OPEN Magazine 23 June 2014

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SPECIAL SEVEN SHADES OF SUMMER IN 28 PAGES

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Fall of the Flight Attendant

Can Rahul Be Reborn?

Congress is not beyond redemption. But only if...

By Harish Khare

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Volume 6 Issue 24 For the week 17—23 June 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

photo imaging Anirban Ghosh and Sharad Tailang cover photo Bettmann/CORBIS

23 june 2014

Shyamal Kumar Sinha

This refers to the essay ‘Maybe Some Paraffin for a Nation Stuck’ by Bennett Voyles (9 June 2014), wherein he has produced a set of dire warnings for Prime Minister Narendra Modi—within only a few days of his swearing in. Western liberals, almost without exception, are really good at celebrating the mayhem in a country overwhelmed by scams, plunging economy, misgovernance and fractious polity, all in the name of excellent democratic practice. On the other hand, no one, let It seems indeed alone the liberals, likes a fantastic that the strong country with a prospect of the country resolute leadership, as it being taken out of the immediately evokes the depth of ruination can primal fear of Stalin, Hitler or worse. It is a be overwhelmed by the small matter that after a liberal nightmare of an long time, in the course imaginary dictator of an intensely fought election, the country chose to give a clear mandate to Narendra Modi, without the perennial hassles of coalition. It seems indeed fantastic that the prospect of the country being taken out of the depth of ruination can be overwhelmed by the liberal nightmare of an imaginary dictator. Come on Mr Voyles, be generous rather than being a doomsday prophet and wish Mr Modi heartfelt congratulations.  letter of the week Modi’s Work Culture

people say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is autocratic, and by inducting newcomers like Nirmala Sitharaman and Smriti Irani in his Cabinet, he has proved that it is his words that will rule (‘The Prime Minister Is Watching You’, 16 June 2014). But if that is the case, then why did he give a free hand to his bureaucrats to run their offices the way they deem right? All Modi wants is good results. For him the bottom line is good performance and he knows very well that he can get the desired output from these newcomers and in turn they will also be groomed for bigger responsibilities. Our Prime Minister is indeed a smart politician who

shamed the nation (‘A Hanging’, 16 June 2014). It appears that the Chief Minister has lost control of the state administration as crime against women goes on unabated. Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav should stop underplaying such incidents and instead take steps to break the politician-police-criminal nexus, otherwise development and growth in the state would be of little consequence.  KR Srinivasan

Vedic Mathematics

means business at any cost. His 100 days agenda and 14-15 hours a day work are much like the work culture in the corporate world, where proper appraisal will take place and non-performing assets will be ejected from the system. The Prime Minister has taken a big initiative by telling his Cabinet secretaries to work without any fear, which will instil not only confidence in them, but can turn around the strained relationship between bureaucrats and politicians.  Bal Govind

Break the Criminal Nexus the gangrape and brutal murder of two minor Dalit girls in the Samajwadi Party bastion of Uttar Pradesh has

the point made in the article ‘Paper Truths’ (9 June 2014) that academic degrees don’t necessarily transform into fruitful actions, was good. But, I was pretty disturbed with the casual reference to Vedic mathematics by terming it as ‘nothing more than redundant methods of calculation’. I don’t know whether the writer has actually tried it or not. As far as I am concerned, I first heard about Vedic mathematics during my chartered accountancy examination preparations from a Delhi-based teacher of accountancy, who is renowned in North India for his mastery over the subject. I was really motivated by him and even started using this system of mathematics. And yes, I benefitted from it and I am sure it would have been worthwhile for many others too. I am not saying that it should be ‘foisted on the Indian educational system’, but on the other hand, these casual remarks about a worthy mathematical system can certainly be avoided.  Sandeep Sehgal

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The Curious Case of the Pizza-delivering Drone tall tales

Popular footage of a Mumbai eatery using a drone to home deliver pizza was staged

announced plans to use drones to deliver goods, a little-known pizzeria in Mumbai hit the headlines for doing an emulation of the procedure early this May. The eatery, Francesco’s Pizzeria, claimed a drone delivered their pizza from their Lower Parel outlet to a customer in Worli, making the total distance of 1.5 km within ten minutes. It uploaded a video of this flight on 19 May and it became an internet sensation, with all the leading Indian and international newspapers

After Amazon

23 june 2014

writing about it.

It now turns out that the entire delivery-via-drone was staged, according to the Mumbai police. The police got involved because rules in India forbid anything to be flown at an altitude of over 400 feet. The laws specifically state that nothing should be flown over security establishments.

The eatery made the drone fly with the pizza box only in some spots. This was filmed and the video later edited in such a manner as to indicate

a delivery had been made. A police officer from NM Joshi Marg police station, requesting anonymity, said, “They did not break any rules because they had hardly flown the drone. When we called the people from the pizza shop, they confessed how they had staged the entire delivery.

Even the person shown receiving the pizza in the video was a friend of the owner’s.”

The pizzeria’s chief executive Mikhel Rajani did not reply to phone calls or messages. Ajay Patankar, senior

inspector from the police station, said, “The case is almost over now. The whole thing was just a publicity stunt to get people talking about their eatery. They had not anticipated the likelihood of the police getting involved.”

The police officer adds that the drone they used was extremely rudimentary. “It could hardly even fly over 20 feet. So for the video, because the drone was so basic, they just attached a pizza box, without any pizza in it.” n Lhendup G Bhutia

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anirban ghosh

small world

cover 12 story

contents 6

hurried man’s guide

to the communal ways of HRS

18

Lessons for the Congress

24 sri lanka

cpm

Eelam and India

The General Secretary India should be indebted to

8

22

open essay

Saving the Sacred Ganga

aap

Can the party bounce back?

person of the week rafael nadal

The King of Clay Stays Golden The great baseliner of tennis gets nostalgic after his 2014 French Open win Lhendup g Bhutia

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nd then he said it. On the summit of his greatest ascent, Rafael Nadal, before taking the customary mock bite off his record 9th French Open cup this week, admitted that the end is near. Not just for him, but for the Big Four of the golden generation— Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray and himself. It is perhaps for the first time any of the Big Four have spoken about it. When he won the French Open, Nadal had equalled Pete Sampras with 14 Grand Slam singles titles—bringing him to No 2, behind Federer who has 17 such titles. But what he said was not celebratory in tone: “I am 28, it’s not forever …I will have a few more opportunities but you don’t know if I will ever win it again.

Our generation is on the way out. We have all been here for a long while. It’s normal.

A generation is walking away and others will replace us. It will not come overnight, but it will come.”

The past is always more promising than the present. More so in sports, where people preach from barstools of the glorious days of yore; when the game was purer and tougher, when there were no distractions of showbiz and fame. How no cricketer will come close to Don Bradman and Gary Sobers, no boxer will equal the grit and showmanship of Muhammad Ali, no footballer can have the skill of Pele.

These are, however, affectations of nostalgia. All these earlier mentioned greats would perhaps struggle with the demanding expectations of modern sports, where players are stronger and trained like soldiers.

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Many tennis lovers, on the other hand, will agree that the present is as good a glorious period as the game has ever had.

The beginning of this era saw the arrival of Nadal challenging Federer, who has been heralded through the decades as GOAT (Greatest of all Time). Later Djokovic and Murray brought additional excitement. They were aided by age catching up with Federer and Nadal’s periodic injuries. These four players have bedazzled a generation with their ability, fitness and character. Since the late noughties, they have blitzkrieged through every tournament, winning most major titles, and greedily keeping Aurelien Meunier/Icon Sport/AP

the top four rankings among themselves, reducing every other player to mere sideshows. Between them, those four men have won 39 of the last 44 majors stretching back to Federer’s first Wimbledon title in 2003. Suddenly it appeared there were four GOATs in the same generation. We have probably been living through tennis’s finest golden era.

And now, as Nadal admitted, it is the comet’s tail-end.

Federer is 34 and many believe he is already way past his prime. Nadal is 28 and Djokovic and Murray are 27. In tennis, this marks the twilight end of the middle ages, while Federer is decidedly old. And the signs have been there. In 2013, Federer continued to plummet down the rankings, and he even exited the 2014 French Open in the fourth round.

While the four have won a few tournaments here and there, they haven’t quite been able to dominate. Nadal, dogged by bad knees, was out for almost a year.

When he returned, he faced a number of defeats, even on clay. And earlier this year, he lost the 2014 Australian Open to Stanislas Wawrinka. The Spaniard has been able to hold on to his No 1 ranking currently and he promises to return. He admits it will be tougher to win tournaments, and perhaps he never will again, but he is going to try. As Nadal attempts to chase down Federer’s record of most Grand Slam singles titles, and the other three seek their own individual glories, all we can do is savour their game and be glad to have witnessed the most glorious period in tennis history. n 23 june 2014

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NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

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travel

Treks through Himalayan clouds

Dishes to beat the heat

The good wife and sister

50 books

food

63

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Chilling literary thrillers

tech cinema

Best of world cinema

Rise of the machine

SPECIAL SEVEN SHADES OF SUMMER

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J Jaya

lalith

aa

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f o r Using subsidised products to

promote her personality cult Imagine the political storm if the Central Government began to sell subsidised products under the brand name Modi.

But in Tamil Nadu politics, a blatant use of state money to promote the brand of the Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa is par for the course. On Wednesday a state government enterprise launched Amma Salt, which

Maharashtra’s Home Minister RR Patil found himself in a soup after a statement by him seemed to suggest that rapes cannot be stopped, but he quickly retracted sE L F DEFEN C E

“Many crimes against women happen inside homes. How is it possible to have a policeman in every household”

“I did not make such a statement.

I said the safety of women will be the top priority of the Maharashtra government”

— 11June, in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly

— 11 June, speaking to the media later

turn

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

will be available at Rs 7 below the market price for a kilo.

This might be a good thing for poor people if not for the fact that Amma is the moniker Jayalalitha is addressed by.

And to leave no room for ambivalence, her photo is also there on the package. There are in fact a whole range of such subsidised schemes with Amma’s name attached to them. Amma packaged water, Amma groceries and Amma canteens—all sell products cheaper than the market. The Tamil Nadu state budget for 2014–15 unveiled in February this year launched the Amma Marundagam scheme, under which new medical shops will be set up to dole out medicines at subsidised rates. The scheme envisages the establishment of 100 pharmacies, apart from converting 210 existing medical shops into Amma Marundagams. Good things for the poor come attached with Amma’s name, making it clear who they have to be thankful for. n

around

Candidate Modi to Statesman Modi country ...In a democracy, criticism gives strength and it will guide us.”

He also expressed deep concerns over rampant atrocities on women and minorities. In the wake of many politicians making preposterous comments, Modi asked them to show respect for women. He was witty, sarcastic, yet compassionate all through the speech. The Prime Minister touched upon various issues of national importance and was at his oratorical best. n

who has fiercely fought the recent Lok Sabha election, employing rhetoric with aggression, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a smooth transition to a statesman with his maiden speech in Parliament where he struck a conciliatory tone, welcoming criticism and vowing to work closely with the opposition. In a departure from his usual haughty self, the Prime Minister said, “We welcome criticism. The more the criticism, the better it is ...It is for the welfare of the

For someone

indranil mukherjee/afp

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angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to the communal ways of the Hindu Rashtra Sena (HRS) A man named Dhananjay Desai was arrested on Tuesday for the murder of a 28-yearold Pune resident Mohsin Shaikh. Desai is the head of the Hindu Rashtra Sena (HRS), a fringe extremist Hindu group active mainly in western districts of Maharashtra, particularly Pune, Kolhapur and Satara .

On 2 June, a mob of 30 to 40 people, alleged to be members of the HRS, were travelling on motorbikes in Pune protesting against the appearance of morphed photos of the Maratha king Chattrapati Shivaji and late Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray on social networking sites. They chanced upon Shaikh who was returning home after his namaaz and beat Desai, the head of him to death. They also the HRS, has been assaulted a few other booked at least 23 Muslim men. times earlier for hate speeches and instigating violence.

express archive

Hindu Rashtra Sena usually holds rallies and protests for what they call defending their religion. Media reports claim that Desai, who hails from Mumbai, formed the HRS when he was 14 years old. He has been booked at least 23 times earlier for hate speeches and instigating violence. HRS earlier held protests against the

another face of Terror Dhananjay Desai in Pune

capture of Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit in the Malegaon blasts case. In 2007, it attacked the office of Star News, claiming their coverage of a story where a Hindu girl had eloped with a Muslim boy was “anti-national”. It also held demonstrations in Pune against the state government’s plan to allot land to the Aligarh Muslim University.

So far 17 suspects have been arrested for Shaikh’s murder, including Desai.

Incidentally, Desai had also been arrested on the afternoon of the murder of Shaikh, on an entirely different case of allegedly distributing pamphlets containing inflammatory content at a rally. The police believe he conspired the murder and are now seeking to ban the group. n

A Road By Any Other Name…

Why naming one after Priyanka Chopra’s father defies logic M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

I

t is admirable how Priyanka

Chopra has performed her duties as a daughter. As her father was consumed by terminal cancer, she was beside him until the very last.

It has now been a year since he passed away and she still continues to do her duty. That is how we heard recently that a road in the suburb of Andheri in Mumbai has been named after Dr Ashok Chopra.

Touching as the gesture is, one must still ask: what exactly has been Dr Chopra’s contribution to society, other than being the father of the actress? Even if we don’t fault her desire to have such a memorial—any daughter would want just as much—should society also be a participant in it? Surely, if it is a public road owned by the state, there needs to be some objective measure for such decisions, an overwhelming reason for one person’s name to be affixed to it as against someone else’s.

There are many daughters and sons who love their late fathers and mothers equally and all of them, if they could, would want a road to name. Is there any reason for Chopra to have a better stake to that particular road?

But we must not blame Chopra alone. Some years back, a road in Mumbai was named after the late son of the ghazal singers Jagjit and Chitra Singh. Vivek Singh had died in a car accident in 1990 at the age of 18. It was a huge tragedy for the parents and Chitra stopped singing after that.

Later, she managed to get the road named after him. After her husband died, she wanted one named after him too. It had become a habit.

Heart-rending as her sorrow is, the civic body again had little justification in humouring her—the sole consideration is influence. All it takes in Mumbai is for a local corporator to push for the renaming. Two years ago, a report by an NGO, the Praja

Foundation, on the performance of municipal corporators in the city found that they were more interested in naming the roads than the plights of roads themselves. The rest of the country wouldn’t be any different.

It is unfair to pick on just celebrities, because many road names are hogged by dead local politicians.

The power to dole out a road name is part of the culture of patronage that is intrinsic to Indian politics. In democracies, we would assume there is a distinction between the private and the public but India is still to evolve anywhere close to that ideal.

An Indian politician lives in the hangover of kings who own If Chopra is so the lands that keen on a road they rule and named after are free to do with it as they her father, let please. her buy it. The There is money can be also another used to repair fundamental and maintain issue with naming roads the road and after human there is some beings. Roads public good exist to travel coming from it on and that purpose is what should determine the name.

Naming them after unknown entities only makes the address harder to find. Numbering them is so much more apt and orderly. Or at the very least auction off the names, like the traffic department does with unique vehicle number plates. If Chopra is so keen on a road named after her father, let her buy it. The money can be used to repair and maintain the road and there is some public good coming from it. There are counter-arguments to that too but it is still more legitimate than doling them out as a favour to the rich and powerful.n 23 june 2014

open essay

By A Damodaran

THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE Let the spiritual and the sustainable meet to save the Ganga

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the corridors of Indira Paryavaran Bhawan, the headquarters of the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), any officer posted to the Ganga Project Directorate— also known as the National River Conservation Directorate (NRCD)—is either ‘low profile’ or ‘sidelined’.

This was not the perception when the A Damodaran Ganga Action Plan (GAP) was launched is a professor of

by Rajiv Gandhi in 1985. He was fresh Economics and from an earthshaking electoral victory.

Social Sciences at His party had bagged 83 of the 85 Lok the Indian Institute Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh alone.

India’s young Prime Minister was hailed of Management, by sections of the media for his refreshBangalore ing ‘approach’ to nature. Mountains and wildlife reserves were his mother’s pet obsessions, but to focus on a river was a novelty. A flurry of activities followed the announcement of the GAP, and the Central Ganga Authority (CGA) was formed to oversee its implementation, chaired by none other than the Prime Minister himself.

A Ganga Project Directorate was set up under the aegis of the newly formed MoEF to implement the Action Plan. But then the euphoria around GAP waned as Rajiv Gandhi was sucked into the scandal surrounding the purchase of Bofors artillery

guns, and his relations with the electorate entered the phase of disaffection.

Succeeding Prime Ministers did not give the Ganga its deserving pre-eminence either. However, the GAP and its administrative superstructure continued to function. Nomenclatures and acronyms were changed at regular intervals to convey ‘change’ and ‘dynamism’. 10 years after its formation, the CGA morphed into the more encompassing National River Conservation Authority that was mandated to look after Ganga’s tributaries as well. The National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA) was the latest to enter the lexicon; and as a result, the NRCD turned into a routine division of the MoEF, demoralising even the officers who manned it. There was nothing in the GAP that could have really captured the imagination of an astute political executive either. The atrophy was painful.

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eanwhile, pollution in the Ganges was on the increase.

Despite the presence of an array of effluent treatment plants along the banks of the Ganga, water pollution ballooned because of municipal waste dumped into the river. Many poorly designed treatment plants broke down, while power outages cramped the operations of the rest. Even today, a significant proportion of the 500 or so factories along the river discharge their effluents into the Ganga’s waters. The problem of toxic waste sludge in the Kanpur-Mirzapur belt continues to be a ric ergenbright/corbis

n

THE PAST FLOWS BY Bathers by the banks of the Ganga at dawn in Varanasi, October 1984 23 June 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 9

nightmare, and the bathing quality of water in Varanasi and Ahmedabad is below prescribed standards. Thanks to underestimation of effluent discharge and ineffective citizen’s committees, the condition the Ganga is in has inexorably moved from ‘bad’ to ‘worse’.

The problem with GAP is that it was improperly conceived and myopically focused. It suffers from three major failings. The first failing has been its narrow focus. For one of the world’s largest river basin systems, a grander agenda of corrective intervention was required; unfortunately, the GAP was envisioned as a narrow ‘clean-up programme’. Despite its wide geographical coverage, GAP focused on pollution control. Attention was on ‘water quality’, rather than what happened at the basin.

Firstly, the well-designed effluent treatment plants on the banks of the river were, at best, a naive civil engineer’s delight.

They relied on ‘end of pipe’ effluent treatment plants (ETPs) that required a lot of electricity to function. Unfortunately, ETPs cannot be totally wished away. They are unavoidable in heavily polluted zones, where possibilities for waste minimisation at the source are limited. However, in some segments of the Ganges, there was scope for cheaper and more effective solutions that were energy efficient. But the gamut of agencies in charge of GAP were impermeable to simple alternatives, particularly those originating from technically sound and socially sensitive people living on the banks of the Ganges—people like the late Veer Bhadra Mishra from Varanasi, noted environmentalist and founding president of the Sankat Mochan Foundation, a nongovernmental organisation devoted to cleaning and protecting the Ganges.

The second failing was that it had virtually nothing to do with hydraulics. In effect, this meant that the NRCD and the NGRBA had no jurisdiction to act on issues that went beyond the ‘clean-up paradigm’.

Both entities failed to address the problem of uneven flow of the river in its various stretches. While the Ganga flows slowly in its western plains, it is menacingly kinetic in its eastern segment thanks to the narrowing course of the river. Patna and Kosi have been—and continue to be—vulnerable to floods. Water harnessing and diversion works allowed water to reach the parched zones of the basin, but it is not clear whether they left stream flows in the critical segments of the river unaffected.

Lastly, the third limitation of GAP was its failure to bring the agenda of sustainability closer to the ‘sacred’ dimension of the river.

can also be a severe test of a Prime Minister’s political finesse.

For its crucible value to be realised, the river needs to be seen for everything it has stood for—a hallowed water body, a spiritual entity, an invaluable heritage of India, a valuable slice of our incredible, ‘plural’ history, a drinking water source, a hydro-electric power base, an irrigation source and finally, a receptacle of municipal and industrial wastes.

A worldview that sees the Ganga in its totality can reconcile the conflicting perceptions about it. For long, the ‘sacred’ connotation about the river has been in conflict with the notion of its sustainability. Those who view the Ganga as sacred do not want to be told that it is a polluted water body, while those who treat the Ganga as a ‘receptacle’ do not want to emphasise its sacredness. Though Ganga heroes like Veer Bhadra Mishra strove hard to reconcile the two ideals, results were limited. Political engineering appears to be the only way out.

Another way in which the chief political executive could enhance the stature of the hallowed river is to use it as a symbol of peace across borders. There is a school of thought that argues that if the Indus water issue been resolved in the 1950s, our dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir would have been less acute. Why not re-imagine the Ganga as a positive symbol of India–Bangladesh relations?

The Modi government is widely expected to revamp the governance systems associated with river Ganga, its tributaries and other major peninsular rivers. There is talk of a larger formation that puts the Ministry of Water Resources and the Ganga restoration programme under the same umbrella. This could perhaps bring in the element of hydraulics into the programme. However, India’s river basins—notably that of the Ganga—are complex entities that require consolidation, resource mobilisation and activities to be undertaken on a war footing.

The painfully staccato progress of last three decades leaves us with very few options.

Ideally a well-designed National Ganga Action Programme should cover the dimensions of heritage, agriculture, industrial policy, pollution control, forests, water resources, trade and related ecosystems, foreign policy and interstate affairs. In other words, a meso Government of India!

The new dispensation calls for the symbolic and substantive presence of the chief political executive at the local theatre of action. Viewed this way, the emergence of an apex leadership with strong moral suasion powers can be critical to effectively implementing a holistic national river restoration plan. In the specific context of the Ganga, this would mean that the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘sustainable’ complement the development programmes.

The Prime Minister’s Office could be the charismatic rivet for the Ganga programme that provides enlightened direction at the local level for a transcending cause.

Ganga has been the most coveted river basin of the world. It is Ganga that ‘ran away from the paradise’—not Caño Cristales, as the world seem to believe.

Let us reclaim our prestige. n

Those who view the Ganga as sacred cannot accept that it is polluted, while those who see it as a receptacle do not want to emphasise its sacredness

F

or India’s chief political executive—whose worldview

transcends the narrow ‘clean-up’ framework—the Ganga and its tributaries promise infinite possibilities for imaginative governance. The Ganga basin is a microcosm of India. It offers almost all the challenges that a Prime Minister faces in his job of governing the nation. Managing the Ganga river basin 10 open

23 June 2014

Adnan Abidi/reuters

Can Rahul Be Reborn? r eco n st ru c t i o n

There is no hope unless he learns to love the Congress

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By Harish Khare INTEEN SIXTY THREE was a bad year for the Indian National

Congress. Indeed, it was the first bad year for the ruling party after it assumed power in 1947.

In the summer of that year, three Lok Sabha by-elections saw the triumphal return to Parliament of three of Jawaharlal Nehru’s most bitter critics: JB Kriplani (who trounced Hafiz Mohammed Ibrahim in Amroha), Ram Manohar Lohia (who bested KV Keskar in Farrukabad) and Minoo Masani (who got the better of Jethalal Joshi in Rajkot). Cumulatively, these three by-elections constituted a resounding political slap across Nehru’s face, and the rebuff was administered within six months of an embarrassing encounter with the Chinese troops on the eastern border—followed by the very austere economic measures (including the supremely unpopular Gold Control Act of 1968) put in place by an unimaginative Finance Minister, Morarji Desai. For the first time since 1947, the Congress had courted public disenchantment and discontent.

23 June 2014

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After the Chinese debacle, Nehru was a broken man— but he had not lost any of his political instincts. With his five-decade-old insights into the Indian people and their moods, he got the message of the three by-elections and understood that something had to be done; otherwise his own leadership would come under the very close and unfriendly scrutiny of an increasingly restive Congress parliamentary party.

Nehru immediately got the Congress Working Committee to appoint a probe panel to “find out organizational deficiencies and… whether the recent by-elections were fought on political and party issues”. The constitution of this panel itself was recognition that the Kriplani-Lohia-Masani triumph had created a new political situation which required a coherent and imaginative response from the leadership.

The public at large had to be reassured that Nehru was neither deaf nor dumb; the party workers had to be assuaged, to be satisfied that the leadership was ready to learn a lesson or two and to undertake the necessary course correction. Above all, there were hard realpolitik considerations. Nehru knew that if he did nothing, he would probably not have died as Prime Minister. And, so he did something quite unimaginable. He initiated what came to be called the Kamaraj Plan. Under this plan, six senior central ministers and six Chief Ministers ‘volunteered’ to resign and work to strengthen the party organisation.

And within a short while, the Congress party had recaptured the initiative; it was sufficiently galvanised internally, and by the time of Nehru’s death it was in reasonably good shape to perform that most demanding of democratic rites—an orderly succession. There was a sufficient sense of internal unity, coherence and discipline, and the Congress did not falter, quietly electing a quiet man as Nehru’s successor; and belying all those who had prophesied disorder and collapse.

If this somewhat longish and tedious history is being recalled, it is only because the Congress today finds itself having to come to terms with its worst ever electoral disaster—as also , to suggest, both to the party’s friends and foes alike, that the situation is not beyond redemption.

The prospect may look somewhat hopeless, but there are enough lessons and precedents for the Congress to draw upon as it gropes its way forward.

The Congress has warded off immediate bloodbath and internal turmoil, for now. Its leadership has decided to dig its heels in. But while Mrs Sonia Gandhi still enjoys enor-

Though the son is deemed a political oddity and a personal enigma, the Congress leaders are not yet ready to demand his head

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mous respect from the rank and file, there are massive doubts about the capability and willingness of her son to provide a hands-on leadership to the party.

Some stunned Congressmen are talking among themselves as if the Narendra Modi victory has heralded the dawn of a new republic. Some of them even go to the extent of pronouncing the death of the Nehruvian consensus. Clearly, however, the Congress leadership, particularly Mrs Gandhi, is not prepared to interpret the 2014 Lok Sabha elections as a rejection of Nehruvian values and ideas. Indeed, the very next day after Modi took over as Prime Minister, the Congress party had organised an internal conclave to reiterate the continued relevance of Nehruvian ‘Ideas’—the occasion being the fiftieth death anniversary of the great man.

In her opening remarks Mrs Gandhi made it a point to underline, in some detail, what she called the four pillars of Nehruvian consensus—the democratic transformation, secular order, equity and non-alignment. The merits of her arguments apart, it was a brave show of unity, political poise and purpose.

Nor are the Congressmen unmindful of the fact that even though the party ended up with a paltry harvest of 44 Lok Sabha seats, it still had polled over ten crore votes across the length and breadth of the country. This is not an inconsequential support base, anytime, anywhere. In fact, it has been pointed out that the Congress vote share in 2014 is still higher than what the BJP managed to get in 2009—and the saffron outfit lived another day to fight and win another battle. The bottom line: if the BJP could revive itself after the 2009 debacle, so can the Congress.

S

ome thoughtful Congress leaders are already

talking about a new Congress, just as Tony Blair reinvented a New Labour party to dislodge the entrenched Conservatives after the dominant Thatcherite years.

At the same time, these leaders are also embarrassingly unambiguous about one thing: it is clear there is no escape from the Nehru-Gandhi family paradigm. Some of them are candid enough to acknowledge that if they occupy the position of power and influence within the party, it was entirely because of indulgence from Sonia Gandhi. And they are also candid enough to say that in this hour of crisis, they are not going to be ungrateful and would not turn their back on her or her son.

Though the son is deemed a political oddity and a personal enigma, the Congress leaders are not yet ready to demand his head. What they expect is that the young Gandhi will listen to the voices within the party and change his ways of doing things.

In private conversations, the Congress leaders acknowledge that Rahul Gandhi single-handedly introduced incoherence and disarray into the organisation. In the last four or five years, the young Gandhi demonstratively voiced his preference for reorienting the party into a ‘dem23 June 2014

Saurabh Das/AP

Implicit in Rahul Gandhi’s approach was a rejection of the traditional Congressman who was viewed as somewhat compromised and corrupt

REPORT CARD Rahul and Sonia Gandhi at a meeting of the Congress Working Committee on 19 May

ocratic’ organisation. This carries with it a suggestion of rejection of his mother’s working style. On the face of it, Rahul Gandhi’s ideas have the meretricious appeal of being politically correct—but eminently impractical. Mr Gandhi’s efforts to introduce ‘direct elections’ into the Indian Youth Congress and National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), its youth and student wings, have been seen as a mixed blessing. Whatever be the intrinsic merits of the experiment, its immediate impact has been an organisational rupture; rather than produce organisational synergy, the two frontal organisations came to be viewed as Mr Gandhi’s personal and rival instruments of power play, rather like the Sanjay Gandhi gang of the mid-1970s.

Mr Gandhi’s experiment itself was not a total disaster.

What proved debilitating was a barely concealed hostility between the All India Congress Committee (AICC) at 24 Akbar Road and Mr Gandhi’s establishment at Tughlak Lane—and this style of estrangement persisted even after the party had anointed him as its Vice President, in Jaipur last January.

Mr Gandhi was seen to be operating independently and unilaterally from the main organisation; and the Congress hierarchy throughout the country was baffled.

For example, he would make visits to the state capitals and Pradesh Congress Committees would have no idea, or at best they would discover his impending visit in the newspapers. Once Mr Gandhi arrived in the state capital, there was no effort made to contact, connect and befriend the local Congress leadership; instead, Mr Gandhi often preferred to remonstratively interact with a group of NGOs, as if these civil society formations were the sole 23 June 2014

source and repository of authentic political instincts and ideas. Implicit in this approach was a rejection of the traditional Congressman, who was viewed as somewhat compromised and corrupt, out to slow down a young leader on the march.

And it was this divorce between Mr Gandhi’s establishment and the Congress party that ultimately proved to be the undoing of the Congress’ 2014 election campaign.

Over the last three or four years, the Congress leaders, especially of the older variety, were made to feel that their presence was a burdensome encumbrance, that their contribution was minimal. Yet, when the election day came, the NGOs had vanished into thin air; these self-serving ‘civil society leaders’ were unwilling to stand up and be counted in the Rahul or Congress column; it was the much derided old Congressman and the old district Congress committee who became the instruments for providing the nuts and bolts of election time mobilisation.

The painful dilemma is that in order to spare Mrs Gandhi and her son the odium of a shameful defeat, the Congress leaders are not prepared to say what is not working for Mr Gandhi, and by an extension for the party.

So, the Congress now faces a twin task: firstly, how to reorient itself for its role as an opposition party at the national level, and secondly, how to make its ruling family become a source of joyful synergy rather than remaining a cause of mutual sullenness.

As it finds itself having to come to terms with a new political adversary and a prolonged spell of powerlessness, the party can profit from the basic mantra enunciated by the 1963 review committee: open www.openthemagazine.com 15

‘It should be constantly borne in mind that the political scene in India is changing and the situation is becoming more and more complex. Political consciousness of the people is being enlarged both in extent and depth as result of economic and social changes which are occurring. With the passage of time, the rate of change is becoming more rapid. The general election itself is a kind of a crucible through which the electorate passes and becomes transformed every time. Any estimation of the needs of the situation, based on the facts of a decade or even five years ago, will prove to be misleading. New forces emerge and there are fresh alignments. The demands of the electorate are becoming more exacting. The responses of the voters are not set in the moulds of the past.

The Congress must possess the insight and the capacity for readjustment which the changing situation demands.’

If the Nehru-Gandhi family’s leadership is not to be questioned, the least the Congress can insist on is that it does not remain ‘set in the moulds of the past’. The Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi family together will have to re-learn what Bill Clinton goaded the Democratic Party to learn before it could dislodge the Republicans from the White House, after 12 years of the Reagan-Bush dominance. Clinton talked, argued and debated with his fellow Democrats: the American voter had to be convinced that the Democratic Party had “a deep desire to affirm the good and virtuous in politics”.

Easier said than done, though. If Rahul Gandhi is serious about a public role for himself, he has an obligation to help himself and his party debate the basic questions: what is the purpose of politics, what are the basic values of public life and how can the Congress as a political party win popular support in defense of its ideas, programs and values?

For decades, the Congress has internalised its role as the party of the government. It is perhaps natural that most Congress leaders think that they know what is best for the country and what is best for the citizens. This mindset has to give way to a new humility and a new willingness to listen and learn from the citizens. To begin with, the Congress will need to reconnect with the masses. The simplest directive Mrs Gandhi can send out is to insist that all District Congress Committee offices be reactivated, and that they should become the hub of local political exchanges.

Not an easy option, though. After all, the Congress as an organisation has practiced and finessed the politics of patronage. The relationship between the Congress President and its vast array of senior leaders is based on a simple ar-

The divorce between Mr Gandhi’s establishment and the Congress party proved to be the undoing of the Party’s 2014 poll campaign

16 open

rangement: they profess an allegiance to her and she, in turn, extends her indulgence and patronage to them, including their personal ambitions and waywardness.

To be fair to Sonia Gandhi, this model has paid off for 10 years. She has enabled the Congress to enjoy power at the national level for a decade. This is not a mean achievement. No other non-Congress leader, thus far, has led his or her party to such an uninterrupted stint. And therefore, she is entitled to think and assume that her command and control model is an effective arrangement; she is also entitled to think that the reason the people of India vote for the Congress is because it is led by a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family.

Now, the BJP under Narendra Modi has aggressively questioned this myth and its attendant assumptions.

Very many people outside the Congress and quite a few of them inside the party are inclined to believe that twenty first century India is too democratic a place to countenance any traditional source of allegiance and obedience—and certainly not to honor or acknowledge a claim which is not backed by personal merit and proven professional achievements.

R

ahul Gandhi, unfortunately, has very little to show for himself by way of personal or professional achievement. His advisors and minders discouraged him from accepting a ministerial assignment over the years, an experience which could have given him not only a sense of achievement but also a record of some performance, which in turn could have been marketed into a leadership asset. The voters in 2014 have certainly sent out a message: that they are not going to be impressed with someone merely on account of his particular DNA. The Congress Vice President’s track record as a vote catcher for the Congress party is, at best, somewhat dismal. Nor has he associated himself with any policy or idea which would have captured voters’ imaginations.

On top of it all, there is an appearance of reluctance and part-time leadership. Many senior leaders were personally deeply disappointed that he chose not to accept the leadership role in the Lok Sabha. This is seen as running away from a difficult duty.

There is a Catch-22 situation in the Congress party. Mr Gandhi and his close aides have concluded that 2014 is not the end of the road; in their view, the outcome was inevitable and inescapable, after the 10 years of the UPA government’s incumbency. Therefore, Mr Gandhi was entirely, perspicuously correct in his understanding that something was not right with the Congress and that it needed to be radically overhauled; the sub-text of this sycophantic formulation is that the only way the party can be remulched is as per Mr Gandhi’s ideas. There is a certain internal but foolish, Alice in Wonderland-type consistency to the argument. But if he is so keen to overhaul the organisation, he can easily begin by dismantling the 23 June 2014

There is no case for moving away from the Nehruvian consensus; the polity needs to be re-introduced to Nehruvian ideas and good practices

role model Jawaharlal Nehru in 1961 Popperfoto/Getty Images

structure of control and command set up by his mother.

And, while he is at it, he can promote two dozen strong, authentic regional leaders across the country, empowering them, encouraging them to embody the best political impulses and instincts.

Since 1950, when India opted for a democratic constitution, promising an egalitarian order, the primary purpose of our politics has been to help sort out unsettled equations; like what the terms of existence between the Centre and the Periphery are; how the Union and the State Governments will perform their constitutionally defined duties; what will be the flavour of the relationship between the majority and the minorities; and, how the citizens will hold—or be allowed to hold—the State accountable and answerable. Of late, new issues have erupted about the nature of the relationship between the political authority and the private sector. All these are easy but not so easily-tractable equations; violence is just barely beneath the surface and disorder is lurking round the corner. Those voted with a mandate to rule have an obligation to produce the requisite wisdom in sorting out these equations, and political parties are enjoined to ensure that fairness is practiced and justice is done.

It is possible to argue that the Congress was disfavored by the electorate because it was not able to perform its traditional role of a pan Indian political party, carefully and craftily mediating through conflicting societal claims. The Congress will need to understand why its 23 June 2014

government at the Centre failed to perform optimally.

Now that the voters have divested the Congressmen of the excuse and the burden of office, they have the challenge of changing with the times. Sonia Gandhi has been the party president since 1998, the longest serving stint in the history of this party. While her stewardship has produced stability, it has also made everybody comfortable with the status quo and all its cascading infirmities.

India had changed and the Congress will have to reinvent itself to be able to answer its new anxieties and aspirations, without abandoning its own values. Certainly there is no case for moving away from the Nehruvian consensus; if anything, the polity needs to be re-introduced to Nehruvian ideas and good practices.

The New Congress can only be a Family Plus. But there will be no Congress, old or new, unless Rahul Gandhi learns—or is made to learn—to love the Congress. He cannot hope to rebuild the party by ignoring, humiliating, and sidelining Congressmen, especially those who choose to call themselves Congressmen. The onus is on him to create working conditions for a new relationship of mutual trust and respect. Once a joyful mutuality is created, a New Congress will effortlessly emerge. n Harish Khare is a senior journalist, scholar and commentator, based in New Delhi open www.openthemagazine.com 17

FO S S I L

The Last General Secretary Why India should be indebted to Prakash Karat Ullekh NP

A

n apocryphal story has it that at the height of the perestroika debate of the late 1980s, a lean and hungry-looking comrade from a party village in Kannur, one of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM’s Kerala strongholds, noted with glee that Mikhail Gorbachev would redraw the boundaries of the Soviet Union into a geographic entity resembling the scar on his balding head. The comment didn’t evoke laughter, but anger and concern within the party panel where the discussion came up. The fall and disintegration of the Soviet Union a few years later left many scars, but very few Indian Communists bothered to learn from the failure of the experiment initiated by Vladimir Lenin, who neutralised the soviets, or the council of workers, and aped the Catholic Church in giving sweeping powers to the party. Notably, the late CPM patriarch EMS Namboodiripad suggested that the party he helped found should shed its Stalinist roots and adapt to new political realities—but soon found himself censured by fellow politburo members and other senior officials, including the then young Prakash Karat, 18 open

the party’s current General Secretary, under whose watch it has shrunk to its historical low as an electoral force.

“True, Karat was the one at the helm when the party suffered one jolt after another. I am aware of the comment that he has succeeded where the Indian bourgeoisie failed for almost a century: to get rid of us from mainstream Indian politics,” notes a senior CPM leader from West Bengal, caught in a pensive mood.

In his state, where the CPM was in power for an uninterrupted 34 years mostly under the late Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, the biggest Left party in the country has in recent years suffered a resounding drubbing at polls, first at the hands of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress and now the BJP, which has shoved it to the third position in the justconcluded Lok Sabha polls.

Nothing is more dangerous than wounded pride, the senior leader warns, referring to the party cadres. “They tend to blame the central leadership, comprising ‘elites’ such as Karat, for steering the party sloppily,” he adds. Within years of his takeover in 2005, Karat, a leader with no experience in political grassroots, has

attracted criticism for blunders only the politically naive would commit. He has also incurred the wrath of a few party veterans, eminent hardliners in their prime, through his rigid posturing long before assuming the post.

But before we dig up the list of his gaffes, it is pertinent to keep in mind his future plans, which smack of myopic ambition. Karat, who is bound to step down as party chief at the upcoming triennial CPM Party Congress in 2015, prepares to rule by proxy by anointing his loyalist, 76-year-old S Ramachandran Pillai—instead of a younger Sitaram Yechury (61)—as his successor. The 66-year-old leader has received flak for presiding over a major downfall of the party. When he took over in 2005, CPM had 43 seats in the Lok Sabha; a power of veto over what it thought were Congress’ anti-people policies. It was also the undisputed leader of the non-Congress, non-BJP forces. A year earlier, Karat’s predecessor, the shrewd Harkishan Singh Surjeet, had played a pivotal role in putting in place a non-BJP government headed by Manmohan Singh, thanks to his privileged access to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi.

23 June 2014

raul irani

LOW MARX Under Karat, CPM’s organisational strength and electoral prowess have been on the wane

Tragedy of Errors

Unlike Surjeet, who was well-versed in the dynamics of national politics, Karat, affecting an inflexibility that some insiders see as a ploy to hide his liberal traits, has often betrayed his political naiveté when it comes to dealing with allies, especially those like the Samajwadi Party (SP). Ahead of the 2009 elections—following a faux pas involving the withdrawal of outside support to the Congress-led coalition over its decision to go ahead with the India-US nuclear deal—Karat tried to browbeat the SP in Uttar Pradesh by getting into negotiations with SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav’s arch rival, Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). His colleague Yechury has repeatedly made it clear that “alienating” the SP was a huge mistake and that the decision to “court” an unpredictable Mayawati was taken on a whim by the likes of Karat and Pillai, without confiding in the rest of the politburo. In fact, the party went on to assess that pulling out of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in haste was a costly move; in the 2009 elections, the Left Front, led by the CPM, won 35 fewer seats 23 June 2014

in the Lok Sabha.

But Karat is not new to political naiveté. While it is well-known that he was at the forefront of a vicious intra-party battle to deny Jyoti Basu a golden chance to become the prime minister— the then West Bengal CM was a choice favoured even by a few senior BJP leaders—what piqued Surjeet no end was that the “young brigade” failed to realise their mistake in 2004 and refused to join the Congress-led coalition, lining up the

When Karat took over in 2005, the CPM-led Left had 61 seats in the Lok Sabha. His party is now reduced to 11 seats, just enough to keep the national party status

“same old, stale arguments” they had raised eight years earlier. In protest, he refused to attend party meetings for a while; he was relentlessly persuaded until he yielded.

“These young leaders are behaving like Naxalites,” Surjeet reportedly said, referring to the likes of Karat who, despite being a cricket afficionado, a man of taste and intensely private, is a breakaway from the mould of politicians that the University of Edinburgh produces. “Karat might be the most erudite and academically qualified of all general secretaries that the CPM had so far—right from [founding member Puchalapalli] Sundarayya,” said one CPM politburo member. “But he is just a textbook revolutionary.”

Now the problem isn’t merely about myopic leadership, it is also about a lack of preparation for Communists to evolve into something else; such as social democrats. “The Left parties have failed to come to terms with changing realities and globalization,” says Sudha Pai, a former professor of politics at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. “After the fall of the Soviet Union, Indian open www.openthemagazine.com 19

Communists clung on to their old ideologies and anti-US stance, besides treating national parties as ‘bourgeois entities’, and in the process squandered away multiple opportunities to lead and be part of the central government.”

“Karat is singularly responsible for not snatching such opportunities,” a senior politburo member (known to be opposed to the General Secretary) told Open. He added that Karat mishandled affairs in West Bengal, where the state unit wanted to retain former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee within the party fold; many of them wanted to pitch him for the post of President of India, something Karat and his team opposed.

“Karat, out of sheer ego, squandered away numerous opportunities for the party. And you must realise that ego alone played a role in these decisions, besides political immaturity,” says a Delhibased central committee member of the CPM. Of course, there was a forlorn weariness on Karat’s face as he faced the media after the CPM-led alliance, ideologically in a deep stupor, suffered a massive backlash in West Bengal in the 2011 state polls: of the 294 seats in the state assembly, it won merely 69 compared with 229 in 2006. The main opposition party, the All India Trinamool Congress (AITMC), swept to power, ending three and a half decades years of the Left Front rule.

A Kerala-based CPM leader, who enjoys good ties with the rebel CPM veteran and former chief minister VS Achuthanandan, is of the view that history has proved ‘Karat and Company’ wrong. Yechury, who initially favoured Basu’s being prime minister in 1996, later switched sides when he found himself outnumbered in the central committee.

Ironically, the likes of Namboodiripad, Surjeet and other seniors had argued for CPM’s joining the deferral government.

“After shooting down a proposal by the winning alliance—[the political coalition of] United Front—to name Basu as prime minister [Basu would later call it a historical blunder], in 2004 Karat struck again by refusing to join the federal government. Instead, he offered to back the Congress-led government. In 2008, the CPM pulled out over its opposition to the India-US nuclear deal, in yet another America-phobic political blunder. Party chief Karat’s efforts to reach out to cer20 open

the CPM failed to realise that the young people of West Bengal think no differently from those in Mumbai or Delhi.

Blind Leading the Blind

S RAMACHANDRAN PILLAI

The Kerala leader is the favourite to succeed Karat next year. The 76-yearold now handles organisational matters

Sitaram YEchurY

The 61-year-old leader is popular on TV chat shows, but he doesn’t enjoy much clout inside the party tain recalcitrant outfits, to push the ruling party to the ropes, alienated some of the party’s own allies. All of these were acts of political hara-kiri,” says a senior West Bengal leader based in Delhi.

A Delhi-based CPM leader argues that the state unit deserves a lot of blame, too.

“People could no longer stand their disruptive activities,” he says. For his part, Ravi Nedungadi, former chief financial officer, UB Group, who grew up in Bengal during the heydays of Left rule, notes that

The generation of leaders that preceded Karat’s was comprised of hardliners: those who walked out of the Communist Party India (CPI) National Council in 1964 to form the CPM. But even they seemed far more in tune with changing realities and grassroots politics. Left watchers say it was Namboodiripad who co-opted younger leaders into the party’s national leadership. Leaders such as Karat were being groomed to take on larger responsibilities, and others like Pillai were named to the central committee of the party as early as 1985. They were special invitees to the politburo even prior to this. Karat was then 37 and Pillai 47, and Yechury was the youngest nominee at 33. In the next few years, five relatively young leaders—Sunil Maitra and P Ramachandran, in addition to Karat, Yechury and Pillai— were nominated to a new panel, called the Central Secretariat, who attended politburo meetings.

“The idea for such an exercise was to bring in a generation that better understood India’s changing realities,” says a senior CPM leader. Even before Namboodiripad went on this “hiring spree”, in West Bengal, then state secretary and CPM stalwart Promode Dasgupta had invested a lot of time and energy in grooming young leaders, and they included Biman Bose, Subhash Chakraborty, Anil Biswas, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and others. In Kerala, CPM patriarch AK Gopalan had enthused younger leaders and inspired them to take up more responsibilities.

But Karat has refused to take inspiration from illustrious predecessors to recruit young talent.

The last Party Congress was proof of this. The politburo’s three new entrants were West Bengal’s opposition leader Suryakanta Misra, Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) president AK Padmanabhan from Tamil Nadu and MA Baby from Kerala; then 58, Baby was the youngest recruit.

Karat has never seemed to understand that Communist parties that believe in parliamentary democracy have often fought alongside national movements, 23 June 2014

prakash singh/afp

PAST GLORY Both Basu and Surjeet (left) were pragmatic; non-BJP, non-Congress parties looked up to them for advice

and often “controlled” such movements to gain prominence. In South Africa for example, the South African Communist Party had the reins of the leadership of the African National Congress. Similarly in other countries, like our neighbor, Nepal. “The blame goes to his predecessors as well who hardly participated in the national movement at its crucial junctures, such as the 1942 Quit India movement,” says renowned historian MGS Narayanan.

More Ego Clashes

In 2006, the Karat-led politburo overruled a proposal by the Kerala state leadership to ally with a Congress breakaway group.

“This was entirely an ego issue,” says a Kerala leader of the party. “Pinarayi Vijayan, the Kerala CPM state secretary, had gone ahead with talks with this group, as he is entitled to, and consulted Karat only later. This irked Karat and without looking at the political opportunity such a pact would bring, he decided to spike it.”

Kerala state leadership, which has now veered towards Karat, earlier blamed him for not initiating disciplinary action against an erring Achuthanandan.

“Later, after he earned a lot of appeal for 23 June 2014

surviving within the party despite questioning it, thereby gaining a cult status, Karat began to be stern with him. By then it was too late,” a politburo member from Kerala told Open.

Cold war between Karat and Yechury hasn’t helped either. Yechury has meticulously used various occasions to denigrate Karat, according to senior party leaders from West Bengal. What bothers Yechury is that he is not number two in the party despite his prominence on TV chat shows. He is not seen as a natural successor to Karat. Instead, it is Pillai who is in charge of the ‘organisation’, a step-

Karat has never seemed to understand that Communist parties that believe in parliamentary democracy have often fought alongside national movements

ping stone to the top job and a position previously held by Karat when Surjeet was general secretary. Surjeet held the same post when Namboodiripad was General Secretary.

Unsurprisingly, in the four Sangharsh Sandesh Jatha campaigns of the recent past, the most significant one, according to a Delhi-based CPM activist, was given over to Pillai and the most insignificant one to Yechury. Pillai led the 18-day southern jatha, Karat the 13-day eastern jatha, his wife (and politburo member) Brinda the nine-day northern jatha and Yechury the eight-day western jatha.

“But all these fights will cease to make headlines with the CPM being reduced to a fringe force,” notes Narayanan, with a smile. The CPM-led Left, which had a historically high tally of 61 in 2004, is now reduced to just 11 seats in its kitty from three states; just about enough to afford it national party status. The CPI, a Left constituent, drew a blank this time around.

The goals envisaged in the 1978 Salkia Plenum resolutions of the party, to transform it into a mass movement with countrywide presence, remain a far cry. The Marxists have already lost the argument and the country. As Karat oversees the last rites of a lost ideology, India is indebted. n open www.openthemagazine.com 21

POLITICS

Is AAP Withering Away?

As the elections bring the Aam Aadmi Party’s internal squabbles to the fore, Arvind Kejriwal faces his biggest challenge yet mihir srivastava

K

ejriwal knows he isn’t being

Kejriwal if he isn’t protesting.

With Delhi reeling under long power cuts, he has seized the opportunity to tap the people’s ire by shooting off a letter to the Prime Minister to intervene, as north India sizzles through an intense heat wave. Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders staged protests outside Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan’s home this week. The revolutionary was back in business.

Yet, despite all his familiar attitudinizing, Kejriwal’s disarming smile has faded these days, following his resounding defeat and the raft of internecine wrangling plaguing his party. For a fledgling party that found the national limelight with a stunning poll triumph in the Delhi Legislative Assembly elections just last December, troubles seem to have surfaced too early. And political pundits aver that the cosmetic patch-ups engineered at a recent high-level meet could amount to little more than hiding dirt by brushing it under the rug.

This Monday, a day after the three-day National Executive meeting of AAP that ended on 8 June, the Tilak Lane residence of Kejriwal wore a deserted look. At the far end of the driveway, Kejriwal’s core team (which once included Ashutosh and Ashish Khaitan), is working from a garage; micro-managing, stocktaking, settling bills. They put up a brave face, cracking jokes, some of them ambiguous. But even fixing the water cooler placed at the entrance seems daunting.

What is missing at the former Chief Minister of Delhi’s residence are the groups of petitioners who used to look up to Kejriwal as a man with a magic wand, who could perform miracles. No more 22 open

volunteers and supporters queuing up.

The party’s high-level summit had just discussed the poll debacle, the blame game and the public spat between senior leaders Yogendra Yadav and Naveen Jaihind before rejecting their resignations. However, party leaders indicate that the cracks could get deeper, implying further trouble for the one-and-a-halfyear-old party, seen as an alternative to the Congress and the BJP until they lost the elections less than a month ago. The worst crisis that has enveloped the party since its inception only mirrors the big fall it has suffered in popular perception.

Kejriwal—media savvy and until recently active on social networking sites—is no longer interested in engaging with reporters, and has preferred to stay indoors. For, he believes his first and foremost task is to help AAP survive this defeat. The reality check has shaken him and the party. The only solace is that they are not the only political outfit swept away by the Modi landslide.

At the national executive meeting, Kejriwal made it a point to hear each member out. Then, he admitted that he too has “made mistakes”. In a bid to reach out to dissidents and keep the party cohesive, he vowed to kickstart the process of restructuring the party from the lowest

“AAP is a collective blunder based on SMS politics and individual efforts restricted to small activist zones”

strata to the national level. The proposed exercise has been named Mission Vistar, under which all existing committees of the party will be refurbished by nominating new members.

At the meet, Kejriwal was particularly attentive to Yogendra Yadav, AAP’s most eloquent ideologue, who was recently caught in the eye of the storm over an acrimonious exchange of mails with Manish Sisodia, a senior AAP leader. In fact, Yadav deserved much credit for articulating the party’s position. His training as a psephologist (a political scientist dealing with the elections) meant his team had forecasted that AAP would do very well in the assembly elections last year. Nearly two months before polls, a similar survey carried out in Haryana showed rising support for AAP. The survey said the party would secure 23 per cent of the votes polled, but Kejriwal, leading the effort in Haryana, finished fourth with barely 50,000 votes in Gurgaon; he had even lost his security deposit.

A

AP’s huge setback hasn’t come as a

surprise for other analysts. Diplomat Pavan Varma, in his latest book The Great Indian Middle Class, calls the AAP a notable entry into the political arena. But he contends that the avowed goals of AAP are too ‘radical in the template of politics and governance’, calling for it to ‘interrogate its tactical tools and question its policy decisions wherever necessary’.

Varma argues that though the party has the widespread support of the middle class, it is still a fledgling force; it needs to work much harder to gain in ideological coherence and organisational strength.

“AAP is a collective blunder based on 23 JUNE 2014

Sushil Kumar/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

SHATTERED AMBITIONS Arvind Kejriwal, Prashant Bhushan, Manish Sisodia and Yogendra Yadav during a press conference in New Delhi on 8 June

SMS politics, individual efforts restricted to small activist zones,” concurs Nirmalangshu Mukherji, a professor of philosophy at Delhi University, who believes the party’s only chance lies in forming an alliance with ‘real’ parties that have mass support. “The entire concept of the AAP is proving to be urban, elitist and essentially anti-people, though I won’t say it is fascist. If their elitist spectacles make them blind to the traditional Left, they can at least watch the RSS for lessons, when the corporate media loses interest.

In fact, even Trinamool Congress will do.’

Of course, most pundits are bearish on the AAP, which was touted a few months ago as the new Left. Despite all claims of burying differences, the blame game has begun to show signs of taking its toll on the party. After all, Kejriwal himself has come under criticism for his dictatorial style of functioning from none other than Yadav, who in a veiled email attack on the AAP chief (addressed to all senior party leaders) referred to the need for a distinction between the leader and the supremo.

Soon, an email from Manish Sisodia that replied by hitting out at Yadav was leaked to the media, to stress the other side of the story. ‘Over the last 15 days, an 23 JUNE 2014

ugly spat has developed between you and Naveen Jaihind. The unfortunate part is that the two of you have been fighting your personal battles in public and through media forums,’ Sisodia wrote, going on to highlight Yadav’s earlier demand that he be declared AAP’s chief ministerial candidate for Haryana.

Sisodia also revealed that Kejriwal had been dead-set against AAP contesting elections across the country; he had wanted the party to concentrate on Delhi. It was Yadav who had insisted on contesting the General Elections.

Unsurprisingly, the AAP ended up spreading itself too thin by contesting 443 Lok Sabha seats. In Karnataka, AAP secured only as many votes as the newly introduced voting option, None of the Above (NOTA). But Yadav has been constantly defending the party’s all-India ambitions. To be fair to Yadav, this gave the AAP the only success it has had, in Punjab. In any case, the idea was to let more and more people know of its existence as an alternative across the country.

This may, perhaps, help it in the years ahead. But Yadav’s future in the party is still, at best, uncertain.

There were discordant voices at the na-

tional executive meeting. Questions were raised regarding who had leaked the mails to the media. Of course, the suspicion rests on those who wrote them.

However, Kejriwal focused on resolving contradictions and differences by proposing that theAAP get estranged leaders such as Shazia Ilmi, among others, back into the fold.

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hat lessons will Kejriwal learn from this humbling experience?

Will he be more of a leader and less of a supremo? A close aide of Kejriwal says, “We must not forget that he is human. Some leaders in the party tend to forget this simple fact. After a national executive meeting which lasted for a day, most of the members wanted to call on Kejriwal in person, one-on-one. All such requests are not humanly possible to entertain.

When he declined to meet some, they left enraged and soon held a press conference, announcing that he is a dictator.”

If Kejriwal can surpass his grandstanding, his actions could make or break the AAP—and the hopes of lakhs of middle class Indians who looked up to him as the gamechanger. n open www.openthemagazine.com 23

UNEASY ALLIES Narendra Modi with Jayalalithaa on 14 January 2008; Vellipullai Prabhakaran’s body being carried away by Sri Lankan soldiers on 19 May 2009 (facing page)

M.Lakshman/AP

d i p lo m ac y

Chennai Checkmated Now New Delhi has an unbeatable argument over Sri Lanka Padma Rao Sundarji

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welve days before the swearing in of Prime Minister

Narendra Modi, India’s Home Office issued a routine notification.

On the ho-hum surface of things, it was one that appears every two years, updating India’s longstanding ban on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the armed separatists who used child soldiers, suicide bombers and civilian shields in a three decade-long civil war for a separate state in north and east Sri Lanka. But, here’s the crunch.

‘The LTTE’s objective for a separate homeland (Tamil Eelam),’ reads one paragraph, ‘threatens the sovereignty and territorial integrity of India, and amounts to cession and secession of a part of the territory of India from the Union and thus falls within the ambit of unlawful activities’.

Three weeks later, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa flew into Delhi to meet Modi and handed him a long list of demands. One of them reads: ‘I request that India should sponsor a resolution in the United Nations... The resolution should... provide for holding a referendum amongst Tamils in Sri Lanka and displaced Sri Lankan Tamils across the world for formation of a separate Tamil Eelam.’

A mirthful senior Sri Lankan foreign ministry source in Colombo pointed out that with this demand, Jayalalithaa is effectively demanding that Modi commit an act of secession, one which will shatter the territorial integrity of his own country.

It is not only the Sri Lankan government that is smirking. Sri 24 open

Lankan Tamils themselves have been laughing for long, but with irritation at the exploits of those in Chennai—ranging from going on hunger strike to beating up visiting Sinhala Buddhist monks—all ostensibly in the name of their ‘blood brothers’ across the Palk Straits.

“It is natural for our friends in Tamil Nadu to show emotions,” the new, democratically elected Chief Minister of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, CV Wigneswaran of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), told this correspondent. “But please allow us to work out our own solutions to our own problems within a united Sri Lanka.”

Call it autonomy, devolution or, the full implementation of the thirteenth amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution, which was authored by Rajiv Gandhi to ensure greater self-rule for the Northern Province. One thing is certain: Sri Lankan Tamils in their war-battered but fast developing provinces in Sri Lanka want to have nothing to do with a separate state called Tamil Eelam.

Most importantly for Indians themselves, the notification also calls attention to a danger that has been brewing since the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009: an influx of armed LTTE fighters into Tamil Nadu.

Late last year, the Sri Lankan Army’s Major General Udaya Perera had told this correspondent that in the last weeks of the war, hundreds of LTTE cadres had deserted their chief, Velupillai Prabhakaran, and made their escape. “They used 23 June 2014

small, undetectable boats and headed to Tamil Nadu. Later, many joined their relatives in other parts of the world.” But what happened to the rest?

A careful perusal of previous versions of the Home Ministry’s notifications from May 2010 to May 2014—the text of which is always carried forward with updates based on the latest inputs from India’s intelligence agencies—leaves no more room for doubt: ‘Though [the] LTTE has been decimated in Sri Lanka... remnant cadres are regrouping in Tamil Nadu in pursuance of their avowed objective of establishing a separate… Eelam.

Possibilities of these [cadres] using India, especially... Tamil Nadu, as a rear base... cannot be ruled out as some LTTE cadres interdicted recently had come by clandestine sailing. Their entering India through sea route and [with] genuine documents in the guise of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees cannot be ruled out.’

Last month’s version of the same notification sustained the warning, though in slightly altered language, of a very clear and present danger: ‘The LTTE is an association based in Sri Lanka but having its supporters, sympathizers and agents in the territory of India...

Separatist Tamil chauvinist groups and pro-LTTE groups continue to foster a separatist tendency... and enhance the support base for the LTTE in India and particularly in Tamil Nadu.... the LTTE, even after its military defeat in May 2009 in Sri Lanka... has been clandestinely working towards the ‘Eelam’ cause by undertaking fund-raising and propaganda activities.’

A highly-ranked North Block source warns: “The threat perception is very much there, those LTTE cadres are here too.”

But to be fair to Jayalalithaa, no matter how absurd her demand— and indeed, the demand of all her state’s politicians—how does the creation of ‘Eelam’ in another country translate into ‘secession’ for India?

“I will not comment on individual political leaders,” said the source. “But please [review]the drumbeats emanating out of Tamil Nadu for more than three decades very carefully. There has been repeated, and open, talk of a “Tamil homeland” which encompasses Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu and even the Maldives.

A Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka could lead to this ‘Greater Eelam’. If that is not secession, what is?”

Like the drumbeats, the essential message of these notifications may be nothing new. But in the hands of a limp, terrified ruling UPA coalition in New Delhi, they were of little use.

Modi, however, is free of the kinds of pressures from Tamil Nadu coalition partners that had paralysed the UPA. Also, new External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is known for her nononsense efficiency.

To both leaders, the sophisticated wording of other crucial passages in the new notification, will be of great significance in both forging a new relationship with Colombo as well as in their dealings with the international community over Sri Lanka: ‘The remnant LTTE leaders or cadres have also initiated efforts to regroup the scattered activists and resurrect the outfit locally and internationally... The [Tamil] diaspora continues to spread, through articles in the Internet, anti-India feeling... by holding the government of India responsible for the defeat of the LTTE.’ The Home Ministry notification ought to help India bring its bilateral relationship with Sri Lanka out of the deep freeze and to compete robustly with China, which in the interim, has made tremendous political, strategic and investment inroads into Sri Lanka and further consolidated its ‘string of pearls’ strategy in the Indian Ocean.

Equally importantly, it will lend India a firmer platform in the international arena, where New Delhi is always under pressure to vote against the democratically-elected government of Mahinda Rajapaksa, for his army’s alleged ‘human rights abuses’ during the last phase of war. But never to condemn the influential, still active sections of the 950,000-strong global Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora who funded and armed the cyanide-capsule-wearing LTTE and continue to espouse separatism in Sri Lanka.

But, all is not lost for Jayalalithaa.

Colombo’s foreign office source said he was “99.9 per cent certain that the Tamil Nadu CM did not once mention Eelam in her actual conversation with Modi.”

There are more surprises in store for the Iron Lady of Tamil Nadu.

The majority of officials in Colombo not only welcomed Modi’s election victory but also that of Jayalalithaa. She is considReuters ered the best bet for India-Sri Lanka relations and her dislike for the LTTE is well-known. Consequently, her ‘seccessional’ demands of Eelam are seen as pure posturing; merely an attempt to keep up with the Karunanidhis and the Vaikos of the world.

Colombo also knows that whether the Congress goes or the BJP comes in, India’s hatred for the LTTE and all its remnants around the world will remain unchanged. No matter how strident a Congress hater or how passionate a BJP voter, no Indian will ever forgive or forget the brutal and heartless assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi at the hands of an LTTE suicide bomber on Indian soil, in 1991.

It follows that New Delhi’s key message on any resurgence of Eelam and in whichever forum, will be: don’t even think about it. n

To be fair to Jayalalithaa, how does the creation of ‘Eelam’ in another country translate into ‘secession’ for India?

23 June 2014

Padma Rao Sundarji is a senior freelance foreign correspondent and a frequent commentator on Sri Lankan affairs. open www.openthemagazine.com 25

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The Gatherings of the Season From travel and movies to books and food, a collection of all things cool this summer MadHavankutty Pillai

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hough the SCALE varies by 90 years, whether you choose

to believe Wednesday’s Indian Express (‘Mercury touches 100-year June high in Mumbai’) or The Times of India (‘At 38°C, city’s hottest June day in decade’), what is not in question is that the heat did set some sort of a new record in Mumbai. In Delhi, a 62-year-old record was broken on 9 June when Palam registered 47.8 degrees on its thermometer. But headlines are hardly necessary for something that can be felt in the bones by stepping outside. To experience the full glare of summer is not a thing of joy.

An indication of India’s eternally uncomfortable relationship with the summer can be found in Ritusamhara (The Gathering of the Seasons), a poem by Kalidasa. The court poet is believed to have lived in the fourth or fifth century AD in Ujjain, then a city of gardens, groves and terraced mansions.

One Ritusamhara translator, Chandra Rajan, notes about the poem: “What strikes the reader immediately is the extraordinary particularity with which the world of nature is observed in all its variousness in the changing seasons: parched under the burning sun and devastating drought, revived and renewed in the rains with brilliant colours splashed all around; mellow in autumn’s golden plenitude; shivering and pale under the wintry moon’s icy glitter. Each season leaves on the landscape its impress of beauty caught in the glowing imagery.”

Except that the impress of beauty Kalidasa evokes in the first canto on summer is mostly about its misery and coping with it. For a poet obsessed with sensuality and seasons, linking the two can take strange forms. Stanzas begin with lovely lines like: ‘Night’s indigo-masses rent by the moon’ and end with ‘In Summer’s scorching heat, my love.’ There are endless lines on the desperate plight of animals, birds and plants who suffer through the season. It must have taken some effort for a romantic like Kalidasa to write poetry on the heat of summer; the redemption being only that he was setting the stage for the monsoon, where poets of his disposition could really roll up their sleeves and get to work.

23 June 2014

Even conquerors found the Indian summer a far worse adversary than native armies. The British, once they established their empire, lost no time in creating hill stations, mini islets that took them as far away from the heat of the Indian plains as possible. The wise thing to do in the season, they quickly realised, was to find a manner of escape. This is true even now.

Technology should have been overlord of the weather; and yet the country is, at the moment, witnessing electricity cuts, power riots and heat strokes, all familiar signs of the Indian summer.

And therefore, like poets who celebrate the summer by using it as a context for better things, the wise enjoy the season by countering the worst it has to offer. There are things you can do and many of them are on offer in this Summer Special.

For example, the simplest of all—escape to a cooler place, into lands where the sun shines mellow and there is a pleasant chill in the air, where meadows and gardens line the paths you walk and snow-crested peaks loom so large it almost seems you could reach out and touch them. The Himalayas and the trekking trails that dot them are a good bet, and we look at nine of those options.

If it is not possible to physically remove oneself from the city, there are the flights that the imagination permits; worlds contained in the pages of a book or in the reels of a movie. Between a page turner and a novel that snails along speaking of human experience is the literary thriller. In ‘The Replacement Thrillers’, we list the best of those available at the moment.

There is an entire category of movie classics too, that many of us, brought up on a staple of contemporary Bollywood and Hollywood, are not acquainted with. These are the movies which shape cinema itself, and we got in touch with the best avant garde directors in India to talk about their favourites in this genre. You might want to pick up some of these old DVDs and watch, when the heat insists you stay inside.

There is also the escape and joy of consumption, the experience of fine things: summer food, like Mango Daulat Ki Chaat which one chef calls the lightest mousse in the world; gadgets like robots that clean your home when the heat makes you languid; and fashion trends that make a sari bikini a bestseller.

Flip over for the escape plan: a gathering of ideas to best grapple with the season. n open www.openthemagazine.com 27

Editor’s Choice

A Groundbreaking Work of Staggering Genius S PRASANNARAJAN

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here is a theory of inevitability in literature.

Whenever a purist in despair mourns the fin of fiction’s siècle, there comes that breakthrough novel, declaring its attitude and ambition from the first to the last page. A novel that announces to the world, most often self-consciously, the power and possibilities of its art. Zia Haider Rahman’s debut, In the Light of What We Know (Pan Macmillan, 576 pp, Rs 599), is one such novel. First, as a first novel by a writer from the subcontinent, what it is not. It is not about the wretchedness of the homeland, that bestselling monochromatic misery. It is not an action thriller, an Oriental whirl of a story.

And its sweep is not limited by either geography or history.

It is as elastic and shapeless as freedom, and its capacity to accommodate ideas and arguments matches the best of the big, boisterous Russian novel, without its emotional excesses. It restores, with a confidence rarely seen in a first novelist, the majesty of an art form that best tells the history of man.

More than fifty years ago, Saul Bellow wrote: “Undeniably the human being is not what he commonly thought a century ago. The question nevertheless remains. He is something. What is he?

And this question, it seems to me, modern writers have answered poorly. They have told us, indignantly or nihilistically or comically, how great our error is, but for the rest they have offered us thin fare. The fact is that modern writers sin when they suppose that they know, as they conceive that physics knows or that history knows. The subject of the novelist is not knowable in any such way. The mystery increases, it does not grow less, as types of literature wear out. It is, however, Symbolism or Realism or Sensibility wearing out, and not the mystery of mankind.” In the Light of What We Know is one of those once-in-a-

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generation chances to realize the magnitude of that mystery.

It begins one September morning in 2008, when a middleaged, brown-skinned man, “haggard and gaunt, the ridges of his cheekbones set above an unkempt beard”, appears at the doorstep of the narrator’s South Kensington home in London. The sudden mention of Kurt Gödel, the twentieth century Austrian-American mathematician known for his theorems of incompleteness, brings together two long-lost friends. One, the nameless narrator, as his address suggests, is an Asian toff, an Etonian and an Oxonian, currently an investment banker whose career is as rocky as his marriage.

The other, his old pal from the Oxford days, comes from the grayer side of the social spectrum, his backstory as bleak as the remotest village in Bangladesh, “a corner of that corner of the world”, and as unsettling as post-9/11 Afghanistan.

Zafar is the brainiest of vagabonds—mathematician, Wall Streeter, lawyer, UN rapporteur, philosopher at large. Their meeting takes place in the backdrop of the big market meltdown, and the narrator himself is a falling Master of the Universe. And the book is Zafar’s story, which is all about being in the world he has chosen to suffer, to argue and play with.

The story defies chronology and celebrates the joys of digression, like any intelligent conversation between two men whose interests are eclectic—and who are prone to showing off. So you are given a little lecture on mapmaking and cartography: “Maps, contour maps and all maps, intrigue us for the metaphors that they are: tools to give us a sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings. That’s what maps myste23 June 2014

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riously do: They obliterate information to provide some information at all.” You are taken to post 9/11 Afghanistan, just another way station in the picaresque of Zafar. This Afghanistan is swarmed by a new army of aid workers: “They were an army in all but name, not the army carrying guns that cleared their path, nor one carrying food or medicine. But they came bearing advice and with the arrogance to believe that they could make all the difference.” Or, an aside on sin and guilt can glide past religions and get caught in the financial crisis of the last decade. You could listen to the argument that “the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer”. So reading Philip Roth “might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing about reckless desire, the temptations of power, and the immanence of rage, or reading Naipaul might convince you to seize the ego that so wants to be loved, drag it outside, put It is the slow it up against a wall, and shoot it.” dance of the Zafar the rootless, who mind that could have been a destitute, needs an alternative animates the world of ideas. He has alpages of ways been the other, the outsider. His parents are Rahman. He not his biological parholds the planet ents, and he is emotionally distant from them. The in his palm and world he has come to ocplays with it cupy is far removed from the world of his father, an immigrant, a bus conductor in London and then a waiter. As his life took a trajectory that was culturally different from the generation of his parents, he was “engaged in something unnatural and subversive”. From his labyrinthine confessions, it is obvious that he needs the existential exhilaration of ideas—and most engagingly, the poetry of mathematics: “For Zafar, mathematics was always about the journey and not the destination, the proof of the theorem, not merely its statement. After all, what does it mean to say that something is true if you can’t show it to be so? I think that in the journey, Zafar found a home in mathematics, a sense of belonging, at least for a while; it is a world without borders, without time, in which everything exists everywhere forever, and I see now what power such a thing might have over the psyche of someone so rootless.” Someone whose struggles span every conceivable realm the displaced one has to overcome: class, culture and memory. Zafar’s romance with Emily Hampton-Wyvern, daughter of English aristocrats and an Oxonian, is the most elaborate humanization of these struggles.

The range of epigraphs—from WG Sebald to Edward Said 23 June 2014

to Joseph Conrad to Coetzee to Graham Greene—only brings out the distance this storyteller is prepared to travel in search of a perfect home for the rootless: a home of the mind. Elsewhere in the novel, Zafar says that “an exile is a refugee with a library”. This is the kind of epigrammatic gem you are likely to read in a vintage Kundera. Rahman, in his art, is more European than sub-continental. It was Kundera who said that Europe, the birthplace of the novel, had abandoned its art, and that the tropical East had become its most fertile ground. The life of Rahman—rural Bangladesh, Oxbridge, Yale, Wall Street—to some extent mimes the life of Zafar, but it is not the kinetic energy of an active imagination that turns the pages of In the Light of What We Know. It is the slow dance of the mind that ani-

mates his pages. Don’t look for emotional tension or portraits of the so-called inner life; this novel is not burdened by psychology.

More than three decades ago, Saleem Sinai’s first cry in Midnight’s Children heralded a new sensibilility. Like Rushdie, Rahman too holds the planet in his palm and plays with it, but his meditative meanderings mark a different style—and the second breakthrough moment in fiction from this part of the world. It is the staggering achievement of a writer floating in the history of the present.. n open www.openthemagazine.com 29

Travel

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A Walk in Himalayan Clouds Life-long hikers give us their top nine treks, through mountains and vales Gunjeet Sra

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hey removed their pants, spoke to each other for a while, and then started walking on the very thin layer of ice that lay before them. It soon gave way to a slushy mix of ice and water; and that is when avid trekker and photographer Nishant Verma, on his first river-crossing on an expedition to Leh with his friend, copywriter Nikhil Guha, remembers panicking. “The moment the water entered my boots… I screamed involuntarily,” he says.

“It was painful as my body was already fighting the cold.” He rested for a moment on the raggedy edge of a little rock protruding out of the mountain, partly submerged in water. “I took the water out of my boots, took a breather and went back in. [It became] more painful, but it was the only way out.

When we finally came to land, I tore [off] my gum boots and gloves to avoid hypothermia and frostbite.” He remembers the pain, but there was also something else: exhilaration. “At that moment, I had just one thought—this better be worth it.”

For most trekkers in the Himalayas, it usually is.

Stupendous views, friendly people and relatively inexpensive travel make this an obvious summer destination. And the more obscure the location, the more travellers are humbled by the fierce beauty of nature. We asked avid trekkers to come up with a list of the most spectacular trails to follow this summer. Go long!

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1

Markha Valley, Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir (16,895 ft) “There is nothing that can prepare you for Ladakh,” says 38-year-old Prashant Aggarwal, who waited for over a decade before finally going to the valley last year. “It exceeded all our expectations not only because of its beauty, but also because of the very friendly people.” Although there are many treks to choose from, the week-long trip to Markha is one of the most popular.

Located between Zanskaar and Ladakh, this isolated valley runs parallel to the Himalayas and is home to Buddhist monasteries set in wild and barren landscapes that have earned the nickname “Little Tibet”. “The only problem we faced over here was that it can tend to get a little too crowded. But if you’re a Ladakh virgin, then this is a must-go.”

23 June 2014

ON TOP OF THE WORLD A trekker exults after making it across the frozen Zanskar River in Ladakh nishant verma

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Triund and Indrahaar Pass, Himachal Pradesh (14,245 ft) This trail passes over the Dhauladhar range and ends at Chamba, through rhododendron and deodar forests. Once upon a time, it was used by the Gaddi shepherds to take their flock to the summer grazing grounds in the higher meadows of the valley by the river Ravi and Lahaul. It is more of a hike than a trek, starting from Galu temple near McLeod Ganj and passing through a base camp; choose from Triund, Laka Got and Lahesh Caves. “If you want to initiate someone into trekking, this is where you take them. The trail is not only moderate but also very beautiful,” says 26-year-old Samrat Singh, who went with his family last year. The right way to do it is to break at Triund for the night and continue to Indrahaar the next day. Some of the views along the way are the peak of Mani Mahesh Kailash and the snow-covered Pir Panjal Range.

23 June 2014

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Kheerganga, Himachal Pradesh (13,051 feet) Known as the hippie trail of India, Kheerganga in the Parvati Valley of Kullu is a meadow that is definitely worth trekking to. According to local legends, this is the place where Shiva meditated for over 3,000 years. It boasts natural hot springs that will take your breath away. “It is a six hour trek like [no other]. You will walk through beautiful meadows and forests and arrive at a peaceful place that you will never want to come back from,” says 20-year-old Shantanu Bose, who has been on this journey three times.

“We go every year. It is easy and everybody can do it.” The valley trails through another valley and then through the village of Malana into the hippie town of Kasol. You can either choose to camp there or at Barshaini to start your trek to Kheerganga. open www.openthemagazine.com 31

travel

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The Sacred Tsum Valley, Nepal (13,320 feet) Known as the Hidden Valley of Happiness, the Tsum Valley at the edge of Manaslu, the eighth highest mountain in the world, is not an expedition for rookies. It takes up to 14 gruelling days to complete. Believed to be one of Buddhism’s sacred hidden valleys, this place is also home to thriving ancient monasteries. “It is like stepping into a period movie and getting lost,” says 35-year-old Tennyson Bankoti, who went to the valley last year.

“You see things that you never thought you would: yaks grazing against breathtaking beauty, virgin mountains. It is unforgettable.” Opened to tourism only a few years ago, the valley has another unique feature. “A Buddhist monk usually travels with a group and teaches the basics of Buddhism on the way, giving gives optional mediation lessons.”

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Alex Treadway/national geographic/getty images

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This is a 100 km trail of spectacular views and adventure.

“It is very easy to get carried away with the beauty of this trek and forget about the hardships you’ll have to endure along the way. But one must always take a realistic call on whether you can do it, else you will cause problems not only for yourself but also for other trekkers,” says Sahai, who went to this popular hiking mecca. She admits she couldn’t complete the trek on her first attempt, being physically unfit. “Plus, the trails are undefined, and finding your way through the great Himalayan national park can be tricky. It is very daunting but extremely alluring because of the adventure it offers,” she says. Sahai says that crossing the Parvati River was the most terrifying experience of her life. “But in the end, the exhilaration of climbing 17,457 feet is overwhelming. The views help too.”

Kinner Kailash, Himachal Pradesh (21,325 feet) You cannot do this one without training. It is one of the toughest in this trek-filled state and takes around eight days to complete. The trail around the fabled Mount Kailash, also known as Kinnaur Kailash, makes up a 60 km trek, starting at Thangi and leading through Charang, Lalan Ti, Charang La and eventually ending in Chitkul—the last village accessible by road, near the Indo-Tibet border in Baspa Valley, Kinnaur. “It is the most difficult trek I have done so far,” says 32-year-old Priyanka Sahai, who has been trekking since she was a child. “The biggest problem was unclear directions—if you don’t have a compass or a guide, you will definitely get lost here. There is no network connectivity on the way. It is non-touristy and you definitely have to train for it, but in the end, it is really worth it because Chitkul is one of the most breathtaking places I have ever laid my eyes upon.”

HIMALYAN TREKKING CHECKLIST

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Pin Parvati Pass, Himachal Pradesh (17,457 feet)

Start planning the details of your journey at least a month in advance. It isn’t a good idea to go in unprepared. Have a realistic plan, keeping your physical fitness in mind. Run for an hour every day for a month, prior to leaving.

Six to eight pairs of socks.

They can save you from frost-bite. Plastic bags for wet clothes, a first aid kit, a tent and your own sleeping bag.

Invest in a good raincoat—not an umbrella. It will not restrict your movements in times of extreme weather; trekking requires that both your hands are free.

Practice carrying your mountain gear for a week prior to the trek, to see if you can adjust to the weight. If not, get a porter.

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Kuari Pass, Uttaranchal (13,990 feet) Known as a winter trek, Kuari is still possible in the summer: a spectacular region in Garhwal, known for its wild landscape and beauty. This trek should take 10 days, traversing the villages of the Chamoli district. “The best experience for me was how the landscape changed with each step. One minute we were walking through silver oaks and the next, through rhododendrons,” says Prashant Aggarwal. “Most summer treks finish in Auli, and although it lacks the charm of nearby places, it is known as the place where the guru Shankaracharya attained enlightenment.” The next day you can either head back to the plains or visit the nearby shrine of Jyothi Math.

Chandrataal Lake, Himachal Pradesh (14,100 feet) A moderate four day trek like no other. Also known as the lake of the moon, Chandra Taal is a sweet water lake located amidst the barren landscapes of Spiti. (It is the source of the river Chandra, which later combines with the Bhaga to form the river Chenab.)

This bean-shaped lake is known for its crystal clear water and the different shades of blue it reflects as the day passes. Small meadows on either side of the lake make it an idyllic camping ground. “It is the night sky at Chandra Taal that blew me away— and the overwhelming silence. In that moment, I almost knew what was being spiritual all about,” says 28-year-old Rahul Sodhi. “We started our trek from Kunzum Pass, and it was an easy downhill walk thereon, with great views of the Himalayas.

We combined our trek with jeep safaris in places and it worked.”

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23 June 2014

After Nanda Devi National Park was declared a UNESCO Heritage site in 1988, the mountain’s East Base Camp became the closest place to witness the majesty of Nanda Devi. It is relatively accessible; you can take the trans-Himalayan trail through upper Kumaon to get here. It will take 10 days to arrive, and your trek will start at the small town of Munsiyari. What makes this peak special, besides its religious appeal, is the fact that it is surrounded by the meadows of Narspanpatti. Milam Glacier Trek, on the other hand, explores one of the largest glaciers of Kumaon, covering an area of 37 square km. The trail crosses forests, waterfalls and villages, encountering chunks of ice and wooden bridges.

This picturesque trek is long and adventurous, and moderately difficult.

Avoid getting wet. This can cause serious health issues; wet gloves alone can lead to frostbite.

Sunglasses with UV protection (not your hipster Wayfarers), sun block and mountain boots are mandatory.

Do not continue trekking if the weather conditions get extreme.

Find shelter, wait it out and follow the instructions of your guide.

Nanda Devi and Milam Glacier, Uttarakhand (13,917 feet)

It is a good idea to carry a hot water bottle; it will help protect you from unpredictable weather. Make sure you carry candies too; sweets help keep your mouth hydrated as you navigate through rough terrain, and will help deal with acute mountain sickness (AMS) as well.

Sleep by 9 pm and start your day early as the weather in the mountains tends to get unpredictable post noon.

Always travel with a guide, although not in groups larger than eight members as it gets difficult to move in crowds. Check the credentials of your instructor before you start your trek; it is common for shepherds to double as guides, knowledgeable but lacking the professional acumen of the real deal. open www.openthemagazine.com 33

Going Places

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Sri Lanka Summer is actually the perfect time to visit, as there is generally good weather from April to October. “Since the east coast boasts only empty beaches, it is not recommended for a family vacation,” says Singh. “Go instead to Hikkaduwa.” “There are local shops, a railway station and the main Galle road runs along the coast,” adds Pankaj Sawhney, a travel advisor in Lucknow.

Check out the fishing harbor, the coral reef beach and if you’re in the mood for something different, try feeding turtles with your bare hands.

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Santi Sukarnjanaprai/moment/getty images

4

Jean-Pierre Lescourret/Corbis

Egypt Packages for as little as Rs 20,000 per adult for three days make for an exciting summer vacation plan. “Our most popular deal is the three day cruise on the Nile with a two day stay in Cairo,” says Akhilesh Singh, who heads a travel agency in New Delhi. Besides customised packages, this part of the world offers a very cheap vacation when compared to other travel spots. You can survive in a modest hotel for as little as $50 a day. Expert tip: if this is your first trip to Egypt, it is a good idea to research and plan your holiday well because tour guide costs can add exponentially to your budget.

Bangkok, Thailand “Thailand continues to be the most popular tourist destination despite the rumours of protests,” says Sawhney, who also claims that at least 70 per cent of business comes from the traffic to the small country. “A couple of years ago, it was only small-time traders, businessmen from small towns that were experimenting with the place. But now it has mass appeal.” Known for its sandy beaches, great nightlife and the shopping of Bangkok, this is the ultimate destination for a fun family holiday.

Pangot, Nainital What makes Pangot irresistible is that it is a very secluded place, despite being 15 km from the more crowded parts of Nainital. Famous for the birds that flock to the area, this small village is home to many migratory species— some 580 varieties in this region alone. The town has comfortable home stays, which are both cheap and relaxing. india picture

DINODIA

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Wayanad, Kerala Wayanad boasts indigenous tribes, temples and trekking routes—the most popular being the trip to Chethalayam Waterfalls.

Accomodation on offer includes both cottages and tree houses, surrounded by mountains and fields .

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Kadmat Island, Lakshwadeep If you want beaches and water sports minus the chaos of Goa, Kadmat Island is the place to go. Also known as Cardamom Island, it is known for its pristine waters alongside thriving cultural life. It also has deep sea fishing and museums.

23 June 2014

Av e n u e s

State Bank Foreign Travel Card

S

tate Bank of India (SBI), with a 200 year history, is the largest commercial bank in India in terms of assets, deposits, profits, branches, customers and employees.

SBI is ranked 60th in the list of Top 1000 Banks in the world by “The Banker” in July 2012.

The origins of State Bank of India date back to 1806 when the Bank of Calcutta, later called the Bank of Bengal was established. In 1921, the Bank of Bengal, Bank of Madras and Bank of Bombay were amalgamated to form the Imperial Bank of India. In 1955, the Reserve Bank of India acquired the controlling interests of the

Imperial Bank of India and SBI was created by an act of Parliament to succeed the Imperial Bank of India.

SBI group has an extensive network, with over 20,000 plus branches in India and another 186 offices in 34 countries across the world.

SBI’s non- banking subsidiaries/joint ventures are market leaders in their respective areas and provide wide ranging services, which include life insurance, merchant banking, mutual funds, credit cards, factoring services, security trading and primary dealership, making the SBI group a truly large financial supermarket and India’s financial icon.

The pre-paid State Bank Foreign Travel Card makes a foreign trip hassle free. It offers a convenient and secure way to carry cash anywhere in the world (except in India, Nepal and Bhutan).

State Bank Foreign Travel Card is available in eight foreign currencies US Dollars, Pound Sterling, Euro, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Japanese Yen, Saudi Riyal and Singapore Dollar. This card can be used to withdraw cash at all VISA ATMs, to transact at Merchant Establishments (PoS) and for e-Commerce transactions.

All the transactions through State Bank Foreign Travel Card are in accordance with the extant Exchange Control Regulations of Reserve Bank of India.

The card is operable at ATM and also for making payments at some of the merchant establishments with a 4-digit PIN which can be changed by logging-in on the web site https://prepaid.onlinesbi.com State Bank Foreign Travel Card is accepted at over 1.80 Million ATMs and merchant establishments worldwide, a comprehensive list is available on website http://www.visa.com or http://visa.via. infonow.net/locator/global.

Add-on cards not exceeding 2 in number can be obtained along with the Primary card, as part of the Travel card Kit. This ensures that in case the Primary card is misplaced, the add on card can be put into use immediately. The add-on cards can be used simultaneously along with the Primary card.

The card gets activated as soon as an amount is loaded into it and all details regarding transactions, balance and statements etc can be checked on Internet by logging on to https://prepaid.onlinesbi.com.

The transactions on the card will be in the currency of the country in which it is transacted; however the debits to the card holder’s account will be in the currency of the card. The exchange rate between the transaction currency and the billing currency used for processing is either a rate selected by VISA from the range of rates available in wholesale currency markets for the applicable processing date or the government mandated rate in effect for the applicable processing date. Currently SBI has a mark-up of 3% over such cross border currency conversion rate, other than on Single currency transactions.

Some countries have nominal charge on ATM transactions as per local regulations, which is clearly displayed prior to the transaction.

For more details please visit https://prepaid.onlinesbi.com/ or http://www.sbi.co.in/ n

Food

7

shades of Summer

Fire and Ice

From Mango Daulat Ki Chaat to Mishti Doi Lollipops, top chefs pick dishes appropriate for mercury rising Sunaina Kumar

C

hef Manish Mehrotra presides over one of Delhi’s most successful restaurants, Indian Accent, where it is nearly impossible to get a table without booking well in advance.

We all know how good this is for a restaurant’s reputation, but it can also fill you with trepidation. “What if the food is too poncey?” is a question that crosses the mind. But, the best food, as Mehrotra demonstrates, is deceptively simple.

When we meet, Delhi is in the grip of a record-breaking heat wave. There can’t be a better time to talk about summer food.

Indian Accent, which serves progressive Indian cuisine, has introduced a summer-friendly menu, like most fine-dining restaurants. “The best food in [the] summer is food that is light and easy, [that] cools you down and uses seasonal ingredients,” he says. He picks his favourite dish from the new menu to demonstrate the three laws he has outlined.

Mango Daulat ki Chaat arrives at our table with a bit of showmanship on his part. He pours water on a tray of dry ice, and in the midst of the thick clouds that waft out sits the Indian delicacy to which he has given a surprising twist.

Daulat ki chaat is almost impossible to translate—you can call it a milk puff, but that does no justice to it. Foamy in texture and sweet in taste, it is available in the eateries of Old Delhi and parts of Uttar Pradesh through winter. Legend has it that the sweetened milk is whisked, churned and set aside uncovered for eight hours; the dew of the night achieves the perfect, cloudy texture that defines it. When Mehrotra was planning his summery dessert, he harked back to childhood memories. While growing up in Patna, he would visit relatives in Lucknow and Kanpur, and 36 open

what he remembers most is the food that would be served at family weddings. Every baraat would serve daulat ki chaat, which he describes as “the lightest mousse in the world”.

“I thought to myself, I can modernise this, I don’t have to set it out through the night, and then I have something that’s light and perfect for summer,” he says. In his version, nitrogen is used, through molecular gastronomy, to create the airy texture; and both ripe and raw mangoes, found in abundance through the season, are added for a sweet and sour twist. It melts in the mouth, leaving behind the mildest of aftertastes.

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n Mumbai, Zoravar Kalra’s Masala Library, like Indian Accent, attempts progressive Indian cuisine and combines it with molecular gastronomy. Here too, concessions have been made for the weather and the need for food that brings down body temperatures. At first, all diners are given complimentary boxes of ‘frozen airé’ bubbles, in which liquid nitrogen is used to freeze fresh flavours like mandarin and kaffir lime. When you open the box, you breathe in the flavour, your tastebuds are tickled with the lightest of sensations, and your palate is cooled and cleansed, before the main course.

When it comes to the marvels of molecular gastronomy, Kalra says that he wants his guests to be as awed and surprised as he constantly is. The technique has also been used for that other summer staple, mishti doi, which is flash frozen and served on ice popsicles as ‘Mishti Doi Lollipops’, topped with fresh strawberry coulis and popped amaranth seeds. “It tastes better 23 June 2014

ashish sharma

are balanced by the coolness of thayar satham.”

At Taj Mahal Palace Hotel’s modern Indian restaurant Varq, back in Delhi, sous-chef Ashish Uggal tells us his summer bestseller is the ‘Khurmani ke Kebab’. It takes a street food favourite, aloo ki tikki, and gives it a modern form. Potatoes are mixed with marinated apricots, pan fried and then laid out on a bed of sweetened curd. “Our version is light, the curd is cooling and it is surprising for people to find apricots and potatoes mixed together,” says Uggal.

ritesh uttamchandani

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SUMMER SPECIALS Chef Manish Mehrotra with his Mango Daulat ki Chaat (top); Salt Water Café’s Refried Pork Belly with Mango, Smoked Lychees and Medicinal Herbs Salad (above)

than the real thing. I think molecular gastronomy can be used to enhance the flavours and presentation, and to introduce an element of surprise into the food,” says Kalra.

He recommends another summer addition to the menu: the pepper prawns with asparagus thayar satham salad. On a bed of curd rice, that most basic and essential of summer foods, sea prawns cooked in thick pepper gravy are laid out. “This is our version of an Indian salad. When the mercury is soaring, we all turn to curd rice for comfort. The chopped asparagus goes well with the rice. The prawns satisfy the craving for hot food, and 23 June 2014

ar from the world of progressive Indian food is Salt Water Café in Mumbai. Here, chef Gresham Fernandes holds the fort in a restaurant that prides itself on serving authentic but trendy European food. The popular hangout’s summer menu predictably features salads and chilled soups, but it houses some novelties. He is most proud of a special summer salad he invented using his favourite meaty ingredient: Refried Pork Belly with Mango, Smoked Lychees and Medicinal Herbs Salad. Here, a heavy and winter-appropriate meat is given a refreshing, summer context. The pork belly, cooked overnight for eight hours, is mixed with fresh herbs like basil, dill, lemongrass and coriander, and then cooked in a Japanese dashi stock. On the side are fresh Alphonso mangoes and charcoal-smoked lychees. “In our country, we think of salad as something with a lot of lettuce. I wanted to break that, and have discovered [that] people are ready to experiment,” says Fernandes.

When we speak with Ritu Dalmia, the star of fine dining in Delhi, she recommends Risotto Agli Agrumi, a risotto with citrus fruits, which has been introduced at Café Diva this season.

(All of her five restaurants have a summer menu in place.) The risotto is inspired by one of her classic recipes—carrot and orange pasta—in which she swaps the orange for mosambi during summer months. This season, she tells us, she wanted to

When Manish Mehrotra was planning his summery dessert, he harked back to childhood memories of weddings, where every baraat would serve daulat ki chaat test an idea: if pasta can work with citrus, so can risotto. It works surprisingly well, and unlike the cheesy variants served in most Italian restaurants, this risotto does not sit heavy. Cooked in a vegetable stock, with citrus fruits like mosambi, lemons and limes, it is seasoned with fresh herbs. “What I like to do most in this season is to combine fruits with the savoury. Our salads and marinades abundantly feature mangoes and pomegranates that are available in the market through summer,” she says.

And there you have it, that age-old maxim for summer cooking: fresh and easy. n open www.openthemagazine.com 37

Fashion

7

shades of Summer

The Age of the Sari Bikini Aastha Atray Banan

A

kanksha Redhu loves to hit the beach in the sum-

mers. Her swimsuits have to be comfortable but also stylish “Never buy something without trying it on, and always keep your mood in mind,” says the fashion blogger. As an Indian girl, she feels that high-waisted bikini bottoms are ideal for the average Indian woman, but it’s all about deciding which asset you want to flaunt. “Choose solid colours first and then introduce prints,” she says. To shop for a bikini, the three main elements to look out for are colours, cuts and prints. Whatever size you may be, the Indian market has a bikini for you. Karan Behal, founder and CEO of PrettySecrets.com, informs us that their best selling model is a paisley push-up bikini. It could say a lot about what Indian women think is their best asset.

However, if the swimsuit scares you, designers Shivan and Narresh, who are considered bikini specialists, have the perfect solution with their sari bikini. Narresh talks about a client who “was a size 14 but used to travel every year to St Tropez to vacation on a yacht. She wanted to look sexy. We gave her our Sari Bikini, which is a bikini top with a sari draped over it. She loved

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it.” Bipasha Basu and Neha Dhupia have both given it their approval. As Shivan and Narresh say, “There was a visible need in the market for a silhouette for women which kept them culturally rooted while being appropriately dressed when out on a holiday. We, as designers, were tired of seeing Indians being misfits on resort and cruise holidays in cotton/silk saris or salwar kameezes. The sari counterfuses two diverse elements: the boldness of the bikini with the modesty of the sari.”

The choice of material—Italian swimwear jersey—makesthe garment apt for holidays as it is resistant to UV rays, sunscreens, body oils, creasing and pilling. It’s been a bestseller for the designers ever since 2011, when it was first put out in the market. As a client, Priyanka Kapur, 30, who always had a problem finding swimwear that covered her hips, says, “I own three.

They are sexily cut and have Swarovski crystals on them. I wore them last when I went to Vegas. I like it low cut at the back. They also come with great cover-ups that flatter you even more.” The perfect bikini could just be the one that, as the designers say, “makes you fall in love with yourself.” n 23 June 2014

Luxury

7

Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Grand Reverso Rs 4.35 lakh

shades of Summer

Time Will Tell Add some style to your wrist as luxury brands warm the market Aanchal Bansal

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hile most of his colleagues and friends bond over cars

and gadgets, for 38-year-old Amit Chand the mention of the word ‘watch’ gets him started on the 15 he owns, the favourites being the Swiss ones. “I have a Raymond Weil, a TAG and a Longines along with a couple of others,” says the Bangalore-based fashion retail professional. “Swiss watches are classic watches that look good when you go to work or on formal occasions.”

Chand remembers the time when he bought his first luxury watch, a TAG Heuer from the Carrera series that cost him about Rs 1.5 lakh, four years ago. Since then, he has been hooked. “I am basically an impulsive buyer,” he says, the latest impulse being a Raymond Weil for Rs 1.8 lakh. “If I see an ad in the papers or in a magazine and I like the watch, I usually go and buy it.”

From the 50s, when India’s first president owned his 18-carat pink-gold Rolex Oyster (later stolen from Dr Rajendra Prasad’s memorial in Patna, only to return several years later in an international auction at $ 444,000) to Chand’s impulse buy Longines, the Indian luxury watch market has come a long way.

It was estimated at Rs 1,000 crore in 2013, and continues to burgeon. While there has been a slump in purchases over the last year, largely due to heavy taxes and the economic slowdown, industry experts presage a growth of 20 per cent in the year ahead.

“The beginning of the year has not been so good but we see things improving now, with measures being taken by the government against sales in the grey market and hopes of a general bump up in the economy,” says Franck Dardenne, General Manager of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) Watches Hublot’s Rose Gold Rs 23 lakh

Chopard’s LUC Tourbillion Lady 2.47 crore

and Jewellery Pvt Ltd in India, to which TAG Heuer belongs.

According to WorldWatchReport, a global report which tracks the demand of consumer and luxury products through internet sales and online searches, interest in luxury watches in India has increased by 12 per cent, despite a slump in sales.

China, at 60 per cent, leads in Asia. Rolex and Omega continue to be the most popular, perhaps owing to a longer presence in the Indian market, but brands like TAG are also showing a growth of 8 to 9 per cent since last year.

In the luxury market, diamond studded straps and 24-carat dials are essentially considered a women-dominated segment, but watches have also become fashion accessories for men. In fact, more than two-thirds of the watch segment is dominated by men. Swiss watchmakers IWC currently market only male watches in India and will enter the female segment later this year. Meanwhile, prices of limited edition watches can notch up to crores of rupees. The luxe often lies in the detail. In a luxury watch, complications like the display of multiple time zones and phases of the moon also matter—the price goes up according to how many there are!

In 2011, Hublot, the luxury Swiss watch brand, brought out a limited Rose Gold watch to mark the first Indian Grand Prix at the staggering price of Rs 23 lakh. All 200 pieces were sold off.

Similarly, Chopard’s diamond studded LUC Tourbillon Lady can cost up to a whopping Rs 2.47 crore. Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Grand Reverso watch, manufactured for British soldiers in the Indian army in 1931, is a popular choice in India and is pegged at Rs 4.35 lakh, roughly.

According to Mumbai-based retailer Viraal Rajan, whose boutique Time Avenue is popular with Bollywood stars, in the luxury watch industry, Indians are more than willing to spend and experiment with different styles and brands. “Indians are increasingly favouring luxury brands like Audemars Piguet and Richard Mille,” he says. Like in every other aspect of the luxury industry, tastes are only expanding. n open www.openthemagazine.com 39

Art

7

shades of Summer

The Waveform Anarchists raul irani

Artists who create works out of sound are increasingly compelling and may soon have a greater audience in the capital and beyond Divya Guha

S

onic artist Hemant Sreekumar

was nine years old when he started tinkering with audio tapes pried out of cassettes, cut and jumbled up, stuck back together and played for his auditory pleasure. “That wasn’t art, really,” he assures me. Not much later, in 1986, he also claims to have started self-hypnosis with television and radio static. This very singular taste for personal entertainment led Sreekumar, through trial and error, from one software and the other, to Art. In 2010, he dazzled urban audiences and a steadily growing community of audio geeks. He was treating them to strangeness in the form of sound and its visual projections at urban venues in Delhi. In April 2013, a performance entitled ‘Technicolour’ at a temporary art space named Kona, an abandoned building in Delhi’s swish Jor Bagh market, was well-attended by those young enough to deal with heat and bad wine, along with the gallerists, collectors and attendant media invited by its curator, Heidi Fichtner. Sreekumar had explained of a 44 open

piece performed in a variation in 2012 : “It’s a fantasy composition and sounds like reptiles having sex with a power generator. Very phallic work... ” Fichtner had to have it, though eardrums were nearly blown out.

Sreekumar based his performance at Kona on a fantasy of a bacchanalian scene of “post-industrial lunar worship by revellers sniffing diesel and dancing in the moonlight”. This fantasy was presented using sounds that created ‘auditory displays’ in the darkened surroundings of dilapidated concrete.

Flashing lights gave shape to the loud, clunking, sonorous air, throwing geometric patterns on the walls.

In India, so far sound art has only gained legitimacy in the last 10 years or so, and compared to the hordes that may land at a Prodigy concert or the substantial, cultivated audience at a more traditional art event, a 100 people at a sound art performance is a success. This relatively new art movement has a few noted players. London-based Ish Sherawat, an-

other audio slave, organised the Sound Reasons Festival which last took place at Delhi’s Blue Frog (now closed) last November, not purely digital but still part of the movement. Artists such as Rashmi Kaleka, who has archived hawkers’ calls in city neighbourhoods, and Delhi-based installation artist Asim Waqif use sound in their work; at this year’s India Art Fair, he hacked into Delhi Police’s public announcements, replacing warnings about bombs with humourous messages.

Like all artists, sonic artists also choose their palette. “I work with very raw sound wave generators,” says Sreekumar.

Reproductions of sirens, cymbals, drums, the piano and saxophones (through software) are all examples, though he limits himself to static—a zero signal sound wave—and the flat crackle of white noise.

Each performance is a discovery of sound produced with the help of data and formulas. These sounds are digitally manipulated by the artist, using his laptop and many knobs and switches during the performance. Communication at these gigs 23 June 2014

(between performer and spectator) remains ambiguous. The audience feeds off the energy coming from the speakers and amplifiers, as well as the mind of the performer, all of it mediated by computergenerated algorithms. The performances are improvised, and never replayed.

After completing a four-year undergraduate degree in fine art in Baroda, Sreekumar chose South Indian temple architecture to understand aesthetics.

This background has led to an approach which, though contemporary and modern, is still classical in its commitment to form. It is a losing chance one has to take, describing sound using words. But there are words to quantify and qualify it, nevertheless.

The artist sticks to meticulously measured sounds subjected to: decay, which is the technical term for a sound losing vigour or power all the way to becoming silent; sonification, which is the use of non-speech audio to convey sensations; and stochastic determination, which is an unnecessary mouthful to describe a process where sounds follow a random pattern driven by software. Sound patterns produced during a performance may be analysed statistically, like the weather or financial markets, but never predicted precisely. Less strictly, Sreekumar calls this unpredictability the Ghost. What does it do? “It just exists, it will evade you and save itself from you. It has roots, but a profoundly difficult form which is unpredictable but not not violent.” The light work in Sreekumar’s shows caters to the “retinal slaves” in us, he says. But the main contents are the sounds. Samrat Bee, electronica aficionado and recent convert to sound art, agrees. “Most people listen with their eyes, not ears. Music, too, is seen mostly and not heard as it was 20 or 30 years ago,” he says. A sound art performance, as Sreekumar says, is “like sitting for a certain duration silently with someone and sharing a sense of human-ness.” Or, it might offer the rude awakening of a sudden slap. Nonetheless, the form resists communication in the truest sense and that is its power.

But Jabba, his pet cat, truly gets Sreekumar—when the artist tests extreme ultrasonic frequencies beyond 18 000 hertz on the tabby. These frequencies, which may be felt by humans as a 23 June 2014

sensation but not necessarily an acoustic one, make Jabba’s hair stand up in alertness. “Cat hair standing on end signifies a state of enhanced alertness, perhaps sensitivity to threat from their pre-domesticated states in the wild,” he says. As a committed sound anarchist, he remains oblivious to the collateral damage to his feline.

Indeed, sound art is anarchic, more spirit than matter; such that if you attack a chord hard you sustain it momentarily longer, but having no strength of its own, it evaporates. And sound art cannot be compared to music: its practitioners

him to Beijing, to people who made DIY ‘sound toys’, as he calls them.

Instruments and tools that range from simple bells to more complex synthesisers: “[These people are] comparable to scientists who don’t adhere to industry or academia. Their works and devices have a sense of anarchy because they speak a language that anyone can speak by putting together a circuit to make interesting and unheard sounds.” He likens these tinkerers to the folk artists of technology. Another popular act in the genre is the Shivnakaun arts project, also called LiveRoom, by Vinny ashish sharma

Sonic boom Hemant Sreekumar (facing page); Vinny Bhagat (above) in his Delhi studio-home

will experiment with forms that are not agreeable to listen to. Importantly, unlike music, the art form has little commercial viability. It is a kind of “acoustic self-destruction, more LSD than beer... you achieve a sense of being alive,” says Sreekumar.

D

elhi-based Samrat Bee, who has been making electronic music for over a decade, was inducted into the sound art scene in 2009 as part of the Goethe Institute’s programme of interactive digital art. In search for original and new sounds, his interest took

Bhagat, who earned an undergraduate degree in music in Australia. His selfbuilt, electro-acoustic headquarters is run from home in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar: a free space for practitioners to work and broadcast live from, to any venue in the world. As regular as he can manage, more than 50 shows so far have been beamed to sonic adventurers around the world.

The leeway and spontaneity sound art provides through ease of use, like all other technology-assisted arts, means it’s a matter of time before the scene becomes sustainable, insists Bee. Keep your eyes wide shut, and listen up. n open www.openthemagazine.com 45

Books

7

shades of Summer

The Replacement Thrillers Who are the new Stieg Larssons? This season’s crime novels are bigger, badder and sometimes better Rajni George illustration Anirban Ghosh

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uicklime melting virulent human flesh in the Hindu Kush and a missing body that turns up much too late; missing waifs implicated in gory, small-town schemes and mysterious women spinning mischief in fast, hip cities; blood, brawn and Berettas. The new thrillers are as wonderfully contagious as the evil and smallpox unleashed on the world of their books. But are they as substantial as their predecessors?

Summer’s big blockbuster, Norwegian thriller king Jo Nesbo’s The Son (Random House, 416 pp) is every bit as grisly as The Snowman, his first hit, and his many subsequent bestsellers. Oslo in disarray, moles and counter-agents, a prisoner who confesses to crimes he didn’t commit and that first more-awful-than-anythingbefore-this crime scene featuring a dead girl with a missing cheek ripped out by dogs. It’s all there. Sonny Lofthus, the prisoner protagonist, is compelling, as is Simon Kefas, the ‘good’ cop who knew Sonny’s father before he allegedly committed suicide, claiming to be the rumoured mole in the police force.

Discovering his father’s murder, Sonny turns avenging angel and starts to piously exact revenge on the nest of villains he has taken the fall for, redeeming himself through anonymous kindnesses as he quits heroin and hunts down the real mole. The action turns on this quest, as it does on every person’s particular addiction: ‘The high. The free fall. The embrace.

Could it really be that simple, that all this time it had only been one needle prick away?’ one decaying character asks, sending himself to a merciful death by heroin.

He could be speaking for any of them.

Local voices—of homeless philosophers, reluctant thugs and kindhearted women—all add to the chorus, showing us an Oslo that both leaves work at 4 on the dot and pays for the drug habits of institutionalised junkies. For, the emphasis is on contradictions. Both Simon and Sonny are appealing bad boys we empathise with, just as we did with detective Harry Hole, Nesbo’s popular and beleaguered hero. After all, underdogs are sexy, in the scheme of the thriller.

The action gets clumsy at times, as the pieces assemble, as does the translation.

Yet, the book charms with its ironic tone: ‘Yes, I killed her. Yes, I’ll read up on how I did it.’ And a final, surprise twist may

23 June 2014

genuinely get even the most seasoned thrill chaser. Above all, there’s the pleasant chill of Scandinavian crime, almost within reach despite the heat, inspiring a huge readership and legions of new writers; Danish 50-something siblings Lotte and Søren Hammer have written five creepy books together.

Nesbø, a studly rockstar/ former football player/ author of children’s books with over 25 million sales to his credit, might be seen as the late Stieg Larsson’s successor. The riveting effect of perverse criminality against the pristine, affluent backdrop of Scandinavia unites the two, certainly. But Larsson, an earnest, crusading journalist—whose kickass ninja of a heroine, Lisbeth Salander, has won the hearts of 75 million and counting in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series since 2008—couldn’t be more different. His message and activism give his books a heft and appeal that Nesbø can’t seem to rival, as moving as the drama in The Son is.

Romance is the odd bedfellow of crime novels and this is seen best in The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair (Quercus Books, 656 pp), the translated-fromFrench debut of a Swiss writer of 29 which won over the French (and the Prix

Nesbø has sold 25 million copies.

Through books like his, the pleasant chill of Scandinavian crime has inspired legions of new writers

Goncourt des Lycéens) but has some of its English-speaking audience stumped.

The book has sold 2 million copies already, and features cocky Marcus Goldman, whose first book became a bestseller, but is stuck for inspiration— till he reconnects with Harry Quebert, his former teacher. Quebert once wrote a great modern classic and is still teaching comfortably in Somerset, New Hampshire, when the body of 15-year-old Nola Kellergan, his one-time illicit amour, is found in his backyard with his manuscript, 33 years after the fact.

‘My terror of the blank page did not hit me suddenly; it crept over me bit by bit, as if my brain were slowly freezing up,’ Goldman tells us, and in the beginning it seems his paranoid, writerly drama will overcome the traditional thrill of the chase that is the province of murder mysteries. But the drama of Nola and Harry’s ill-fated affair takes over, as does a pervasive nostalgia for what could have been, three decades ago. There are long days by the shore and contemplative nights in the gorgeous stone and pine house— complete with ocean view and deck— that becomes Quebert’s lovely home, Goose Cove: the stuff writer’s-retreat aficionados dream of. Combine this with the mystery surrounding Nola and her family, the local eccentrics and the bovine malice of small-town layabouts, and the book finally takes off. That long-ago events can have such an immediate impact evokes a thrill, transcending the long, grating passages on summer love.

But there is no doubt that this book, the work of a young author who got lucky, is contented with smaller stakes.

This summer, thrillers have spiraled upwards into mega versions of the genre, as in Terry Hayes’ I am Pilgrim (Transworld, 896 pp), an almost 900-page book that you’ll want to gobble in a day.

Featuring a shadowy intelligence agent, deeply alone on a mission to save the world and with stories to tell, the book is the star of ‘best of’ thriller must-read lists with good reason. The book starts with a horrific murder; a woman has been killed while on a cocktail of drugs, mid-intercourse, and anything that might identify her has been destroyed by acid. That this becomes a minor event will tell you how very large the scope of the book is— the endgame is intercontinental destrucopen www.openthemagazine.com 47

Books tion, with the potential victims being America, Saudi Arabia and more. Trying to get to the Saracen who plots biological terrorism, the eponymous hero, Pilgrim, must develop images off mirrors flown to Florence, track down endangered Turkish wind instruments, enlist a large, white cyber genius who dresses in a kimono—and re-enter the life he has managed to flee. For, the ‘banquet of consequences’ a specialist warns the West has reaped, arrives head on.

Hayes, a screenwriter who scripted movies like Mad Max and Cliffhanger, seems to have found his calling in a hit critics describe as ‘a full tilt mix of Homeland, The Wire and The Bourne Ultimatum’. His jumps from Manhattan

Romance is the odd bedfellow of crime novels, and this is seen best in The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, the translated-fromFrench debut of a Swiss writer to Bodrum to Jeddah are as exciting as they are fun, and they are unhindered by the hokey staginess that similarly international or ‘exotic’ books can call upon themselves. Instead, the book is fresh,

human and self-possessed enough to pull off even honking lines like: ‘I knew he was lying—he was so full of shit that if I gave him an enema I could have fitted him in a shoebox.’ What a romp!

recommendations The literary world tells us what to read this summer Aatish Taseer

MJ Akbar

Summer reading in India is not, unlike Europe or America, beach-holiday breezy, but a time for some indoors mind-bending.

And so: Forged in Crisis: India and the United States since 1947 by the young don

Rudra Chaudhuri (I must declare an interest—he is a son of very dear friends); Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City

by Laurent Gayer; and The Warrior State: Pakistan in the Contemporary World by TV Paul. Rudra’s is a history of how good intentions can go awry, unless anchored in a rational understanding of national interests.

Karachi has degenerated into the new Beirut—because, as Paul explains, the Pakistan state has too many warriors.

In the Light of What We Know

by Zia Haider Rahman: It has the quality of certain Conrad novels—such as Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness—where a narrated story, often told through the night, forms the main body of the novel.

All That Is by James Salter is arguably one of the best books I’ve read in years. I adore Salter’s other books— Light Years , A Sport and a Pastime —but this is the masterpiece. Incredible, also, from a writer in his late eighties. A miracle! Buy it immediately. I am also rereading Bruce Chatwin’s Utz and The Viceroy of Ouidah.

Such elegance, such humour: ‘He knew God made men to rack them in the wilderness, yet his own sufferings had hardened him to the sufferings of others.

Fatima Bhutto I’m kicking off my summer reading list with Alba Arikha’s Soon. Arikha is a gifted short story writer, memoirist and novelist and this narrative poem carries the natural lyricism present in everything she writes. I’ve 48 open

also just gotten Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar (translated

by Jerry Pinto)—I read Em and the Big Hoom by Jerry Pinto last year and loved it, so have been looking for more of him since then. Romesh Gunusekera’s Noontide Toll is another book

I’m looking forward to reading (Monkfish Moon is a great collection of stories for those enjoying the revival of the form), and lastly Eduardo Galeano’s Children of the Days, which has just landed on my desk.

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Often, it’s the dramatic quirks of ordinary people that crime novelists pride themselves on picking up. In Private India (Random House India, 448 pp)— which is veteran American crime-writer James Patterson’s forthcoming Indian collaboration with our home-grown thriller-killer Ashwin Sanghi—the maid’s first question in Marine Bay Plaza when she encounters a dead woman in the loo is: ‘How the hell am I going to clean this up in fourteen minutes?’

Hyperbole flies thick and fast, as is common in this genre. Santosh Wagh is a RAW agent recruited by Jack Morgan, ex-marine and head of the most renowned agency in the world, to head Private India, the city’s finest investiga-

tive agency, after Mumbai’s seven deadly train bombs in 2006. Now, a string of murders causes the agency to investigate; the victims have been strangled, and strange objects have been found arranged around their corpses. Battling ganglords and godmen, Wagh must fight the terror that threatens his organisation and thousands of Mumbaikars .

A collective venture like this one will have fans excited July end, but the local flavour isn’t always quite right; ‘The cocktail party on the rooftop of the Oberoi Hotel was what’s known as a “page-three event,” where guests came to strut and pose like peacocks’, we are told.

This, we know. What hits home are the punchy in-jokes: ‘Johnnie Walker or Jack

Akhil Sharma

Abraham Verghese I’m planning to reread Gabriel Garcia Marquez, especially Love in the Time of Cholera And whatever of Pamuk’s that I have not read as yet.

Sonia Faleiro

I’m excited to read Arunava Sinha’s translation of Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay’s Panty, two novellas about the sexual lives of women.

Also, You Are Neera, love poems by Sunil Gangopadhyay.

The Night in Question is one of the finest short storycollections of the last 25 years.

I love seeing an author rework a stylistic technique over different subjects or from different angles. This collection by Tobias Wolff, about people struggling economically and with addiction and mental illness, is as bracing as a stiff drink.

Amitava Kumar This summer, given that I have an appearance at the Geoff Dyer conference at Birkbeck, I am looking forward to reading his new non-fiction, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George HW Bush, and his novel, The Search. [Also] his old novel, The Colour of Memory, which is being re-issued in its 25th year.

23 June 2014

Morgan—he’d made his choice.’ Indian crime novelists are now an increasing tribe, and Sanghi, like Swati Kaushal, has found a market that is worth investing time in; readers are keen to find homegrown hybrids.

Many of the old games persist in the thriller fiefdom; Dedalus, a small, alternate publisher produces slight, delightfully quaint crime novels. Among them is Codename Xenophon (Dedalus Books, 256 pp) by schoolteacher Leo Kanaris. A professor of ancient history, who dares to bring up the horrors of ancient Greek history, is the first in a series of murder victims that brings private investigator George Zafiris into conflict, over and over again, with the nation’s failing institutions, against the backdrop of its crisis.

The investigator’s methods are old-fashioned, the cheating wives and husbands consistent, and the language classic mild: ‘Tell him to go boil his arse.’ But for all the book’s semblance of outdatedness, the author’s eye is quietly sharp. Of a middleaged man bedecked with gold, trophy girl and powerboat: ‘The market had crashed two years ago, but luxury—of this strange, 1960s, cigarette advertisement kind—still flourished.’ Dedalus’ God’s Dog, featuring a Dominican monk who is a Vatican secret agent, sounds as delicious.

Frog Music (Picador, 416 pp), Emma Donoghue’s oddball fictionalization of a slow mid-nineteenth century murder in San Francisco is a similarly niche example of how a thriller can play out. In it, a threesome of former circus stars are split apart by a young girl who defies everyone and speaks the truth—ending up dead at the very beginning. Full of dodgy sex scenes, squalid intrigues and old school chicanery, the novel is flawed yet haunting in its excesses, almost justifying the stagey lines: ‘Her pulse sounds so loud, the room seems to shake with it.’

The coded elegance of Dashiell Hammett’s detectives are an age away; books struggle to keep up with the warpspeed gratification of films. But suspense is that art form writers in this genre must strive to sustain: Donna Tartt in her stupendous The Goldfinch, conjures a much higher crescendo of tension in the nonevent that marks much of her long book, than some traditional crime novelists manage. Luckily for us, the special effects seem to manage the rest. n open www.openthemagazine.com 49

Cinema

7

shades of Summer

Around the World in 80 Minutes India’s avant-garde filmmakers recommend world cinema classics that shaped them Shaikh Ayaz

“N

o, no, no—you couldn’t have got me more wrong,” director Dibakar Banerjee nods emphatically, rejecting the claim that he is less of a movie geek than some of his peers (Anurag Kashyap, Sriram Raghavan and Anand Gandhi, to name a few). “I’m a huge fanboy,” he says, emphasising ‘h-u-g-e’. “It’s just that I have too many gods.”

The maker of Khosla Ka Ghosla, Love Sex aur Dhokha, Shanghai and now, Detective Byomkesh Bakshi starring Sushant Singh Rajput, Banerjee’s universe is one of movies, and he’s quite catholic in his taste. He can talk about a rare Hungarian classic whose name you can’t even pronounce (he can), a long-forgotten silentera filmmaker’s editing techniques, how Satyajit Ray reinvented himself in his later films or why world cinema is just another name “invented by Europe” to sell films that might put the general public to sleep.

For those who can appreciate intelligent storytelling, world cinema is a goldmine. Much of today’s so-called new age cinema is a clever rehashing of world cinema classics, which itself is usually a rehashing of something utterly profound like, um, a B-movie. In one unusual case 50 open

involving Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill , considered the King Kong of movies, the trail of inspiration led directly to India.

Tarantino, hero worshipped just about everywhere, baffled everyone—including Kamal Hassan—when he cited Aalavandhan, aka Abhay, as a major influence on Kill Bill.

It’s a film that nobody saw—except Tarantino, of course. But what he saw in that utterly disastrous film is what makes Tarantino truly unique. His ability to find hidden gems from the trashcans of cinema history is already the stuff of legend.

Banerjee shamelessly borrows from every movie he watches. “That’s why filmmakers should see other people’s films, to steal techniques and make it their own. And to feel jealous, to feel awed or to feel what you are doing is probably better.” As for Tarantino, Banerjee feels people often don’t steal the right things from him. “Everybody likes to copy men wearing dark glasses, walking in slow mo. It’s daft. That’s the least original part of Tarantino that you are copying. If you’ve got to copy Tarantino, then copy the moment where he brings certain perfection, where funny and brutal meet in the most beautiful way possible.”

Mandar Deodhar/india today images

Of late, Banerjee has been revisiting the works of Sergei Eisenstein, the director of the influential Battleship Potemkin, a film that is enjoyed mostly by academics and FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) students. According to Banerjee, “You keep reading about Eisenstein but few actually make it a point to watch him. I’ve realised that in some of the cases, roughly between the 1920s and 1930s when sound came in, that’s when they truly invented the jump cut. (Jean-Luc) Godard and the French New Wave and all that, what they did was they reinvented the jump cut. But if you see the silent films, some of those cuts are way ahead of their time. Just the other day, I realised that the more I see of Eisenstein, the more those editing cuts are getting etched in my mind.”

Suddenly, he jumps up in excitement to share an important piece of information he forgot: “Some of those cuts—I’m using them in Byomkesh Bakshi!”

23 June 2014

inspired (Dibakar Banerjee (facing page), the silent cinema fanboy; Qaushiq Mukherjee (below), who prefers the radical subversive

In Qaushiq’s Gandu, the character Angel wears a red wig like the protagonist Lola, which was, “a deliberate and direct reference to Run Lola Run”

“Godard and the French New Wave... what they did was they reinvented the jump cut. But if you see the silent films, some of those cuts are way ahead of their time” Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

Banerjee was introduced to world cinema via the pre-liberalisation Doordarshan, a time when it was possible to watch good stuff on television. In Banerjee’s case, it led to the discovery of a whole new world: a treasure trove of classics like Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus and works of veteran German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff. “I must have been nine or ten when DD showed Orpheus and I realised that it was something different that I was seeing,” he recalls.

“Doordarshan, at that point, had a heavy staple diet of Hindi and regional films.

But at the same time, Orpheus shook me up. I also remember seeing Costa-Gavras’ Z (his Shanghai was an adaptation of Z) and then, believe it or not, they showed István Szabó’s Mephisto. How did DD get these classics? I don’t know.

Probably, they had an arrangement with some German or French distribution company.”

Though he was too young to make any 23 June 2014

sense of what these films were trying to say, what Banerjee did find in them was a “promise of something deeper”. He recounts the imagery of these films as being very powerful and as having got “stuck in my mind forever”.

When Banerjee turned filmmaker, these casual viewings came back to haunt him. “Everything that I have seen in my life has impacted me. It impacts all of us. You can’t be free of that impact, ” he says.

And yet, Banerjee can never watch a film as a viewer. He cannot afford to relax.

“I don’t think any self-respecting filmmaker can completely watch a film as audience. I went to watch Amour,” he says, of the Academy Award-winning French crossover hit. “Of course, once I was into the film, I was completely sucked into it.

But at the same time, I came out determining that I have no business ignoring the film’s tricks and tips that I can get to improve my own work.”

Q

aushiq Mukherjee, or simply Q, is the sort of filmmaker who’s out to offend you. He is eccentric by nature, and it reflects in his films, Gandu and Tasher Desh, among others. When MidDay compared him to Andy Warhol, he objected bitterly, “Shit! I don’t want that. I’m not a bourgeois. On the contrary, I lead a very difficult life. I’d rather be India’s Banksy.”

He watches the kind of films that he makes; radical and subversive, something that “jolts you out of your slumber.

Wake up, asshole! Wake up!” World cinema, according to him, is very large, rich and varied. “With every cultural shift you see a complete turn in terms of cinematic decisions, logic and narrative quality. Something that I really admire in world cinema is this kind of latitude and flexibility.”

Q’s primary influence is Dogme 95, an avant-garde movement started by the Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and open www.openthemagazine.com 51

Thomas Vinterberg. “These directors had come up with a set of ten rules to break all rules and hierarchies of filmmaking and that altered my perspective on how cinema should be viewed from there on,” Q says. His top choice for Open’s readers is Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, which is just about every art filmmaker’s favourite movie these days. Q explains, “It’s about a family on vacation in their summer home, which is on an island. Once there, you’re cut off from the world. On the very first day, they meet these two boys who go on to terrorise them—the way they terrorise them is on another level of anarchy. There’s this one sequence where one of the boys gets shot and at that point the other guy, shocked at this event, starts frantically searching for something. You don’t know what he’s searching for, why he’s searching for something when the opponent has a gun. Finally, he finds, from under the sofa, a remote for the TV. He turns to the camera and presses the ‘rewind’ button.

And the film rewinds. How can you do that in an utterly realistic film?”

Fond of Japanese culture, Q has a mustwatch list that includes all the films of Takashi Miike and Sion Sono. Follow it up with the beloved Run Lola Run, a breakout German film that shows a character running for much of its length.

What to look for in it? “The narrative— the way it is approached,” Q replies. “The classical format of filmmaking that’s been going on for ages was broken, in

a way, by Run Lola Run. It represented the new culture that was emerging out of the 1990s.”

In Gandu, the character Angel wears a red wig like the protagonist Lola, which was, “a deliberate and direct reference to Run Lola Run”. He goes on to recommend a Spanish and a French film, both with a great influence on his upcoming fantasy film, Ludo. “Ludo has a lot of referencing, cross-referencing and mixing up and mashing up of references. You must watch this Spanish film called Rec and this bizarre, mind-tripping film called Sheitan—not the Hindi one, the French one,” he says, laughing.

Q calls his work absolutely homageoriented. Much of his thinking is shaped by world cinema. “I don’t think I’ve a single frame that’s original. I firmly believe in the fact that we’re living in a post-modern world and everything’s been done before—and done by some very brilliant people. We can only try and improve on that.”

U

nlike Banerjee and Q, Anand Gandhi who directed the criticallyacclaimed Ship of Theseus, finds science a big turn-on. He calls himself a rationalist/scientist/case-builder who’s engaged in making films.

Talking to him makes you feel like you’re in a science practical. In between discussing science, neuroscience and why VS Ramachandran deserves a Nobel,

Gandhi talks about the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s work and refers us to his recent blog post, titled ‘10 Great Films!’, in which he overwhelmingly praised Tarr’s The Turin Horse . “If nightmares are our mind’s way of preparing itself for eventualities,” Gandhi wrote, “this one prepares us for the worst—the end of the world, the suspicion that daily rigmarole is indeed absent of purpose, and the realisation of the complete absence of meaning. The tragedy of day-today existence is the other side of the inchby-inch destruction of the world. From the haunting images by Fred Kelemen to the hypnotic score by master composer Mihály Víg, the genius of Tarr and [co-director Ágnes] Hranitzky is in setting up the right triggers for every member of the audience to have their own personal enlightenment. If there is such a thing as a peaceful, soothing death, Béla Tarr’s masterpiece is an insight into what that might be like.”

If that’s too disturbing for your liking, watch Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Peddler and The Cyclist, clinical examinations of regressive Iranian society. And, more recently, Leos Carax’s Holy Motors: “Fantastic. For a long time, I haven’t seen anything like that.”

Movies were never a part of Gandhi’s childhood. Plays and theatre were. He comes from a family where his mother, a fan of Mahesh Bhatt and Yash Chopra, constantly badgers her son about his choice of “bizarre” movies, asking why

Summer Cinema

Three triple roles, big budget masala and horror noir Madhavankutty Pillai

52 open

It’s hard enough to suffer one actor in most Hindi movies but when you have three of them in triple roles, it might just be excruciating.

Humshakals, which releases on 20 June, has Saif Ali Khan, Riteish Deshmukh and Ram Kapoor, all in triple roles. This might look like an inventive use of exaggeration but anyone expecting an Angoor, that superlative take on The Comedy of Errors by Gulzar, will in all probability be disap-

pointed. Because filmmaker Sajid Khan’s style of filmmaking is slapstick dumbed down to silly. For some reason, however, going by his track record at the box office, the audiences don’t really mind.

Vidya Balan carved a big, unusual space for herself in Bollywood with Dirty Picture and then Kahaani. Her next movie Ghanchakkar bombed badly. It will be interesting to see what will happen when Bobby Jasoos gets released early

next month. She plays a detective donning a bunch of disguises, none of which look very convincing in the promos. If the movie does well, then it will be a validation for heroine-oriented movies, a trend much evident in recent times in the work of Balan and Kanagana Ranaut. If it flops, it will mean that Bollywood’s male DNA remains unchanged except for minor aberrations.

Pizza, releasing next month, is a Hindi remake of the hit 23 June 2014

Prabhas Roy/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

“If there is such a thing as a peaceful, soothing death, Béla Tarr’s masterpiece is an insight into what that might be like”

True cinema Anand Gandhi highly recommends Tarr’s The Turin Horse from his selection of ‘10 Great Films’

his friend Anurag Kashyap makes films that are so dark, ugly and violent. “Who watches them?” she recently asked him, and all Gandhi could do was laugh.

Who watches them? An elite minority that wants to be challenged, rather than be entertained. We all know that this viewership is limited. “The Lives of Others won the Oscar for the best foreign language film but you should do a head-

Tamil movie of the same name. It was part of the new wave of low budget auteur cinema coming from the Tamil film industry and what gratified many, including critics, was how well it did commercially with an audience 23 June 2014

count of how many people actually went to see it,” says Banerjee.

In such a scenario, film festivals have become a lifeline for world cinema.

“They have held the front against commercial justification being the sole justification of the film. That’s what a film festival does—it upholds originality of vision, newness and a certain commitment to a personal integrity,” says

that traditionally grooves to Rajinikanth’s flying kicks.

Pizza is a horror movie with a twist, shot in a dark, realistic tone. Will it get mangled by the time Bollywood’s producers get done with it? They have made it 3D which is somewhat jarring for a noir film. The rights for the movie are said to have been bought for the same amount as the budget for the original film. But just as money can’t buy you happiness, neither can it ensure a good remake.

Banerjee. Few films have travelled as far as Ship of Theseus and its director’s biggest revelation so far is that all film festivals are, more or less, inconsistent.

Of late, Gandhi is noticing a sharp decline in quality. “I’ve become increasingly impatient with the cinema of the world. I’m barely able to stand a film that’s made anywhere. I guess I’m over consumed,” he says.

World cinema is nothing but what is otherwise known as art house or personal cinema. “Earlier in the 1980s we used to call it parallel cinema. Right now, we are calling it world cinema because art cinema cannot be sold. It’s marketing with another name,” says Banerjee, adding, “And it’s always been there—the cinema of the other kind, cinema that does not pander to popular taste and sensibility or any sort of market forces and tries to remain a true art form by itself.”

Banerjee has an interesting theory. Art cinema, or world cinema in this context, was meant to be a replacement for paintings. “In Europe,” Banerjee explains, “we saw the migration or the tentative migration of a lot of artistic minds towards cinema; like Buñuel, Dalí and Renoir. They started playing with cinema as an alternative to the canvas, and going to the cinema hall sometimes became synonymous with going to the museum or a salon. This could be the origin of ‘art cinema’.” He adds, “That’s a surmise. You can check.”

Break out the DVDs, crack those subtitles and find out, in an hour or so. n

Things haven’t been going well for Salman Khan lately, given that his court cases are catching up with him. And there is the fact that Jai Ho, his last movie had a rather tepid response from the audience.

After a long uninterrupted spell of success, this was the first chink in his superstardom. There is much riding on Kick, which hits the screens late July. It will be a vintage, big budget Salman action movie loaded with one liners and without too many sur-

prises. Will the same old formula with the same old superstar be enough for the same old audience? Everyone will wait and see.

Technology

7

shades of Summer

blutgruppe/corbis

Rise of the Machine Floor sweepers, ‘dogs’ and humanoids are some of the robot services Indian homes can enjoy now Lhendup G Bhutia

I

n the short story, Runaround, writ-

ten by the grandmaster of science fiction, Isaac Asimov, by the year 2015, humans have learnt to mine the planet Mercury. And when the mining station shuts down, it is their advanced robots they turn to. These sophisticated anthropomorphic machines, marked by their will for self-preservation and their need to obey and protect humans, are the troubleshooters which can bear Mercury’s intolerable heat and fix the station.

As always, the comparison between the rich imagination of Asimov’s universe and the reality of the modern world is interesting. We are now only a few

54 open

months away from 2015, and by all apparent appearances, the world of amazing robots Asimov envisaged is lightyears away. But if we look around closely, we are not so far behind as one might think. Robots have in fact been rapidly entering our worlds of late. Even in India where the robotics industry is in a nascent stage, robots are no longer simple industrial machines shackled to factories and warehouses performing mundane tasks like packaging, lifting and loading. But they are increasingly entering our houses and offices, working beside us, and sometimes replacing us.

They are flying as drones carrying cargo

and conducting surveillance, they are zipping about on ground intelligently manoeuvring around obstructions while cleaning floors and windows, and as cute little intelligent humanoids and robot dogs, they are carrying out commands and responding to affection.

E

very morning, a 51-year-old man in Coimbatore wakes up by 5.30 am and waits for the day’s newspaper to arrive at his doorstep. And when it does and as he starts reading it, he strains his ears to catch the sound of a robot making a complaint.

23 June 2014

S Raghuraman, a divorcee who lives with his 82-year-old mother in a twofloor house that stretches to 3,200 square feet, owns a fleet of 15 Milagrow RedHawk, small disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaners, each of which comes alive at the programmed time of 5.30 am and goes around cleaning the house and returning to its docking station after it has completed the task. These robots move on their own, without need of supervision or instruction, going around and underneath objects, collecting dust, as though they can see the rubbish and objects in front of them. At no point does Raghuraman have to intervene, except once a week when he has to remove the accumulated dust from its bin, or when a robot encounters a hurdle and beeps out a complaint.

“At that point,” he says, “I have to go around the house, into every bloody room with a robot, to find which of those goddamn ones is making the noise.”

Of the various consumer robots currently available in India, the most popular are the ones like RedHawk that clean floors. Milagrow, a Gurgaon-based firm that manufactures and sells different types of consumer robots, claims it sells at least 300 pieces of floor robots every month. Apart from RedHawk, which costs Rs 23,990, it sells another ten floor robots. These include the Milagrow CloudSniper, which not only cleans the house but also through an internet-enabled 24x7 video camera can be managed from a remote location by the owner to keep an eye on the house. It costs Rs 54,990. Milagrow also provides two types of WinBots, which are robots that attach themselves to windows, mirrors, and other glass surfaces and clean them on their own; a body massaging robot called Wheeme that can move around a pre-selected region of the body, providing various degrees of pressure, and a lawn mowing and a swimming cleaning robot.

Rajeev Karwal, who left his job at Reliance Digital, where he worked as president and CEO in 2007 to start Milagrow, because he believes robotics is a field which will experience tremendous growth in the coming years, says, “Technology is reaching that point 23 June 2014

where a new age of robots is emerging.

It’s no longer just large and expensive industrial robots. The industry is gradually moving towards producing smaller and affordable robots that help humans, both at home and workplace.”

Milagrow had to work on the technology of floor robots, which have been available abroad for a few years, before introducing them here. Since houses tend to be more dusty in India, all floor robots have a one litre dustbin instead of the smaller bins abroad, the wheels are made stronger since Indian carpets tend to be thicker, and Karwal had to ensure that these robots could deal with long strands

ants, acts autonomously, doing various stunts like exercising or dancing.

Two years ago, College of Engineering, Pune, purchased a Genibo for its students who are interested in robotics. Dr SS Ohol, associate professor of its department of mechanical engineering, says, “We had a number of robots, but we wanted to purchase something advanced, something that possesses artificial intelligence. Today, Genibo is extremely popular in college. Not only students of robotics use it to understand how it has been built, anytime anyone comes to college, be it visiting students or parents, they always want to see

Genibo is modeled to resemble a bull terrier, is about 200 mm tall and costs Rs 2 lakh.

This robot dog can understand and obey around 100 voice commands such as “Sit” and “Do a headstand” of hair, as most Indian women tend to have long hair.

Among the most advanced robots currently available within the country are Genibo, a robot dog, and Hovis Eco, a humanoid, both marketed by MetalMate, a Ludhiana-based company which manufactures and sells consumer and educational robots. Genibo, which is modeled to resemble a bull terrier, is about 200 mm tall and costs Rs 2 lakh. It can understand and obey around 100 voice commands such as “Sit” and “Do a headstand”, express emotions like happiness, sadness, anger and sleepiness, and react, through its sensors, to touch. Hovis Eco, available either in its one foot tall (Rs 80,000) or four feet tall (Rs 3.5 lakh) vari-

the ‘robot dog’.”

Apart from Genibo and Hovis Eco, MetalMate is also manufacturing a one foot tall humanoid, which it believes will be able to perform the same tasks as Hovis Eco, but will cost only around Rs 30,000. The firm also sells a number of robots involved with pet care like a pet feeder—a small robot which can store pet food for a week, making a part of it available to the pets only at specific times of the day. Navrisham Kaur, the marketing director of MetalMate says, “Apart from the advances in computing power and sensor technology, today’s robots possess advanced artificial intelligence (AI), which allows them to function more autonomously and to make deciopen www.openthemagazine.com 55

technology ashish sharma

while before take-off. The US Federal Aviation Administration currently only approves the use of drones by police and government agencies, although Amazon hopes that the US civilian air space for drones will be opened up by 2015.

I

sions based on the situations encountered. You wouldn’t have seen this a few years ago.”

“Robots, unlike humans, will never arrive late or do a half-hearted job,” says Karwal. “And very soon, home robots will consign the human maid and vacuum cleaner to history.”

O

ne of the most exciting fields in robotics currently is the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) drone. In Mumbai, a group of IIT former students have developed what they call ‘Netra’, a lightweight UAV for surveillance and reconnaissance operations. It is a small 1.5 kg drone that at a maximum speed of 30 km/hr can carry out surveillance over an area of 1.5 km from a height of 300 metres, for 30 minutes on a single battery charge. Even if it runs out of battery during an operation and all communication with it is lost, the drone can find its way back to the owner on its own.

So far, they have mostly been used for paramilitary purposes. However, last year it was deployed in Uttarakhand to 56 open

Of the various consumer robots currently available in India, the most popular are the ones like Milagrow RedHawk that clean floors on their own help the Army locate survivors and estimate damages in areas where the force could not reach, and an early version of it was used in the popular Bollywood film Three Idiots.

The likes of Amazon have unveiled plans for what it calls ‘Amazon Prime Air’, a delivery system that would enable online retailers to deliver packages to customers using unmanned aerial vehicles. However, these proposed fleets of package-delivering sky robots will take a

n the case of Raghuraman, he believes that those who want to use robot technology in their homes need to make their house as robot-friendly as possible. Every morning he puts the mats in his house inside the bathroom after noticing that some of his RedHawks were encountering trouble going over them. He has also increased the height of some of his furniture pieces so that the robots can move easily under them to clean the floor. He is currently planning to get rid of the bed in his bedroom, since one of his robots is often unable to move around a wooden groove. “People don’t understand, this is the machine of the future. You need to respect it for it.”

Last year, when Coimbatore faced a 13-hour-long power cut, the battery of all his RedHawks ran out. His two sisters who also live in the city visited him and chided him for having bought such a large consignment of robots that did not seem to work. “They asked me, ‘Where are your robots? I don’t see even one.’

They ridiculed me,” he says. So he purchased solar panels and reconfigured the power points to ensure that all his robots now run on solar energy. Apart from his 15 RedHawks, he also purchased a robot for a nearby temple. However, the priests gave it away to Raghuraman’s friend since they apparently did not like the vibe the machine gave out.

His mother still detests the robots and prefers a domestic help. “I explained to her how we don’t need a help any more.

But she is old and likes someone to talk to,” he explains. So Raghuraman programmes the robots to clean up before the maid arrives. “The maid doesn’t even get to know I get robots to clean the house, since I feel she might feel her job is under threat. So she cleans up the house all over again,” he says.

“And recently, the maid told me how clean the house is. How despite using a single bucket of water to mop the floors, the water never turns dirty,” he says.

“What does she know of my robots?” n 23 June 2014

Hot Chips

Thumb’s Up What if you could answer your phones, control your music system, play console games or control the television set with just a flick of your thumb? What if you could control the air conditioning, your phone or music system in the car while driving, without once getting your hands off the steering wheel? Fin is one the most revolutionary wearable technologies, developed in Kochi, Kerala, that allows you to do just that. Fin is a ring like contraption, to be worn on the thumb, that transforms your palm into a gesture interface. With gentle finger taps or swipes, any connected Bluetooth device can be controlled through this contraption. You can also turn your hand into a numeric keypad of sorts, where you assign numbers to different sections of the fingers. So anytime you need to call, all you need to do is key in the number by tapping various sections of your fingers, and thereby making a call without touching the phone. The retail cost of this device is currently around Rs 7,100.

Fitness on Your Sleeve There are a number of cell phone apps that help an individual monitor his health. A Bangalore-based company has taken this concept further with its GetActive device, which can be clipped on to any piece of clothing. This device tracks the physicial activity of the user through the day, checking how many calories he has burned, the distances he has walked, the number of hours he has slept etcetera.

But it doesn’t end there. Because people often give up workouts out of boredom, this device allows a user to connect to a larger group of GetActive users by going online and putting up all the information gathered by the device on the cloud. This way the group can stay connected, compete and egg on each other. This device costs around Rs 3,000.

Smart Timekeepers Did you reckon that cell phones, with their ability to keep time, were making watches obsolete? Perhaps not. India has recently seen the launch of a number of smartwatches. These are computerised wristwatches, which don’t just keep time, but can act like modern smartphones. You can run mobile apps on them, listen and watch audio and video files, take photos, access text messages, emails, calendar, Facebook and Twitter, and also, by connecting it to your cell phone via Bluetooth, use it to make and receive calls. The one launched by Sony, has a 1.6-inch screen with 220x176 resolution and costs around Rs 14,990.

Samsung’s smartwatch, called the Galaxy Gear, comes with a 1.63-inch and 320x320 resolution, and costs Rs 15,290.

Curve Your Enthusiasm Your TV sets have become flatter and thinner, and they gone from boxy devices in your living rooms to slick wall-mounts. Now they have also become curved. A few months ago, Samsung launched curved UHD (4K) TV sets in India. Meant to provide an immersive, IMAXlike experience, these wavy displays are being touted as the next generation of flat TV screens. According to Samsung, curved TV sets work better because they follow the natural curvature of the eye. Even cinema screens have a little curve to them. The UHD, or ultra high definition, at a resolution of 3840 x 2160 has four times the pixels of most full HD screens currently available. Samsung has launched a total of ten different curved TV models, varying from 40 inch models right up to 65 inches. The prices range between Rs 1.04 to Rs 4.49 lakh.

23 June 2014

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CAreer

Upgrade Downgrade The de-glamourisation of the flight attendant Rajni George

“F

light attendant,” Nayma corrects me; it’s the po-

litically correct reference to the streamlined new model of the seventies’ dreamboats who guided Indian passengers to gentle landings. A few decades ago she would have been an air hostess, with access to plush hotels and Condé Nast-worthy vacations, possibly on the heels of a modeling career and the accompanying public persona. Wearing her sari sexy, that woman was sometimes the subject of enticing advertisements, suggesting the illicit pleasures of flying and that marketable commodity, exotic Indian beauty. Or else, the equally popular romanticisation that is Indian hospitality. Often, life would segue into a life-altering marriage and unimaginable prosperity: glamour, in the eyes of pre-liberalisation India.

But while 29-year-old Nayma is just as alluring and could easily model, she is now part of a professionally fitted team of ‘cabin crew’ at Jet Airways—and she’s already burnt out. “My friends used to envy me when I started out at 21 because of the travel and the big salary, more than what they got starting out,” she says. ‘But in the last 10 years, I’m exhausted; less staff to each flight and less time than stipulated between flights, ordinary hotel rooms far from the cities we used to like exploring but now don’t have the time to. And my salary has not grown; theirs have.” Just as the elegant pantsuit or skirt set have replaced the sari, life too has gone economy class, in some ways.

“Glamour was in the seventies, when Parmeshwar Godrej and Maureen Wadia were air hostesses,” recalls Jitendra Bhargava, former executive director of Air India. “Then, there was only the film industry – and flying.” The air hostess of yesterday was a beautiful, carefully preserved legend, admired at a certain distance and in the rarefied atmosphere of expensive air travel; today, training academies turn out well-groomed girls who can serve 40 at a go at economy rates. After the Kingfisher crisis ran its course last February, the public heard about delayed pay, frustrated staff and the lack of alternatives—but the real challenge of aviation’s over-subscribed flight attendants comes daily.

They were drawn by the allure of the upgrade: frequent international travel and relatively high salaries. Air hostesses at private airlines like Jet and Kingfisher make from Rs 60,000 to 80,000 monthly on the international circuit, depending on how much they save off travel allowances, without having to invest in undergraduate or post graduate education, and with little other experience. For someone fresh out of school, seeking to avoid the IAS and MBA route, here is access to the previously unattainable perks attendant to a high disposable income.

‘I can’t really see any of today’s hostesses marrying into the Wadias and Godrejs,’ journalist Vir Sanghvi commented in a 58 open

BLATANT SEDUCTIONS An old advertisment for an Air India flight to New York (this page); an IndiGo advertisment for international flights (facing page)

column some years ago. ‘It isn’t that we look down on them. It’s more that we’ve stopped looking up to them.’ This smacks of the kind of snobbery women face as they enter the workplace, but the remark marks the obvious strains of growth and changing gender dynamics. These women want the same lifestyle, to see the same cities and live as large. But they also want to save while they’re at it—and they are looking for respect and professional treatment.

“This was a later, legendary glamour cultivated through marriages like Parmeshwars, attached to when they became society women, adjuncted to the idea of the wife,” argues Shefalee Vasudev, author of Powder Room, a contemporary account of Indian fashion. “But it was also a ‘forward’ career, and the word did not have the problematic connotations it has today. It meant going out and getting a life for yourself. The Doordarshan news23 June 2014

Air hostesses were once carefully preserved legends, admired from a distance; now, academies turn out girls who serve 40 at a go at economy rates reader was also seen as glamorous; Salma Sultan, Neethi Ravindran and her saris. Today, the TV anchor is not as glamorous, like the flight attendant.”

Quality of life is the source of complaints. “How much work is too much work?” is a question Indians are starting to ask, in a country which is increasingly reaching global standards but allows a six or even seven day work week. This is an industry which has kept exceptionally quiet. “You need 13 people to serve an international flight on a B777-300, but sometimes nine people are doing the work. They don’t want to pay that many people,” says Rubina Dhillon, a former flight attendant. “The extra four people—do the math. Stay, board, allowance, extra pay for hours, everything. People do complain, but nothing happens.”

Just about five feet two inches tall, the 31-year-old looks tiny but holds her own. We spoke to her first after she had just left 23 June 2014

the industry; Dhillon, a psychology graduate with an army background, peaked at six-and-a-half years, not uncommon.

Like many cabin crew members in their late twenties who sought a new vocation when opportunities as sprightly, presentable young cabin crew were exhausted, she wanted to leave but had her doubts about feasible options. In 2011, she checked out, before reaping all of this line’s considerable profits: “I enjoyed all the travel and the money, but I was soon exhausted.

More than the sexual harassment which women in this line are said to be vulnerable to, it’s the long, difficult hours that get you.” At 22, she had drifted into a cabin crew job she wasn’t sure she wanted, having passed it up in the first round of interviews.

Today, she works at a major public relations firm.

Not everyone has been so lucky in this self-perpetuating yet strapped industry; many airlines are reporting losses and cutbacks, yet new applicants throng around the hatch. Countless young women—and some men—who travel to the country’s metros from small towns to work in the airline industry have to return home if they are laid off or tire of the job; or, they stay and take other, lower-paying jobs. Private enterprises like Frankfinn Institute of Air Hostess Training, founded in 1993, eagerly cash in, hungry for talent—“Send me your resume,” the lady on the phone says as soon as our call is answered. However, there is no return call when she hears we want a quote on flight attendants’ welfare.

“We might spend eight hours in the air, but we also spend two hours reporting and much more than the 15 minutes they say we’ll need after landing,” says Disha, who has worked with Jet Airways for six years as cabin crew. “If we don’t take off and are grounded, which sometimes happens, especially in winter, we still have to serve passengers and are not paid for that or for reporting.”

Cabin crew regulations for airlines stipulate that flight attendants work a maximum of eight hours flying time and 11 hours including reporting time per day on the domestic circuit, under the Flight Duty Time Limit. (They also allows 30 hours in seven consecutive days, 125 hours in 30 consecutive days, 1000 in 365 days; internationally, a maximum of 11 hours daily and 15 hours including reporting time, 45 for seven days, 125 for 30 days and 1000 for 365 consecutive days. ) Compensatory rest of two hours extra per extended hour is allotted, but in addition to the stipulated 120 or 150 minutes prior to scheduled time of departure, there are makeup and dress code requirements which might take another hour, and travel to the airport. These are hours that are not accounted for on a regular basis.

“There is some overtime pay for extended hours but no one I check with seems to recall how much exactly,” says Disha.

“There used to be a short crew allowance before, but they stopped giving it; whenever there’s a crunch they stop giving it. There are sometimes four people serving 162 regular and eight privileged—170 passengers! We are meeting safety requirements, but it’s service that gets out of hand. And we are made to sign an agreement saying we won’t talk to the media; we are not allowed to form a union.”

The Jet Airways cabin crew manual says, ‘A cabin crew shall neither be detailed nor undertake any duty between 0000— 0500 hours (domestic operations), if during the previous day he/she has performed a flight duty during the same period.’ open www.openthemagazine.com 59

However, many of the flight attendants interviewed over the last few years say people end up working too soon after returning from a flight. Service will drain you physically, they claim.

Indeed, weakness and hair loss, as well as problems with hearing and childbearing are often reported amongst women who work for 10 years or less.

Bhargava, who headed human resources and in-flight service while at Air India, blames the greedy expansion of the private airline industry. “The airlines have been pulled up, but the DGCA is not stringent enough,” he says. “It is no longer a dreaded regulatory body that monitors airlines. The industry has grown so it can’t regulate as efficiently.” But, he allows for some exaggeration on the part of the flight attendants, saying, “I doubt people are working more hours than they want to.”

Not all of the glamour is properly recalled either; those were different times with different rewards, though the standards were certainly higher than today’s in some ways. “The airline was particular that only girls from good schools were chosen in the old days,” says Shehzarin Avari, a sexagenarian who joined Air India in 1964 and left after around four years, in the days of JRD Tata. “We were trained on the ground for about nine months and got our basic salary and allowances. Then, we had to find and pay for accommodation on our own. It was hard work with long hours; often through the night. There were no trolleys then. We walked back and forth from the gallery carrying big, heavy trays with proper crockery and cutlery, laden with food. Balancing huge metal coffee and teapots made us strong in the arms and wrists!”

Of course, there was a different kind of treatment that made up for this unnoticed—or unadvertised—labour. “We were trained in how to wear a sari and apply makeup and were allowed lipstick, eye liner and mascara—though we had beauticians from Paris come and train us in how to apply makeup and do our hair.”

The finishing school ethos is almost palpable; “When we were on out station layovers (some places for four to five days) we had to be back in the hotel every night and could not leave town.” Try to imagine enforcing curfew on today’s upwardly mobile, independent working women.

Air hostesses in the days of JRD Tata had Parisian beauticians train them in grooming; flight attendants have Rajesh Pratap Singh designing uniforms en masse

TRADE-OFF Flight attendants are over-burdened on flights, sometimes dealing with difficult passengers, but don’t have to carry heavy metal crockery anymore

The concept of glamour is what has been complicated, Vasudev says. “These girls in their own bracket are still glamourous, in that range of young women who will dress up and go to work; whether in hospitality or sales. Designer Rajesh Pratap Singh created the navy-blue IndiGo uniform.” IndiGo is indeed an icon of style in the air, both in its sleek, modern advertorials and the wigs and makeup its crew plays with.

“What’s interesting is male flight attendants,” adds Vasudev.

“The mythical new age man, boiling milk while the wife has her post-coital drink—that’s him. In fact, male flight attendants take care of passengers with more sensitivity at times.

And airlines like Spice Jet are attempting revamps. Siddharth Kumar, senior account manager, says they are announcing an upcoming weekend uniform of jeans and T-shirts; casual chic that takes us even further away from society lady glamour.”

A

mbitions were different in the old days, but there

were lower bars to meet, a less frenetic pace. “We were supposed to fly 60 hours a month from ‘chalks off’ to ‘chalks on’,”

60 open

23 June 2014

whenever they go through a financial crisis they make us share rooms on international layovers,” says Disha. She adds that we should check with the DGCA; it is this general confusion that the industry sustains its labour force on. No one is sure what exactly is permissible. As one senior aviation industry official put it: “It’s a no man’s land.”

“When we had meetings, I spoke up about the unfairness of working hours, but it all comes to nothing,” says Dhillon. “Head honchos come to meet us, and when I spoke up, my base manager came down heavily on me. I was given no international flights for two months, and whenever they next had staff meetings, I was put on a flight.” The world she describes is a carefully controlled, antiseptic atmosphere—with an expiry date.

There is an impermanent aspect to the life of a flight attendant that is especially worrying to the aspirational middle-class girl who is now her; it could all change, any minute, and no one will really notice. There’ll be someone new to replace you, tomorrow, and you are out of a job and looking again, with little additional educational skills or experience outside of service.

Dhillon narrates one particular incident where a drunken man somehow got on board, even, unbelievably, bringing out a bottle of Malibu he’d stashed away. Is there a proper procedure in place, to report an incident like this?

“You can report it to your supervisor, who will take it to the manager, who will forward it to higher authorities,” she says. “Nine times out of ten, the customer will be right—usually people don’t want to report. The emphasis is on safety and security, even in our rigorous training, not on incidents of this nature.”

Importantly, the passengers have also changed. In addition to inappropriate behaviour generally reported amongst what several flight attendants call “labour class passengers”, Dhillon also describes one of several alleged sexual harassment cases, now legendary: a flight attendant tried to reprimand a VIP customer who was making inappropriate comments and he eventually slapped her. Following an enquiry, she was eventually asked to apologise to the passenger. She resigned, in protest.

Here is an atmosphere in which a person can be fired for giving a privileged passenger the wrong number of ice cubes (a confirmed urban aviation legend).

“It’s not exploitation - no one’s being forced,” says Dhillon, “but it could be better: give them more than enough rest, enough people in a crew, support your staff against customers when the need arises.” As the aviation industry rides its crises, this is one simmering issue yet to be dealt with. In the meanwhile, we surf Tumblr histories of ye olde air hostesses, remember our Wadias, content ourselves with nostalgia. And fight for our upgrades. n

In the sixties, air hostesses did 60 hours a month from ‘chalks off’ to ‘chalks on’; half the time today’s flight attendants end up flying

Vivek Prakash/Reuters

says Avari, of the old air hostess days. This, shockingly, is half the amount of the maximum time allowed to flight attendants these days.

“I have had to ground a few flights, but we do not get a lot of reports of this nature,” said EK Bharat Bhushan, former Director General at the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) when we spoke in 2012. “Flight attendants are not registered with the DGCA, so we have no records for them. A lot of the monitoring has to be internal,” he clarifies; pilots’ Flight Duty Limits are what is closely monitored. (The current DGCA was contacted but could not be reached for comment at the time of going to press.)

Flight attendants say they can’t resist the big money they were promised—but is it still all that much? Six years ago, Rs 80,000 bought a lot—but instead of increments, flight attendants like Nayma, Disha and Rubina were given more international flights, with the accruing benefits, when things were good. “Our basic salary is too low, and sometimes it is late.

Earlier it was paid on the third, then the fourth; now we get it around the tenth. It’s so difficult for people paying loans. And 23 June 2014

(Names have been changed, when given without last names.) open www.openthemagazine.com 61

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

The Good Wife and Sister

Contrary to what the tabloids insist, there’s been no falling out between Kareena Kapoor and Karan Johar after the actress walked out of his troubled production Shuddhi. Kareena, who has always described the filmmaker as “the brother I never had”, insists they’re still very close. “When Saif’s travelling, Karan comes over and we sit on my couch and drink champagne and gossip till three in the morning,” she reveals.

Recently the actress and her husband Saif Ali Khan reportedly accompanied her sister Karisma to the family court, where the latter is working through a messy divorce from her husband, Delhi-based businessman Sanjay Kapur.

As for rumours suggesting that her sister has a new man in her life—namely Sandeep Toshniwal, a pharma company honcho—Kareena will say nothing. Not a word.

It’s easier to get her talking about her cousin Ranbir and his relationship with Katrina Kaif, which she ‘outed’ on Karan’s chat show not so long ago. Rag her about letting the Kat out of the bag, and she says, “There’s nothing I said on that show that I didn’t have full permission from both of them to say.”

But she’s not likely to go on another television show anytime soon. Asked by Saif’s partner Dinesh Vijan to help promote their banner’s new film Lekar Hum Deewana Dil , by appearing on a popular comedy show with her cousin Armaan Jain who debuts in the film, Kareena was unsure. Saif, however, is clear his wife will not be roped in for a project she has no involvement in. He’s advised her against it.

Because Age Is More than a Number

After offering the part to every A-lister she could think of—everyone from Rekha and Dimple Kapadia to Madhuri Dixit and Tabu—Zoya Akhtar finally cast Shefali Shah as Anil Kapoor’s wife in Dil Dhadakne Do, which she’s currently shooting on a luxury cruise in the European waters. Turns out none of the ladies were keen to take the part because they were unwilling to play Priyanka Chopra and Ranveer Singh’s mother.

The job was even offered to a much 23 june 2014

younger actress who burst onto the screens last year with a starring role in a celebrated indie, but understandably she was offended. No amount of persuasion that they would ‘age her gracefully’ would do the trick.

With her start date rapidly approaching, and no A-lister willing to bite the bait, Zoya locked in Shefali for the film.

That reportedly created problems for another project, namely the Meghna Gulzar-directed crime drama Talwar, based on the Arushi Talwar murder. According to sources, Shefali had been roped in to play Irrfan Khan’s wife in that film, but had to ditch the movie when Zoya signed her for DDD. Thanks to producer Vishal Bhardwaj’s connections, however, Talwar landed Tabu.

Apparently Zoya’s not thrilled that Tabu would take a supporting role in Meghna’s film over a central part in her ensemble drama, but with both projects currently filming, it appears that all’s well that ends well.

Keeping Bad Company

There are whispers going around that the staff of a leading male star are concerned about the actor’s growing closeness to a ‘confidante’ who may be alienating him from his very loyalists. According to members of his team, the star in question, well-known for his professionalism and impeccable manners, is increasingly becoming unsympathetic and indifferent towards those working for him.

Fingers are being pointed squarely at his latest friend and ‘consultant’, who tends to behave like a star himself, particularly with the actor’s staff. Those employed by the actor are not thrilled taking orders from the new friend, and they don’t seem to like the fact that the actor is clearly under his influence. Some even suggest that the new fella on the block may have some hand in the actor’s recent personal crises too—certainly as far as advising him wrongly goes. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

Birds of Different Feathers

by as h i s h s h a r m a

Brothers Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, aged 33 and 36, began an initiative to rescue birds back in 2003. They have managed to save about 5,000 birds so far. Beginning the initiative only as a pastime, they had no idea that their hobby would translate into a career. The brothers have managed to raise the necessary funds on their own and have hired several veterinary doctors for the treatment of the birds they rescue. To date, thousands of birds have been treated, including black kites, vultures, hawks, eagles, owls and peregrine falcons. The brothers also have a helpline number on which they say they receive at least 10 to 15 calls everyday. They are now planning to expand their operations by taking their charitable trust to the international arena.

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23 june 2014