. If I enter a temple or mosque or any sacred place for that matter, treating it with reverence doesn’t make me a puppet. But what Deepali Issar did just feeds her false sense of virtue and nothing more.  Rishav Rastogi

Check Before You Endorse

this refers to ‘Jairam Ramesh and the Radiation Threat’ (12 August 2013). Shashi Tharoor, even though he isn’t remotely related to the scientific community or temperament, did something similar by endorsing Naveen Jindal’s tri-vortex armband, which had ‘miraculous healing powers’.

How one wishes our well-educated politicians were just a little more prudent in selecting what they endorse.  Sudhamshu

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Not in the Mood to be Saved Today foolhardy

In Maharashtra, floods have marooned villages but residents are refusing to be rescued

Last month, during floods in Chandrapur district of Maharashtra, the district administration pressed at least five rescue boats into operation. Ganesh Shinde, tehsildar of Chandrapur, was on one of them. The water level then was as high as the first floor of apartment buildings. When they neared one such window, Shinde peered inside to find a bunch of children and bewildered adults waving at them to head back. “They said we will come later,” Shinde says.

It is still raining in the region and the administration con-

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tinues to send rescue boats to the flooded villages. But people just don’t want to leave.

To combat the situation, tehsildars in the district have now started recharging the mobile phones of village pradhans so that they can contact the administration in case of emergencies. “We are recharging Tok and Gangapur villagers’ phones for Rs 100. They send us updates,” says Rajesh Sarwade, tehsildar of Pomburma, over the phone. “It is a strange situation for us.”

“We keep our phones with us all the time in case someone

calls,” a district official says.

“We are doing rounds, pleading with people to leave, but they look relaxed. I guess they are used to the floods.”

Villagers have their own parameter to judge the danger point. In Ballarpur tehsil, they have decided to move only if the water reaches a particular room of the primary school.

In the apartment complex from where Shinde was turned away, the water level rose and the families had to move to the second floor. They still didn’t want to leave. They said they had food and asked the officials

to recharge their phones.

Finally, when they realised the danger they were in, they called the officials. “By then, we couldn’t take the boat into the campus. So we had to figure out another treacherous way, where an official climbed a wall and rescued the families,” Shinde says.

In Tok, the administration brought people to a camp, but when the water receded, they went back despite being told to wait. “People are obstinate. We are also tense. What if it gets too late?” asks Sarwade. n chinki sinha

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Victim of Sexism? Nah news reEL

Why Raj Thackeray couldn’t take over the Sena

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Khankot

Srinagar

Allahabad

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Of a postPartition village

The strange thing about memory

Amitabh Bachchan’s janmbhoomi

Moveable roots

Going Home

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l o n g o n Rahul Dravid normally steers clear of controversy. But the country’s cricket board has fallen so low that even he could not resist putting the great panjandrums of Indian cricket in their place. “There are so many fans and so many people who care deeply about this game and it is because of these fans that we are who we are as cricketers. Administrators are there because of the fans and the cricketers to run this game, so [the] credibility of a game, or a board, or even a government, for that matter, is important irrespective of what you do. If you are in public life, it is important,” Dravid said.

That’s right, BCCI. You exist for the public and the players—not the other way round.

And now that Dravid has made a statement, will Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri finally muster the guts to speak out against their crooked paymasters? n

F o r crashing some 500 points in

two days and refusing to welcome Raghuram Rajan as RBI governor

What Ails India’s Supreme Court aff l i c ti o n Something’s bugging the apex court of this country. ‘Supreme court judges being brought down left, right and center... by a bug! Justice Bobde unwell now,’ tweeted @courtwitness1 on 29 July.

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Eight judges in the past four weeks have been missing sittings due to ill health. The latest to join the count, according to notices posted on the Supreme Court’s website, are Justice Sudhansu Jyoti Mukhopadhaya and Justice MY Eqbal. The reason stated for their absence is ‘non-availability’. There has been no official statement on judges being under the weather. But the need for them to be fighting fit again is evident in the fact that of the 69,446 pending matters for the month of July, 44,298 are incomplete and cannot be listed for ‘hearing’ at the apex court. n

The BSE Sensex has done it again: displayed super sensitivity to what the US Fed does (or does not do) with its stimulus and shrugged off domestic news. Okay, its 450-points odd crash of 6 August mostly took place before Raghuram Rajan was appointed RBI governor, but still, the index should’ve had the courtesy to recover in tribute to him the next day. It fell 68 points more. This, while Rajan is not just an IIT-IIM-MIT dude, he has been the IMF’s chief economist to boot. A decade ago, he wrote a book on saving capitalism from capitalists, which should be of help in keeping bank licences away from capitalists of the crony kind. A few years later, he didn’t just foresee the Great Recession, he ironically held America’s [mis]quest for equality partly responsible. n 19 august 2013

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Why we leave home

A matter of belonging

Growing up on sports

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Adam & Eve: did they ever meet?

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Net Gain Women tennis stars are laughing all the way to the bank. Seven of the 10 women who topped the Forbes list of highest paid female athletes are tennis players. Maria Sharapova topped the list, having made $29 million last year. Serena Williams came in second with an income of $20.5 million.

Li Na and Victoria Azarenka were third and fourth on the list, respectively. The three women unconnected to tennis who made the top 10 were Nascar racer Danica Patrick, South Korean figure skater Kim Yuna and golfer Paula Creamer. The numbers took into account endorsement deals and prize money. n

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Criticised for saying employees from Rayalseema and Andhra must leave the newly-formed state, Telangana Rashtra Samithi chief K Chandrasekhar Rao cried ‘misquote!’

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‘If Andhra has to start working, all Andhra employees will have to go back.

We are not saying ‘bhago, bhago’; only that those who have cornered our jobs illegally and wrongly should go back’ —K Chandrasekhar Rao, as quoted in The Indian Express, 2 August 2013

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“I just said that Andhra employees must work for the Andhra government and Telangana employees must work for the Telangana government” —K Chandrasekhar Rao, as quoted on IBN Live, 4 August 2013

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The $332,000 Burger l ab taste It’s been a five-year-long wait for the world’s first lab-grown beef burger. And the experts who tasted it in London this week were somewhat reserved in their judgment. Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands led the expensive experiment, which was supported by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The burger was made using strands of meat grown from muscle cells taken from a living cow, blended with salt, egg powder and breadcrumbs and coloured with beetroot juice and saffron. Austrian food researcher Hanni Ruetzler and US-based food writer Josh Schonwald tasted the meal. Ruetzler said, “It’s close to meat. It’s not that juicy, but the consistency is perfect.” Schonwald added: “The absence is the fat. There’s a leanness to it. But the bite feels like a conventional hamburger.” Post agreed that the technology, intended to be animal and environment friendly, was at an early stage but predicted the meat could be on supermarket shelves in 10 to 20 years. “This is just to show that we can do it,” he said. n 19 august 2013

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On the Contrary

People Tweeting from Glass Houses Shobhaa De and a few observations on cheap personal attacks M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

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n the case of Raj Thackeray, Nitesh Rane and Sanjay Raut versus Shobhaa De over her tweet—‘Maharashtra and Mumbai??? Why not? Mumbai has always fancied itself as an independent entity, anyway. This game has countless possibilities’—what is interesting is how it subtly shifted shape from regional jingoism to feminist gripe. Barkha Dutt, on an NDTV show, asked Rane whether a tweet by him on De was not “obnoxious and sexist”. During the show, along with a mug shot of Raj Thackeray, they also ran his comment on De, ‘It’s not Quite As Easy as Getting a Divorce’, under the heading ‘Maximum City, Maximum Misogyny’.

Let’s ally ourselves with De over a few things. She wrote the tweet as irony, accepted. There was no intention to offend, accepted. There is no need to apologise, accepted. The things said against her were intimidatory, accepted.

She was targeted because she was a woman, not so easy to accept.

For instance, Nitesh Rane’s tweet— ‘Rather than twitter, Shoba De shud say the same thing on the streets of Mumbai openly after which she won’t be left with any ‘shoba’ forever.’ Google Translate says shoba in English can be beauty, lustre, glory, smartness and scintillation. Replace them in the tweet and you have: ‘...after which she won’t be left with any beauty/ lustre/glory/smartness/scintillation forever’. It is a threat, but how do you extrapolate sexism?

Thackeray’s response was benign by his standards. It can be construed as many things but misogyny is bizarre. The only way for anyone to arrive at that is to think that Thackeray was referring to De being divorced once. There is, however, a simpler explanation. Penguin India has a line of books that goes under De’s imprint. She selects and promotes those titles. The second of them released some months ago with the monologue Sdé on its cover and the name of that book was Breaking Up: Your Guide to Getting Divorced.

Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Raut saying that what De said was empty talk done by people after getting drunk in page 3 parties and his willingness to bring her down to

MAXIMUM FEMINISM Maharashtra’s politicians’ rants against Shobhaa De were intimidatory but hardly sexist

This is her tweet after Raj Babbar said that Rs 12 can buy you a lunch in Mumbai: ‘Never understood what the beautiful, intense, sensitive Smita Patil saw in the Blabbering Babber...’ sobriety is the language of threat. But there are hundreds of instances in the Sena’s history of worse language where a man was the object.

In the portrayal of clumsy Sena rhetoric (Rane, Thackeray, Raut have the same DNA) as sexism, De has had her own contribution as well. This Sunday, she wrote in a column in The Times of India: ‘Can they do no better than launch cheap, personal attacks on a woman?’ For a moment let’s be gender neutral and agree that cheap personal attacks should be made on no one. Let us then turn to De’s Twitter account a few days before this attack was made. This is her tweet after Raj Babbar said that Rs 12 can buy you a lunch in Mumbai: ‘Never understood what the beautiful, intense, sensitive Smita Patil saw in the Blabbering Babber. Maybe he

fed her 12 rupee meals?’ Don’t fault Babbar for thinking this is a cheap personal attack.

Even if there are no Rs 12 meals on offer in Mumbai, bringing in a long dead wife sort of qualifies for it. Would we call it Maximum City, Maximum Misandry?

Or should this rule be amended: it is okay to make cheap personal attacks against some people, like politicians who have put their foot into their mouth.

Or whose looks you find amusing. Which is probably why De tweeted this about Rahul Gandhi once: ‘Correct me if I am wrong, but in my time a beehive hairstyle was in vogue. Sonia often sports a beehive.

Rahul must have been inspired by mom!’

It’s not such a nasty tweet, but yo, what does feminism say about evaluating human beings as objects based on body… and hairstyle?

After Asaram Bapu’s ashram was found using large amounts of water for a Holi celebration, De tweeted: ‘Ass-a-ram has done it again!...’ Ass-a-ram might be a good laugh for many, but not for Asaram. If there is a school that teaches such creative puns using names of other people, then it is from that very place that Nitesh Rane learnt his Shobic turn of phrase. n 19 august 2013

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A Hurried Man’s Guide to Ravindra Jadeja’s rise

Indian cricket all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja has topped the ICC bowlers’ rankings in ODIs, sharing the spot with West Indies spinner Sunil Narine. He’s the first Indian to do so after Anil Kumble, who had managed the feat in 1996. Two other Indian bowlers, Kapil Dev and Maninder Singh, have also secured this position in the past.

It Happens

Almost a Road Movie A film star decides to fill potholes in Kochi and gets flak from the mayor S h a h i n a K K

Jadeja has risen to the top because of his excellent performance this year. He has so far taken 38 wickets at a bowling average of 18.86 in 22 ODI matches this year. He is also the leading ODI wicket-taker this year. Apart from this, he’s also had a great season with the bat, scoring a total of 382 runs with an average of 47.75.

Jadeja first broke into the side in 2009 on the basis of his performance in domestic cricket.

Despite being an effective spinner, he was initially dismissed as a bits and pieces

taking the initiative Malayalee actor Jayasurya fills a pothole in Kochi

jewel samad/afp

He has so far taken 38 wickets at a bowling average of 18.86 from 22 ODI matches this year

cricketer who would never survive international cricket for long.

To compound matters, his batting never really took off and he was later dropped. He made a comeback to the ODI squad in 2011 on the strength of his performance in the IPL that season. In 2012, he going great guns was bought by Chennai Ravindra Jadeja Super Kings from Kochi Tuskers Kerala in the IPL. Jadeja is now also a regular fixture in Test matches. He got a call up for the Test squad in 2012 after his performances in the Ranji Trophy matches. He has scored three triple-centuries in Ranji Trophy, two of them in the 2012-13 season, the most by any Indian cricketer. His performances since then in all formats have been stellar. During the India-Australia Test series at home, he dismissed Michael Clarke five out of six times. His meteoric rise has coincided with that of India’s.

The all-rounder hails from a humble family in Jamnagar, Gujarat. His father used to work as a watchman for a private security agency and his sister as a nurse in a local hospital in Gujarat. Since his good fortune, Jadeja has bought an Audi A4, a Hayabusa and—strangely enough—a horse. n

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is a good thing for a movie star but having one is not a smooth ride either. After a road accident that killed two youngsters in Kochi, Jayasurya, a popular actor in Kerala, decided that instead of waiting for the municipal corporation to fill the city’s potholes, he would do it on his own. On 20 July, the actor, along with a few friends and some auto drivers, gathered on Shanmukham Road opposite Marine Drive and filled the huge potholes formed by heavy rains.

It was, however, a move that didn’t go down well with the city’s authorities. Kochi’s Mayor, Tony Chammany, alleged that what Jayasurya did was nothing but a publicity stunt and it was not exactly a job well done.

“He did it unscientifically. I have received complaints that the metal used to fill potholes got washed out and spread across the road in the rain. It only created more hazards to commuters. I am told by friends in the media that the actor waited for all TV channels to arrive at the spot to start work. Why did he do so if it was a genuine attempt to fill up potholes?” asks Chammany.

Jayasurya has dismissed the Mayor’s complaints. He does not

accept the allegation that the potholes were filled unscientifically.

“I have done it as best as I could. It is common sense that merely filling up potholes with metals will only increase the problem. I have not done so,” he says.

He also rebuts the charge of it being a publicity stunt. “No one will believe that I have to look for publicity through such an act. Mine was an expression of protest. I did not call the media; they “I do not regret came on their own, which is what I did. usual. Even if I You can see had called the the change in media, what is the city after wrong in it?”

Though my public the Mayor and expression of the municipalprotest” ity did not like what Jayasurya did, he received plenty of support across social networking websites.

“I have no regret for what I did.

You can see the change in the city after my public expression of protest. Many resident associations are now coming forward to repair roads in their localities without waiting for the benevolence of the corporation,” he says. n 19 August 2013

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The Takeover That Wasn’t Why Raj could not snatch the Shiv Sena away from Uddhav after Bal Thackeray’s death haima deshpande

founder’s death, Raj has remained just that, a mirror image, while Uddhav has taken firm control of the party. Raj has unexpectedly been floundering in politics, picking up an odd issue here or there, but largely staying quiet—possibly disappointed that the clamour he had expected among Sainiks for his leadership did not begin. For all his aggression, the Sainiks seem to have settled for Uddhav’s far-less-public style of politics.

Though there had been past indications that Raj would make a bid to take over the Shiv Sena, few are willing to bet on such an event now. It is no secret that senior Sena leaders who have been unhappy with Uddhav’s approach feel let down by

this. Raj’s own attitude towards his cousin, which has been under close watch, suggests little hostility.

Meanwhile Uddhav, who has developed a ‘political cunningness’ in recent months, as many say, has used the time to his advantage. He has been moving across Maharashtra, interacting with partymen in an effort to consolidate his position as their leader. While Raj remains ensconced within the confines of his Shivaji Park residence, Uddhav’s outreach effort has sent Sainiks a signal that he intends inheritors (L-R) Raj Thackeray and Uddhav Thackeray at the funeral of Bal Thackeray

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When Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray died last year, many Mumbaikars expected that his nephew Raj Thackeray, chief of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), would take over the party he had split apart from.

Considered a mirror image of his uncle in temperament, manner and even looks (with allowances for the age difference), Raj was widely seen as a natural inheritor of the Sena founder’s political legacy. All he had to do, some felt, was snap his fingers for Sainiks to take to the streets in his support and force the Thackeray pretender Uddhav, Bal’s son, to make way for the real defender of the Marathi manoos.

Now, nine months after the Sena

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Shiv Sena has run the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation for two decades.

The Sena’s clout in Mumbai, while still significant on account of Maharashtrian support, has been loosening in recent years as the city’s population has grown more diverse. In the context of this trend, a split of the manoos voter base between the Sena and MNS has meant a weakening of both parties. Before his death, Thackeray had called Uddhav and Raj and asked he chasm between the cousins, them to come together and form a single however, is thought to have widened. political entity in the interests of In the past few months, both have kept sons-of-the-soil. On cue, Chandumama away from each other, mimimising interVaidya, the maternal uncle of Uddhav and action. Uddhav may lack the showmanRaj Thackeray, had pledged to fulfill that ship of Raj on public platforms, but his dream of his late brother-in-law. As the behind-the-scenes moves appear to have worked. The months since Bal Thackeray’s brother of Meenatai and Kantatai, the death have seen Uddhav move away from mothers of the cousins, Vaidya was seen as the right man for the task. However, he the shadow of his father and emerge his seems to have given up his efforts. own man. Comparisons are no longer Ambitious wives on both sides are said drawn with his late father or even with his to be working to ensure that the cousins cousin. This, his admirers say, has been do not patch up. Uddhav’s wife Rashmi achieved with subtlety.

There is also talk that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who is set to lead the Sena ally BJP to the Lok Sabha polls, Ego and ambition seem to has renewed efforts to bring Uddhav and be the big stumbling blocks Raj together again. As the rationale goes, between the cousins. Both Raj the BJP would want a united Sena as its ally. But this has been denied by Gopinath and Uddhav see themselves as Munde, the senior leader in charge of the Maharashtra CM and neither is BJP campaign in Maharashtra. The mood within the state BJP is upbeat, and a patch willing to play second fiddle to the other. Even their ideas and up between the Thackeray cousins could complicate already vexed relations with agendas appear to differ the Sena, an ally of over two decades, over local issues of seat sharing. and Raj’s wife Sharmila, it is said, will Ego and ambition seem to be the big never allow a merger as they see larger stumbling blocks between the cousins independent roles for themselves in the that make it hard for them to join forces.

Unlike the late Sena chief who believed in state’s power structure. remote-controlling his men, Uddhav and Raj are both keen on wielding direct power. Both see themselves as ources say that Uddhav is keen on Maharashtra CM and neither is willing to rebranding the Sena with a strong play second fiddle to the other. Even their infusion of young blood. The old guard so ideas and agendas appear to differ. All of central to his father’s planning will find no this means that a merger of the Shiv Sena role in Uddhav’s Shiv Sena. The political and MNS, or even an electoral alliance, is careers of Manohar Joshi, Subhash Desai almost impossible. and a host of senior leaders are over now, as While the Thackeray cousins have Uddhav puts his own team in place. His differences, in electoral terms their son Aditya has a role as well and is playing appeals overlap. In fact, after Bal a kind of party mascot to attract the youth.

Thackeray’s demise, many expected Raj to The MNS chief, in contrast, lacks his run away with the Sena’s vote bank. cousin’s organisational skills. Even seven However, despite his early playing to the years after the MNS was set up, the party’s Marathi manoos gallery after he broke physical presence in the state remains away to form the MNS, Raj has been sparse. He has only concentrated on its reluctant to make further efforts. Apart growth in Mumbai and Nasik. Though from meeting partymen, Uddhav has also Raj’s blueprint for his party included a been on a mission to endear himself to network of shakhas along the lines of the Mumbaikars on civic issues. His recent Shiv Sena’s, no move has been made in public apology to the city for potholed that direction. This has stunted the party’s roads has earned him brownie points. The expansion plan and has in some places leading the party with all he’s got. It has also kept an exodus from the Sena to the MNS from materialising. Indeed, switchovers have been so few that Uddhav’s detractors are perplexed. Those close to both cousins say that this in itself amounts to an endorsement of Uddhav’s leadership by Sainiks at large.

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even seen Sainik switchovers return to their original Sena. Raj has done little about it. Given current trends, the MNS leader’s habit of taking extended breaks from interactions with his activists may prove to be his undoing.

As polls approach, if both the Shiv Sena and MNS continue to vie for the same political space and constituents, then clashes between the two parties may be imminent. In the past, Sainik violence has been along ideological fractures. From the mid 60s to the late 80s, for example, the Shiv Sena engaged the state’s Communists in street battles, with South Indians occasional targets of the party’s wrath. As the BJP’s Rama Janmabhoomi campaign gained pace, Bal Thackeray’s focus shifted to Mumbai’s Muslims, a phase that saw bloody riots in the city in late 1992 and early 1993.

With that legacy of strongarm politics, the Shiv Sena—named after the 17th century ruler Shivaji—has a reputation that unsettles not just minorities but also secularists of all kind. Uddhav’s agenda, however, has signalled something of a retreat from that toxic mix of identity and agitational politics of the past, with intimidatory tactics replaced with a relatively moderate outlook.

Under Uddhav, the Sena has not spouted much Marathi manoos rhetoric, though the response of Sainiks to a harmless tweet by Shobhaa De recently suggests that their old attitudes are as hard as ever. “Maharashtra is a raging fire, don’t play with it,” Uddhav had told the media, reacting to De’s ‘why not?’ on statehood for Mumbai, and Sainiks turned up at De’s doorstep to protest.

Sainik-turned-Congressman Narayan Rane’s son Nitesh had some nasty words for De, too, but the angriest response was from Raj Thackeray, who told De that separating Mumbai from Maharashtra was not as easy as getting a divorce. Since Sainiks had already beaten the MNS to De’s door, Raj’s brigade refrained from street protests. Yet, the MNS is the likelier of the two parties to resort to threats and ultimatums in the manner of the Sena of old. This would be apiece with Raj’s attempt to hijack the Shiv Sena’s identity politics, the kind that wants North Indian migrants denied jobs in Mumbai, Marathi films given an edge over Hindi films, Marathi made compulsory as the language in use by the government, civic offices and courts, not to mention school curricula. For all of Raj’s attempts to hijack his uncle’s party, however, it is now clear that it will always remain a coup bid, not a takeover. And the mirror image will stay just that—an image. n 19 august 2013

Independence DAY Special

Khankot

Land’s End Of a post-Partition village Hartosh Singh Bal

I

was sweating. A white-bearded Sikh, infuriated and

inebriated, was waving a loaded pistol in my face. He was telling the person who had accompanied me to his house, “Sukhbir [Singh Badal] vi edar zameen baare puchhan di himmat kare, te ude sir te pistol rakh ke odi thondh wadd danga (Even if Sukhbir Singh Badal dares come here to ask about this land, I will put a pistol to his head and chop his neck off).” Only when the realisation sunk in that we were fellow litigants in a court case challenging the acquisition of our land by the state, did he calm down.

Satinder Bir’s anger was understandable. For more than a decade, our land in Khankot and his in Sultanwind, both villages close to the Grand Trunk Road on the outskirts of Amritsar, has been subject to the Punjab government’s whim. It was an Akali Dal government that first issued a notification for acquiring 275 acres of land in the two villages. Soon after, the state exempted 87 acres from the scheme, a windfall for builders who had managed to buy much of it from farmers faced with the acquisition.

The Congress government that succeeded the Akali one in Chandigarh exempted a further 32 acres.

In each case, the exemption had little to do with what Amritsar needed, it had everything to do with what politicians needed. While farmers whose land was being acquired were being offered Rs 25 lakh per acre by the government, builders were selling plots and earning well over fifty times that amount on each acre. Even on the far outskirts of Amritsar, a 500 sq yard plot now costs close to Rs 1 crore.

*** Somewhere near the town of Renala Khurd in Pakistan lies a patch of land that once belonged to my family. In lieu of this land, through a series of land transfers, complicated but no more so than the history of the division of the Subcontinent, my family came to own land in Khankot. More or less 67 years ago to the day, a series of such transactions and the forced movement of millions of people created the two countries of India and Pakistan.

It was only in the mid-1950s that we finally obtained the rights to the land. By then, my father and his brothers 14 open

had left our ancestral village for study or work. Land left unattended in Punjab is liable to be land lost, so the family arranged for the transfer of our ancestral land to Khankot as well, where an uncle managed our landholdings for us.

Each summer my sisters and I would travel to Khankot for our school holidays. For children, it was idyllic—the cold subterranean water from gushing tubewells, ample servings of freshly made butter and lassi, pears from the village orchards and the unfettered run of the fields lying fallow as they awaited the sowing of paddy. But we gave very little thought to the events that made this idyll possible.

Last year, I found myself travelling through Punjab with a friend from London whose parents had first moved to Pakistan after Partition. She was the first of her family to make the trip back. Both her maternal and paternal villages lay along the Sutlej, not far from Jalandhar, and in each, Arain Muslim landowners had given way to Jatt Sikhs after Partition, much as my family had taken over land in Khankot. Unsurprisingly, the Jatts knew very lit19 August 2013

photos ruhani kaur

what remains (Above) among the last of the orchards of the ‘Garden Colonies’; (right) a deed issued by the Department of Rehabilitation allotting land in a village emptied by Partition

tle about this village; their relationship with the land was functional and they cared little about its past. The people who knew of her parents, for whom the village was a native place, like it was to her, were a handful.

It occurred to me that my relationship with Khankot was representative of the amnesia that continues to afflict Punjab. While I knew a great deal about my native village of Sathiala, which I had visited but once, the past of the village we had made home had never drawn my attention. This year, hoping it was not too late, I went looking for what little I could now find.

It was easy to locate the sole Jatt family that had resided in Khankot before Partition. The family elder, Ajit Singh, was eleven years old at the time. Khankot, he told me, was a village inhabited by Muslim Dogars, another landowning caste. All of them had moved to Pakistan.

19 August 2013

witness to history Ajit Singh, one of the elders from the only Jatt family that has been living in Khankot for decades before Partition

For those who seek ideological explanations for the violence in Punjab, whether during Partition or the more recent years of terrorism, such testimonies are an antidote.

The cult of violence and the feud lay at the heart of the slaughter “They left safely,” he said, “There was very little trouble here.” He could even recall the name of a prominent inhabitant, Shamsuddin Dogar: “Everyone called him Shama or Shamu. I think he went and established a wellknown hotel in Lahore. For a brief while after Partition we heard from some of them. They had mostly settled near Jandiala Sher Khan.”

This was the home of Waris Shah, the patron poet of Punjab and author of Heer. When Amrita Pritam raged against our failure to give voice to the crimes of Partition, she invoked Waris Shah. Perhaps, the echoes of this reference made me doubt the completeness of Ajit Singh’s anodyne version.

*** The need to verify what I had heard took me to the neighbouring village of Sultanwind, to the house where Satinder Bir had accosted me with a pistol. His father Jagir Singh, old enough to have been a young man at the time of Partition, told me that the villages around Sultanwind had been a battlefield: “The violence started months before Partition. Men from our village used to go out on raids. Daily, they killed men. After one such incident, Baloch troops came to the village. They picked up some of our men.”

When we asked him about the Dogars, he said, “No one would attack them in their village; there they were in 16 open

strength and there were Muslim armymen on horses guarding the village. But the day they were to leave for Pakistan in a train from one of the camps adjacent to the railway station, we reached there, armed and ready to kill. The Baloch troops guarding the train opened fire and let no harm come to the Dogars. We had to flee, some of us jumped into ditches to survive the bullets.”

There was no sense of regret for the violence in his voice.

Emptied of its inhabitants, the land in Khankot became available for the resettlement of refugees. The extent of this effort has never been fully documented, but one of its architects, MS Randhawa, has written about the ‘rehabilitation of refugees from West Pakistan in rural areas of East Punjab’ in his book Out Of The Ashes. In a chapter titled ‘Garden Colonies’ he notes: ‘A bright feature of land resettlement operation, is the scheme of Garden Colonies. Twenty-seven large blocks of evacuee land, which had been excluded from general allotment, have been allotted to persons interested in horticulture for growing gardens…It was also decided to harness the enthusiasm and talent for gardening in the non-displaced people of East Punjab by allotting them similar areas in the garden colonies. The condition for their admission into these colonies was that an allottee had to surrender an equivalent area from his holding which was added to the general evacuee pool...The garden colony of Khankot is close to the city of Amritsar on the Grand Trunk Road, and apart from the facility of canal irrigation, it can also be electrified and can have tube-well irrigation. This colony is suitable for the growth of pears and banana.’

*** The idyll I remember from my childhood was born of this decision. It was only much later in life that I realised that the village I grew up in was hardly typical of Punjab.

The groves of pears that we took for granted were green and lush year round. The fruit ripened mid-July, and loaded trucks would make their way from the village to Calcutta along the Grand Trunk Road. Basketsful of fruit would arrive at my uncle’s place. He was an MSc in Agriculture, and he had helped plant many of the groves that once dotted the village.

Eventually, it was the very closeness to Amritsar that Randhawa mentions which was to become Khankot’s undoing. The orchards have given way to garish mansions. Only the parts of Khankot closest to Amritsar, caught in the legal dispute over land acquisition, are still dotted with fields and the odd orchard, standing next to a residential colony that has come up on the 32 acres ex19 August 2013

empted by the Congress government in Chandigarh.

In reality, the 32 acres would have extended to the entire scheme. The builders had attempted to buy the remaining land under acquisition. Only the obduracy of Satinder Bir and Jagir Singh, whose land stood between the 32 acres already exempted and the rest of the acquired land, stopped them. The builders had links with powerful men in Punjab. Ordinarily, they would have just moved people out of the way. But the father and son came from a clan notorious for their ability to stick together and fight. They were known as the Kanwas, the crows— attack one of them and they would all fight back.

Back in Delhi, as I searched through books and the internet for accounts of violence in Sultanwind, I came upon the testimony of Shingara Singh, patriarch of the Kanwas, on journalist Andrew Whitehead’s website with its remarkable collection of Partition testimonies.

Whitehead had interviewed Shingara Singh in 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of Partition. He was 97 at the time and lived on for another decade. In Shingara Singh’s words: ‘When the Jallianwala Bagh incident took place I was 19 years and nine months old. It was Baisakhi day when the firing took place. I heard the crack of bullets. I saw people falling from the walls, running helter-skelter, falling by the side.

I ran through a narrow door to the Sarai at the Golden Temple.

I was jailed in 1947. We had gathered rifles, pistols and kirpans. We would go out on horses. Wherever we could find Muslims we would kill them. We would shoot them down with rifles, we would butcher them with kirpans. I had one kirpan for a long time, when I lost it, I replaced it with a new one. It had a very sharp edge, one blow and a head would go flying.

I killed them because they killed so many of ours on the other side. Ask anyone, Shingara Singh killed a lot of Muslims.

The Muslim police came to the village and killed two persons from my clan. They call us the Kanwas, we are a big clan. If one fights, we all pounce along with him.

The Muslims of Rasoolpura had gained a reputation for killing Sikhs. Eighteen of us attacked them with bombs while they were offering namaz and then we opened fire. We killed an uncountable number. Then we chased them through the alleys. We butchered six more.

The Muslim police came looking for us with guard dogs. One of the dogs pounced on me. They jailed two of us in Lahore fort.

When Independence came we were in jail. When they used to take us to court we would tell then we should be rewarded, instead you have arrested us. Finally we were let off on August 15.

I am proud of what we did. Even today there I feel rage because they killed our people. If I find those Muslims again I will kill them. There is no question of my rage cooling in these fifty years. Even if I am sentenced to hang, I will kill them.

Yes, we also suffered during the years of terrorism. It was a wave. We suffered a great loss, but it was the doing of the gov19 August 2013

ernment. Five of ours were killed, were martyred. The government did it. They killed people in each house.’

*** The Kanwas lived instinctively, through their tribal code of retribution. For all those who seek larger ideological explanations for the violence in Punjab, whether during Partition or the relatively recent years of terrorism, such testimonies are an antidote. The cult of violence and the feud lay at the heart of the slaughter.

Done with a century of violence, the Kanwas have now run into an enemy they can’t combat. I realised when I was leaving Jagir Singh’s house that even if they win the court case being fought, the victory may amount to nothing. At the gate, he held my hand, and pleaded, “Forget the fight over the land, forget what the government is doing.

Just write about the intoxicants that have spread through our land. We have seen the worst of Partition, we have seen the worst of the years of terrorism, but they don’t compare with what is happening now. Alcohol was bad enough, now our children have been given over to drugs, and we can’t stop them.”

The next morning, well before seven, with the flight back to Delhi scheduled later in the day, I headed along the bypass that turns off the GT road at Khankot towards the Indo-Pak Wagah border. It skirts Amritsar before the exit to the airport. All along the way, the same transformation that I had seen in Khankot was visible. Fields and villages had given way to unplanned and exoteric housing colonies. Past several marriage palaces, lavish in their excess, I turned into a building just as large. The signboard announced the Hermitage de-addiction centre.

I was just in time for a ‘sharing’ session. Large-framed men thinned out by their addictions spoke softly and hesitantly of coping with life after they had booked themselves into the de-addiction centre. Much of the conversation revolved around the difficulties they had in setting up interpersonal boundaries, in resolving simple things such as sharing food stocked in the refrigerator in their rooms.

Vishal, the counsellor, himself in recovery, told me after the session that much of the discussion was actually about restraint and temptation: “They are learning to say ‘no’.” And then he told me that over the past few years there had been a surge in addicts enrolling themselves at the centre, “Heroin, opium, alcohol, gambling—you see it all. Many of them are from families that have recently come into wealth. The price of land has soared. They suddenly come into money and they no longer have any reason to work or for that matter do anything. The windfall of selling land at exorbitant rates is like winning a lottery. It is a high of its own, a one-time high, and then how do you sustain it?” n Brief portions of this piece have previously appeared in Himal and 3quarksdaily blog open www.openthemagazine.com 17

Independence DAY Special

Srinagar

The Home that Never Left Us And the strange thing about memory Rahul Pandita

I

n the early 1980s, when we still had a home in

Kashmir Valley, I went to a school named after Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Walden’. Every morning, after assembly, children of all classes sat on jute mats and recited names of countries, continents, rivers, oceans and parts of the nose, among other tidbits of general knowledge. We were particularly delighted when it came to naming African nations because we got a chance to mispronounce Angola as ‘Bangola’—which in Kashmiri means ‘firecracker’.

When I was in class four, my father had me shifted to my sister’s school. “That way,” he said, “both of you can be together and I won’t be worried.” Somehow, Father was always worried about me. That also meant that I hardly went on excursions to Aharbal waterfalls; Father feared that some bully might push me in. Every other year, we heard of a school kid being swept away by the rapids.

My new school was next to Srinagar’s Iqbal Park, where a year before my joining, a few rowdy men had displayed their genitalia to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during a ami vitale/getty images

public rally. Of course, Father never told me about this. It before we were forced to leave, I feel like visiting one of was only through a classmate who boasted that his uncle those shops in Connaught Place that make rubber stamps was among those men that I learnt of it. and name plates and get a similar board made, with the Father didn’t know, but I did have my share of adventure. same number.

One of my forbidden thrills was to slither down a wooden But that will change nothing. Our heart will be in pole behind my first-floor classroom to the ground. Also, Kashmir, or Kashmir will be in our heart, but we will still there was a graveyard beyond the school wall, and some live in Gurgaon, climbing to the terrace every morning to of us would sometimes jump across to gather earth from check the water level in the tank and then planning our a fresh grave. A friend’s father had told him that this earth day accordingly. A relative will visit Kashmir and return could turn an active person passive. We placed some of it with a pile of pink eggplants and red radish and vost’e under the chair of a teacher whose belief in the rod—often haakh that leaves rice with a red hue. A portion of it will be a clump of nettle grass he used as a punitive weapon—was sent to us, and for a few days, Father will smile every time extreme. A couple of times, we thought it had really he lifts the lid off the dinner bowls. Sometimes, he will inworked. But then, someone spilt the beans and my friend sist that we eat on the floor in his room like good old times. was thrashed with nettle grass. We had to use the same Those are the only times he has a second helping of food. earth to soothe his legs with mudpacks.

In the evening, after the school bell rang, we would rush out to the old gatekeeper, who made us hold each other’s ince we left Kashmir in 1990, Father has never rehands to form a chain that he then joined to help us cross turned. I have visited regularly, though, and every the road. From there, we would walk through a street time I visit I click pictures and play a sort of quiz with named after Kashmir’s last Maharaja him. Ditto when images of the Valley and then saunter into Lal Chowk, past appear on television.

People often ask Amira Kadal bridge.

Fire in Secretariat: “Okay, Dad, so tell On Tuesdays, Hindu boys would stop me if I would like to me where this wall is?” at the Hanuman temple for boondi It takes him about five seconds: return to Kashmir. “Hmmm… this is right next to Jahangir dipped in sugar syrup. Often, we also I don’t know what hotel.” stopped by at Kapoor Brothers statioAnd then it is a phantasmagoria of ners to greedily look at Capital noteto tell them. I don’t sorts. books, Camel geometry boxes, Ajanta know whether we “The Assembly building caught fire fountain pens, Peacock diaries and really left Kashmir. in front of me.” “This is where we used other pricey stuff.

I don’t know whether children in Perhaps we did. But to take a bus to our village.” “This is where we fell off the scooter one day— Kashmir still do such things. I don’t did Kashmir ever me and Baeraaj’e (Dear brother: father’s know whether gatekeepers like that leave us? It didn’t cousin in this case).” “This is where we old man exist any longer. I don’t know would buy your school shoes.” (Of whether there is any space left in the course I remember, Dad!) “This is where graveyard behind my school. I don’t know if the Kapoor brothers stayed or left Kashmir, like thousands of men had gathered that evening, wearing most of us. Palladium, a cinema hall next to it, now looks shrouds, chanting slogans against Pandits.” like a postcard from Beirut of the 1980s.

That is Lal chowk, where once upon a time, a bookshop had painted on its outer wall this quote by Desiderius There is nobody left to feast on boondi.

People often ask me if I would like to return to Kashmir. Erasmus Roterodamus: ‘When I have a little money, I buy I don’t know what to tell them. I don’t know whether we books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.’

Move a little ahead, cross a narrow road, and you are in really left Kashmir. Perhaps we did.

Habba Kadal, named after a poetess whose songs even few But did Kashmir ever leave us? of my non-Kashmiri friends know by heart since I’ve It didn’t.

Every time I climb the stairs to my Gurgaon apartment sung them so many times in a drunken stupor. It used to and ring the doorbell, I am reminded of the fish-shaped be a maze of houses, occupied mostly by Kashmiri bell we had at home. Beside it was a blue-coloured board Pandits. They are abandoned now, barring a few. Then of the water works department bearing our connection you had the Ganpatyar temple closeby, where students number: 44732. Sometimes, when father talks too much would offer laddoos to appease God to pass their exams. of home and of how much timber he had ordered weeks Now special prayers are held there by a handful of Pandits who did not leave and some of us watch it live on the web.

It is here on the Habba Kadal bridge that they brutally killed the young Naveen Sapru in 1990 while he was reunforgettable memories A Kashmiri boy enjoys a lazy day fishing on Dal Lake in Srinagar turning from office. I have written about him in my

S

19 August 2013

open www.openthemagazine.com 19

ashish sharma

religious ties Kashmiri Pandits propitiating the deity at Kshir Bhawani shrine in Tulmula village, about 27 km from Srinagar

Kashmir memoir—of how he was shot and grievously wounded first, of how the crowd showered shireen over him as is done on a corpse, of how they danced after he died. But I missed a small detail. As my friend Vinayak Razdan wrote later in a blog: ‘They say when the killers shot him down on that bridge, the man fell to ground. His killers, with pistols in hand, came around to check on him and to make sure he was dead. The man on ground, in pain, raised his one hand and told his killers, ‘Bas. Be ha Mudus. Stop. I am already dead.’ A killer shot him through his hand.’

It is also here in these bylanes that a man called Bitta Karate roamed about, sniffing for what he called ‘Batt’e mushie’k’ (the smell of a Pandit), and once he got a whiff, he would then draw out his pistol and kill the source of that smell. He still passes through these lanes, except that there is no need to scout for any such smell now. Also, he sees himself in politics now and that is why, sometimes in June, on the day of Jyeshta Ashtami, he visits the Kshir Bhawani shrine and poses with members of the Kashmiri Pandit diaspora. He is especially adept at walking up to an old lady and holding her hands with his, stained with the blood of at least 20 Pandits.

I

went to Kshir Bhawani last month, running all the way at 05.30 hours from Kashmir University to the shrine, a distance of roughly 20 km. For years, my grandfather refused to leave his village and come and stay with us in the city because every day, before sunrise, he would walk up to the shrine and spend all morning there. When I go, I call Father from there and make him 20 open

listen to the sound of the bell ringing over the phone. He doesn’t speak at all afterwards. He is transported back to his village.

The next time he and his brothers meet, they recall moment after moment of their lives back then. The last time round, my uncle remembered a tragic figure in their village who was always brought to tears singing Pyaar ka bandhan toote na from the 1961 film Shola aur Shabnam.

They were in splits remembering an impostor who had pronounced himself a saint, and who, one day, upon being asked by a pregnant woman of her child’s gender, closed his eyes and said, “There are only two types of fruit.

So it will be either one or the other.”

O

n my way to Srinagar airport to catch a flight back to Delhi, I asked the driver to pass through my old school. I always did that. The building had been in shambles for years, but the wooden pole was still intact. But this time, I found the building no longer exists. It has been brought down to expand the road for an upcoming flyover.

Last year, in Mumbai, the filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra and I recalled our days in Kashmir. I discovered that even he had gone to the same school in Srinagar many years ago, and like many of us, he too had slithered countless times down that wooden pole.

I haven’t told Vinod yet about the school. But it doesn’t matter. A building might be brought down—in that sense, it may be dead. But memory never suffers rigor mortis. So, as long as that remains alive, we will always be slithering down that pole. n 19 August 2013

Independence DAY Special

Bollywood

‘Whatever I am today is because of my father’ Amitabh Bachchan, actor

Mumbai, Maharashtra, and Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh

‘H

ome’ is where you live. My home is in Mumbai. It is the city that gave me my present profession, my independent home, my wife, my children and my grandchildren. I lost my parents here, too. My ‘roots’ are where I was born. The earth and environs of Allahabad. So, Mumbai is my ‘karmabhoomi’ and Allahabad, my ‘janmbhoomi’.

From my birth till age 14, I was in Allahabad—14 formative years, of growing up and facing the challenges of life at that age. One of the strange aspects of life is that what you experience in youth remains with you for a longer period than what you did yesterday. I remember most

india picture

idol Allahabad shaped the man who shaped so many others

of it—my family, my parents [poet Harivansh Rai and Teji Bachchan] and their status in society, my schooling and its wondrous experiences, friends, incidents, the day of Independence, the cortege of [Mahatma] Gandhiji, and later the corteges of close family friends Panditji [Jawaharlal Nehru], Indiraji, Rajiv and Sanjay [Gandhi].

Then, activities in school, the atmosphere of the city, its language, its importance in the history and culture of our nation.

Allahabad is a unique and vibrant city. It has, through hundreds of years, been blessed with many varied assets.

It is an important religious centre because of the triveni sangam—the confluence of the Ganga and Jamuna and the hidden Saraswati—where it is auspicious for Hindus to immerse the ashes of their dead. Alongside is a magnificent fort built by Mughal rulers. There is Allahabad University, one of the four main universities built by the British, a centre of learning. It is the city of Motilal Nehru and Panditji and several important political figures, connected with many freedom movements, hence a huge political centre. The most number of prime ministers of India have been from Allahabad.

Five, I think!

It has the Allahabad High Court, the first among the four or five built during the Raj, so is a centre of huge legal importance. And then a great literary centre, with some of the most prominent Indian poets and writers residing and coming from there—Firaq Gorakhpuri, Nirala [Suryakant Tripathi], Mahadevi Verma, [Harivansh Rai] Bachchan and several others.

I was too young then to assimilate what it all meant.

The meetings and visits of literary luminaries to the house and my own travels with my father to poetic symposiums must have left an impression, which now reflects in whatever I do and think. One always feels one should have had more time to spend with elders. But lamenting what one missed, in hindsight, has always remained an unexplainable feature of the human race.

Whatever I am today is because of my father.

These assets of Allahabad still remain and shall remain eternally. Of course, comparatively and materially, Allahabad has changed with modernity, taking rapid strides, much like other cities in the country. But somehow when, at my age [70], you look back, you view Allahabad differently. There was a quietness about it, or so I believed at that young age, despite its vibrancy. Now, of course, it has grown in many ways. Yet I feel it has still not lost its original qualities. I doubt if it ever will. Most cities exist with an inborn culture and remain in that strain no matter what the circumstances.

I have not been able to visit it as much as I would have liked. But old associations, friends, family, places and people shall always stay within me. n 19 August 2013

Independence DAY Special

Teteliguri

The Unsafe Augusts of Assam F

warm clothes. I don’t remember it had been a night in people sitting around fires lit in August when my maju-borold blackened iron cauldrons in ma—my father’s elder brother’s front of their houses and chatARUNI KASHYAP wife—screamed out for help to ting— a common scene during the neighbours while we were winters. I don’t remember the visiting her house. My brother and I had played a prank, smoke and smell of potatoes burning. which had terrified her. The neighbours rushed out of Those fires were often alive with a lot of loud laughter. their houses to help. Men from the nearest outpost of the When the thick, eye-smarting smoke going upwards Village Defence Party came with their bamboo artillery, would bend towards one of the people sitting by the fire, too. When they learnt what had happened, they looked we would tease him or her because it was believed that at me with accusing eyes as if I had done something un- the smoke chased only those people who stood by the pardonably wrong. road and peed. When the smoke ‘chased’ our serious unMy father tried to calm them down. I was terrified. My cles and scary aunts, we tried hard to suppress our laughbrother wasn’t, because he was too young to understand ter because we didn’t dare ask them if they peed by the what was going on; perhaps he was still laughing that we side of a road when no one was watching. managed to scare maju-borma. She opened the door, There were no sounds of such laughter and chatter that walked out of her house, spitting on her chest to chase night. No, I don’t remember people doing the things we away the fear that my brother and I had planted in her. commonly do in winters. So what was unusual about that “Thu-thu-thu! You boys would have killed me today,” she November? Was it really November?

My father looked at me and said, “No, it was November. said, “Bhoy khalong dei!” We didn’t laugh like we used to do when she spoke in our dialect, not because father Don’t you know what was going on that year?” Then, as a was around, but because both of us knew we had done first year undergrad student in college, I didn’t know. But something wrong, though we didn’t know what it was. now I do, and I understand why the atmosphere of August Playing a prank on your aunt didn’t seem like much had extended to wrap around November, why November had become synonymous with August, why no smoke of a sin. chased the person who peed by the side of the road.

Y

or many years, I thought

Augusts on the banks of the Brahmaputra have been unconventional for more than three decades

ears later, when I was discussing that event with

my father, he corrected me: “It wasn’t August; it was November.” He laid stress on the word ‘November’ to suggest that he was sure. I wasn’t convinced, “No Pita, it was really August. Why would she be so scared then? I mean, I can understand people being scared and vigilant during August. The VDP party, the shut doors...”

I was in college when we had this conversation. My mind raced as I spoke to him, remembering, recollecting.

Was it really November? Then it must have been a pretty warm November because I don’t remember wearing 24 open

I

t was natural for me to believe all these years that it

was August because I—like everyone else in this state, like government office-goers and insurgents, like middleclass people in Guwahati and daily wage earners—have bitter memories of August.

It is during August that we are reminded of our turbulent relationship with Delhi, because there is an increase in the density of Indian Army personnel, who stand by the streets of Guwahati, stopping ‘suspicious looking’ people in cars and on motorbikes to ask random ques19 August 2013

reuters

state of fear Indian Army personnel frisk bus passengers by the side of the road in Guwahati, Assam

tions such as ‘Where are you going?’ and ‘Where are you coming from?’ and ‘Who is with you?’

It is during August that we are afraid to travel much, especially by train, for fear of bombs planted on the tracks—but we have always had to travel, because it is during this period, between late July and early August, that students from Assam return to different cities across India to their educational institutions after spending their summer breaks at home. Not everyone can afford an air-ticket.

It is during August that bombs explode in different parts of Assam.

People say this or that militant outfit is trying to send this or that message, to show their strength, waning or otherwise. In 2000, on one such day in August, one of my classmates from Maligaon in Guwahati went out for his mathematics tuition lession and never came back. He must have been engulfed by one of the many reasons that make August a volatile and unsafe month in Assam.

A

ugusts on the banks of the Brahmaputra have been

unconventional for more than three decades now,

19 August 2013

unlike Augusts on the banks of the Kosi or Narmada or Yamuna. Perhaps the best phrase to describe an Assamese August is: ‘the reign of fear’. Especially during the 90s, when I was going to school in Guwahati by crossing the Brahmaputra River every day.

I remember going to celebrate Independence Day with my father at his office, with the hope of eating free khurmas, boondiya-bhujiya and jelepis. Sometimes, we would walk out of our protected All India Radio Campus and visit one of our family friends’ houses. Together, we would watch the Independence Day parade and wait to see Assam’s convoy. When it would appear on the TV screen, we would try to recognise the things in it.

During such trips, we would often walk or drive past the Judge’s Field, where the state government celebrated 15 August. “Look at that,” someone always said, “We are celebrating Independence Day out there, with such tight security that not even an ant can get in without permission.” At that age, I missed the tragic connotations of celebrating Independence Day under a blanket of fear.

This fear—normalised by the time we started having crushes and bunking school to watch first-day-firstshows with friends—is something worse than actual open www.openthemagazine.com 25

death. The person who dies of a gunshot during a skirmish doesn’t feel this fear for long. But it disrupts daily life with far reaching consequences. It makes people do things that are out of character, that are unexpected.

I saw my mother doing something like that once.

the eyes of the paranoid Indian State.

The officers peeped inside the car. They checked our driver’s driving licence and looked at my brother and me.

I must have looked very young then, otherwise they would have probably searched me, too.

I

T

n the late 90s, we bought a new car. I forget the mod-

he night my aunt was almost scared to death by an el now, but I remember the driver we hired because innocent prank we played was actually a November we would often fish with him when we went to our night, one that had become synonymous with the nights grandmother’s house. When we decided to bathe in and days of Assamese Augusts. But I didn’t believe my fathe large pond in our ancestral house, he bathed with ther because he has a good memory; I believed him beus and looked over me and my cousins. Often, he would cause he told me it was during Operation Rhino—a ‘countell us stories about the conflict in his village—now ter-insurgency’ operation launched by the Indian Army in Bodoland—which he left behind to earn a living in in September 1991 when news of death and torture were Guwahati. When we had nothing to do, we would bug everyday conversation.

That night, we had reached Teteliguri, our village, very him to teach us how to say ‘I love you’ in Bodo.

We went to our ancestral house almost every fortnight, late. Perhaps we were late because we had taken the last and during one such trip, when the secret killings of bus after my father was free from office work. Perhaps we were late because he stopped for a long Assam—a series of extra-judicial killings of perceived insurgent sympathistime at the shop in Tetelia, where the ers allegedly conducted by the govern- A person called Pitou bus stopped, and spoke to people from ment—were going on, we were stopped was beaten up when his childhood, buying orange-cream by a group of Army personnel after we biscuits we could have with tea. the Army asked him had crossed Jorabaat, an intersection.

A few yards before we reached majuhis name and he “Those hills on the other side of the borma’s house, my brother and I raced road belong to Meghalaya, and on this said ‘Pitou’—since to see who could reach her house faster. choric sound of our leather shoes side of the road, it is Assam,” someone ‘pito’ in Hindi means The on the gravel road approaching her in the car said, and we—school-going ‘beat’, they thought house was loud at night. I don’t know adolescents or younger—were fascinated because our minds couldn’t under- he was making fun of whose decision it was to play ‘militarybut we stamped our feet, stand how something on the other them by asking them military’, jumped on the verandah, banged on her side of the road could have a totally to beat him up wooden door, until she started screamdifferent address.

When security forces stop us on trips ing for help, refusing to open the door. like this, my father always walks out of We stopped only when our father the car, shows his identity card, and, since he is a Central reached. “What the hell are you guys up to?”

“Is that you?” she asked, opening the door with tears in Government employee, we are rarely checked.

Sometimes they tell him that they like the Sainik Bhaiyon her eyes—I could clearly see them in the light of the kerka Karyakram broadcast by the All India Radio. But that osene lamp. Later, she broke open a coconut for us, gratday, my father had forgotten to bring his identity card ed it, squeezed it and strained the coconut-milk into a and they wouldn’t let us proceed without checking the steel glass. She mixed it with water and made milk-tea car. We were asked to step down from the car and open for us, with a little sugar tossed into the boiling pan the trunk. before serving.

It was then I saw my mother stepping out, and I was surShe told us about how most people in the village didn’t prised to see that when she spoke to the security forces, understand the language of the Army and were beaten up when she introduced herself as a professor, she covered because they didn’t know what to answer. She looked at her head with a sador. She rarely did that, unless we were me and said that in another village, a person called Pitou in the village. “It is just a custom,” she explained, “I am a was badly beaten up because when the Army asked him daughter-in-law here, not a professor.” his name and he said ‘Pitou’, they thought he was makI never asked her why she did that while speaking to ing fun of them by asking them to beat him up—since the Army and I wondered for years. Perhaps that day she ‘pito’ in Hindi means ‘beat’. My father laughed, “It must was stepping into the role of a ‘Mother Who is a Professor’ be a joke! Which village? When?” She hushed him up and to earn respect and sympathy, putting aside her feminism said with firm conviction, “No, don’t laugh. It is true.” for a little while because, after all, she was living at a time Outside, the crickets were singing. Of course it was a when every person who spoke Assamese was suspect in scary night. n 26 open

19 August 2013

Independence DAY Special

Bollywood

‘Nature has humbled me and also toughened me’ Prasoon Joshi, poet-writer

Almora, Uttarakhand

nature boy ‘I am still a boy from the hills who believes in the goodness of the human heart’

A

lmora is a hill station known for its spectacular

landscapes. There are lovely pine trees everywhere.

As kids, we played games that involved counting pine tree leaves. If you got four, you were said to be lucky.

You could walk miles playing that game without realising you had reached home. We knew how to distinguish the ‘edible’ wild berries from the poisonous ones. The hills had their own folklore. If you heard a bird chirping

somewhere, there would be some strange story about how that bird was human once.

This proximity with nature has made me respect it.

Nature has humbled me. The mountains, sea and forests are so grand that man cannot help but feel like a footnote—like a tiny pixel in a picture. We are all part of nature; nature isn’t a part of us. That’s why I have completely surrendered to it. I have no desire to fight with nature.

I am amused to see the craze for adventure sports. You may think that you have done bungee jumping and climbed mountains, but the truth is that nature is invincible.

Nature has also toughened me. My nani, a deeply religious woman, used to take me to temples in the farthest of mountains. I saw how tough she was and I realised nature tests you, but it does not manipulate. In advertising and movies, I come across people who are mean and Machiavellian.

I don’t know how to deal with them because I had no experience of that. I am still a boy from the hills who believes in the goodness of the human heart.

Apart from shaping me as an individual, Almora also defines my poetry. Its imagery recurs in my work. For instance, I often use the word ‘dhoop’ (sunshine)—as in ‘Tu dhoop hai, jhham se bikhar’ (in a song from the film Taare Zameen Par) or ‘Dhoop ke makaan’ (from Break Ke Baad). In Almora, I would stand by a window to see the effects of sunlight and shadow change the colour of the landscape. Moreover, ‘jhham’ is an onomatopoetic pahadi word, meaning ‘full throttle’. n

‘I feel like a South Indian trapped in a North Indian body’ Ayushmann Khurrana, actor

Chandigarh, Punjab

T

he thing about Chandigarh is that nobody is re-

ally from Chandigarh. The town was developed by foreign architects, post-Independence, and the people are either from what is now Pakistan—West Punjab—Punjab or Himachal Pradesh. Chandigarh is at the tri-junction of Haryana, Punjab and Himachal, so the cultures are all mixed, though it’s mainly Punjabi.

Chandigarh looks like a big city but, at heart, has the mentality of a small town. People live a disciplined life.

They sleep for eight hours, get up early, work out and eat well. It has given me simplicity, sanity and discipline. But it lacks the thriving cultural life of Mumbai or Delhi.

In the early 2000s, I started two theatre groups called Aaghaaz and Manchtantra. We regularly performed on the streets of Chandigarh and often found the audience 28 open

uninterested and unreceptive. When I first came to Mumbai in 2002 to participate in Mood Indigo, the annual cultural festival at IIT, Powai, I was amazed to see how involved and appreciative an audience could be and to see students from colleges in Delhi, Mumbai and Pune perform so confidently. They were far ahead of us.

The sort of people I met in Bombay were so different from those back home. Everybody knows how Punjabis are —loud and occasionally shallow. I was never the typical Punjabi. Sometimes, I feel like a South Indian trapped in a North Indian body. But being Punjabi, in a way, prepared me for Vicky Donor [my 2012 Bollywood debut]. Having observed Punjabis all my life, I could add my own little touches and nuances to the character of Vicky.

Luckily, I go home often. Right now, I am on the terrace of my Chandigarh house and it’s so quiet and peaceful here. I can see the Himalayas and a sky full of stars. n 19 August 2013

Independence DAY Special

Fount

A Historical Sense What Sanskrit has meant to me aatish taseer

I

had come to Sanskrit in search of roots, but I had not

expected to have that need met so directly. I had not expected my wish for a ‘historical sense’ to be answered with linguistic roots.

Aged twenty-seven or so, when I first began to study Sanskrit as a private student at Oxford, I knew nothing about the shared origins of Indo-European languages. Not only did I not know the example given in my textbook— that the Sanskrit a ¯ rya, the Avestan airya, from which we vivek thakkar

have the modern name Iran, and the Gaelic Eire, all the way on the Western rim of the Indo-European belt, were all probably cognate—I don’t even think I knew that word, ‘cognate’. It means ‘born together’: co + natus. And natus from gnascor is cognate with the Sanskrit root jan from where we have janma and the Ancient Greek gennao ¯ , ‘to beget’. Genesis, too.

And in those early days of learning Sanskrit, the shared genesis of these languages of a common source, spoken somewhere on the Pontic steppe in the third millennium BC, a source which had decayed and of which no direct record remains, absorbed me completely. Well, almost completely. The grammar was spectacularly difficult and, in that first year, it just kept mushrooming—besides three genders, three numbers and eight cases for every noun, there were several classes of verbs, in both an active and middle voice, each with three numbers and three persons, so that in just the present system, with its moods and the imperfect, I was obliged to memorise 72 terminations for a single verb alone.

And still I found time to marvel at how the Sanskrit vid, from where we have vidia ¯ , was related to the Latin videre— to see—from where, in turn, we have such words as video and vision; veda too, of course, for as Calasso writes in Ka, the ancient seers, contrary to common conception, did not hear the Vedas, they saw them! Or that ka ¯ la, Time and Death, should be derived from the Sanskrit ka ¯ l, ‘to calculate or enumerate’—related to the Latin kalendarium, ‘account book’, the English calendar—imparting, it seemed to me, onto that word the suggestive notion that at the end of all our calculations comes Death. Almost as if ka ¯ la did not simply mean Time, but had built into it the idea of its passage, the count of days, as it were.

These thrills were so self-evident that I did not stop to ask what lay behind them. But one day, a few months into my second term, the question was put to me by a sympathetic listener. An old editor at Penguin. I was in London assailing him over dinner, as I now am you, with my joy at having discovered these old threads, when he stopped me with: But what is this excitement? What is the excitement of discovering these old roots?

An oddly meta question, it should be said, oddly selfreferential, and worthy of old India. For few ancient cultures were as concerned with the how and why of 19 August 2013

knowing as ancient India. And what my editor was saying was, you have the desire to know, fine—you have jijñ a ¯ sa, desiderative of jña: ‘to know’—but what is it made of?

What is this hunting about for linguistic roots? What comfort does this knowledge give? And, what, as an extension, can it tell us about our need for roots, more generally? It was that most basic of philosophical enquiries: why do we want to know the things we want to know?

I

grew up in late 20th century India, in a deracinated

household. I use that word keeping in mind that racine is 'root' in French, and that is what we were: people whose roots had either been severed or could no longer be reached. A cultural and linguistic break had occurred, and between my grandparents’ and my parents’ generation, there lay an imporous layer of English education that prevented both my father in Pakistan, and my mother, in India, from being able to reach their roots.

What the brilliant Sri Lankan art critic, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, had seen happening around him already in his time had happened to us (and is, I suppose, happening today all over India).

‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes in The Dance of Shiva, ‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.’

This is an accurate description of what we were. And what it meant for me, personally, as an Indian writer getting started with a writing career in India, was that the literary past of India was closed to me. The Sanskrit commentator, Mallinatha, working in 14th century Andhra, had with a casual ‘iti-Dandin: as Dandin says’, been able to go back seven or eight hundred years into his literary past. I could go back no further than fifty or sixty. The work of writers who had come before me, who had lived and worked in the places where I lived and worked today, was beyond reach. Their ideas of beauty; their feeling for the natural world; their notion of what it meant to be a writer, and what literature was—all this, and much more, were closed to me. And, as I will explain later, this was not simply for linguistic reasons.

I was—and I have TS Eliot in mind as I write this—a writer without a historical sense. Eliot who, in Tradition and the Individual Talent, describes the ‘historical sense’ as: a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense, he feels, compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but that [for him]—I’m paraphrasing now—the whole literature of Europe from Homer onwards to that of his own country has ‘a simultaneous existence’.

My problem was that I had next to nothing in my bones.

Nothing but a handful of English novels, some Indian

19 August 2013

writing in English, and a few verses of Urdu poetry. That was all. And it was too little; it left the bones weak; I had no way to thread the world together.

The place I grew up in was not just culturally denuded, but—and this is to be expected, for we can only value what we have the means to assess—it held its past in contempt. Urdu was given some token respect—though no one really bothered to learn it—but Sanskrit was actively mocked and despised. It was as if the very sound of the language had become debased. People recoiled from names that were too Sanskritic, dismissing them as lower class: ‘Narindar,’ someone might say, ‘what a driver’s name!’ They preferred Armaan and Zhyra and Alaaya.

The Sanskrit teacher in most elite schools was a figure of fun. And people took great joy at having come out of a school, such as The Doon School, say, without having learnt any more Sanskrit than a derisive little rhyme about flatulence.

What was even more dismaying was that very few people in this world regarded Sanskrit as a language of literature. In fact, Sanskrit, having fought so hard historically to escape its liturgical function and become a language of literature and statecraft, had in the India I grew up been

The way a culture arrived at its words gave you a picture of its values, of its belief system confined once again to liturgy. And an upper-class lady, on hearing that you were learning Sanskrit, would think nothing of saying: ‘Oh, I hate all that chanting-shanting.’

Sanskrit was déclassé; it was a source of embarrassment; its position in our English-speaking world reminded me of the VS Naipaul story of the boy among the mighty Mayan ruins of Belize. ‘In the shadow of one such ruin,’ Naipaul writes in The Enigma of Arrival, ‘a Mayan boy (whatever his private emotions) giggled when I tried to talk to him about the monument. He giggled and covered his mouth; he seemed to be embarrassed. He was like a person asking to be forgiven for the absurdities of long ago…’

T

o have Sanskrit in India was to know an equal

measure of joy and distress. On the one hand, the language was all around me and things that had once seemed closed and inert came literally to be full of meaning. ‘Narindar’ might have sounded downmarket to the people I had grown up with, but it could no longer be that way for me. Not when I knew that beyond its simple meaning as ‘Lord of Men’, nara—cognate with the Latin open www.openthemagazine.com 31

nero and the Greek anér—was one of our oldest words become’. From where we have the Old English wyrd— for ‘man’. Some might turn their nose up at a name like ‘fate, destiny’; but also werde: ‘death’. That extra layer of Aparn. a, say, preferring a Kaireen or an Alaaya, but not meaning restored, it was impossible ever to think of me. Not when it was clear that parn. a was ‘leaf’, cognate Shakespeare’s ‘weird sisters’ from Macbeth in the same with the English ‘fern’, and aparn. a, which meant ‘leafless’, way again. was a name Kalida¯ sa had himself given Paravati: ‘Because What Sanskrit did for me was that it laid bare the deep she rejected, gracious in speech though she was, even the tissue of language. The experience was akin to being able high level of asceticism that is living only on leaves fall- to see beneath the thick encroachment of slum and shaning from trees of their own accord, those who know the ty, the preserved remains of a grander city, a place of gridded streets and sophisticated sewage systems, of magnifpast call her Aparn. a, the Leafless Lady.’

My little knowledge of Sanskrit made the walls speak icent civic architecture. But to go one step further with and nothing was the same again. Words and names that the metaphor of the ruined city, it was also like seeing had once seemed whole and complete—such as Anuja Trajan’s forum as spolia on people’s houses. The language and Ks. itaja—broke into their elements. I saw them for was there, but it was unthought-of, unregarded, hardly what they were: upapada compounds, which formed the visible to the people living among it: there as remains, and most playful and, at times, playfully profound com- little more. There are few places in the world where the pounds. Anuja, because it meant ‘born after’, or ‘later’, was past continues into the present as seamlessly as it does in a name often given to the youngest son of a family. And India, and where people are so unaware of it. ks. itaja, which meant ‘born of the Neither is the expectation of such an earth’—the ja being a contraction of jan, awareness an imposition of the present that ancient thread for birthing, begeton the past. Nor is it an import from ting and generating—could be applied As an Indian writer elsewhere; not—to use the Academic’s equally to an insect and a worm as well word—etic, but deeply emic to India. getting started as the horizon, for they were both earthFor it is safe to say that no ancient culwith a writing born. And dvi|ja, twice born, could mean ture thought harder about language a Brahmin, for he is born, and then born career in India, the than India, no culture had better means again when he is initiated into the rites assess it. Nothing in old India went literary past of the to of his caste; it could mean ‘a bird’, for it unanalysed; no part of speech was just country was closed a part of life, no word just slipped into is born once when it is conceived and then again from an egg; but it could also to me. The work of usage, and could not be accounted for. mean ‘a tooth’, for teeth, it was plain to This was the land of grammar and writers who had see, had two lives too. grammarians. And, if today, in that So, yes: once word and meaning were come before me was same country, men were without grambeyond reach reunited, a lot that had seemed ordimar, without means to assess language, nary, under the influence of the world I it spoke of a decay that could be meagrew up in, came literally to acquire sured against the standards of India’s new meaning. Nor did the knowledge own past. of these things seem trifling to me, not simply a matter of That decay—growing up with as little as I had—was curiosity, not just pretty baubles. Because the way a cul- what lay behind my need for roots and the keenness of my ture arrived at its words, the way it endowed s´ abda with excitement at discovering them. It was the excitement, at artha, gave you a picture of its values, of its belief system, a time when my cultural life felt thin and fragmentary, of glimpsing an underlying wholeness, a dream of unity, of the things it held sacred.

Consider, for instance, s´ arı ¯ ra or ‘body’. One of its possi- that we human beings never quite seem able to let go of. ble derivations is from √s´ r. r. , which means ‘to break’ or ‘de- But there was something else. stroy’, so that s´ a ¯ r ı ¯ ra is nothing but ‘that which is easily deIn India, where history had heaped confusion upon stroyed or dissolved.’ And how could one know that confusion, where everything was shoddy and haphazard without forming a sense of the culture in which that word and unplanned, the structure of Sanskrit, with its emerged and how it regarded the body? The body, which, exquisite planning, was proof that it had not always been as any student of John Locke will tell you1, had so differ- that way. It was like a little molecule of the Indian genius, intact, and saved in amber, for a country from which the ent a significance in other cultures.

I thought it no less interesting to observe the little memory of genius had departed. n jumps of meaning a root made as it travelled over the Indo-European belt. Take vertere, ‘to turn’, from the old 1 ‘Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property Latin uortere: we have it in Sanskrit too: vr. t, vartate: ‘to in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State of Nature turn, turn round, revolve, roll; to be, to live, to exist, to hath provided, and left in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, abide and dwell’. It is related to the German werden—‘to and thereby makes it his Property.’

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Independence DAY Special

Bollywood

‘I am still searching for a place to call home’ Nandita Das, actress-filmmaker

Baripada, Odisha

I

was born in Bombay and brought up in Delhi. After living a good part of my life there, I have returned to Mumbai, completing the cycle.

My father [artist Jatin Das] is an Odiya and my mother, a Gujarati. Every summer during my school and college days, we would go first to Baripada, the district headquarters of Odisha’s northern district of Mayurbhanj, and then to Mumbai, to my maternal grandparents’. mychele daniau/afp

wanderer Das increasingly feels like a citizen of the world, but is still looking for a place where she’d like to raise her child

With my roots spread all over, it is difficult to know where they are thickest and deepest. I do feel at home in a lot of places. But if I had to pick one place that truly makes me nostalgic, it would be Baripada.

I remember the quickening of my heartbeat as our family home in Baripada grew closer. It was a long, tiring journey involving a train to Balasore, a bus and finally a rickshaw. In later years, the journey was reduced to a flight and a car, but the excitement of the last 500 metres was no less. The city child in me used to wait for the wilderness, the well, pond, trees and farms, and, of course, lots of cousins to play with. Not to forget the absolutely delicious Odiya food that even today, sadly, one can’t find anywhere except in Odiya homes.

I may not have had such a deep connection with Baripada had it not been for my father, whose roots there are thick and deep, despite having lived most of his life in Bombay and Delhi. He left home at 17, but wants it, even today, to be exactly how it was then, deall the changWhat impacted me spite es—most not for the even more than better, though often inevitable. growing up with My childhood art and culture was memories are of a growing up with town where everyfreedom and the body knew everybody space to question— else. Temple festivals were more social and this has had a cultural gatherings profound impact than religious ones; on my choices, my we could be out in the sun all day playing values and the around with sheer person I am abandon. The peace and intimacy of a small town was the perfect antidote to the noisy chaos of the big city. It helped me straddle different worlds with ease and that has been a big boon.

My father is a painter, poet, gardener and cook, and has a host of other talents and interests. But beyond all that, what has influenced me most is his sensitivity, integrity and passion for everything that he does. What impacted me even more than growing up with art and culture was growing up with freedom and the space to question— this has had a profound impact on my choices, the values I hold dear and the person I am.

Over the years, I have travelled a lot, met many wonderful people and I increasingly feel like a citizen of the world. But I am still searching for a place where I would like to raise my child—and call home. n 19 August 2013

Independence DAY Special

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Independence DAY Special

Patna

Pangs of a Patna Visit Intimations of mortality Amitava kumar

T

he baby was only ten minutes old. That is what the

infant’s father said to me, but it was more likely that half an hour had passed since the time he was born and rushed to the clinic because he wasn’t crying.

The clinic is new. It is located on the ground floor of the house where I grew up in Patna. My elder sister is a doctor and owns the clinic with her husband. When I first saw the baby, around nine in the morning, he already had a thin tube in his tiny nostril. This tube brought oxygen to his lungs. The child was wrapped in a soft white dhoti, but my sister, or her assistant, had covered him with puffy sheets of white cotton.

The baby was making an unearthly, prolonged, painful sound. With each breath he took, the baby was grunting, the sound too loud for a body so small. I don’t know how else to say it: the cry was that of a dying animal, and the look on the faces of the people in the room showed that it had a shattering effect on them.

I stepped out of the room and saw my sister, the doctor, standing beside the stairs; she had both hands on the railing and was leaning over it with her eyes shut.

I had come back to Patna to see my parents. They are old. I’m aware of their mortality, of course, and perhaps as a result of it, I wonder also about the days that are left to me. The question becomes poignant when it is posed in Patna. I remember how, some years ago, while I was writing a book about post-9/11 legal trials in the US, I had met Hemant Lakhani, a man convicted of selling an Igla missile to an undercover agent pretending to be from a terrorist organisation. Lakhani was an old man and his long sentence means that he will die in prison. On the day of his sentencing in a New Jersey courtroom, Lakhani pleaded with the judge, begging for leniency because, he said, everyone wants to die in their homeland.

Home is where you go to die.

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he greater truth, of course, is that my hometown Patna is where people die all too often, all too easily.

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find a bed in a hospital. There are other perversions in the business. My friend Ravish Kumar, an anchor for NDTV, once told me that when he went to a pharmacy in Patna to buy medicines for his father who had fallen sick, the man behind the counter looked at the prescription and guessed the doctor’s caste correctly. The doctor had prescribed medicines made by companies owned by businessmen of the same caste. This is routine practice in Bihar. As Ravish put it, even medicines have a caste.

While I was talking to the salesmen, one of them mentioned that the lack of facilities meant that people had to travel long distances to get help. In the room adjoining the one where we were sitting, there was a couple who had come from Jharkhand. They had brought their fouryear-old boy, who had not been able to urinate in three days. The problem, it turned out, was even more complidespair A woman who lost a daughter to Chhapra’s mid-day meal tragedy with another of her children

Zheng Huansong/Xinhua Press/Corbis

The day I began writing this piece, children were brought to Patna dying or already dead from having eaten their pesticide-laced mid-day lunch in a village near Chhapra.

A week earlier, meeting some medical sales representatives at my sister’s clinic in Patna, I had asked what diseases they were most in the market for. Antibiotics, they said, and added that people also suffered from tuberculosis and diarrhoea. One of them, Ajay Pathak, told me that even if you go to Patna Medical College and Hospital only to meet a doctor, you still have a good chance of contracting TB. He was talking about himself. A month earlier, he had also started suffering from Hepatitis E. There were four of them, the medical salesmen, and each agreed that the worst thing about their job was seeing patients suffer because there was such an overwhelming lack of medical facilities. You have to pay a bribe to

cated than not getting help where they were. My sister sisters, one of whom was mentally disabled; the baby’s fatold me that the child’s parents had first taken him to a lo- ther was the only child of his parents. By evening, the cal doctor who told them he needed to clean the boy’s gen- baby had settled down and was sleeping peacefully. There ital area. That doctor inserted a catheter in the boy’s penis was still concern, but he had stepped out of danger. We and this ill-advised action had hurt him. It was why he were all enormously relieved; in fact, I felt giddy. I was in wasn’t peeing. He was given medicine while I spoke to the my hometown and I felt enough at ease to declare happisalesmen, and before his parents took him and left, he’d ly to the baby’s father—the mother was still in the hospiat last been able to release what my sister called “a trickle”. tal where she had undergone a Caesarean procedure that But that had been the previous week. No past success morning—that now my sister had earned the right to could offer solace or suggest a cure for the grunting baby. name the child. My sister laughed off the idea but I eagerHis pulse, oxygen saturation and respiration were being ly proffered the name ‘Amartya’. Over the next three days, translated into a flow of brightly coloured numbers on a I visited the baby’s room often. I met his mother when she monitor. A special lamp was keeping him warm, the tem- arrived, in tears, to see her baby for the first time. perature close to what he had been accustomed to inside Your hometown is always where your roots lie, but I his mother’s womb. An intravenous feed, attached to his think it can also be about the spread of branches and, in a tiny arm and secured by means of a cardboard splint, took new season, fresh blossoms. fluids into his bloodstream. A clamp glowing red was attached to his ear. Three or four sensors were stuck to his t would have been neat to end the tale here. But there skin, thin tubes radiating from his pink form. Every second or so, one of the machines, perhaps the one recording is another story that must not go untold. There was anhis pulse, beeped. The infant’s cry was louder, or more no- other baby at my sister’s clinic. This baby, who was three ticeable. It went on for an hour, and then more. The baby months old and already had a name, Sneha Kumari, came had come at nine, and at noon he was still at it. I wondered from a village in East Champaran. Her sternum was forewhether he’d die of sheer exhaustion. shortened and weak, and she was having trouble breathing. She was also sufWhen I put the question to my sister, her reply seemed to suggest we needed Once, when a friend fering from pneumonia, and that was to wait and see. Meanwhile, she bought went to a pharmacy my sister’s main concern. Sneha’s faa ventilator for a little over Rs 1 lakh. ther and grandfather are manual lain Patna, the It was explained to me that when a bourers. She had been brought to my pharmacist guessed sister’s clinic by her grandparents and baby cries after coming out of its mother’s womb, the crying helps rid its lungs the doctor’s caste— her mother; they were staying in what of water. This had not happened with had formerly been our family’s garage he had prescribed and now been converted into a space for this child. This baby, who didn’t even medicines made by those who couldn’t afford the rooms inhave a name yet, was grunting in a struggle to breathe. Hence, the tube of companies owned by side. Sneha’s grandfather told me that oxygen. Hence, too, my sister’s attempt had spent Rs 50,000 on the baby’s businessmen of the he to drain fluids from near the baby’s treatment so far, going from one docsame caste throat by using a vacuum machine. tor to another near their village. This money had come from loans he had takAnd assorted injected medications. en from rich peasants in the village: the It was difficult to watch or hear the baby. His maternal grandmother, who is the mother of interest on the loan was Rs 3 each month on every hunthree daughters, stood distraught, one hand squeezing dred he had borrowed. He told me he belonged to a caste the other as if she were putting on a tight bangle. The ba- that traditionally prepared oil. His daily earnings were beby’s father, a man with a broad, serious face, was sitting tween Rs 50 and Rs 100.

For Sneha’s family, my sister and even I were objects of on a bench outside. I sat down next to him and found out that he was the manager of a local bank. He told me he was suspicion and resentment. I saw it in their look. Unlike the father of two daughters. He revealed that in his upper- the family of the other baby, who were grateful that my caste society, people were inclined to ‘indicate’ (he used sister had saved their child’s life, Sneha’s mother never the English word) if one didn’t have any male progeny. stopped frowning while she spoke to me. She addressed There had been cause for concern because of the baby’s angry questions at my sister. She knew that the system gender. The mother had complained that the foetus was tilted against her. In fact, it promised her annihilawasn’t kicking that day and her gynaecologist had taken tion. Why should I have expected the young mother to quick action, delivering the child about ten days prema- feel at home in Patna? I doubt she had any education. She turely. Would there have been less precipitous haste if was tall and slim, with a pretty face, and all she had was there hadn’t been the pressure of having the family’s first her anger. It shone on her face. I didn’t blame her for male child? My sister said that the baby’s mother had two hating Patna, or, for that matter, for hating me. n

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Independence DAY Special

Bollywood

‘I feel like a stranger in a strange city’ Vikramaditya Motwane, filmmaker

Mumbai, Maharashtra

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har, now an affluent enclave of the city, was once

a small suburb, dotted with bungalows and modest buildings. It was almost like growing up in a small town. We knew the best places to eat, the best shop to buy paan and where to get the freshest veggies. All that local flavour has, sadly, vanished. Some of the pride I used to feel as a kid at being a Bombayite/Mumbaikar has gone, too.

The Delhi Metro, I am told, is bringing people closer.

When was the last time any of us bonded with fellow commuters in a Mumbai local? Mumbai’s physical landscape is fast changing into something we never dreamt of. When my parents divorced, my mother moved to Lokhandwala complex. In the 80s, it was the end of the world. Rickshaws would refuse to go there at night.

Today, it looks like a fish market.

‘You carry your roots with you even when your home is elsewhere’

Financially, the city has evolved, but look at what it has done to our values and social fabric. We are living in a world of corruption—not just governmental, but also personal. Infrastructure is collapsing; there is the overcrowding of spaces and the sheer fact that Mumbai has become a dog-eat-dog world. But my biggest grouse is that our social habits are changing. It’s about who we have become as people. It’s about people not giving a shit about things. We are living in a bubble. The whole concept of social space is gone. Life has become so robotic. You travel in an air-conditioned car from office to home, then you go to an air-conditioned mall and come back home to your air-conditioned bedroom. People don’t interact with one another.

What has happened to this city? I don’t walk the streets the way I used to. At times, I feel like a stranger in a strange city walking among strange people who are going to strange places. It hurts to see Mumbai in such a mess.

Yet, none of its flaws lessen my love for it. n raul irani

Soha Ali Khan, actress

Mumbai, Maharashtra

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oon after my birth in Mumbai I was sent away to Delhi to be with my grandmother. My parents [cricketer Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi and actress Sharmila Tagore] were leading a more retired life then, so I was not exposed to the glamour and glitter in the way that perhaps my brother [actor Saif Ali Khan] was. My upbringing was normal. We were taught the value of tolerance, secularism and money. Our pocket money had to last the week, so we had to prioritise our wants. We celebrated all festivals. We didn’t have imported cars or fancy gadgets.

We did have a massive garden to play in and that is something I know to be a luxury in Mumbai today.

Mumbai is now my hometown and I am passionate about it. Passion has elements of love and hate. What it doesn’t have is indifference. There are things I love about the city and things I dislike. I love the resilience of the people, the colours and flavours, the energy and spirit, and I hate the filth, inequality, squalor, corruption and smell.

Gulzar’s wonderful song Logon ke ghar mein rehta hoon from the 1979 film Griha Pravesh likens living in rented

19 August 2013

apartments to walking around in a pair of socks. That has always been my criterion of what a home should not feel like; it should be something that rests you, relaxes you and that you are comfortable with. It need not be a house, a fixed address; it is possible to have a home and yet not have a fixed address.

Home is any place where you are comfortable in your skin. Roots are much deeper. They involve a certain aspect of one’s lineage and ancestors—these are something ingrained, an intrinsic part of you, separate from your home and your house. You carry your roots with you even when your home is elsewhere. n open www.openthemagazine.com 45

Elsewhere ‘Home is any place where you are comfortable in your skin.

Roots are much deeper’

Independence DAY Special

Parli happens only in the rainy season Men with motorcyles fishing on the banks of the Kalpathy is a common sight once the waters begin to swell

Before the Bend in the River Vignettes from the village of Parli in Palakkad, Kerala Madhavankutty Pillai photographs by ritesh uttamchandani

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wo bridges run parallel over the Kalpathy river, 12 kilometres from Palakkad town. One of them is about 50 years old and the other more than 150. On the new one, the buses of Kerala, which their drivers drive like motorcycles, careen as if on an expressway. On the old one, young unemployed men sit on the railing, throwing handmade lines to bait fish. This happens only in the monsoon and only in a monsoon like this one, when it has been raining relentlessly. For a long time I believed the older bridge was made by the East India Company 46 open

during its campaign against Tipu Sultan and the engineer who constructed it was Parrulli, an Italian. That, I thought, was how Parli got its name. When I went there last month, a number of local residents repeated this history, except that Parrulli was now a Frenchman. On a rainy afternoon, I walked down the bridge and looked for the etching I knew was there with Parrulli’s name and designation. I found it in the middle of the bridge, in an alcove against a side wall. In faded letters behind a gathering veil of moss and lichen, I could read ‘Parrulli 19 August 2013

Bridge’. A second line below it was ‘1852’, and under that, ‘AB Robinson Esq Coll’. I deduced that if at all there was an engineer, his name was Robinson. Perhaps Parli’s name did not have exotic foreign beginnings. Then there was the date. In 1852, Tipu Sultan would have been dead 53 years. I was wrong there too. This was an ordinary bridge that came with British consolidation of the region and the development of trade. How is it then that I embellished a beginning in the nooks of memory? All geneses are unreal—part myth, part history, part want. And it is never clear what is what.

ly that lived in a house called Chittenipatt Puthenveetil migrated to Ottapalam because they were ostracised after one of the women, an ancestor of mine, rejected the advances of a landowner. That is a story and who knows how much of it is true? Ramachandran studied in Victoria College in Palakkad and would sometimes get a classmate home. That was my grandfather who married my grandmother and after many years bought land in Parli and built the house. Ramachandran left the Navy, went to Delhi under orders of Communist party higher-ups to work for their mouthpiece, got disenchanted with them, joined Shankar’s Weekly and later wrote on politics for The Hindustan Times. He accompanied Members f I stand in the middle of both bridges and look at the of Parliament on morning walks to get material for his river winding away, I can see it flow 100 metres into a words. When my father was working for The Far Eastern bend. There it joins another river, the Gayathri. The con- Economic Review in Hong Kong, his British editor once fluence creates the Bharathapuzha, one of the most im- showed him an editorial and said this is how you should portant rivers of Kerala. It starts in Parli. Our house is write. It was written by Ramachandran. When he remuch before the bend, a short walk to the river that is tired in the mid-80s, he had nowhere to go and came to still Kalpathy. When I was a child coming for my sum- live with his sister in Parli. Journalists and politicians in mer vacations here, we went to bathe in the mornings Kerala who knew and had heard of him came visiting in through a small path abutting the walls of a school and his initial days back home. He did nothing of any note in then down a flight of steps onto the rivParli, not even writing. He used to sleep er. There were sand patches on it even in the main hall of the house. Once then, but most of the river was water, my grandparents came to Mumbai, he From the other cold and morning fresh. There were moved into their room. They were too shore, I can see a decent to ask him out. He made urchins small eddies and deep pockets into swamp with wild of the village do odd jobs, like getting which children jumped from round gardens where him booze, until they started forging rocks. Now, as I try to walk along that path, I cannot. As soon as I cross the last cheques in his name. He became cauwater should be. house, the weeds and woods take over. tious with money, which was probaThe river is dead, There is no way to reach the river from bly dwindling. The number of visitors I think, eroded by there. From the other shore, I can see a reduced to nothing and he didn’t seem swamp with wild gardens where wathe depredations of to mind. Eventually his heart gave way and when he was being taken to hoster should be. The river is dead, I think, sand smugglers pital, he said in English, “It is all over.” eroded by the depredations of sand And it was. smugglers. But then I think, when has there ever been a single cause for anything? Did we stop frequenting the rivt home in Parli, I used to see a man named Manickan er before it went bad or after? When taps and running Nair drop by sometimes. He was one of those local buswater and showers and western commodes and shampoos and soaps and so many other things came. The riv- ybodies who seem to be there without any evident purer stopped being a daily necessity. When man stopped pose. My grandmother says that when she first saw him, walking that path, the weeds took over. This monsoon, it it was as a cook for the birthday celebration of her second rained so much that the river looked full and satisfied. It son. He had been part of the campaign to save the river was alive in its own fashion. Mauled but breathing. along with my grandfather. I remember him because I was told he was a murderer. As a Naxalite, he had been in a band that had killed a landowner in a place called Kongad. y grandmother’s elder brother, CP I wanted to meet Manickan Nair now. He was 90 years old Ramachandran, left his home as a teenager to join and took some time to open the door. He had been havthe Navy in the 1940s. There is a story of his ship los- ing lunch, cooked himself. He had joined a Christian sect ing its way, and when they found land again, he real- and the house was owned by it. He lived alone. We were ised they had drifted into the Bharathapuzha. He was in a large hall with plastic chairs decked one on top of the from Ottapalam, 22 kilometres from Parli, and so was other, used for meetings of the sect. The curtains were my grandmother. That is where my roots lie. My roots drawn and it was bleak. He offered me a plastic chair to sit also lie in Kozhikode, from where a branch of the fami- on and told me how he had been a devout Hindu who be-

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winning shot Since 2004, Parli High School has won over 100 national medals, 250 state medals in sports and its students have been picked for international meets

Except that it doesn’t. It is empty.

Someone didn’t do the mathematics.

It is not high enough and so there is not enough pressure for the water to reach the houses. The Parli Janakeeya Samiti, a group of residents who work to improve the village, blames it on that old story, a mix of corruption and incompetence. The last time I went to Parli, the Samiti was distributing compost bins for homes to turn garbage into fertiliser. There are two of them in my home too, lying forlorn. No one stays there now.

My grandmother lived in that house throughout her life. Her sons and came a Communist. After the party split into the CPM and daughters left decades ago, returning only for sanctuary CPI in the early 1960s, he was drawn to the Naxal move- in times of trouble, a bad marriage, a husband’s business ment. In 1968, he participated in an attack on a police sta- that went bankrupt. She saw the death of her mother, hustion in Telissery that failed after the police started firing band and two brothers in that home. She stayed on alone, at them. Escaping, he walked alone through a forest, final- split the house into two and let one part out on rent just to ly finding shelter in someone’s home. But local RSS mem- have people around. Two months ago, her heart condition bers caught him there and turned him over to the police. worsened and she was finally plucked out at the age of 85 and stays with my aunt in He was tortured and spent Palakkad town. They go to a year in jail. On his restay in Parli on weekends lease, he went to his brother’s place in Ahmedabad Everything churns and changes. On or when relatives like me visiting. Otherwise and then returned after a the surface, the weeds look like they come year to Parli and Naxalism. the house is empty. On its have won. Underneath, the river It was in 1970 that they dewalls are portraits of all those who lived there. Four cided to kill the landownwaits patiently to fill itself generations, counting my er. Manickan Nair must great grandmother. And in have been 47 years old all those portraits, so many then. He was illiterate.

When I asked him why they killed the man, he point- who are departed, their number slowly creeping up as if ed to the page of a book he had and rattled off a litany of in a race to outnumber the living. injustices. They went for their target at night, knocked on the door, told him why they had come and hacked his go to see Manoj PG, the sports coach of Parli High throat. Manickan Nair did not do the actual killing, only watched it. He was caught and released on parole after sevSchool. My aunt accompanies me. When she was a en years in jail. He rejoined the Communist party as a lo- student here, she once insisted on going to class in a salcal worker. He then switched from guru to guru and reli- war kameez she had had stitched. It was such a novelty gion to religion as a follower of Sathya Sai Baba and Mata that everyone laughed at her. It is a Malayalam-medium Amrithanandamayi and a Muslim inbetween. In 1993, he school. The middle-class, which means families like found Christ and solace. Two days after I visited him, he mine, do not send their children there anymore. Manoj came home to see my grandmother. He had taken the bus joined as coach in 1995. His experience was in cricket and because he couldn’t afford an auto. He said the conductors handball but he decided to focus on athletics. He was not and drivers knew him and always gave him a seat. While an athlete. He had once run a 400-metres race and dropped we sat, he suddenly pointed to his feet, which were black out after 300 metres. His reasoning, however, was simwith age, indicating a spot above the ankle that looked ple. To advance in team sports like cricket, one needs inoily. “What is it? What is it?” he asked me. fluence with sports bodies. Manoj had no connections.

Athletics, however, was relatively immune from politics. “First is after all first,” he says, “No one can not send walk two minutes from home and see a green tank someone who came first in a district meet for the state towering above the houses that line the lane. It was level.” For seven years under his coaching, Parli school erected by the Panchayat to supply running water. did not win a single medal at the state level. In 2002, one

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student came fourth and a heartbroken Manoj decided to give it one more shot before moving on. In 2003, a student won first place in the rural sports meet. Manoj’s exultation was momentary as he realised that no one considered it an achievement. In 2004, a student got a silver for Hammer Throw at the state meet. Overjoyed, he asked a reporter to put the boy’s photo in the newspaper.

He was told that only those who won gold get that. The next year, the school won three golds, setting a state record with one. In the national schools meet, they won a gold and two bronzes. And they kept winning after that.

Every year they get 35 to 40 state medals now. Since 2004, Parli High School has won over 100 national medals, 250 state medals and its students have been picked for international meets. How did this happen? Manoj attributes it to poverty. The students understood that sports was a way to a better life—admissions to engineering colleges and government jobs. They gave it everything they had.

When they ran, they ran for a better life. Their underfed bodies had little strength for races like 100 metres, but they had resilience. At first, Manoj therefore made them do intense endurance workouts for long-distance event fitness. Athletics has 28 events and he knew that any student would be fit for at least one of them. If they couldn’t

run or jump or throw, he made them walk, and they won a national gold in walking. Early morning, you see students running on the streets of Parli. No student who comes to his training camp is turned away. Manoj tells me about a student called Karthik who first attended the camp in class six or seven. He was thin and weak and Manoj was sure he had no chance as an athlete. He kept coming for camps. After his SSC, Karthik started to gain height.

Manoj had him train for the triple jump, and then to everyone’s astonishment, he came third in the state in class 11. The next year, he came first in the state and second at the national level. The boy was 6 feet 4 inches tall by then. “He did a jump of 15.70 metres,” says Manoj, “The Olympics qualifying mark is 16.55. He just has to jump one more metre [to get an Olympics entry]. We brought him that close. The Air Force has given him a job. Now it is up to them to take him further.” While returning from the school, I look at the students. All the girls are dressed in brown salwar kameez. What was once absurd has become commonplace. What was taken for granted has been uprooted. Everything churns and changes. On the surface, the weeds look like they have won. Underneath, the river waits to fill itself. People go, return, age and die, and legends get woven in anonymity on school grounds. n

Independence DAY Special

Kalimpong

Why We Leave Home

The story of a small Himalayan town in the Northeast Lhendup G Bhutia

W

hen I was young, I lived in an unremarkable

These men, who had been deracinated in one land and house. It was made of wood and stone, and stood abandoned in another, would soon go too. on a levelled boulder. But what was fascinating, And so would their world. at least to me, was a small see-through panel of glass that had oddly been built into a wall. Every few days, I would tiptoe to this panel, climb up a tall wooden stool, and peek alimpong was a town of settlers. Located in the footthrough it to carry out what I believed was successful eshills of the Himalayas in West Bengal, about 55 km pionage on the rest of my family. I would observe my par- from Darjeeling, it provided permanence to the wanents’ and my grandfather’s conversations, and, through derer and the exiled. Nepalis came here. So did Tibetans, the movement of their lips, try to ascertain the contents Bhutanese and various Indian communities. After of their speech. I would later dwell satisfactorily on this Colonel Francis Younghusband’s ambitious expedition activity of mine. I realise now that far from spying on to invade Tibet in the early 1900s, for which he used a my folks, the panel was used to keep me route via this town, Kalimpong beunder supervision. came a flourishing trade centre. People Once, as I went about this routine—I dealt with salt, musk, caterpillar-funMy grandfather must have been about five then—a gus, medicinal plants, animal hides, curious sight awaited me. There was an and the most lucrative of all, sheep would make the unusually large gathering of Khampa The route stretched all the way journey from Lhasa wool. men (those from Tibet’s Kham region) from Lhasa to Kalimpong, and from to Kalimpong— in the room. Tall and broad-shouldered there on to Calcutta and the rest of the sometimes on in their magnificent dark robes and world. According to some accounts, broad-brimmed hats, they stood in Tibet’s wool exports to the US, Britain, foot, sometimes deathly silence. Some had prayer beads Italy and Japan in the 1950s were worth on horse—over in their hands. Some had daggers in around $2 million annually, a large sum treacherous of money in the post-War years. their waistbands. When they moved a My grandfather was one such trader. little, the ornate sheaths of their dagpathways in around gers ever so often caught the glint of the He would make the journey from Lhasa 18 days evening sun. My grandfather was with to Kalimpong—sometimes on foot, them in that gathering. His infirm body sometimes on horse—over treacherous lay on a large bed. I saw an old Tibetan pathways and high mountain passes in around 18 days. After a few successful trips, he brought monk give him some water.

When I woke up the following morning, the same his wife to Kalimpong. He rented a house and found a crowd had gathered on the street outside. It was still not shed for his 11 horses. And in this idyllic town, long bedawn and the street was lit by a bright crescent moon. In fore Tibet was occupied and before India regained freedom, he settled. Later when one of his horses delivered a one corner, I saw my dead grandfather.

Nobody spoke a word. There were no tears, there was pony, it was presented to my father as a gift. no emotion. Somebody blew a conch and the rest just carOur house was located on a boulder between two roads. ried his body. But you knew they cared. As a magnificent On the road above lived Tibetans, and below, the town’s moon looked on, this procession of silent mourners Marwaris. Above, every meal was a feast of different animarched through the town from our house to a cremato- mals, even of parts that the animal alive would not have rium on the hill. They were carrying one of theirs to his been too proud of. Below, steel plates came with unusual contents: chapattis, curries and pickled vegetables. The final resting place.

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photos arkadipta chakraborty

idyllic yet melancholic On the way to Durpin Dara monastery in Kalimpong, located in northern West Bengal

Tibetan boys would often bully the other boys. When they grew up and started trading, though, the Marwaris proved too clever for them. On this fragile deal was their coexistence based.

My grandfather wasn’t originally from Lhasa. He came from Tibet’s Kham region. Far from the peace-loving Buddhists who now abound in popular imagination, the people of this region are martial. It is believed that when Ghengis Khan could not subjugate them, he drafted them to his army. My father remembers, when he was young, a head rolling about our house like a hairy football—the result of a Khampa acquaintance being accused of cheating in a game of dice. Khampas, as I noticed of my grandfather and his friends, did not speak much. When they did, their tongues were as coarse as their manners. Many of them in Kalimpong were involved in the Tibetan Uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet. When some of them secured an audience with Jawaharlal Nehru to present him with evidence of Chinese depradations, India’s then PM was struck by their appearance. “Just like cowboys,” he is said to have remarked, “just like cowboys.” In 1962, once the Indo-China war broke out, all trade ceased and the town’s commercial life came to a grinding halt.

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here is an old undated photograph in my house. It is tattered on one side and tearing apart in the centre.

Some Tibetans are seen sitting, while others stand. My grandfather is there too, seated some distance away from my young father. It is almost like a class photo taken in school, where subjects stand in rows with morose faces.

Except that this is a wedding photograph of my brother’s elder brother. There is, however, a strange expression on my grandfather’s face. I think he was smiling.

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I remember this expression. Because I encountered it once while I sat beside him. I had turned around in a darkened hall and the light of a flickering screen had revealed a smile on his face. On the screen, an agile man was performing irresistible feats with his body. Many years later, I learnt that this man was Bruce Lee, and the film, Enter The Dragon. Like many other old-timers, in his advancing years my grandfather had two favourite pastimes: cinema and the Sunday show on Doordarshan.

Kalimpong had two cinema halls. Kanchan was older and mostly screened Hollywood films, while Novelty, which had modern extras like cola and popcorn, screened new Bollywood films. Movie tickets, especially of Western and Bruce Lee films, would be hard to come by. And often the success of the films could be gauged by the fights that broke out outside the theatre. When we tried to get tickets at Kanchan for Enter The Dragon, a film that had been long released in other parts, not only were stones being thrown at each other, belts were being unbuckled and twirled, and fists strengthened with knuckledusters. The film ran for over a month. I remember having to ask my grandfather not to participate in the fight, even as an elder cousin had entered the melee with an unbuckled belt. We eventually had to buy the tickets in black.

We were also one of the few households to own a TV set, a black-and-white. Every Sunday, my grandfather’s friends and their wives would troop in. The men would bring their own chairs along, and the women, needles and wool. Someone would invariably have to stand outside shaking the antenna for better reception. After my grandfather’s death, this Sunday morning crowd thinned. One by one, over the next few years, we lost these people to either ailment or old age. open www.openthemagazine.com 51

past glory Ramshackle and with almost no patrons, Novelty is a sad shadow of its heyday

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hy do we have to go?” I remember asking my father once. “Because you have to,” he replied in a reproachful tone.

My grandfather was long dead and I was now approaching high school. We, along with his friends and their children, were on a picnic on the banks of the mighty Teesta.

Just a little distance away, the powerful current of this river meets the calm waters of the Rangeet, a confluence so beautiful that it’s called ‘Lover’s Point’. All you hear is the sound of a river gushing down the hills, occasionally interrupted by the sudden glee of men who’ve hooked a big fish. My father’s suggestion that I leave town for a better life seemed unreasonable.

But the signs were already there. The bloody agitation for a new state of Gorkhaland was more or less over, but those who could were already moving. Youngsters were

Youngsters were leaving town to either study or work elsewhere.

Kalimpong had become a place where people came from leaving town to either study or work elsewhere. Some moved abroad and others to nearby Indian cities.

Kalimpong had neither good higher education nor employment to offer. Those who didn’t relocate hung around in darkened pool rooms—their only entertainment.

Kalimpong had changed. It had become a place where people came from.

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little over a year ago, I returned to Kalimpong after many years. Even as my vehicle was climbing the hill and approaching the town, I could feel the town in 52 open

the air—light, as always, and filled with birdsong. When we neared the Teesta, I asked the driver to slow down so I could look out of the window to see the majestic river.

It would be no exaggeration to say that I was startled. In place of the Teesta, there flowed an emasculated river.

The river that so many locals prayed to and which gobbled up entire trucks and spat out remnants several miles downstream was now a sad picture of its former self. It had been dammed at various points. Its current had no force and its water level had been raised.

Unable to understand my silence, the driver said, “Sir, they will start boating soon.”

During my stay, save one or two, I hardly found anyone I had studied with in school. The town had changed. Its people had changed. Everything was concrete and cement even though this made winters frighteningly cold.

On my last day, I visited the two cinema halls. Kanchan was still around with a melancholic air about it. But the nearby stores that enlivened the space with chatter and gossip had disappeared. On closer inspection, I found the gates of the theatre locked. No staff was around either. The ripped movie posters of a time long past were enough indication that it had shut shop many years ago. The area where all those fights used to break out had been converted into a taxi stand.

At the other end of town, Novelty was still running. I bought tickets for an evening show of The Dirty Picture.

Inside, the seats were broken, the fans creaky, and the entire area reeked of urine. Just entering it felt like visiting the hull of a long-sunken ship.

The theatre was empty, save for two groups. In one corner, a few young boys were drinking alcohol. In the other, two boys were entwined with two girls.

At some point, someone vomited and left.

The girls left too.

And the rest of us just sat there in an empty, dirty theatre, each for a different reason, hypnotised by a film none of us really cared to see. n 19 August 2013

Independence DAY Special

Bollywood

Sudhir Mishra, filmmaker

Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh Muddatein guzari, teri yaad bhi aayi na hamein, Aur hum bhool gayein hon tujhe, aisa bhi nahin (It has been ages since I remembered you, But it’s not as though I have forgotten you either)

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his verse best expresses my feelings for Lucknow.

They say a Lucknowi can toss out a couplet for every occasion, event and feeling. That’s because, not too long ago, it was a centre of Urdu poetry and tehzeeb.

Though people see Lucknow only in ‘pehle aap’ (an Urdu phrase meaning ‘after you’ denoting Awadhi courtesy ) terms, it is a place with a great Lucknow reflects in sense of history and my work, the way I culture. Lucknowis talk, the way I walk have grace and sophisand the way I live tication. They interact with each other with my life. The ideas of warmth and bonho- home, homeland and mie and with a sense identity manifest of humour and irrevthemselves in erence. They also enjoy the finer things in your habits and life—I still have a behaviour, no fondness for good matter which part of food.

Lucknow is an ex- the world you live in ample of a truly secular city. Hindus and Muslims have peacefully co-existed for years. There has never been a communal riot. The idea that a place can be so safe and secure has stayed with me. I used to travel to school in a rickshaw and never once felt a sense of fear or insecurity. The concept of street fights and violence was alien to us.

It was a wonderful town to grow up in.

When you are a young man, every city looks like Paris.

So did Lucknow. We lived near the Charbagh station area.

I still go there whenever I can and end up running into a thousand relatives whose faces I have forgotten. But they haven’t forgotten me.

My father, a mathematician, encouraged and led us to develop an independent way of thinking. People around us were very open and generous with their knowledge.

At home, there was a culture of books, poetry and politics.

All these early experiences helped me later in my work as a filmmaker.

Why did I make a film about Naxalism set in the 1970s

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the india today group/getty images

‘To a young man, every city looks like Paris’

a thousand yearnings of poetry ‘Ghalib shaped my worldview’

and call it Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi? For two reasons: Lucknow and a man named Mirza Ghalib.

What has Ghalib got to do with Naxalism? Ghalib shaped my worldview. I borrowed his way of looking at relationships, love and the world, and how to go beyond that world.

Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi could not have been possible if I was not from Lucknow. In Khoya Khoya Chand, the character Zafar comes from Lucknow. I based him partly on my father. That film is a love letter to Awadhi tehzeeb.

Lucknow reflects in my work, the way I talk, the way I walk and the way I live my life. The ideas of home, homeland and identity manifest themselves in your habits and behaviour, no matter which part of the world you live in. To twist a famous phrase, ‘You can take the man out of Lucknow, but you cannot take Lucknow out of the man.’ n open www.openthemagazine.com 53

Independence DAY Special

Hyderabad

A Matter of Belonging

SG Photography/Getty Images

Is home the place you were born or the place you have the most vibrant and long-lasting memories of?

Anuradha Roy

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ear takes physical form in our neighbourhood

in Hyderabad: it is embodied in a man who seems a hundred years old. When he is sighted round the corner, bent and frowning, heading with rapid steps for our cul de sac, we stop playing on the latest mountain of sand or rubble and scoot out of sight behind the houses.

The houses are his, the sand and rubble are his. He is universally known as Tataiyya, or grandfather. The local laws give him the right to evict tenants overnight. If the tenant refuses to leave, he sends thugs who ransack 19 August 2013

nostalgia ‘There are no familiar geographies, no family homes to return to, no remembered landscapes that survive’

homes and fling belongings into the street. You didn’t want to be on Tataiyya’s wrong side, not if you wanted a roof over you: this has been dinned into us by our parents.

We were never to risk his displeasure. My father has been a field geologist and our early life was lived in tents. He says that felt more secure: the tent and the patch of sky above were your own.

There are five houses in the cul de sac. The one we occupy overlooks the big rectangle of dirt around which the houses are built. On our left is a garden with a stonewalled well and guava trees. At the back, a narrow yard with an outdoor latrine. On the right side, a patch of grass in which a drumstick tree stands in one corner, all by itself.

It’s an old-fashioned, two-storied house with flagstone flooring, deep verandahs. A Punjabi joint family has the upper floor. The new daughter-in-law spends all morning practising romantic songs from Hindi movies: first we hear the original played on the record, then her uncertain voice picks up a fragment of the tune, then the record comes back. Late at night, after her husband is home and the rest of the quadrangle has fallen quiet, her voice floats downward, still pinched and off-key: “Tum duur nazar aaye, badi duur nazar aaye…”.

In the room below I lie awake, mystified. Is this romance? On our recently acquired television set, buxom Jamuna in a bandage-tight sari approaches her marital bed to the rhythms of a languorous song. She’s holding a huge glass of milk and as she hands it to Akkineni Nageswara Rao, trembling and simpering, something significant passes between them. I don’t know the meaning of that glance. I don’t know yet that this glass of milk in Telugu movies signifies plenitude, fertility, sex.

We look around ourselves, my friends and I, at women who are different from our mothers. Mrs Batliwala lives alone next door. She spends all day in sleeveless maxis, no children or husband in evidence. She tries enticing us with ludo and fried goodies but we don’t like going there.

Outside our quadrangle, in an affluent house that doesn’t belong to Tataiyya, is a woman more intriguing.

She lives with her parents. She had been married to an African, goes neighbourhood lore, whom she left because he beat her. Her little daughter plays in their lawn. They never let the child out to make friends, as if by being sequestered this half-Black child remains a secret.

In the Number 74 public bus to school, my best friend and I notice a boy: the mandatory laughing eyes, floppy hair, cleft chin. He is probably in college—while we are merely in Class 7. We wait for the day he will—he must— look at us. What will happen when he does? Who will get him—she or I? We agree to share him, and name him Fifty-Fifty.

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In school, the principal’s son, the only young man on the horizon and therefore imbued with mystery and desirability, leaves a trail of cigarette ash on the piano at which (he knows) we will later congregate for singing class. Each girl in the class is secretly convinced the ash is meant as a subtle romantic message for her alone.

My friend next door, a Telugu girl called Suchitra, has revealed not long ago that under the chaste round-necked blouse she wears above her ankle-length lehenga, she has a chemise whose front she fastens tightly all the way down with seven safety pins. If she’s flat-chested, boys won’t look at her, is her prim reasoning. And yet, if a boy does glance at either of us, we parse every last meaning of the look, Suchitra and I. Suchitra is from a poorer branch of Tataiyya’s family.

Her father is a stocky, glaring man, flamboyantly moustachioed in the manner of Telugu movie policemen; but he is only a municipal inspector. He is always in khaki shirts and trousers and at his paunch is a brass-buckled belt. When Suchitra or her sister Sulekha do anything he considers wrong, he whips off this belt and lashes them with it.

Every evening, Suchitra and Sulekha wash their faces with soap, dust them white with talcum, line their eyes with kajal, place a tiny dot of red Shringar on their foreheads and a bunch of orange flowers in their long plaits.

They call for me to come out and play. The only hiccup in this routine occurs if they have had the belt.

Since Tataiyya is an indefatigable builder, those heaps of sand and rubble are a fixture in our quadrangle. One year, he adds a new, posh (mosaic-floored, attach-bathroomed) floor to the house opposite ours and rents it out to a pilot called Mr Andrewes, a fair-skinned AngloIndian as tall as a door and as solid. His wife wears trousers and has short hair. Andrewes Uncle goes off in his blue peaked cap and gold-braided jacket to fly his planes; Aunty bakes cakes. They have two angelic toddlers.

Andrewes Uncle believes in cleaning his own car. This inspires Bhargava Uncle, the floor below, to dismiss his car-cleaning boy and emerge twig-legged in shorts identical to Andrewes Uncle’s. Bhargava Uncle looks smug as he strokes his Premier Padmini with a sopping rag. This is one aspect of the Andrewes no one else can emulate because nobody else in that quadrangle has a car.

Evenings, a group of milkmen arrive with their buffaloes. Just before milking them they slap a syringe the size of a broomstick into the buffalo’s backside. The leathery hind, raw from daily injections, bleeds afresh. The animal lows with pain and then milk spurts into the pails. In the monsoon months, the milk smells so urgently of buffalo hide that we cannot drink it without gagging.

Milking time is when the women from all the houses stand around in groups, gossiping but vigilant, their gazes fixed on the buffalo’s udders. Gossip thrives on a couple who have just moved in.

They are young; the woman is pregnant and a source of open www.openthemagazine.com 55

intense curiosity for us too. For if the singing woman up- that the delicately-spiced Bengali food we eat is insipid stairs demonstrates a staid breed of romance, this one pro- compared to the volcanic sambar served at his school. vides a potent, dangerous example: she has eloped with It isn’t just the food we find insipid. My brother and I her first cousin. “Unthinkable,” the adults cluck, “per- have enough Telugu now to follow the movies and their verted”. Their families have cut them off for incest. songs. On radio there are Babban Khan’s comic, rapid Not one relative or friend in this new city, the pregnant fire snatches from Adrak ke Panje in Hyderabad’s Dakhni woman tells us: three girls listening wide-eyed. She dialect, which we speak just as everyone else does. scrubs her spotless two-room set. She gives us boiled Andrewes Uncle plays The Silver-Tongued Devil and I on tea and biscuits. his hi-fi. Bengali songs grate, dully lugubrious, on our Which of these women are we going to be? Saturdays, re-tuned ears.

Shanivaramma arrives, flower-dappled tray of rice in One foolhardy afternoon, the two sisters, Kunja and I hand, coin-sized kumkum on her forehead. Black magic steal into Tataiyya’s house. It is a bungalow down the abounds here: wayside packets of lemon smeared with road, surrounded by orchards. At this time, green young turmeric, clumps of hair. Step on one and you’ll die a lin- totapuri mangoes hang like tear drops from its trees. We gering death. Shanivaramma exudes menace too. We give have been observing them grow. Soon they will be too her money to keep her from unleashing the dark planets. ripe. It’s the raw mangoes we’re after, tart but sweet, their In return she tells our futures, says keep my predictions flesh white and crisp. The acid usirikaya berries we stole secret or they won’t come true. from another neighbour’s tree are no match for totapuri Once the Andrewes house is done, Tataiyya begins on mangoes with salt. the next one, adding a floor. Soon it feels as if Kunja alIt is after we have broken off the fourth or fifth mango ways lived in it. When she has her first period, it is both that someone spots us in the tree. It’s hard to clamber thrilling and scary. She down before they reach us must live on a rough mat in and Tataiyya’s men scuttle one corner until her five out from the corners, My father announces he’s been days are done. After that transferred back ‘home’ to Calcutta. shouting. They have long lathis and it does not matter there is a wedding-like My parents are overjoyed. The to them that two of the feast in her honour. Kunja relief of going back home! Our own mango thieves are looks unfamiliar and bridelike in a glittering half-sari Tataiyya’s kin. Or maybe house, and no threat of eviction! and her long plait is a jasdoes, because we don’t My brother and I are heartbroken. itactually mined rope with flowers get beaten.

Home is supposed to be Calcutta?

There’s probably no conwoven so thickly into it nection, but soon after, the that you don’t see her hair Because we were born there? sand heaps arrive at our at all. It seems obvious that door. Men come and chop a glass of milk, a groom with curled moustaches, and a silken bedchamber are the drumstick tree down. Labourers begin digging up only a matter of time. Kunja does not touch the baghara what we think of as our garden. A new two-roomed set baingan and dabal-ka-meetha at her feast; she looks aloof, comes up, shutting off one side of our house.

When I’m 16, my father announces that he’s been as if she’s above greed and hunger.

At school I exchange my lunch box for the ones with transferred again, this time back ‘home’—to Calcutta. My gunpowder-smeared idlis. The littler Muslim girls from parents are overjoyed. The relief of going back home! Our nawabi families eat at long tables in the assembly hall. own house, and no threat of eviction! My brother and I are Their ayahs come with hot food and spread out a meal heartbroken. Home is supposed to be Calcutta? Because with proper plates and cutlery. Once a week, they have re- we were born there? ligious instruction class with a maulvi. When the girls are Twenty years after leaving Hyderabad I go back there older they rebel and the ayahs vanish, though maulvi sa’ab on a work trip. I search for that quadrangle, but there doesn’t. The girls now stand around the corridors like ev- are shopping malls and apartment blocks where it eryone else, sharing their saalan and kababs. used to be.

At Suchitra’s, the food is humbler but there’s plenty I’ve been counting the places I’ve lived in over these when her father is away. Her grandmother sits with nee- years: those many servant quarters, barsaatis and houses dle and thread stitching sequins into calendar pictures of in many cities. Not one exists as it was any longer. They gods and goddesses, raising her eyes from her work at have turned into office blocks, builder’s flats, high rises. times to watch us eat. There is fat-grained rice with a lime- There are no familiar geographies, no family homes to sized scoop of vegetable blazing with chillies. Its merest return to, no remembered landscapes that survive. Home is wherever the tent is pitched for the night. We are touch is heavenly agony.

At home a crisis occurs when my brother complains migrants forever. n 56 open

19 August 2013

Independence DAY Special

Bollywood

‘Most urban people don’t know where they belong’ Manoj Bajpayee, actor

Belwa and Bettiah, Bihar

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hough I was born in Belwa, a small village in Bihar

near the Indo-Nepal border, I was packed off to a boarding school in Bettiah after class four. People there were poor, or had a frugal lifestyle. We were surrounded by agricultural land. There were open fields, rivers and canals, forest animals, and cows and buffaloes that went grazing from field to field. There were only two or three theatres that ran and reran old classics like Hunterwali, Teesri Kasam and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam. We had watched all the Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt classics. New films took an eternity to reach Bettiah.

A new Amitabh Bachchan release was like Diwali.

My father was a farmer. He wanted his children to have a proper education. He used to say, “Do whatever you

want, but complete your graduation.” My education gave me a solid foundation. I learnt to be independent and responsible. If you look around, you will see city children have a pampered and limited upbringing. That’s why most urban people face the problem of not knowing where they belong and what their culture is. That isn’t the case with small town people.

All my life, I have lived away from my parents. Because I saw so little of them, I never took them for granted. I used to go to Belwa to meet them at every opportunity. I still do. In October I will be in Belwa, feasting on the town’s famous kebabs and reliving those days. There comes a stage in every man’s life when he feels like going back to where he belongs. Of course, now Mumbai is home. But do I want to spend the rest of my life here? I don’t know. You can’t stay here, you can’t stay there—it’s a typical migrant’s dilemma. n

‘Home and roots are synonymous with comfort and identity’ Sabyasachi Mukherjee, fashion designer

Kolkata, West Bengal

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riginally, I am not from

Kolkata. I came from the suburbs, and ended up forming a strong relationship with the city. I am 39 now; I came to Kolkata at 16.

I have lived in one city for over 23 years of my life. Give or take all of Kolkata’s problems, whether infrastructural or social, I would not trade the city for any other—because it is home. A lot of who I am, and my career, has been shaped by it.

I see home and roots as being synonymous with comfort and identity. These are important ideological notions, essential for the sustainability of any clothing brand. They are also interlinked—identity comes from comfort and comfort comes from identity. Without this, a brand is in no man’s land.

I am a true Calcuttan. I lead a laidback life. I am easily content with the small things in life. Professionally, Kolkata has helped balance my ambitions; it keeps me culturally inclined and slows me down so I do not burn

19 August 2013

out. Kolkata is a slow-paced city which means people are ambitious but not malicious.

What makes me belong to Kolkata, apart from things like art and architecture, is the energy of the people.

Nobody is out there to backstab the other. Everybody finds their own little niches and spaces. If you lose your way in the city and ask somebody for directions, he or she will drop you all the way to your place. In return, the person will make sure you don’t leave his or her home without a cup of tea. That’s how warm people in Kolkata are. n — As told to Shaikh Ayaz open www.openthemagazine.com 57

laidback ‘‘I am a true Calcuttan—easily content with the small things in life’

Independence DAY Special

Fanville

Growing up on Sportstar How the magazine was to shape what I’d do later in life Akshay Sawai jayanta shaw/ap

paper puja In the pre-internet era, the ‘jazz age’ of magazines, the glossy centrefold was the most coveted part—and relatively easy to steal

I

n the early 90s, a man visited my father a few times used Sportsweek to improve my English vocabulary. He in connection with work. My sister and I thought he underlined words and wrote their meanings in the marresembled Franco Baresi, the balding and grim-faced gins. I found out what ‘pathetic’ and ‘vicious’ meant in defender in the Italian football team. ‘Baresi’ became our this fashion. Other random memories of the magazine name for him. One day when he came home, my moth- include a cartoon character called Sporting Sam. er answered the door and told my father, “That Baresi or Towards the mid-80s, however, that Chennai Express Qureshi is here.” called Sportstar roared past its rivals. It upped its producOur family was crazy about sports, especially my fa- tion quality, introducing glossy paper in key sections of ther, my elder sister and me. My eldest sister also followed the magazine. It carried syndicated content from around sports but not with the same intensity. My mother, a the world and had talented writers on its own staff. proud patron of Marathi creative arts, looked down upon Sportstar was like a Yash Chopra movie, lush and internathis plebeian endeavour. But she would have had to som- tional. Name the sport and the magazine was strong on ersault across a laser field like Vincent Cassel in Ocean’s it. Cricket, tennis, Olympics, football, hockey and trackTwelve to stay untouched by the sports virus in our house. and-field were all better covered in Sportstar. Sportsweek Inevitably, sports or pop culture influences took root in and Sportsworld had quality journalists too. The gifted her mindspace. And so she inadvertently hummed Papa Rohit Brijnath, for instance, learnt his ropes at Don’t Preach while making sandalwood paste for the puja, Sportsworld. But Sportstar’s overall strength as a product or registered names such as ‘Baresi’. Even today, she is was unmatched. Eventually, our family switched loyalprone to asking me out of the blue, “So what is McEnroe ties to Sportstar. I was never a subscriber, but bought up to these days?” many issues off the stands and others from old book Three things contributed to my family’s love for sport. shops (sneaking a look at Debonair in the process).

My father played local These days, one league football and was finds lines about the particular about exerjoy of ‘curling up with Sport was joy, escape and possible cise all his life. He liked a book’ clichéd. But to livelihood.

I had played a bit myself and buy the latest Sportstar everything athletes read and watched enormous amounts. from a newsstand, or stood for—style, fitness, and above all else, activlocate a prized past isBesides, I had grown up reading the ity. My father hated lethsue at an old paper dispatches of Sportstar staffers from argy. The second reason mart (raddiwala) , and around the world. Not a bad way of was Doordarshan, which then enjoy it at leisure earning your bread and bottle in that era (the 80s and at home while the rain came down outside 90s), brought home just was indeed a pleasure. the right amount of My obsession with sports magazines made me an sports. Not too much, as is the case now. Not too little, as was the case before. The third reason, and the focus of this expert on raddiwalas in our area, and also the lay of the memoir, was sports magazines. This was the pre-internet land in their shops (this was important when money was world and therefore the jazz age for magazines. Men of all short and material had to be pilfered). Somehow, ages of that time had piles of sports journals. the prominent raddiwalas of my childhood were all Sport and Pastime, published by The Hindu Group, was Gujarati and had names starting with ‘P’. There was Patel the top sports magazine of earlier eras. But by the time my Paper Mart, Punjani Paper Mart, Pethani Paper Mart and generation came round, the three major ones were I think Pravin Paper Mart too. For a while, Patel was the Sportsweek, Sportsworld and Sportstar. Each belonged to a family raddiwala. major newspaper group and city. Sportsweek was a One day I was returning home with my father when we Mumbai product owned by Mid-Day. Sportsworld came saw a four-page poster of Jimmy Connors displayed at from Anandabazar Patrika in Kolkata, and Sportstar from Patel’s. Connors on Nehru Road in Vile Parle East. Connors The Hindu in Madras. hitting a double-handed backhand with his signature My father was a fierce football and hockey lover who steel Wilson T2000 racquet. Had Connors actually been laughed at cricket. He subscribed to Sportsweek after India present at that spot and hit a shot, the ball might have won the 1975 hockey World Cup. The winning team was flown across the street and knocked someone drinking on the cover. We were a Sportsweek family for almost a de- cheap liquor at Bharat Hindu Hotel and Bar on his head. cade. It was through Sportsweek that I got acquainted with The poster was from a foreign magazine, and not any forthe names of Khalid AH Ansari and Ayaz Memon, my eign magazine: a French one. Nose in the air, Monsieur bosses in later life. I remember excerpts from Sunil Patel quoted the price. “Five rupees, not a paisa less.” Five Gavaskar’s Idols that the magazine ran, and its coverage bucks for a poster was a steep sum at a time when a new of the 1983-84 India-West Indies series. My father also Sportstar cost Rs 3. My father, a Jimmy Connors of bargain-

19 August 2013

open www.openthemagazine.com 59

ing, haggled spiritedly. But the gangly Patel won the argument with this clincher, delivered in a Gujarati accent: “Saheb, yeh Jone McEnroe hain. Isko bahut demand hai.”

I

suming man in simple clothes. Harsha Bhogle was generous with his time when I approached him as a collegian seeking guidance. At that time a boy named Rihen Mehta had swum the English channel. Bhogle asked me to meet Mehta, write a story and send it to Sportsworld. The story wasn’t used, but it was a good drill. And I didn’t mind the excursion to the Mehtas’ lavish Malabar Hill apartment and a nibble of expensive mithai.

n the film Amelie (French, again), there is a character called Dominique Bredoteau. He is a lonely man estranged from his family. Every Tuesday, Bredoteau buys a chicken and roasts it with potatoes. Once the chicken is cooked, he hungrily cuts it and reaches inside to pick out chicken oysters, one of the bird’s delicious parts. In magne evening a few days ago, I was clearing out a cupazines, the equivalent of oysters are glossy centrefolds. board. In the bottom shelf was my collection of sports These are easy to steal. You just have to quietly pry the magazines, perhaps around 300 in number, some of them pages off its staple pins and slip the section into another dating back 30 years. I find nostalgia a rich emotion, but magazine. Then you pay for that one and leave. I pulled 30 years is too long a time. It can’t be healthy to retain off quite a few such heists, until one day, the inevitable something from that far back in your life. Under the hot happened. I got caught, and escaped a thrashing only by yellow light of an overhead bulb, I decided to get rid of the collection. Then I flipped open a Sports Illustrated issue virtue of being a kid.

Sportstar was also the catalyst for my choice of sports from 1999. I had bought it from a raddiwala. The original journalism as a career. As a student, I was not bad but was owner of the copy was Moothedath Madhavan of Denver. distracted. The fundamental problem was I had no inter- His name and address was on a label in the bottom left est in commerce, the corner of the cover. stream I graduated in.

The copy had someRecently, at the office of how washed ashore in Sportstar was like a Yash Chopra movie, India, and ultimately a chartered accountant friend, I picked up a lush and international. Name the sport into my hands. It was a book on accountancy special issue in which and the magazine was strong on it. and taxes. My spontawriters wrote about a Cricket, tennis, football, hockey and neous reaction was a past event they would wince. Debit this, cred- track-and-field were all better covered in have liked to witness. it that. What the duck.

Each piece was accomthis magazine than in others Sport, on the other panied by art work, not hand, was joy, escape photographs. It was and possible livelitruly a collector’s item, hood. I had played a bit myself and read and watched with rare content. In a piece on Althea Gibson, the first enormous amounts. Besides, I had grown up reading the coloured tennis player to win a Grand Slam, Michael dispatches of Sportstar staffers from around the world. Bamberger reveals fascinating information about this seminal figure in sport. As a girl in Harlem, Gibson someNot a bad way of earning your bread and bottle.

The writer I followed above everyone else was Nirmal times rode the subway aimlessly at night to escape the Shekar, The Hindu’s tennis specialist. He went to beatings of an alcoholic father, and immersed herself Wimbledon every year and claimed to know and even in sport during the day. During her historic triumph at dine with superstars. He had a flowery writing style, Wimbledon in 1957, she herself spent the evenings drinkwhich to young minds seemed impressive. He often start- ing whisky and smoking. She slept till late, almost till ed articles with quotations of philosophers and intellec- match time. Rick Reilly writes about Francis Ouimet, a tuals. (One knows now that some of the things these in- young caddie who miraculously won the 1913 US Open tellectual heavyweights said were hot air, complicated golf. Ouimet was 20, and his caddie 10. sentences passing off as profundity.) Many sports jourI also found a 1994 copy of Sportstar which had an adnalists of my time were inspired to get into the trade be- vertisement for Ray-Ban sunglasses featuring the model cause of Shekar or R Mohan, Sportstar’s chief cricket writ- Rachel Reuben in a swimsuit, and recalled how coveted er. When I started touring myself, I was curious to see the that page was years ago. In another issue was a picture of faces behind the names. I first saw Nirmal at a Davis Cup Bishan Singh Bedi doing something you wouldn’t expect tie in Jaipur in 1996. I saw Ayaz Memon at a party at the him to—skipping. I did discard about two-thirds of the Leela in 1994 for Superhit Muqabla, the popular Hindi magazines, but could not get myself to part with the rest. songs show on Doordarshan. He was dancing. I met ‘For a ringside view of the world of sport’ was the promR Mohan before a rained-off one-day international be- ise ofSportstar. But to readers now, the magazine and othtween India and New Zealand in Goa in 1995, an unas- ers like it are a ringside view of their past. n

O

60 open

19 August 2013

between the sheets

first knowledge base

Pre-teen agonies and ecstacies of uncovering the secrets of sex sonali khan

L

ast week, like every other person who reads news

online, I came across a particularly unintelligent piece of writing masquerading as a feature on unknown ‘facts’ about women. The depth of the author’s insights about women and our pre, mid and post coital behaviour, in addition to our bathing non-habits, reminded me of my first sexual fact-finding journey.

I must have been around 10. Our geography teacher bustled into class and announced, “Girls, we’re going to learn about the Pennines mountain range today.” Instantly, the cool girls started tittering. I wondered what it was that had aroused their mirth this time. They chortled every time we crossed paths with a ‘Dick’ in literature and violently jabbed their middle fingers in the air when they fought. No one understood their secret language and gestures, but everyone laughed uproariously, afraid of looking foolish. As the years passed, the cool girls’ power increased. While the rest of us revelled in the illicit thrill of ‘shit’ and ‘ass’, occasionally stepping so far out of line that we’d make it to ‘bastard’ before being struck by the thought of invoking the wrath of the adults responsible for us and switching to the far less incriminating ‘bas-ket case’, the cool girls were well onto ‘fucks’, ‘pussies’ and ‘cunts’. I would have gladly parted with a limb or two in exchange for the source of their information. I wanted to strut around school too, part of the sorority that was privy to The Secret.

And then came that wonderful year, the year we turned 13. I made a beeline for the rack of Mills & Boon that was no longer off-limits. I could feel the disapproval of our pointynosed librarian as I sat, hunched over my treasure, lunch hour after lunch hour. But I didn’t care. I was going to take down the cool girls, snatch their pedestals from under their unsuspecting pert bottoms (a phrase I picked up from the countless M&Bs I devoured that year). In retrospect, I’m amazed by my scientific approach. I read about him devouring her dewy lips with as much clinical focus as I dedicated to perfecting the complicated ammonia fountain experiment for the chemistry practical. And the thought of his tongue nudging past her teeth was profoundly revolting to me. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would willingly

partake in such unsanitary behaviour. I learnt that a woman’s ‘delicate barrier’ was her most priceless possession; that even if it had cobwebs over it, an intact hymen was better than no hymen.

My next sexual adventure happened outside my cousin’s room when I was 15. By then, the idea of male and female breaths mingling was significantly less perplexing. As I eavesdropped in wide-eyed wonder outside her door while she and her friends giggled about playing tonsil-hockey with their boyfriends, I was introduced to the mechanics of Making Out. By the end of summer, I adelevin/getty images was taking copious notes on what they called second and third base, thanks to one of the girls who had just returned after a year as an exchange student in New York. She came with juicy stories of vibrators and men sticking ‘it’ in all ‘three holes’. The best friend and I spent many agonised hours with our trusty encyclopaedias, trying to solve the mystery of the other two holes.

For my sixteenth birthday, my parents bought me my first computer.

On Sundays, I was even allowed to hook up the internet line for a whole hour. After six years of hearsay and second-hand knowledge, the best friend and I were finally going to know. It was a moment of historic value. This was the day that would later be recalled as the one we saw our first penis. The real waving, thrashing, bobbing thing that was twice the size (length and girth) and so much prettier than those illustrations in our books. Exactly three minutes and 47 seconds later, the best friend and I sat on the bed, mirroring each other’s horrified expressions. The browser history had been cleared at lightning speed as the visuals on screen threatened to trigger our gag reflexes.

Pre-teen and teenage knowledge? Check.

Pandering to antiquated stereotypes? Check.

Rudimentary Google search? Check.

(Sprays deodorant on unbathed self and joins Mr Laikhuram in his mission to defecate on the world of online writing.) n

This was the day that would later be called the one when we saw our first penis

62 open

Sonali Khan was holding on to her virtue, and then she fell in love...with several men.

She drinks whisky, not Cosmopolitan 19 August 2013

mindspace Life & letters

A Return to Kathakali

71

O p e n s pa c e

Hrithik Roshan Vishal Bhardwaj Shahid Kapoor

70

n p lu

B.A. Pass Rabba Main Kya Karoon

69 Cinema reviews

Chronofighter Oversize GMT +30 India JVC Kenwood NX-SA55 Logitech G510s Keyboard

68

Tech & style

Did Adam Meet Eve? Food for Thought Genetics of Smell

Science

City of Perpetual Wait

64 72

afp

waiting in Patna A city that is a lesson in patience 64

life & letters

City of Perpetual Wait The generation that grew up in Patna’s years of anarchy understood the wisdom of waiting and it has remained with them Chinki Sinha

‘How sterile is all human endeavour to pilot one’s own life.’

—From my grandfather’s diary, 5 January 1988, Arrah

H

e, my grandfather, would sit

in the verandah with a bottle of rum and listen to Loha Singh, a popular Bhojpuri series on All India Radio penned by Rameshwar Singh

Kashyap about the adventures of a Sikh army veteran. He did this while waiting for the electricity to come back.

There were other things he waited for—a gas connection, his pension and death. All this he wrote in his diaries, three of which I found when he died a decade ago.

Sometimes a visitor would arrive.

A man, whom I addressed as the ‘old

man’, would sit with my grandfather lamenting the plight of the country while they both, and million others across Bihar, waited for the next election to change something.

In that decade that he was waiting for death, he read Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach many times over and wrote in his diaries. He wrote about the cold in Patna, the rains, the people, the telravi s sahani/reuters

egrams he sent his sons. Most of all, he wrote about waiting.

If you grew up in Patna in the 1980s and 1990s like me, you’d know that there were too many things wrong with the city. All you could do was wait.

Power cuts lasted for hours and as we waited for electricity, Umesh, our domestic help, would tell us stories of ghosts in his village: witches, feet turned backwards, asking for jalebis, benign ghosts and vicious ones. Waiting was pleasurable. We almost looked forward to it. But I am still afraid of ghosts.

I sleep with the lights on.

We were in no particular hurry to get anywhere in Patna. That’s what I got from my city. I can spend an eternity waiting and not complain.

We waited for my father to earn more, or for admissions, or for Lalu Prasad to be ousted from office, and for Bihar to be a lovely place to live in unlike the ‘stopover’ it had become in the great migration. Everything was delayed. Sessions in colleges ran late. I was forever planning my exit strategy.

Now, I am waiting to return. Again, there is no hurry.

W

aiting was full of possibilities.

We’d take the midday shuttle train from Patna to Arrah. It was only 60 km away but the journey took four hours with a halt at every station. Chain pulling was routine.

There wasn’t much to do in Patna.

During summers, we’d pay Re 1 to be members of a day library from which we could borrow comics like Bankelal, Super Commando Dhruva and Nagraj, and spend the long vacations reading as we waited for school to reopen. We went to the botanical garden once a year for a picnic, and sometimes we’d go eat ice-cream at a fancy restaurant.

I still love stories. I have learned to tell a few. But I wait for my mother to narrate how Lord Krishna suffered because he cheated in the great war of Mahabharata. Even gods have to make amends, she would say. I wait to hear that again.

Life was still. Even the river, which flowed past the city, assumed a lazy

19 August 2013

pace here. It lingered, reluctant to move on. I spent too many evenings watching the river flow.

Here, I was always planning my escape. Now, I come back to it looking for an anchor. I am always returning to Patna. It doesn’t mock me for running away. It is like a childhood lover, who stays back while you roam the world, cross mountains and rivers and cross them back. He is there. He is old, but he has been waiting. It is reassuring.

I never quite understood this zeal for waiting.

Like my mother, who put away crockery and other nice things,

waiting for a special occasion to use them. Perhaps if you come from a place that went through an

erosion of almost everything, you knew you had to wait for better days

It is only in this city that I can sleep at 11 pm after my father has switched off the lights. As I lie in bed waiting for sleep to come, my bachelor uncle staggers into his room to drink his whisky with no company. I can see him from my room. He is old, weak and very very lonely. I want to ask him if he will forgive us all. But I never say anything.

I wonder if anything has changed at all. He is waiting for the final farewell.

While he waits, he drinks a lot. He has kidney problems. His lover is dead.

They waited for everyone’s blessings for too long.

My room looks shrunken. So do my parents. And everyone else. But I am in a time warp. I have lived in different places. I tried to live in America. Not New York, or Boston, or San Francisco, but in small-town America, a nondescript city that lies in the rust belt.

Everyone confused Utica with Ithaca.

I bought a home theatre system and a black leather couch. On weekends, I went to the malls, did my laundry, baked brownies and watched reality television, and later hit the pubs like everyone else, and spent the Sundays running errands or just cooking a lot of food that I would later pack into the freezer. I owned ugly snow shoes and down jackets. I checked the weather channel for warnings of storms and tornadoes. I couldn’t live there. With all its promises, it didn’t feel like home. It was full of refugees who were waiting to return home. But they had been assigned this country, and this city. In some refugee camp, they must have been cheered by others when the list showed their names against America.

I was in exile too. I had graduated from Syracuse University and The Observer-Dispatch in Utica had hired me as a reporter. On most evenings, holed up in my apartment as snow fell outside, I wrote poems about home. It was strange how much I remembered Patna. It was like I was carrying it with me everywhere.

P

atna glitters in the night. I drive

through it aimlessly. I try to reconstruct from beneath the glass and metal and the shimmer the places of my childhood, of my youth. I climb atop the Biscoman Tower, sit in the revolving restaurant and go around in circles, measuring the darkness against the lights. After all, we waited our entire childhood and youth for it to open.

I can smell the river. We are near it.

The driver tells me it has shrunk, retreated by at least a kilometre. It makes me sad. I don’t live here anymore. But it should have continued to be what my memory holds of it. open www.openthemagazine.com 65

manish sinha

living in a time warp For those who grew up in the curfewed city, Patna was a trap with no opportunity from where one had to escape

As the restaurant starts moving, I look out on to Patna, and the darkness beyond it. I go around in circles, returning to the point of departure. Each year I returned, pushing my own perception of space, the city looked as if someone had chipped away at it. Emaciated, dull and shrunken.

Was I to revel in the news that malls had come up, restaurants were making money, and, a floor beneath, young men were sitting in leather couches and drinking their rum and Coke, or sipping their whiskies. It was no longer a curfewed city where streets would be deserted waiting for daylight to purge it of its shadows.

I am angry for the years that I lost to chaos and anarchy and kidnappings and everything else that was Bihar.

All that time I waited for Patna to be good again.

There is a peculiar smell when October begins there. Burnt wood, concrete, filth. I have tried to understand the smell, break it down, name its ingredients. It is a smell peculiar to my city. I have looked for it elsewhere. It doesn’t belong anywhere else. I wait to smell it again.

I was 22 years old when I eagerly boarded the train to Delhi to study information technology. I needed to get out. It didn’t matter what I studied. The need to escape was bigger than the one 66 open

to make it anywhere in particular. But even now, there’s so much of my city within me that I often feel heavy with the weight of nostalgia.

I

would always wonder what lay on the other side of the river. An island, an isolated patch of land where the poor lived, or just sand where the boat could take you. I am afraid of water.

The last time I returned home, I asked the boatman to take me to the other side. It was dusk, and the bells of the temple were ringing. From some corner, the muezzin was calling the faithful for prayers.

He stopped the boat midway, lit a bidi and started to speak about politics. There we were, in the middle of the river, the sky a deep shade of blue. Neither of us was in a hurry.

He wasn’t doing so well. But the government had started some welfare schemes and he was glad to be among the beneficiaries. He hadn’t thought of leaving ever. He knew the river and understood its moods. He could steer the boat, and it felt nice being on the water, waiting for customers, and waiting for a lot of other things to change. Maybe not in his lifetime. But certainly for his children.

I never quite understood this zeal for waiting. Like my mother, who put

away crockery and other nice things, waiting for a special occasion to use them. Perhaps if you come from a place that went through an erosion of almost everything, you knew you had to wait for better days.

We were that generation that knew we had to go away. The city was a trap. Those trapped were people like my parents, who weren’t ambitious, who liked their afternoon siestas, and who didn’t want fancy cars or foreign vacations. Or, students who came from villages or towns to the city’s colleges to study. Streets near Patna University were lined with shabby hostels. The young men looked emaciated yet determined. They were waiting for opportunity.

I try to think of my city as divided between after I left and before I left. But I am forever straddling the middle space.

But I am happy to wait now. Because it means not giving up.

I remember a photograph of a refugee sleeping at the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees in Utica.

It was taken by Bosnian refugee Tatjana Kulalic. The caption of the photo described how refugees are always waiting for something.

“It hit me that you are always waiting,” a student had told me as I stood making sense of the photo.

I nodded yes. n 19 august 2013

allocation of crop calories While India allocates 90 per cent of its overall calories to feeding people, China, Brazil and the US allocate 58 per cent, 45 per cent, and 27 per cent, respectively

Did ‘Adam’ Meet ‘Eve’? They lived around the same time but they probably didn’t live near each other, let alone mate

Food for Thought

stephen carroll photography/getty images

science

A

ccording to researchers, modern humans trace their lineage to two common ancestors. Two individuals, ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ and ‘Y-chromosomal Adam’, are believed to have passed down portions of their genomes to present day humans. Previous research has shown that Mitochondrial Eve, or the matrilineal most recent common ancestor, is likely to have emerged from East Africa somewhere around 99,000 and 148,000 years ago. But apart from this, very little is known about human ancestors.

Now a new study, in the journal Science, shows that the male most recent common ancestor, or Y-chromosomal Adam, lived roughly around the same time as Mitochondrial Eve. The recent study, which was conducted by sequencing the DNA of many entire Y chromosomes, found that the male most recent common ancestor lived around 135,000 years ago. The researchers claim that ancient ‘Adam’ and ancient ‘Eve’ probably didn’t even live near each other, let alone mate.

The date of origin of ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ had been found by studying the DNA of mitochrondria, which are 68 open

structures inside cells. Mitochondrial DNA is present in the human egg, so only women pass it on to their children. This can reveal the maternal lineage to an ancient Eve. The Y chromosome, on the other hand, is passed down from father to son. For the current research, the Y chromosomes of 69 men in several populations in sub-Saharan Africa and Siberia, Cambodia, Pakistan, Algeria and Mexico were studied.

The new study shows that Y-chromosomal Adam predates the earliest known fossil of Homo sapiens.

This may imply that H sapiens is older than what the fossil evidence currently suggests or that early humans mated with a closely related hominid species that contributed to the Y chromosome gene pool.

According to the researchers, the human genome contains tiny snippets of DNA from many other ancestors. These however don’t show up in mitochondrial or Y-chromosome DNA. The researchers are currently sequencing the Y chromosomes of nearly 2,000 other men. This new research, the scientists believe, will help them pinpoint where precisely in Africa our ancestors lived. n

According to a new study by researchers at University of Minnesota, the world’s croplands could feed 4 billion more people than they do now by shifting from producing animal feed and biofuels to producing exclusively food for human consumption. Meat takes a big toll on food security because it takes up to 30 crop calories to produce a single calorie of meat. The researchers say that while a complete shift from animal to plant-based diets may not be feasible, even a partial shift would yield results. They say that a shift from cropintensive beef to pork and chicken could feed an additional 357 million people, and a shift to nonmeat diets that include eggs and milk could feed another 815 million people. n

Genetics of Smell

According to a couple of studies in Current Biology, genetic differences explain the differences in smell sensitivity and perception between individuals.

The researchers tested nearly 200 people for their sensitivity to ten different chemical compounds that are commonly found in foods. They then searched the subjects’ genomes for portions of DNA that differed between people who could smell a given compound and those who could not. The researchers found that for four of the ten odours tested, there was indeed a genetic association, suggesting that differences in the genetic makeup determine whether a person can or cannot smell these compounds. Also, the ability to smell one compound doesn’t predict an ability to smell another. n 19 august 2013

temperature-compensated pendulums In 1721, George Graham invented

tech&style

the mercury pendulum to compensate for the influence of thermal expansion and contraction of a pendulum rod with changes in temperature

Chronofighter Oversize GMT +30 India Graham’s dual timezone watch on the occasion of India’s Independence Day

JVC w Kenwood NX-SA55

Price not known

Price on request

C

reated for india and Indians across the world, this dual timezone watch is designed for half-hour time differences and thus help overseas Indians stay synchronised with their homeland (or the other way round if they have relatives abroad).

Combining elaborate technical processes and a bold design, the limited edition Chronofighter Oversize GMT +30 India chronograph is an easy- to-read watch that grants its wearer perfect display for both.

The aesthetic appeal of this watch in its stainless steel and red gold (18K) case is enhanced by an elaborate black sapphire bezel and a large see-through sapphire case back. The colours of India are well represented on the dial. Its min-

19 August 2013

utes and seconds counters are in green, while its chrono, minutes counter hands and tips of its GMT and GMT +30 hands are in orange. To complete the design and technology, a fast-action Chronofighter start/stop lever is reinforced by an ergonomic black PVD coating.

Its other specifications are no less remarkable: a 47 mm steel case, calibre G1733 automatic bi-compax chronograph, 28 jewels and 28’800 A/h (4Hz) Incabloc shock absorber. It also boasts of a domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating on both faces, white super-Lumi Nova hands and numerals, a skeleton GMT hand with a white super-LumiNova head and orange contour, and an integrated black rubber strap.

It has a power reserve of 48 hours and is water resistant down to a depth of 330 metres.

Graham traces its origins to London clockmaker George Graham (1673-1751), who is considered the father of the chronograph. Now, more than a quarter millennium after his death, Graham is a privatelyowned Swiss watch company that makes its timepieces at La Chauxde-Fonds, Switzerland. n

Built like a pillar, there are four main speakers run by four amplifier sets on the outside of this cylinder, creating impressive sound at any angle. It uses an SRS WOW HD engine for its fabulous surround sound effect. A dock connector for the iPod 4/4S (using a 30 pin connector), a USB port, built in FM/AM tuner and a CD player are all incorporated. It’s also compatible with Bluetooth n

Logitech G510s Keyboard

Rs 9,995

If you are a serious gamer, you realise how a non-responsive keyboard or a key combination that takes time to press can lose you a game. Logitech now offers its G510S high-end keyboard for gamers, with 18 programmable G-keys that make complex actions simple, a 500 Hz report rate (2 milliseconds), and an LCD that can be programmed to be an RSS reader, a performance monitor, a profile selector or a media display. There is also provision to connect your headset via the keyboard. But its monochrome LCD and the lack of a USB hub make this slightly more pricey than it should be. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 69

CINEMA

making a circuit Arshad Warsi, who was orphaned at the age of 14, began working as a door-to-door cosmetics salesman three years later. His interest in dancing and choreography led him to start his own dance studio, the springboard for his acting career

B.A. Pass Shilpa Shukla is phenomenal as the ‘aunty’ who seduces a young college boy ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Rabba Main Kya Karoon Director Amrit Sagar cast Arshad Warsi, Riya Sen,

Paresh Rawal, Tinu Anand Score ★★★★★

l, shilpa shukla Cast shadab kama rajesh sharma hl Director ajay ba

B

,

ased on a vivid story by Mohan

Sikka, The Railway Aunty, this film is an exact adaptation. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been, but that is the creative decision of director Ajay Bahl and he has executed it with some skill.

About an orphaned boy living with relatives in Delhi, doing ‘BA Pass’, a degree for all seasons, who is sent to do chores for an ‘aunty’ who seduces him, B.A. Pass has pretty explicit sex.

Not all of it is erotic, but there is no disputing that the ‘aunty’ is rivetting and her casting spot on. You just can’t take your eyes off Shilpa Shukla. The gravelly voice, the boyish figure (she was the sultry hockey player in Chak De! India), makes her the ‘aunty’ of adolescent dreams.

The other star in the film is the city of Delhi. After training him in the erotic arts, Sarika aunty pimps Mukesh (Shadab Kamal) out to other ‘aunties’ across the metropolis. As Mukesh tells it in the story, “from Gol Market 70 open

to Bengali Market and as far south as Sundar Nagar. Some aunties only wanted to meet in a seedy tourist lodge in Tooti Chowk, after shopping in Connaught Place”. Frankly, this comes across as more ‘Delhi passe’ than ‘Delhi noir’, but what has happened in the last few years is that in cinema writing, Delhi is the new storyteller.

The nouveau riche flamboyance of the city makes for terrific visuals, and B.A. Pass, with its sharp contrasts of chess games played in lonely tree-lined graveyards, afternoon sex in posh bungalows and raucous neon-lit nights in cheap bars, works well.

The drawback of the film is that it sticks too close to The Railway Aunty, which, after all, is a short story, not a novel. So despite a fairly compact 95 minutes, the movie has a sense of incompleteness, with the inner life of the most interesting character ignored.

Till the end, we don’t know what makes Sarika aunty tick. n

This film is about dealing with the fallout of infidelity by using the placebo effect.

Basically, it is corny advice to prospective husbands about how to cheat on the wife, because, as the advice-giver says, “Only cheating keeps a good marriage going”, and, further, how to be imaginative in diverting her suspicions and keeping her happy.

Arshad Warsi plays the sly devil who hands out advice to his cousin, an innocent chocolate boy (Akash Chopra), on the eve of his marriage to a childhood sweetheart (Tahira Kochar). The wedding is to be a big Delhi jamboree and the mamas, those dirty old relatives who have been there and done that, turn up to provide ‘evidence’ that Guru Arshad’s advice is valid.

It is sad to see three decent actors playing stupid mama roles . Paresh Rawal’s tactic is to convince his wife that his dalliances are her hallucinations. Tinu Anand is a dyslexic husband—he keeps looking for a bra when what he needs is a bar. And as for Shakti Kapoor, he has convinced ‘wifey’ that he only goes to a woman when he wants to bum a cigarette.

More like a collection of dirty jokes than a movie, this is a silly, crude and sexist film. n ad

19 august 2013

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Safety First? Think Again

Hrithik Roshan, who’s been on cloud nine since fans started raving about the trailer of Krrish 3 earlier this week, hardly looks like someone recovering from an intense surgery. In case you’d forgotten, only a month ago, the actor, in his own words, “had a metal rod drilled into my skull to suck out the blood that was pressing against my brain”. Hrithik describes it like any other procedure, but admits the pain has still not faded. Yet, he’s unusually upbeat and says the only way he could explain the emergency to his two sons was by staying positive.

More than likely, he’ll resume shooting Bang Bang only after the release of Krrish 3 in early November, since recuperating and promoting the superhero movie are his current priorities. When I asked if the surgery had changed his outlook towards performing stunts—given that it was a 30-foot headlong dive into the sea that’s believed to have caused the blood clot in his brain—Hrithik smiled mischievously and said he intends to be “much more careful now”, but also added that he’d still do the ones that “aren’t completely unsafe”.

War over Hamlet

Another film likely to be displaced from its intended production schedule is the Hamlet adaptation to be directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia that Hrithik has reportedly committed to doing. The filming was originally meant to start in November, but will now happen only after Hrithik wraps up the remaining portions of Bang Bang.

This could well give Vishal Bhardwaj the edge in the race to bring the first Hamlet adaptation to screens.

Bhardwaj’s version, reportedly titled Haidar, will star his Kaminey leading man Shahid Kapoor. Although Shahid famously gave Bhardwaj a hard time during the making of that film, industrywallahs say he personally approached the filmmaker for a second chance, vowing to mend his ways. He has also promised to shave his head to play the character, which, if you think about it, is a big commitment from an actor who made a huge fuss about holding an inflated condom while shooting a song with a message on family planning.

Meanwhile I Am director Onir, who has also co-written a Hamlet draft with Black screenwriter Bhavani Iyer, is still gathering

19 August 2013

finances for the project and talking to actors about possibly starring in it. Onir, you might remember, lashed out at Dhulia some months ago when the latter revealed that he was getting ready to tackle Hamlet. Dhulia dismissed the diminutive director’s complaints, insisting that no one had a monopoly over Shakespeare and that Hamlet was open to multiple interpretations.

The actor who has always maintained that he was keen to play Hamlet someday is Amitabh Bachchan. While Big B did later concede that he was too old to slip into the part now, he was hopeful his son Abhishek might someday land the opportunity that always evaded him.

Extra Sloppy

Given that he has produced a few successful films, is welltravelled and worldly wise, you’d hardly expect this popular star-producer to find himself in the kind of mess he recently landed in when he showed up in Los Angeles to shoot his latest film. It turns out that his producing partner hadn’t so much as even asked around for the rules and formalities of shooting in LA before arriving with a full unit.

The filmmakers discovered that they couldn’t employ extras off the street and pay them a token amount to appear in their film. To use extras in Los Angeles, they had to hire those who were members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and had to pay them wages prescribed by the Guild. Those numbers, apparently, were significantly higher than what our desi producers had budgeted for, and the scenes couldn’t be shot without a significant number of extras.

Left with no other choice, the production reportedly moved overnight to Detroit, where SAG rules and wages didn’t apply and where they could possibly continue to exploit locals by paying them paltry wages. That part of the problem may have been solved, but it meant rewriting several scenes to suit the new locations while also trying to meet shooting deadlines. The director-duo helming the film have apparently been grumbling about the lack of professionalism on the part of their producer pair and all the stress they had to go through on set. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 71

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A Return to Kathakali

by r i t e s h u t ta m c h a n da n i

Ninety-eight-year-old Chemancherry Kunhiraman Nair conducts an evening class at his school, Kathakali Vidyalayam, in Koyilandi, Kozhikode. The teacher, who ran away from his home with four annas borrowed from his sister, started to learn Kathakali when he was 15 under the guidance of Guru Karunakaram Menon at Keezhpayyar and then began performing with several troupes across Madras Presidency.

After Independence, with the decline of the princely states, which were the main supporters of such arts, Chemancherry and several other artistes of his time had to look for alternate sources of income. With the help of some friends, he established the Bharatiya Nritya Kalalayam in Kannur (where he only taught Bharatanatyam) and later established several branches of the same across Kerala. In the early 1950s, he also worked with Fairy Circus Company for two years, training their dancers and acrobats.

Brick by brick and penny by penny, Chemancherry eventually set up Kathakali Vidyalayam in his hometown in 1983. Chemancherry, at 98, hasn’t stopped performing. On 26 June, his birthday, when he last performed, the weight of his Kathakali costume and jewellery—almost 20 kg—made him stumble as he walked up to the stage. But once there, he didn’t miss a step.

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19 august 2013