OPEN Magazine 27 October 2014 by Open Media Network

THE WEALTH ISSUE

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2 7 O C TO B E R 2 0 14 / R S 4 0

The Enchantment of Riches Politics and Wealth Why Indians Hate the Rich Death of Coolie No 1 The Meaning of Lakshmi

AN ICON JUST GOT LARGER

THE NEW NAVITIMER 46 mm

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

Haima Deshpande (Mumbai) Mumbai bureau chief Madhavankutty Pillai Associate Editor (Web) Vijay K Soni assistant editors

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

Krishnanand Nair (South)

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Ajay Gupta regional heads—circulation D Charles

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

R Rajmohan

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Volume 6 Issue 42 For the week 21—27 October 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover design and imaging Anirban Ghosh cover image Raja Ravi Varma’s oleograph

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HN Ramakrishna

This refer to the cover story ‘The Intimacy of Death’ (20 October 2014) and the interview with well-known physician Dr Atul Gawande. Dying with dignity is an issue faced by many of the terminally ill. Attempting or assisting suicide is a criminal offence in many countries. Many physicians may consider euthanasia for the terminally ill who do not desire to live in pain, but given the risks do not wish to allow it. Doubtless, death is a loss. It deprives us of experiences and milestones, of time The notion of assisted spent with our spouse dying is very odd. and children. In short, it No one ever needs deprives us of all the assistance to die; it things we value. As inevitably happens Woody Allen says: “I’m for some quickly and not afraid of death; I just others extendedly don’t want to be there when it happens.” Modern technology and medication has left us, if not disabled, faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death. The notion of assisted dying is very odd. No one ever needs assistance to die; it inevitably happens for some quickly and others extendedly. To be more precise, perhaps we should speak of assisting patients at the time of death by providing loving, compassionate care.  letter of the week Modi’s Clean Sweep

prime minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ initiative is highly positive (‘A Matter Out of Place’, 20 October 2014). The Prime Minister has rightly launched the mission on the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, who campaigned for cleanliness and sanitation for all. By doing so, Modi appears to have ignored the unease in the RSS camp. However, for the project to succeed, all ministries should be so activated to ensure that adequate manpower is deployed. Municipal corporations and industrial firms that utilise the services of private contractors for cleaning up have not been wholly successful. It is only during some VIP’s visit or presence that roads and offices

are kept neat and tidy. Besides adequate sanitation staff, effective supervision is required for a successful Clean India mission.  Chandrasekaran

Just a White Wash

in the essay, ‘A Brief History of Colour and Power’ (13 October 2014), the author says, ‘Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh immigrant to the United States who unsuccessfully petitioned for citizenship claiming to be ‘a descendant of the Aryans of India, belonging to the Caucasian race (and, therefore) White’... ’, but the author fails to mention that only ‘Whites’ were eligible for citizenship of the US at that time. And when later the author says, ‘in 1923 the Supreme Court declared Indians ineligible for citizen-

ship’, it is the same Bhagat Singh Thind case, but again he fails to mention that the US court rejected the Aryan Race theory peddled by White Supremacist historians of that time, and considered it propaganda. The essence is: the Aryan Race theory is to be used by White to fool Indians and not something to be used by Indians to claim privileges.  Prem R ou

Don’t Shut the Book Store

this refers to ‘Turning a New Page’ (13 October 2014). I spent a big and impressionable part of my childhood browsing endlessly in the aisles of The Green Book Shop without ever being chided by the tall guy at the register (whom I fondly referred as Uppi Bhaiya) for not buying anything during most of my visits. It would be horrific if Flipkart and its ilk herald the demise of such truly special places that are not just a business platform.  Sameer Narula

Talk in Peace

though nawaz Sharif is under pressure to resume dialogue with India, Pakistan must understand that guns and dialogue cannot go hand in hand and that peace talks can be had only when Pakistan stops its proxy war and [policy] of terrorism (‘When War-War Goes Against Jaw-Jaw’, 20 October 2014). The cancellation of secretarylevel talks in August this year could be one of the reasons or Pakistan to keep the border hot and compel India to resume dialogue.  KR Srinivasan

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K Padmarajan (left) as he files his nomination papers in Assam in 2008

The Perpetual Candidate’s Pre-Poll Failure How Dr K Padmarajan, who has contested 165 elections so far, had to beat a retreat from Maharashtra When the results of the

Maharashtra elections are revealed this Sunday, one man who is not going to be interested is Dr Kunchambu Padmarajan. Known as the Election King of India, Padmarajan claims to have contested 165 elections so far. All his nominations have been as an Independent and against the who’s who of the country’s political firmament. But in Beed, where he put in his name for the Maharashtra Assembly election, his candidacy, to his

27 october 2014

surprise, did not get through. “It’s the first time I contested in Maharashtra. I put in my nomination papers and stayed there for a week to pay the deposit amount of Rs 25,000 and get 10 local proposers as per the rules. I had a shock when members of the ruling party threatened me to withdraw my nomination and forced ten of my proposers not to back me. We were physically prevented from meeting the returning officer,” he states. “When I left the town due to the threat to my life, my

candidature was rejected on the technical ground that I did not have the backing of 10 citizens from the constituency,’’ he says from his home in Tamil Nadu, to where he beat a hasty retreat. Padmarajan says he started contesting in 1991 against the then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao. The last election he contested was against Narendra Modi in Vadodara. His opponents include 12 chief ministers and he clearly enjoys being in the fray despite having lost Rs 15

lakh in deposits. “Only polls to posts in the Rajya Sabha, Vice President and President are refundable,’’ he laughs. A tyre trader by profession in Tamil Nadu, Padmarajan studied homeopathy and even to this day dispenses free medicines. He says he is currently pursuing an MA in History. In the last Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, he got 6,273 votes, polling the third highest in the constituency and highest as an independent in the state, he claims. n Anil Budur Lulla

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Anupam Nath/ap

small world

22 6

contents

hurried man’s guide

eDITOR’S NOTE

The enchantment of riches

cover story Wealth special

person of the week malala yousafzai

mumbai

bollywood

The maximum city’s relationship with wealth

The money makeover

The Indian Super League

politics

deals

Politician versus the plutocrat

Clash of the e-commerce titans

The Wealth Issue

The Girl Who Dared From a gunshot to a Nobel Peace Prize—the inspirational story of the youngest Nobel laureate Lhendup g Bhutia

he Nobel Peace Prize this year was awarded to two individuals—a 17-year-old girl from Pakistan who has been campaigning for female education and a 60-year-old man who has spent a lifetime fighting against child labour. But when the announcement came, it wasn’t the choice of the 17-yearold, the youngest ever to receive this award, but that of the 60-year-old, Kailash Satyarthi, that evoked surprise because very few in India had heard of Satyarthi. But the young girl? No. She had been a favourite this year, like she had been last year. Such has been the story of Malala Yousafzai. As is now widely known, Yousafzai was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen when she was 14 years old—for championing female education in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. She initially used to pen an anonymous blog, written in the form of a diary, about Taliban’s occupation of the region, criticising them for banning schools for girls. But she became more vocal, openly talking about the right of girls to education in newspaper reports and documentaries, even though she started receiving death threats. When she chanced upon Richard Holbrooke, the then US special envoy to the region, Yousafzai even confronted him, urging him to do something about the state of affairs for women who want education. By the time she was shot, she was already well known in Pakistan, but the shocking nature of the incident, where a militant boarded a school bus and opened fire on her, catapulted her to international fame. 4 open

Since the attack, she has been living in the UK, where she underwent surgeries and now goes to school. She travels widely, speaking about female education in Pakistan. She delivered a speech at the UN last year and authored a best-selling memoir, apart from winning a number of awards. When she met Barack Obama in the White House, she even told the President how US drone attacks were fuelling terrorism. In the last few years, the choices for the Nobel Peace Prize have been somewhat contentious—Barack Obama in 2009 and the European Union in 2012, for Splash News/Corbis

instance. But traditionally, the Peace Prize, it appears, is offered to either individuals who have accomplished something specific in peacekeeping or to individuals who have devoted their lives to a specific cause. Malala seems to fall in the latter category. Some have, however, found the West’s fascination with Yousafzai troubling. Arundhati Roy, for instance, when asked by Laura Flanders—an English-American broadcast journalist—about the choice of the Nobel Peace laureates in an online interview, said, “... as an individual, it is very difficult to resist great powers trying to co-opt you and, trying to use you in certain ways, and she’s only a kid, you know, and she cannot be faulted at all for what she did, but certainly the great game is going on… this should not be taken as if I am criticising the individuals at all, but when the great game is at play, then they pick out people.” There is definitely something irritatingly patronising about some of the media coverage surrounding Yousafzai. Like last year when Jon Stewart, during an interview of Yousafzai on The Daily Show, told her, “I want to adopt you.” But what Roy suggests is perhaps too conspiratorial. And, if it is even partially true, Yousafzai appears too clear-minded to let any of that obfuscate what she wants to say. The Nobel Peace Prize often does little to the cause of the individual being awarded, apart from the early attention it generates. But by awarding Yousafzai, an inspiring young woman, it has bestowed upon her an honour to achieve more. n 27 october 2014

kailash satyarthi

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

music

The father figure

Thaikkudam Bridge

John’s love for football

b books

cinema

Arjun Kapoor on his art and fears

■

boney

kap oo

■

f o r slapping a legal notice on

Ram Gopal Varma for the title of his next film Granted that Ram Gopal Varma has made quite a few lousy films in the recent past for which, one could argue, some sort of comeuppance is deserved. But what Boney Kapoor, producer-director and husband of actress Sridevi, is doing stretches the

limits of reasonableness. Kapoor has sent Varma a legal notice because the title of the director’s next film is Sridevi. The upcoming Telugu film— whose poster, showing a teenage boy staring at the midriff of a woman, was recently released—is about an adolescent’s infatuation with an older woman. Media reports say Kapoor and Sridevi are upset that Varma did not seek the actress’ permission before using the name. There is really no way to prove that the filmmaker is referring to the actress. Legally, at least, it appears as if Sridevi and Kapoor are on a sticky wicket and Varma is in no mood to oblige. As he wrote on his Facebook page, ‘I am going ahead with the title “Sridevi” because I am well within my legal... rights to use it... legal because a name cannot be copyrighted and also like I said the film has nothing to do with the real Sridevi to the extent that the protagonist is not even an actress’ n

The girl from Meerut who set off a Love Jihad scare in Uttar Pradesh now admits to having eloped with her alleged abducter twist

‘I was abducted on 23 July and raped on the same day in a Madrassa in Hapur, near Meerut’

‘I ran away from home because I feel a threat to my life from my parents and relatives...I went with the boy belonging to a different community out of my own will’

—The girl’s FIR statement, filed on 3 August

—Her statement to the police, quoted by The Hindu on 13 October

turn

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

The new wave of Hindi writers

around

How to Get Real about Realty of India’s securities regulator to bar property developer DLF and its senior executives from tapping the capital market for three years is certain to act as a deterrent, but cleansing the realty sector would require setting up a regulator for it. The DLF case illustrates how business groups use a maze of companies and complex transactions to withhold material information from the authorities and capital markets. According to Sebi, DLF failed to

Arko Datta/REUTERS

The decision

A billboard of real estate major DLF in Mumbai 27 october 2014

provide key information on subsidiaries and pending legal cases at the time of its record-breaking 2007 initial public offering. The company, which has a $3 billion burden of debt, now cannot access funds from Indian equity and bond markets. The decision impacts all its stakeholders. The heavily indebted DLF may find it difficult to complete ongoing projects. However, tough action is needed to reform a sector that has become a vast playground for well-connected individuals. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to the Indian Super League Between October and December this year, eight teams will square off in the first ever Hero Indian Super League, a football tournament along the lines of cricket’s IPL. The League comprises Atlético de Kolkata, Chennaiyin FC, Delhi Dynamos FC, FC Goa, FC Pune City, Kerala Blasters FC (Kochi), Mumbai City FC and Northeast United FC (Guwahati). In the same spirit as the IPL, teams are required to have a number of foreign players: a primary marquee player, along with seven others, five of whom ISL has reportedly must be chosen from trounced the IPL a pool selected by the with respect to fees ISL. There are already a paid to marquee number of impressive players, with Italian names in the mix; striker Alessandro Kolkata has Luis García Del Piero securing as their marquee, while Rs 11 crore Guwahati boasts of Joan Capdevila; David Trezeguet plays for Pune, while Alessandro Del Piero is with Delhi. The ISL has reportedly trounced the IPL with respect to fees paid to marquee players too, with Italian striker Alessandro Del Piero securing Rs 11 crore

Vijayanand Gupta/HT/Getty Images

As in the IPL, celebrities hold major stakes in most of the ISL football teams. Sachin Tendulkar is part owner of the Kochi franchise, while Sourav Ganguly is with Kolkata (as is

Team owners with the ISL organisers at the launch

La Liga giant Atlético Madrid), John Abraham with Guwahati, Ranbir Kapoor with Mumbai, and Salman Khan with Pune. In the opening match held at the Salt Lake Stadium in Kolkata, the home team routed Mumbai City FC by a margin of 3-0.Between 12 October and 10 December, each team will play all others twice in the league stage (playing home and away matches), earning three points for a win, one point for a draw and none for a loss. Between 13 and 17 December, the top four teams from the league stage will play off in a two legged semi-final (First vs Fourth and Second vs Third). The final will be played on 20 December. n

The Bihar CM’s Bizarre Equation Marrying at 25 = less child malnutrition = long life M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

he reason Jitan Ram Manjhi lives of Indians. If it did, then Manjhi

is the Chief Minister of Bihar has roundly to do with his caste. He is a Musahar, the most downtrodden among Dalits in Bihar, and appointing him Chief Minister was part of Janata Dal-United leader Nitish Kumar’s strategic move to halt an advancing Bharatiya Janata Party tide in the state because it would ensure the community’s allegiance to his party. This Monday, following a function to discuss child malnutrition, Manjhi came to a press conference and said that late marriage after 25 is one solution to the problem. According to an Indian Express report, he gave his own example of having married after 25 and still being fit at 71. Note that this has zero connection with child malnutrition because the correct example for him to quote, if at all, would have been the health of his children on account of the age at which he got married. But there were further absurdities in store. The Express report quoted him saying, “Population explosion and malnutrition were a result of violation of Ashrama system that had sound categorisation. One reason behind height of a person coming down from seven to five feet is because of early marriages.” Manjhi also said that ‘the Ashrama system, which advocated a phase of celibacy (brahmacharya) till one attained the age of 25, is scientific in nature. According to the system, the other phases are grihastha, vanaprastha and sannyasa.’ If there is any evidence that people were seven feet tall in India, then it is locked in Manjhi’s cupboard. It is the same as believing monkeys could talk or that there were flying chariots in ancient India. Neither do we know that this system of Ashramas ever crept out from the scriptures to be part of the

should at present be in the forest doing sannyasa as per the Asharama system. But he is not. The conversion of celibacy into energy does work for many people but has nothing to do with anatomy; it is a psychological effect, like placebo action. But leave all that aside. The biggest irony of what Manjhi said is that he is now espousing a system of thought that has led to the enslavement of Dalits for millennia. The Ashramas that he speaks about is actually conjoined with another word; the real term is Varnashrama The biggest and in it the irony of what of the Manjhi said is concept four stages of life that he is now is woven with espousing that of the four castes (varnas) of a system of Hindu society, thought that which does not has led to the even give Dalits enslavement a place in it. In of Dalits for recommending it, Manjhi, a man millennia who is Chief Minister because he is Dalit, is toeing the line of Brahminism. It is a system of thought that gets temples cleaned after he has visited them and which he complained about recently. Caste has endured for so long in India because the ‘lower’ castes were conditioned to become willing participants in a worldview that this was a preordained state of being. But it is not. Demolish that belief system, then there is no place for ridiculous thoughts about marrying at 25 doing anything against malnutrition or for longevity. One would think a Dalit who became the Chief Minister of a state would recognise that. n 27 october 2014

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S PRASANNARAJAN

the Enchant

he Biblical sin of greed is a familiar

were the pioneers, and the best of them saw little slogan against the venal rich, the source of difference between building a business empire and all our evils. It is the regulation diet of we the building a nation. The national movement, to a great poor, we the exploited and we the majority extent, was patronised by the upper business class, who are brought up in the noble tradition of though, it must be added, free India was hardly a austerity of the soul. In every scandal that breaks out, friendlier place for business. As the Government— the anti-hero is invariably a crony capitalist with steeped in the twin loftiness of socialism and Third the means to buy the system with a discount. In Worldism—built dams and steel factories, in every moral harrumpher’s fairy tale about the Bombay and elsewhere, industrialists with a greatunequal nation, pachyderms in pinstripes who er sense of ingenuity were building an alternative control the boardrooms are the engineers of social India. Alternative because its value system was not division. And if it is a land without justice, we do compatible with an India of the controlled market know why it is so: a minority has amassed the and the all-knowing Government. In their India, national resources leaving the rest of the wretched to ambition was not morally reprehensible, and to rot in the margins. No one in the business of nation dream was to muster courage to break the system. building ever told us, echoing Deng Xiaoping, that it The nowhere-to-stratosphere legends of certain is glorious to be rich. The wealth creator here, in the Indian business houses are as motivational as the popular imagination, is worse than Martin Amis’ stories of Japanese zaibatsu or Korean chaebol. The immortal hero John Self, an epitome of the excesses state was not an ally for them; it was a challenge. of the Eighties, in the novel Money. The political rhetoric has only added to the Still, in spite of this acquired national narrative of portrait of the wealth creator as wealth stealer. The the nobility of the austere and the vulgarity of the politician always wants the poor as election fodder, rich, the wealthier Indian today is a global and being one of the world’s poorest countries, India citizen. He is there not because he is enabled by the is the perfect backdrop for your average ghettosystem; he is there in spite of it. His ancestry says friendly socialist, and they are all socialists when it it all. In the initial years of postcomes to “change”. The most idiotic Independence India, the national of them, by the sheer frequency of its model was borrowed from the Soviet usage, have come to believe that the Union, though we called it a mixed wealthy are the cause of Indian Even if it is not yet economy. But the capitalist part was poverty. This misplaced social glorious, it is cool to analysis brings out a paradox: In conditional and regulated and the socialist virtues were celebrated. It spite of having one anti-wealth be rich in an India was more Marx than Adam Smith; the regime after another, and all of that is shedding its state hovered over the aspiration and them socialist irrespective of socialist habits. You ambition of the individual. The ruler nomenclature, why is it that India do not have to be a was wiser than the citizen. remains poor with abominable There were, though, a few who social indices? But the much socialist to create loved the art of making money. Some suppressed business class, in their an equal society. of them were, literally, born to make growth story, did far better than the Even a responsible it and multiply; they continued state that suppressed it. One is a capitalist can the tradition of the inherited trade of story of national lethargy and the community. Then there ideological deep freeze; the other is achieve that

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ment of Riches

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habits. And you do not have to be a socialist to create an equal society. Even a responsible capitalist can achieve that. India is not there yet. In his book on social virtues and the creation of prosperity, Trust, Francis Fukuyama writes: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Societies that are good at producing wealth-creating economic organisations most likely are also good at creating wealth-redistributing interest groups that harm efficiency. The positive economic effects of spontaneous sociability have to be calculated net of the costs incurred as a result of interest group activity. There can be societies that are good at producing only interest groups without being able to create effective businesses, in which case sociability would have to be considered an overall liability. Medieval Europe resembled such a society in many ways, as do certain contemporary Third World societies that have an excess of parasitic employers groups, labour unions, and community organisers and a dearth of productive corporations.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Third Worldism as a mental disorder has not been fully eradicated from the Indian Establishment, and the regime change hopefully will be accompanied by a national cure. An atmosphere for effective, productive business is what the state should provide now, perhaps, instead of overreading Thomas Piketty. Then wealth creation will not be an embarrassment of the rich. n illustration by Madhu bhaskar

about perseverance, adventure and imagination. The end of the Licence Raj did certainly bring in a whiff of freedom. But freedom was still conditional. Soon, license would be replaced by regulations, and ironically, the supervisor of a regulated market would be the erstwhile liberalisation guru. Wealth creation, again, became an activity the limits of which were set by the state, and it was good business versus bad business all over again. Crony capitalism, after all, is inevitable in a country that makes it difficult for the honourable businessman. Regulation is an invitation to corruption, and that is how the state becomes the father of the crony capitalist. In the series of corruption scandals that rocked the previous Government, two recurring characters were the shady capitalist and his counterpart in the Government. Much of the shame India acquired as one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most corrupt countries could have been avoided had the system allowed good businesses to flourish. The socialist state, while condemning the poor further into the ghettos, continued to feed a certain kind of wealth maker, the one who grows in the grey zones of India. The national mood has changed, and being rich is not something to be ashamed of, we are told. Wealth creation, the state has come to realise, is not tax collection. Even if it is not yet glorious, it is cool to be rich in an India that is shedding its socialist

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illustration by anirban ghosh

The Politician ver

The curious relationship between the ruling class and the business class By PR Ramesh and Ullekh NP

sus the Plutocrat

n a visit to Kolkata while he was Prime Minister, Chandrashekhar decided to give his special protection group the slip. He left the Raj Bhavan one morning in a private car headed for the south Kolkata residence of a well-known industrialist for breakfast. A few hours later, he returned to the Governor’s house and soon left for the airport, where reporters accosted him with a barrage of queries on his jaunt, the news of which had leaked out by then. “Did you visit an industrialist this morning for breakfast?” went the first question. Chandrashekhar, surrounded by a posse of guards, policemen and officials, swaggered to a halt and looked at the reporter with resolute eyes. “Yes. I did,” he said with an unabashed air of indignation. “Is it true that Dhirubhai Ambani (Reliance Group chairman) was there for breakfast?” “Yes, he was there,” the Prime Minister answered without a blink. “Did you go there to collect money for the elections (due soon)?” “I did not go there to collect money,” he said, “But if I could collect some money, then why not?” The reporters were unimpressed with his frankness. “Sir, will you accept money from businessmen?” one of them asked in a raised voice. Chandrashekhar, the erstwhile Young Turk who often sneered at pretensions, retorted, “Money is always with such types. If money would have been with Surdas and Tulsidas (great saints of the medieval period), I would have taken it from them.” And he walked away.

Chandrashekhar was certainly an exception among Indian politicians, most of whom zealously court businesses in secret but dislike even a slight mention of that association in public. Economists and sociologists have explained this fear among politicians as rank hypocrisy. After all, the notion of whatever is good for business is ipso facto bad for the poor is par for the course in low-income countries marked by huge inequality and low socio-economic indices. Right from the time of India’s freedom, the Congress party has been a recipient of corporate donations to run its affairs. But that did not stop Jawaharlal Nehru from ticking off regional leaders over their links with business groups and rich community leaders. In return, he often got flak over his expensive ways, apparently financed by the Congress party’s money chest that drew cash from corporate hands. University of Virginia Professor John Echeverri-Gent has studied the sway of money in Indian politics for years. In a recent paper titled ‘The Economy, Business, and India’s 2014 Parliamentary Elections’, he argues that the Nehru-Gandhi clan had managed to retain its hold over the Congress primarily because of its sole access to campaign funds, especially during the polls. “Why has the Nehru-Gandhi family been so influential? Inflow of 12 open

dinodia photos

MK Gandhi with industrialist GD Birla, 1946 27 october 2014

campaign finance allows the family to centralise control. They (the family) tend to have more access and control over this funding. Centralised campaign funding is a key feature of any dynastic political party,” he says. Such associations with wealthy businesses, Echeverri-Gent notes, have over the decades helped the central leadership of the Congress eliminate the role of affiliated mass organisations such as INTUC and even regional satraps, especially in the time of polls. “Because the family has access to these funds, it reduces the party’s incentive to build organisations or affiliates that connect with segments of civil society,” he says. Some businessmen contacted by Open are of the view that politicians are fair-weather friends. “They used us when they needed us and dumped us when they didn’t,” says a Mumbai-based industrialist, referring to “those decades” when doing business in India was the “toughest job on earth” as he describes it. A former bureaucrat recalls that when faced with the oil crisis of 1973-1974, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi approached the House of

Hindujas to parley with the Shah of Iran to help restructure oil payments to the Middle Eastern country. Finally, the Hindujas managed to convince the Iranian dictator, a friend of theirs, to stagger payments over a longer period. The oil crisis of 1974 had forced India to spend 65 per cent of its foreign exchange earnings on the import of oil, compared with 11 per cent before; the crisis itself had been precipitated by an embargo by the region’s oil-producing countries in protest against US support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The Hindujas’ support eased India’s dollar crunch to some extent. Indira Gandhi, despite her pro-poor rhetoric and nationalisation drive—all inspired by close aides like prosocialist PN Haksar—had made meticulous overtures to the corporate world and helped businessmen when she realised that the traditional old tycoons of India were in favour of the ‘Syndicate’—the Congress faction that sought to expel Gandhi in 1969. Historians suggest that the Syndicate, led by the likes of the late K Kamaraj and Morarji Desai, were pro-business while Gandhi adopted

Right from the time of India’s freedom struggle, the Congress has been a recipient of corporate donations to run its affairs. But that didn’t stop Jawaharlal Nehru from ticking off regional leaders over their links with business groups and rich community leaders Dinodia Photos/Getty Images

a populist, socialist stance—she would soon go ahead with the nationalisation of banks. She also went on to create a parallel power bloc among businesses to combat the influence of the traditional rich who were largely supportive of the Syndicate. And that was a masterstroke: one of the business houses to which she swiftly disbursed licences and other permits (at a time when it took years to get business go-aheads) became the showpiece of Indian enterprise, steered by Dhirubhai Ambani, who back in those days was looking to diversify his textiles business by entering other fields of enterprise. The fortunes of the empire he built were on the rise. So were those of Indira Gandhi, who battered the Congress old guard, won the support of most high-level bodies of the party, and took firm charge of it. Indira Gandhi’s flirtation with upcoming businesses was as intricate as her socialist posturing. When the country was buffeted by the oil crisis of the 1970s, her government passed on a huge chunk of the burden to consumers. Many scooter users had to use public transport to work as the Government began to curb consumption of petroleum products for non-essential uses. Her evocative slogan, ‘Garibi Hatao’ (eliminate poverty) did appeal to the country’s poor, but she also helped select businesses and permitted private partnership in certain segments, the most famous being the automobile sector. Unlike her father, she wasn’t entirely scornful of corporates in public, though she projected a socialist (Left to right) JRD Tata, Homi Bhabha and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1944

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Despite her pro-poor rhetoric and nationalisation drive, inspired by close aides like pro-socialist PN Haksar, Indira Gandhi had made overtures to the corporate world and helped businessmen when she realised that the traditional old tycoons of India were in favour of the Syndicate image that helped her pull in votes. While businesses were demanding the liberalisation of India’s stiff regulations in the early 1970s, she brought in a pro-reform face, LK Jha, as her chief economic adviser, generating a lot of goodwill among corporates. She also recruited the likes of pro-Left economists KN Raj and S Chakraborty to the economic advisory council in a tightrope-balancing act. Historians have suggested that she found maintaining a pro-socialist persona crucial to maintaining strong ties with India’s ally Soviet Union, which helped the country modernise its armed forces. In practice, she let pro-business economists such as PC Alexander, KN Jha and Arjun Sengupta take key decisions behind the scenes. By 1980, when Indira Gandhi returned to power after the Janata interlude, she was destined to kick off the process of liberalising the Indian economy by freeing it of the shackles of centralised planning put in place by her father. But political expediency meant that she nationalised six more banks in addition to the 14 she had back in 1969. Even so, economic historians give her the credit for launching the bold task of ridding industry of cumbersome procedures and allowing private-sector participation in various sectors. She had also held her ground in 16 open

the face of opposition from Leftists and Right-wing parties in going to the IMF in 1981 for loans that—thanks to good monsoons—India was able to pay on time. Still, being friendly with businesses was seen as dangerous for a politician. “Despite our efforts to help Nehru in his endeavour to construct what he called ‘temples of modern India’, dams, and later Indira Gandhi, by offering loans for public works, a businessman was seen as a persona non grata for politicians—in public I mean, not in private meetings,” says the Mumbai-based industrialist.

any historians refer to the era of Rajiv Gandhi,

who replaced his mother in 1984 after her assassination and soon won an electoral mandate, as a stage when India’s economy slowly started moving from ‘state control’ to ‘autonomy’. The young Prime Minister, who surrounded himself with technocrats and whose party had its heftiest ever majority in the Lok Sabha, began to talk about things like “tapping market forces” to forge ahead with development projects. By then, expenditure on public-sector employment, military expenses and subsidies had begun to skyrocket. To finance expanding budget deficits, the Government had been borrowing 27 october 2014

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Dhirubhai Ambani (centre) with guests at the wedding of his son Mukesh Ambani, Mumbai, 1984

Dhirubhai Ambani, who had been named L&T’s chairman in April 1989, had to step down from the post to make way for DN Ghosh, former chairman of the State Bank of India. The incident provoked widespread resentment within the business community money from overseas. Economists close to the Prime Minister knew that a balance-of-payments crisis was on the cards. Rajiv Gandhi was convinced that there were too many controls in India and too much prejudice against the private sector. In fact, the Congress poll manifesto of 1991 was reflective of his economic ideas—it called for an overhaul of the systems that drove growth in the country. Rajiv Gandhi had a dream, of course, but was bogged down by political compulsions and corruption scandals. He had brought much of the turbulence upon himself through preposterous measures aimed at winning vote banks. Opposition from all quarters, especially from his own party colleagues, meant that reforms under his watch could not get beyond the drawing board. When PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh moved in 1991 to open up the economy, their liberalisation agenda was what had been drafted earlier by Rajiv Gandhi’s core team of advisors (with later revisions by Yashwant Sinha as 18 open

Finance Minister in the Chandrashekhar Government that preceded Rao’s). “It is true that by the end of Rajiv’s rule and later when Chandrashekhar came to power, the relationship with businesses improved a lot,” says a senior Congress leader who was close to Rajiv Gandhi. But the period between Rajiv Gandhi’s 1989 General Election loss and Chandrashekhar’s ascent, a phase that saw VP Singh as Prime Minister (1989-1990), was seen as one in which some companies were subjected to a witchhunt, especially Reliance India Ltd (RIL), founded by the man responsible for India’s equity cult, Dhirubhai Ambani. Even earlier, as early as May 1985, VP Singh, who was then a minister in the Rajiv Gandhi Cabinet, suddenly placed curbs on the import of purified terephthalic acid (PTA), which was crucial for RIL to make polyester filament yarn. RIL somehow managed to get letters of credit from various financial institutions that let 27 october 2014

it import a year’s requirement of PTA. By then, Ambani had used his famous powers of persuasion and had befriended Rajiv Gandhi. It was in 1990, as Prime Minister, that VP Singh went after Reliance again, this time by stonewalling efforts by the conglomerate to acquire managerial control of Larsen & Toubro. Dhirubhai Ambani, who had been named L&T’s chairman in April 1989, had to step down from the post to make way for DN Ghosh, former chairman of the State Bank of India. This interference in corporate affairs provoked widespread resentment among businessmen. Contrary to perceptions, VP Singh was no socialist and had accepted favours from businessmen. In the run-up to the polls of 1989 and later, ahead of the formation of the National Front Government headed by Janata Dal and backed by the Left and BJP, Singh had fallen back on businessmen friends as a go-between among various parties that backed him. Both the BJP and Leftist parties that had offered support to VP Singh’s government used to hold discussions at the Vasant Vihar residence of the late businessman Viren J Shah, who was appointed West Bengal Governor when the BJP came to power in 1999, much to the delight of the Left Front government in the state. The likes of Jyoti Basu used to meet BJP leaders such as AB Vajpayee and LK Advani to discuss the framework of the NF Government. Singh, for his part, insisted on distancing himself from the BJP despite showing no reluctance in taking the party’s support as Prime Minister. Besides, his huge dependence on industrialist Shah, who was also a BJP leader, did nothing to temper his aggressive anti-business posture in public.

setting the stage for enhancing trust between politicians and businesses. According to insiders, all such camaraderie also helped offset deep mistrust of the liberalisation move within the Congress dispensation. Later when the United Front Government was in power in 1996, it pursued reforms, but the focus was more on fiscal management and the lowering of tariffs. Reforms got another push after the BJP was elected to power in 1999. The Vajpayee-led Government went ahead with bigticket reforms measures, including disinvestment and luring foreign direct investment. However, the decade since 2004, when the BJP was unseated by the Congress at the Centre, saw reforms drop into limbo. This hurt business-politics ties that had improved over the years.

ccording to a former bureaucrat, businesses are partly to blame for the bad name they have earned. For many decades after Independence, business houses had set aside meagre funds for community work and had stayed grossly opaque and greedy, lobbying with unscrupulous politicians to exploit natural resources TIMESCONTENT

Finance Minister Manmohan Singh with Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, 1991

relationship between business and politics improved sharply when Chandrashekhar was Prime Minister and Sinha his Finance Minister—and later when Narasimha Rao was at the helm. It was Sinha who deserves praise for preparing the main blueprint of what would later become the reforms agenda under Rao. In 1991, when Rao decided to go ahead with reforms, bipartisanship—or cohesion among political classes over an issue—was the name of the game. A former Finance Ministry official says that there “was enough and more of back channels of communication” between the ruling side and the opposition back then. He adds that RV Pandit, a publisher who was friends with people in high places in politics and business, carried “messages from Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh to BJP veterans AB Vajpayee and LK Advani and back”. Corporates were also used as “channels” between the government and the opposition, he

It is widely known that the liberalisation launched by PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh had been drafted earlier by Rajiv Gandhi’s core team of advisors with later revisions by Yashwant Sinha as Finance Minister in the Chandrashekhar Government 27 october 2014

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or obtain exclusive licences. Politicians, for their part, entertained individual businessmen in private and rubbed shoulders with business groups in public. Politicians like the late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan had no qualms about admitting their links, though. When quizzed by party colleague KN Govindacharya at a party meeting about the source of funds, he snapped, “You never asked me to wash cash in Gangajal.” The Mumbai-based industrialist maintains that most businessmen can take genuine grievances to the Government only through lobby groups such as CII and FICCI. “For many politicians, being seen with individual businessman is sinful. They are okay with being seen with representatives of business groups. I find this rather ridiculous,” he says. While ‘global best practices’ are increasingly being emphasised in India, until a few decades ago, business houses would often act on their whims. Businessmen who spoke to Open argue that until liberalisation was kickstarted, unleashing ‘animal spirits’ (a term coined by John Maynard Keynes to describe emotions that charge an economy), profit margins were too low to set aside Shome Basu/The India Today Group/Getty Images

large sums for social work. Besides, corporate tax rates were steep. Meanwhile, the last 10 years of Congress rule saw a sharp rise in cronyism, even in sectors such as coal that fell under the direct watch of the previous Prime Minister, who held additional charge of the coal ministry. Discrepancies in the allocation of 2G spectrum licences by allegedly undercharging favourite corporates had put the UPA Government in a spot over promoting crony capitalism and stifling competition. “All this led to a decline in goodwill for not just the politicians but also businessmen. The businessman was again villainised for pursuing politicians with gusto,” concedes a Congress leader. He also says that many entrepreneurs have not had a good time under the Congress rule. Companies like Adani were vilified and several probes were forced upon the Gujarat-based company by the coercive regime. “Wealth once again became a dirty word in India during our rule that saw many scams,” the Congress leader adds. The rise in inequality over the decade also contributed to public frustration. The problems posed by widening income gaps came to the fore globally after the recent economic slowdown, with the role of capitalists again under fierce debate across the world. The renowned French economist Thomas Piketty has dwelt at length on such dangers, prompting even the likes of Microsoft founder Bill Gates to take note. Gates argues that reparatory measures must be taken to face down the perils of deepening inequality.In his book, Capital in the TwentyFirst Century, Piketty argues that the rich are sure to get richer and the poor poorer since the rate of return on capital is always higher than the rate of economic growth, which implies that those who earn their income from capital (the wealthy) tend to outpace those who rely on the overall growth of the economy (salaried workers and others). Worsening inequality remains a major concern in India. As pointed out by Georgetown University Professor Martin Ravallion, the country had made good progress on fighting poverty, the rates of which have been falling since the early 1990s. As he sees it, the war against inequality will now have to be led by better policies, “including policies to address the inequalities in human development”. Without doubt, to ensure equality of opportunity, the country’s leaders have to first focus on skilling its people to prepare them for employment options beyond farming and related jobs. Poor healthcare facilities and sanitation also make it difficult for people to make socio-economic advances. While there has been some progress in primary school participation, as Ravallion says, India’s problem of poor schooling persists. He reminds the country’s rulers that the United

The late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan had no qualms about admitting links with businessmen. When quizzed by party colleague KN Govindacharya at a party meeting about the source of funds, he snapped, “You never asked me to wash cash in Gangaajal” 20 open

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(Left to right) Mukesh Ambani, Vajubhai Vala, Japanese Ambassador Takeshi Yagi, Narendra Modi, Canadian High Commissioner Stewart Beck and Ratan Tata

Modi’s Government has made clear its commitment to skilling, in which the private sector’s role is crucial. Arun Jaitley said: ‘Unless the government gets revenue, it cannot build infrastructure and service welfare schemes. By being pro-business and pro-poor, I am not contradicting myself’ States made its rapid progress thanks primarily to high quality public education and healthcare for all.

he Modi Government has made clear its commit-

ment to skilling, and enlisting the private sector is critical to the success of this initiative. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has also made the following amply clear on his Facebook page: ‘Unless the government gets revenue, it cannot build infrastructure and service the welfare schemes for the poor. By being pro-business and pro-poor, I am not contradicting [myself] but both have to exist at the same time.’ That perhaps sets the tone for a renewed effort in getting businesses on board to combat inequality by ensuring quality skilling and better health for India’s millions. For her part, Rema Balasubramaniam, a Washington DC-based senior consultant at International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank, feels that as countries grow economically and attain the status of a middle-income economy, politics and wealth would have a healthier relationship. Like Ravallion, she argues that good policies can make that happen. According to her, such markets demand accountability, services

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and results. It helps that electorates in middle-income countries tend to be a fast-moving literate group. According to the latest data of the World Bank, which came up with this classification, the world has 86 Middleincome countries (MICs) that account for just under half of the globe’s population. They cover a wide income range, with the richest MIC having a per capita income 10 times that of the lowest. The group has grown since the mid-1990s, with10 countries moving into the bracket from the low-income category. China is the most dramatic example of a country that has made that transition. That country is not a democracy, and its people have long been taught to hate the rich. Popular attitudes towards the wealthy have not shown much change despite gaige kaifang (economic reforms launched in 1980 by Deng Xiaoping). Rochester University Professor John Osburg, in his book, Anxious Wealth: Money, Morality, and Social Networks Among China’s New Elite, has highlighted the precarious lives that the rich lead in that country. Indian attitudes appear less rigid. Maybe the world’s largest democracy is ready to forge ahead on a different path. Maybe India’s affluent classes can chip in to prevent Piketty’s forecast of a worst-case inequality scenario from coming true in this country. And then wealth would no longer be a dirty word. n open www.openthemagazine.com 21

the

ealth i

The Capital City A Profile by Madhavankutty Pillai

ust as one crosses the suburbs into Worli,

Samudra Mahal juts up from the edge of Mumbai, casting its eye out into the Arabian Sea. It is one of those multi-storeyed buildings that go by the moniker of ‘landmark property’. A flat is an expensive thing to buy in the city anywhere. In south Mumbai, the prices are obscene and beyond the means of most Indians. But properties like Samudra Mahal set records. Last year, the company Borosil bought an apartment there paying around Rs 1.2 lakh per square foot; total cost: Rs 43 crore. A few years ago a family too bought a flat there paying a huge sum and then moved in. Money can’t buy you happiness but you do expect it to take care of the petty problems that bedevil the middle-class and the poor. A few months into living there, the geyser burst, pouring down 20 litres of water. While renovations were ongoing, they looked at the work that the contractor had done and saw cupboards and cabinets but without drawers inside. He wanted more money than what had been agreed upon and this was his way of holding them to ransom. The walls seeped water in the monsoon, the servants quit without warning, and so on. Last Friday, the taps stopped running for two hours in the morning because the tanker had got delayed—there was no 24-hour water supply in Samudra Mahal and the society has to buy it. Moral of story: Rs 43 crore can get you the best address in town, but not the best lifestyle. “The address does not buy you peace of mind, no address in Bombay does,” says the resident. “The only thing that makes Samudra Mahal special is the price. Property prices have got nothing to do with the quality of the space that you are getting.” In some sense, that is an egalitarian quality of the city; no matter how wealthy a personis, Mumbai— infrastructurally battered through and through— ensures discomfort. But incredible amounts of money still float around and the rich live a schizophrenic existenceof opulence and pettiness. “There was a wedding last year where Housie was being played and they gave away yachts. I know people who will only shop abroad for their kids.

INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP/Getty Images

Courtesy: TATA Steel

(L-R) Jamsetji Tata with sons Dorabji and Ratanji (grandfather of former Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata) and cousin RD Tata (father of the late JRD Tata); the Bombay

They will not feed them any snacks that are locally made because they think it is not good for health— a ridiculous view of child rearing. At the same time, when they are out shopping, they will look for a discount on every purchase they make,” says the resident.

urun Report, an international luxury publishing and events group, comes out with list every year of the richest people in countries around the world. Last month, it released its India Rich List 2014, giving an idea of how Mumbai remains the cash cow of the country. According to it, the wealthiest man in the country— Mukesh Ambani with a personal net worth of Rs 1,65,000 crore—was from Mumbai. The second richest man was also from there and that was Sun Pharma’s Dilip Shanghvi with Rs 1,29,000 crore. Of the 10 richest men in India, four are from Mumbai, the other two being Pallonji Mistry and Kumar Mangalam Birla. To make it to the India Rich List, the cut-off was Rs 1,800 crore and there were 70 such individuals from Mumbai (Delhi was a far second with 37). ‘Whilst Mumbai continues to dominate with 30% of the list residing there, Delhi came in second with 16%, followed by Bangalore with 10%,’ the report noted. The country’s most valuable company, Tata Sons, is headquartered in Mumbai with a valuation of around Rs 6 lakh crore. A few months ago, the real estate consultancy Knight Frank also published its annual Wealth Report. An Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (UHNWI), according to its definition, is someone whose net worth is worth more than $30 million, and it found that Mumbai had 577 24 open

such people in 2013. The number is tipped to more than double and go up to 1,302 in ten years. It is a city of ever increasing millionaires. Mumbai’s association with wealth has always been a progression. There are the old rich who are joined by a wave of new rich with a new set of economic conditions. For example, the Punjabis and Sindhis who came after Partition and then slogged their way to prosperity. Then they soon became the old rich as another wave arrived. The only thing common to all of them is what is common to all businessmen—competence, ambition and a degree of amorality. The first such wave of the ultra wealthy came to the fore right in the early nineteenth century and what they got into would today be a questionable sector (though of course it is foolish to look at a different age using the morality of today). Mumbai has its commercial roots in drug money. In his book Opium City: The Making of Early Victorian Bombay, Amar Farooqui writes, ‘Its transformation into one of the leading cities of the empire occurred fairly rapidly within the space of about four decades during the first half of the nineteenth century. Circa 18001840 Bombay became a major exporter of opium and raw cotton, mainly to China. The role played by these two commodities in the rise of Bombay and its capitalist class is generally recognized, but the centrality of opium has not been sufficiently emphasised.’ For example, the community of Parsis, known for their honesty and charity, thrived on opium in that era. They began as ship builders for European clients in Gujarat. The historian Gyan Prakash writes in his book Mumbai Fables, ‘When the Company (East India) shifted its head27 october 2014

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remained stuck to the past even after liberalisation brought to the fore new business opportunities had to suffer. Family divisions also added to their woes, but as the Aditya Birla Group has shown, the consequences of family splits can be overcome by prudent policies and initiatives,” says Tripathi.

afeeq Ellias, an award winning filmmaker, photographer and long time chronicler of many aspects of Mumbai, explains the socio-economic status of the city’s inhabitants with respect to their position vis-avis the suburban railway tracks. In 1974, when he left for Japan for a long stint abroad, he remembers that status altered downwards as “you went from the western side of the tracks (Marine Drive, Malabar Hill, Worli) to the eastern side (Bombay Central, Byculla, the docks on Reay Road), from the western railway to central to the harbour line. And of course it altered similarly as you went south to north, from Churchgate to Andheri then.” When he returned in 1979, he found it still a city holding on to its cosmopolitanism, its relative inclusiveness, its ability to absorb people from all parts of the country, its Stock Exchange in 1946 shyness in flaunting wealth. “But that reticence in flaunting wealth began disappearing as the city’s textile mills closed down and a new ‘economic order’ began making quarters to Bombay, they followed and quickly became its impact. Over the years, the city began re-configuring the most important and wealthy mercantile community. itself. The mills were replaced by shopping malls. New They were not alone. Hindu and Jain merchants of residential projects proudly describing themselves the Bania caste and Muslims of the Bohra, Khoja, and as ‘gated colonies’, oblivious to apartheid connotaMemon communities from Gujarat flocked to exploit the tions of South Africa, began springing up in what opportunities that the new colonial settlement offered.’ was once the city’s underbelly. Parel, Lalbaug, Wadala for When the British encouraged opium trade with China example,” he says. He also observed that with wealth came callousness from Mumbai and the traders of these communities saw towards the environment, public spaces, public health, the profit to be made, they didn’t need to think twice. Rafique Baghdadi, an amateur historian and an education and transport. “The wealthy in developed expert of sorts on all things cultural in Mumbai, says that countries have their own complexities but they have Parsis also had the idea of living it up. He says even now if realised, even if partially and selfishly, that the greatyou go to any of their houses built in that time, you will er good is, in the final analysis, often also in their notice how modern and aesthetic they were. “They were interest. Which is why New York has many times more using the latest lighting equipment in their homes. They tree cover than Bombay, even tiny Taipei has open were entertaining people. They were trading. They were public spaces that even distant suburbs in Bombay do globalising, especially because they were trading with not have. Pollution levels in these cities have actually declined. [For] the wealthy in Bombay on China,” he says. the other hand, everything is fine so long Since then there have been periodic as they can travel from air-conditioned changes in the social composition of the homes through air-conditioned cars to wealthy in Mumbai. Dwijendra Tripathi, Though it is foolish air-conditioned offices or gyms and back a former IIM professor who is India’s foremost business historian, says that in to look at a different to their residential towers; 200 metres is too much to walk,” he says. recent times the most visible change is age using the And then there is the disappearing the emergence of Marwaris and Punjabi morality of today, frugality that was once the hallmark of Khatris on the Mumbai business scene the fact is that the business class, of an older generation in a big way. “They, of course, are not new of Marwaris and Banias. “That frugality entrants, but have carved out a more Mumbai has its dominant position in recent years,” he says. came out of their experience of hardship commercial roots There have been those who couldn’t back in their former villages or towns, in drug money, in adapt too, like the former textile barof migration, of the many reminders of exporting opiumerubs wealth being transient; it also coincided ons. “Business groups like Mafatlal that 27 october 2014

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Samudra Mahal in Worli, Mumbai

with Gandhian values and the shortages that were part of Nehruvian socialism,” says Ellias. He thinks that globalisation and the impact of media have made younger generation brash and eager consumers. They are the beneficiaries of the new economic order, of the financial and services industries, often earning dollar-equivalent salaries and perks. “They do not have the default anxieties of their parents who believed in owning their own apartments, in paying the minimum in taxes and maintenance, in savings for a rainy day. They are happy to pay high leases or steep maintenance fees even if they own their own apartments in their housing complexes,” he says. Dwijendra Tripathi too observes, “Frugality has been one of the fundamental traits of trading classes all over the world. The trading groups of Mumbai retained this trait even after they pioneered modern industries. I think that most of the later generations are indulging in conspicuous consumption which has proved to be a characteristic trait of the neo-rich.”

south Mumbai resident whose job brings her

into contact with some of the wealthiest in that part of town has an interesting observation to make of investment bankers: whenever their bonuses arrive, they go and buy watches. “A watch can be as expensive as Rs 20 to 25 lakh. Young finance guys are all spending money on watches. They feel like it is the cool thing to do, a way of showing you have credibility as a rich person,” she says. Given that it is hard to spend beyond a point, the biggest thing that people splurge on would have to be related to their homes. A budget of Rs 20 crore for the interior decoration of a newly purchased home wouldn’t be unusual. To a middle-class person, that is unimaginable but it is easy to ratchet up such a bill because all of it is imported. “If you buy a certain kind of sofas from certain 26 open

In south Mumbai, prices are obscene and beyond the means of most. Properties like Samudra Mahal set records. Last year, the company Borosil bought an apartment, paying around Rs 1.2 lakh per square foot; a total of Rs 43 crore

kind of places, it can cost you Rs 25 lakh. A kitchen will easily cost a crore,” she says. But she still thinks the nouveau riche who worked for their money have more character than the old who got it through inheritance. She speaks of landlords who own four or five flats whose net value would be over Rs 100 crore but will still give the bill of a painting job to a new tenant. “They are stingy and petty. They have no feeling towards it. If you spend money and buy a place you feel connected. If you have simply inherited [property], you have no connection. Their children will feel even less connected. They look at a home that they have inherited and given on rent and all they see is just cash,” she says. Another set are those who might own a flat that makes them wealthy on paper but they don’t really have anything beyond that and so they become hostage to that real estate. Three or four generations stay together in small 2BHKs and the children refuse to move to a suburb where they can have a better lifestyle. Likewise, in a similar situation are many socialites who actuly don’t have too much money. “They are well connected, a lot of them are from the old families, but don’t have real money to spend. At least a large percentage of them don’t. But they all turn up for everything and expect all things for free,” she says. To make the irony of that society even greater, when a finance professional or a successful entrepreneur rents a flat on Marine Drive paying a couple of lakh as monthly rent or buys it paying Rs 10 to 20 crore, he finds he has a neighbour who is paying a few hundred rupees as rent for a similar flat because the rates were frozen for those who became tenants decades ago thanks to obsolete laws. A lot of people in south Mumbai pay a pittance to live in some of the most expensive real estate in India. An interesting aspect about Mumbai’s relationship with wealth is how the poor themselves have been co-opted into this culture. When a mall comes up over a mill, even 27 october 2014

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Mukesh Ambani (centre left) at his wedding in 1984 with his brother Anil (centre right)

prices of homes in slums rise. Ellias has made two films on Mumbai’s slum dwellers, one in the 80s and the other in 2005. “In the 80s, there was a strong politicisation, a greater belief in the collective struggle for dignity. 20 years later, I could see the impact of globalisation at the lowest levels of society. Slums were not impervious to the ‘steroid’ driven, heady rise in property prices. Which probably explains why slum dwellers can accept a glittering shopping mall or residential tower in their midst, something unimaginable in the 70s or 80s. So I would say that a slum dweller in the 70s saw the wealthy as a polar opposite at best, if not an adversary at worst. He now buys into the ‘mantra’ of growth, a version of the locomotive theory, if you will, that they will eventually also be beneficiaries. That has changed the way they look at the rich; which can of course change dramatically and unpleasantly if the economy doesn’t deliver.” The trickle down happens because the support system for the wealthy is that relentless influx of migrant workers into Mumbai at every level. For example, a domestic servant in Samudra Mahal soon realises his or her market value and jumps ship. Drivers are now getting paid triple of what they got five years ago. The demand for their services comes from people with enterprise, entrepreneurs with ambition who have been the oxygen to Mumbai’s life-blood. If you go to supermarkets in Mumbai, you will notice a prominent brand of dairy items called D’lecta. Deepak Jain, who started the company, came to Mumbai 20 years ago, first working in a dairy company and then branch28 open

ing out on his own in 2001. Mumbai, he found, was much more cool about money. People displayed wealth in far less conspicuous ways than they did in north India. He saw some very wealthy people going about in a very humble manner, people were less pushy about who they knew and who they were. Jain started with very little capital, about Rs 10 lakh, and began D’lecta as a company marketing and distributing ghee for another company. “We established that as a brand. Along the way we learnt a lot about consumer distribution. For us, the initial three, four years were very challenging. I started with 8 to 10 people and there were months when I would wonder where the next month’s salary would come from,” he says. Right now D’lecta employs 125 people but, while his business has taken off, Jain says that his lifestyle continues to remain the same. “I don’t think I am driven by acquisition of a wealth target. What drives me is the creation of something that I am proud of, a business which deals with good products, building some brands, influencing lives of people who work with us or are around us,” he says. Jain comes from a traditional business family with all their ethos of watching your pennies, but he notices the young earning a lot and spending a lot. “I am now 54, maybe my generation is not so much into it. People want bigger cars, better houses,” he says. This is the pool in Mumbai from which he draws those professionals who work for him. Both cultures, extravagance and moderation, go together in Mumbai, at least for the time being. Jain says, “For anyone who has some dreams, Mumbai is a very good place to start.” n 27 october 2014

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Bloodshed In the Online Marketplace

How e-commerce firms, their war chests overflowing with recent funding, are taking on each other like never before by Lhendup G Bhutia

aking up unusually early one Monday work, Krishna Rao, was late to the sale. He logged on to morning, I sat—groggy and sleepy, yet Flipkart only in the afternoon. “There were just vegetable palpably excited—in front of a computer. In cutters and appliances by then,” he says in condescena few minutes, at eight o’clock to be precise, sion. “Until I came across this TV set.” Despite not wantthe virtual doors to Flipkart’s much publicised ‘Big Billion ing a TV set, the price of the product—just Rs 22,000 after Day’ sale was to begin. And I wanted to check out the a discount that slashed its price down from Rs 32,500— products before others started logging in. But when it start- goaded him to replace the boxy CRT television set that ed, the sale was nothing short of a mad scramble. There occupied his living room with an LED set. He wanted to were pen drives for Re 1, cellphones for Rs 99, computer consult his wife and brother. He wanted to check who appliances and cameras with discounts of around in his family or those in the neighbourhood would be 90 per cent. As it turned out, there were a number of available to receive the product’s delivery. “But the people who, just like me, had woken up early for the sale, products were disappearing so fast. For a moment, even some even smart enough to foresee the rush and narrow this product went out of stock. You had to make a decision down and add to their ‘carts’ what exactly they wanted fast,” he says. “So I bought it.” In all, as Flipkart later revealed, the sale that lasted 10 days in advance. The website became slower to load. It hours generated revenues of $100 milcrashed multiple times. And every time it recovered, there were fewer products to lion. It sold a total of 2 million products. be chosen from. Within minutes, someAround 500,000 mobile handsets, times seconds, most of the best deals were another 500,000 items of apparel and When Jeff Bezos now hidden behind ‘out of stock’ signs. shoes, and about 25,000 television sets arrived in India, were purchased in all that day. But people Everything, it seemed, mattered—the were also upset. They railed about the speed of the broadband connection, the Flipkart put up injustice of not being able to purchase promptness of your decisions, the agilhuge billboards of goods, and about prices that seemed to ity and speed of your clicking index finits advertisements ger, the familiarity to navigate the website have been suspiciously raised before the at the airport, for products, even the ability to recover discounts were displayed. They wrung from the disappointment of someone else their virtual hands and hashtagged the highways and areas beating you to a deal. For me, it was all too phrase ‘#Flopkart’. Yet, e-commerce, in all close to Amazon’s much, and I had to log out. its glory and disappointment, it appeared, offices to taunt the had finally arrived in India. Its potential In Delhi, a Mumbai-based assistant Amazon head had finally been revealed. director who had travelled to the city for 30 open

27 october 2014

illustration by anirban ghosh

part from the festivities and the lights, Diwali isn’t

only about shopping. It isn’t only about how much you spend. It is also about how much you save. Retailers and malls have played on that psyche for several years, enticing new customers and clearing old stock with discounts. Now e-commerce websites are using that same strategy, offering what seem like impossible discounts to wean away shoppers from not just brick-and-mortar stores but also other e-commerce websites. Online marketplaces are locked in an intense battle to topple one another. Ever since Amazon entered the Indian market last year, the competition has heightened. Flipkart currently Flipkart currently leads India’s e-commerce leads the country’s market, estimated at e-commerce market, around $3.1 billion, but estimated at around projected by the likes of NASSCOM to rise to $100 $3.1 billion but billion by 2020. Amazon projected by the has grown rapidly in a likes of NASSCOM year’s time, and Snapdeal is to rise to $100 quickly catching up. Each one of them, now billion by 2020 awash with funds, their war chests overflowing with recent funding—Flipkart raised $1 billion in July, Snapdeal raised $233.7 million this year, and Amazon promises to put $2 billion into its Indian operations—are taking on each other like never before. When Flipkart announced its sale with front page advertisements in leading newspapers, Snapdeal ensured it had advertisements immediately after Flipkart’s, dissing the other’s sale and pointing to its own. Amazon, according to media reports, purchased the domain name Bigbillionday.com, also the name of Flipkart’s sale, which would lead users to Amazon’s website instead. A few days later, when Amazon launched its sale, Diwali Dhamaka, Flipkart reportedly paid a similar compliment. According to a Times Of India report, when Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, recently arrived in India, Flipkart put up huge billboards of its advertisements at the airport, highways and areas close to Amazon’s offices to simply taunt the Amazon head. The e-firms are now buying out smaller e-commerce firms: Flipkart acquired the fashion e-tailer Myntra, and Snapdeal acquired Shopo.in, a handicraft e-commerce firm. They now also sponsor top events, from the last Indian Premier League (by Amazon) to Bigg Boss (currently being done by Snapdeal). “This fight will only get more intense,” says Harminder Sahni, founder and managing director, Wazir Advisors Pvt Ltd, a retail consultancy. “E-commerce is still in a nascent stage, but is picking up rapidly. And each one of these firms wants to kill off competition and become the market leader.” All e-commerce firms currently offer a number of features, from cash on delivery (CoD) to a no-questions32 open

Flipkart’s Sachin (L) and Binny Bansal

asked replacement policy. They all use a host of courier options, including India Post, to reach the most obscure of pincodes. Every little innovation or attempt is quickly replicated and bettered. When Amazon India introduced next-day guaranteed delivery, Flipkart and Snapdeal quickly followed suit. Flipkart promises next-day guaranteed delivery in 50 cities and guaranteed next day delivery on Sundays. A spokesperson of Flipkart says, “We have always believed in innovation—and our focus has been on launching customer facing features that can enhance the online shopping experience for the Indian shopper.” Speaking about the firm’s future plans, the spokesperson adds, “We are tying up with more and more sellers from smaller markets. We believe that the smaller artisans and manufacturers from across the country are the future of online marketplaces in India… We will also look at expanding our seller base—and entering newer categories such as furniture.” However, almost all the companies in e-commerce are currently running losses. Snapdeal reported losses of Rs 264.6 crore for the year 2013-14, compared with a loss of Rs 120 crore in the previous year. Flipkart reported a loss of Rs 281.7 crore for the financial year 2013-14, up from Rs 109.9 crore the previous year. But these e-firms seem to believe that the focus now should be on expansion and market creation rather than turning profitable. The Flipkart spokesperson says, “We can be profitable today if we choose to be. But for us, the key issue is not profitability but growth. The potential we are witnessing in the Indian e-commerce ecosystem today makes it amply clear that there is a lot of scope to scale up the 27 october 2014

business. And we want to keep investing in the business while we see such growth.” According to Ashish Jhalani, founder of Etailing India, an e-commerce consultancy in Mumbai, despite the vast potential for the growth of e-commerce in India, a large number of customers are still wary of shopping online, and the recent sale organised by Flipkart has worsened matters. “The sale made people more suspicious of online shopping, particularly at Flipkart. No wonder that despite making great sales, Flipkart’s founders apologised,” he says. “But unless the suspicion of online shopping in general is addressed, we won’t be seeing any of this fantastic projected growth.” Many e-commerce ventures, especially relatively smaller firms, are trying to address such fears. Zivame, which sells lingerie online, allows users in Bangalore, where it is based, to order up to 10 items of innerwear to try out in the privacy of their homes, before deciding to buy any. It has also set up a fitting lounge in Bangalore, where, with an appointment, fitting experts help women try various different types of innerwear. Fashionara, which retails clothes and shoes, allows users of the six largest cities to order a number of items to their homes or

offices, and try them on before purchasing any. The delivery agents are also trained in measuring an individual should the need for alteration arise. “The key,” says Arun Sirdeshmukh, founder of the e-commerce firm Fashionara and former CEO of Reliance Trends, “is to replicate the experience of buying from a traditional store as much as possible, where one can touch, feel—and maybe even alter—products [that one intends to buy].” According to experts, which e-commerce firm eventually emerges as the strongest will be determined not by the discounts offered, but by how it differentiates itself. Sahni says, “Everyone will provide the same discounts, and currently almost everyone has the same products. But will you be able to provide exclusive products? Can you build niche segments? You cannot give huge discounts always. This is the reason that Xiaomi phones or a Chetan Bhagat book is launched on Flipkart.” Some e-commerce firms are already trying to target specific consumers. The likes of Yepme target customers in smaller towns and cities and produce private labels that are stocked not just on its own website, but also on others. Zivame sells not just global brands but also affordable ones that it makes itself. Richa Kar, co-founder and CEO of Zivame, says, “At a category level, we saw some big gaps in the [lingerie] market. First we tried to bridge them with prodZivame, which sells ucts of international lingerie online, brands, but soon realised allows users in that this would not work Bangalore to order for a large number of our customers, as the products up to 10 items of were expensive. innerwear to try Therefore, after adequate out in the privacy of research, we decided to their homes before launch our own brands.” According to Kar, the firm deciding to buy any sells over 100,000 products every month. Fashionara focuses less on discounts and more on convenience. Apart from letting buyers try out clothes, it also offers several kitschy colourful products that are usually available only in street markets. It also has shopping assistants who chat with customers over the telephone and help them locate and buy what they’re looking for.

Zivame’s Richa Kar

n 11 October, Rao had yet to get the TV set he ordered on 6 October. This, despite being promised a next-day delivery. “They keep postponing the date. Now they want to deliver when no one is home. I’m sure they don’t even have the product and are trying to source it now,” he says, angry about the dodgy reliability of e-commerce firms. “How can you trust them when something like this happens?” A few days later, he laughs and says he is willing to give e-commerce firms another chance. He got his LED set on 12 October. n open www.openthemagazine.com 33

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Why Indians hate the rich

There is more to it than political indoctrination and civilisational baggage by suhel seth

here is still shame in being rich in India. And Or your ability to spout Keats and Milton with equal febeing rich is subjective. It doesn’t matter how licity. We must also remember it was a citadel of intellecrich you are. What is important is that you are tuals, the city. And the Marwari influx didn’t help matrich enough in the eyes of the beholder. It also ters either. The average Calcuttan was aghast at wealth doesn’t matter whether you have worked hard to get to without an academic edifice. where you are. What galls Indians are the rich. The twoFrom Calcutta I moved to Bombay, which celebrated wheeler owner perhaps despises the four-wheel owner, commerce and wealth but only as symbols of success and the hierarchies just keep moving upwards. We are and achievement. Bombay was—and remains to some almost loath to admit wealth and it is not just for the sake extent—the city of dreams, and it was fine if you had of grace and etiquette, but almost in a manner that seems some of its gold dust sprinkled on your being. But then apologetic. We despise those who have more than us not again, the rich were born to some levels of goodness, and because it disgusts us, but because we don’t believe the this was mostly thanks to well-off Parsis who still wear rich deserve to be where they are. This is true, but then their wealth so lightly. Almost every institution that again, only partially. It is a fact that many who are rich was created in the early 1900s was thanks to some today have no legitimate business being rich. There are Parsi benefactor, be they homes for the homeless or many in the upper classes who wear their wealth on their hospitals or temples of the arts and sciences. And then sleeves. I have often been dismayed by the lack of general came Independence. But the years just preceding 1947 good that some of the rich indulge in, but that’s because were those of sacrifice, where once again the rich were we also have this grand habit of building legacies. We seen to be anti-national or uncaring for the multitudes don’t believe there should be anyone else benefiting from who had to live in penury or deprivation. the wealth we may have accrued. I know many wealthy What followed independence was the annihilation people who wouldn’t balk at spending lakhs of rupees on of the concept of good wealth. We were born free but the wine they drink or on the weddings of their ugly brats, in chains: shackled to silly notions of socialism, which but would cringe to give back to society in any measure. looked at wealth as a social evil. But there were some other They are the ones who create this enduring perception of realities too: the exodus of people from Pakistan to India the Indian Rich being a self-serving class. made the behaviour of many in the North ruthless and But to examine why Indians hate the rich, we have laced with greed. There were other fallouts of socialism. to once again fall back on history. Piety and academ- Nehru was not just loved but followed: there were many ia were once the twin birthmarks of success. This had who caved in to socialism as the country’s preferred social and commercial disposition. So even if been part of Indian civilisation for aeyou had money, you behaved differentons. Renunciation was seen as a sign of ly. Elegance and education played their maturity and goodness. Hoarding monpart in refinement as well. But that slowey was seen as something despicable and The rich in the ly began to disappear. With economic crass. Often enough, lack of money was liberalisation and the implosion of mespun into a badge of honour. I remember country will dia, there was a lot to be said about statgrowing up in Calcutta where one was have to realise ed wealth. At the same time, the stock shy of driving up to one’s college on a that being feted market showed up symbols of excessive motorcycle. A car was unthinkable. Being for being wealth that for some time adorned magdifferent from the rest carried a social azine covers and then made for jail prostigma, and the core differential was monetarily rich files. It was during that stock market wealth. Which is why money to many is far different boom and as a fallout of many scams, in Calcutta was unimportant; what was, from being some dating back earlier, that we began was your ability to hold your own in an humanely rich to see hatred replace envy. involved discussion on Marx and Engels. 34 open

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illustration by anirban ghosh

Sadly, nothing has changed to this very day because many who are rich have been proven to have gotten there by emasculating the systemâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;violating all manner of laws and then exhibiting a brazenness which is not just galling but reprehensible. Rich lists and stories of private jets and yachts didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t help matters. The same Bombay that celebrated success was beginning to spawn a new currency of envy cloaked in hatred. Delhi had now become the certified hotbed of corruption and easy money, whilst Calcutta was reeling from one chit scam to another. When three of your principal cities suffer such afflictions, there is little that the rest of India will or can do. The rich at the same time wanted to live a life they believed they had earned. And that is fair too. But to get rid of civilisational taboos is difficult for any society, as it is for todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s India. We have a piquant situation. We want every global brand in our show windows; we want weddings and birthdays to be as garish as ever; we want to show people we have arrived; and in all this, there are only a few who fear breaking the law. When wealth is aspirational, it serves a great purpose of stoking others to achieve. But when wealth begins to mock the state of deprivation that most others are in, it takes on a role that is best described as ghoulish. Today people want to eat the rich and not venerate them. We keep using the examples of old money only to distinguish ourselves from the louts with money who have injected vulgarity into everything they do. I do not believe it is going to be an easy ride for the rich. 27 october 2014

There are too many social disparities that India needs to exorcise. There is a lot that we need to teach the ones who have, especially the art of giving. Our rich continue to earn but refuse to share the burden of an equitable society, which we must. There continue to be cases of profiteering at the expense of the State, which is seen as our money being squandered by the privileged. That creates its own angst, as it should. Not enough rich people are seen to be compassionate or even nationalistic. Very few among them have given the nation any meaningful institutions that we can truly be grateful for. Yes, schools and toilets will be established, but that is seen more as obeisance to a government diktat than a call of conscience. If the rich want some respect in this country, they will have to earn it. For some, this may be a revelation; having fed off a system they are adept at manipulating, they sometimes fail to see how they are regarded by those outside it. They will have to realise that being feted for being monetarily rich is far different from being humanely rich. And the day the wealthy in India can even grasp this difference and work towards a more equitable and fair India, we will have moved the needle from hatred to respect. I never grudge people their money. I always despise their lack of empathy. It is time for the rich in India to have a balanced heart rather than a mere balance sheet. n Suhel Seth is Managing Partner of Counselage India and can be reached at Suhel@counselage.com open www.openthemagazine.com 35

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The Death of Coolie No 1 It’s a millionaires’ ball in Bollywood. Slumdogs and other romantics are no longer welcome by Rachel Dwyer

“M

ere paas maa hai” is the famous riposte the younger brother gives to his elder brother’s boasting about his illgotten gains (Deewaar, directed by Yash Chopra, 1975). While family values always trump financial gain in Hindi films, wealth is an important marker of class as well as a means of enabling the increasingly extravagant lifestyles of the films’ characters. After Independence, Nehruvian socialism and the enduring influence of Gandhi’s ideals about poverty were inescapable. In the 1950s, the association of wealth with colonial Anglicised lifestyles fused ideas of material advancement and Western lifestyles as something to be rejected. Hence the wealthy Neena (Nargis), imprisoned for murder, declares that ‘Foreign flowers cannot flourish on Indian soil’ (Andaaz, directed by Mehboob Khan, 1949). While Bimal Roy’s films often examined the poor and the marginalised, Raj Kapoor chose to depict them as noble and the rich corrupt. In Shree 420 (1955), the wealthy Seth Sonachand Dharamanand is dishonest and evil (his car registration number is 840, a double of 420), whereas the impoverished Raj and Vidya are indisputably good. The two women in Raj’s life, Vidya (‘Knowledge’) and Maya (‘Illusion’), are distinguished by a love of virtue and kindness on one hand and a love of money and lack of good qualities on the other. Raj moves between the two merely by changing his clothes, but ultimately, when he becomes aware of the suffering of the poor and the immorality of the rich, good prevails. Many other films show the lure of wealth but love and honest poverty are always the hero’s choice, even though viewers may enjoy seeing the world of wealth on screen and revel in songs such as Shailendra’s lyrics to money Teri dhoom, sung by Dev Anand’s black marketeer (Kala Bazar, directed by Vijay Anand, 1960). A recurrent theme was rich-poor romance, so the rich boy falls for the poor girl in Bobby (directed by Raj Kapoor, 1973) or rich girl-poor boy in Aan (directed by Mehboob Khan, 1952) and Jab Jab Phool Khile (directed by Suraj Prakash, 1965). The story often hinges around the 36 open

A still from the 2011 film Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara which focused on self-fulfilment

revelation that the poor partner’s family was originally rich but deprived of its fortune for a range of complicated plot reasons such as the suspicious father rejecting his child in Awaara (directed by Raj Kapoor, 1951), or illegitimacy in Trishul (directed by Yash Chopra, 1978), while the swapping of babies has remained a frequent motif from earlier films such as Munimji (directed by Subodh Mukherjee, 1955), In his Angry Young Man roles, Amitabh Bachchan usually grows up poor but achieves dignity and respect through his speech, dress and gesture while often accumulating money illegally. Yet, despite this powerful presence, other films began to shift to showing rich characters who were not morally tainted by wealth but who lived enviable lifestyles adorned with large houses, the finest fashions and overseas travel. A new kind of modern style for the wealthy began in the 1960s, in films like Yash Chopra’s Waqt (1965), although the zamindars and thakurs continued to follow the old style of mansions whose wellknown feature was a magnificent split staircase leading to a galleried upper storey. The Angry Young Man’s descendants continued to fight poverty in the urban jungle, while the comedy film addressed the issues of wealth and poverty, notably those of Govinda where he moves between the wealthy and the poor via the plotline—whether as a poor man pretending to be rich in Coolie No 1 (directed by David Dhawan, 1995), or a rich man pretending to be poor in Hero No 1 (directed by David Dhawan, 1997), although the common theme is that he teaches the spoilt rich girl a lesson. 27 october 2014

However, while Hindi films revelled in the melodrama of rich and poor, showing real poverty has been disparaged, whether in the movies of Satyajit Ray or those of Westerners such as Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008). In the last 10 or 15 years the poor have begun slowly to vanish from the mainstream Hindi film now known as Bollywood which is often preoccupied by showing the superrich in films such as Karan Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001). In the latter, the adopted son marries a ‘poor’ woman, whose family own a sweetshop, leading to his adopted father disowning him. The family has magnificent houses, between which they travel in their luxury cars and helicopters. Their celebrations of Diwali frame the film, seeing the separation and reunification of the family, bringing together wealth, religion and familial love. A recent group of films has moved towards focussing on self-fulfilment and vocation, mostly by children of the wealthy. Wake Up Sid (directed by Ayan Mukherjee, 2009), the Akhtar siblings’ Dil Chahta Hai (directed by Farhan Akhtar, 2001) and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (directed by Zoya Akhtar, 2011),and 3 Idiots (directed by Rajkumar Hirani, 2009) all emphasise that self-fulfilment and being true to oneself will lead to true happiness. The poor have now all but been erased, and the middle classes are barely seen. The wealthy are the internationally rich, defined by their consumtion patterns, who can devote alltheirenergiestofindingthemselves,oftenthroughtravel and romance. The new image of the rich is due in part to changes in 27 october 2014

the broader culture of cinema. In the 1950s, filmmakers were often closely associated with leftist cultural groups, such as IPTA (the Indian People’s Theatre Association) and the Progressive Writers. They envisioned a new future for the new nation, with often lip-service being paid to Gandhi while more actively following and promoting Nehru’s socialism. The new middle classes who have emerged in such large numbers since the 1990s are mostly, by definition, upwardly mobile, and seek consumerist lifestyles and wealth. They also come from different castes, regions, etcetera, and their culture is shaping contemporary Indian culture, including cinema, where India is no longer an economic ‘basket case’ but a major power, where wealth is to be had by those who work for it. It is this group which has largely brought the new government to power and supports ‘Hindu Family Values’ of religion, the family, etcetera. This may be seen as a modern form of the traditional Purusharthas, or aims of man, namely kama (‘pleasure’), dharma (‘religion’) and artha (‘wealth’) for the householder, while the ascetic life is valued for those who seek it. The Hindi film remains the best guide to modern India and its imaginings of the rich, their lifestyles and their values show us the place of wealth among a host of other Indian values. n Rachel Dwyer is Professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, University of London. Her latest book is Picture Abhi

Baaki Hai: Bollywood as a Guide to Modern India (Hachette, New Delhi)

open www.openthemagazine.com 37

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The Meaning of Lakshmi The Goddess shows how wealth can be liberation by Devdutt Pattanaik

s Hinduism made its journey from Vedic ritualism to Puranic devotion, it became increasingly monastic. This meant that the yogi, one who does not care for wealth, was given more respect in society than a bhogi, one who enjoys wealth. In such a society, Lakshmi was seen as the source of all problems. Rather than taking responsibility for their own inadequacies, human society blamed Lakshmi for the conflicts of society.

38 open

This tension between the yogi and the bhogi is a constant theme in the Puranas. The yogi Shiva is turned into the bhogi Shankara when he marries Parvati. The bhogi Indra learns from the yogi Vishnu how to transform rana-bhoomi or battleground into ranga-bhoomi or playground. Similar tensions can be seen in temple lore, where the language is regional, and the themes more practical. The following is an Odiya story which is part of the temple lore of Puri Jagannath temple where Krishna Jagannath is worshipped along with his brother Balabhadra and his sister Subhadra. One day, Balabhadra saw Lakshmi entering the house of a sweeper woman. He declared that she had been contaminated and orders his younger brother not to let her into the house. Krishna obeys and shuts the door of the temple. In the days that follow, to the great alarm of the divine siblings, no food is offered to them. On enquiry, they discover there is no food being cooked in the kitchen as all vegetables and fruits and cereals and pulses and spices have disappeared from the pantry and the market. There is not even a drop of When we discover water to drink. The siblings trace this catastrophe to that Lakshmi does their rejection of Lakshmi. not discriminate Eventually Krishna apolobetween saint gises to his wife and begs and thief, that all her to return to the temple. In this story, Krishnaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hierarchies are ascetic brother, the yogi manmade, then Balabhadra, learns that noLakshmi becomes a tions of contamination and tool for liberation pollution make no sense to 27 october 2014

the goddess of wealth. These are artificial cultural norms created by humans to satisfy their craving for hierarchy. Food will satisfy without discrimination the hunger of all, be it a sweeper, a king or a god. In other words, food is satya, truth independent of human opinion. Notions of contamination, which is the hallmark of the caste system, is mithya, dependent on human opinion. When we discover that Lakshmi does not discriminate between saint and thief, that all hierarchies are manmade creations, then Lakshmi becomes a tool for liberation. The following is a Telugu tale from one of the richest temples of India, the temple of Tirupati Balaji that enshrines Vishnu on earth. The sage Bhrigu, a yogi, decided to pay a visit to Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. He found Brahma too busy conducting a yagna with Saraswati to pay him attention, so he cursed Brahma that he would not be worshipped at all. He found Shiva too busy being intimate with Shakti to pay him attention. This time, his anger was a little less, and so he said Shiva would be worshipped, but not as he looks—only as an abstract symbol, the linga. He then moved to the ocean of milk, to Vaikuntha, convinced that Vishnu would surely pay him attention. But there he found Vishnu sleeping, his feet being massaged by Lakshmi. Furious that he mattered to none in the trinity, Bhrigu kicked Vishnu on his chest, where is located Srivatsa, the symbol of Lakshmi. Vishnu did not get upset; he understood Bhrigu’s frustration and apologised to the sage, and checked if Bhrigu had hurt his foot while kicking his chest. Watching Vishnu touch 27 october 2014

his feet, Bhrigu was happy. Then realisation dawned as to how foolish he was being: though he claimed to be a yogi, his attention-seeking behaviour revealed he was actually a bhogi. Lakshmi did not appreciate Vishnu’s servility, whatever his reason. She was furious that Vishnu did not punish the sage for insulting the Srivatsa. She walked out of Vaikuntha in a huff and went down to earth. Vishnu followed her, desperate to bring her back, for Vaikuntha cannot remain Vaikuntha without Lakshmi. He decided to stay on earth until Lakshmi agreed to return. But he found no house; devotees would give him shelter until someone richer or more powerful came along. Finally, he saw the seven hills that reminded him of the seven Even Vishnu needs hoods of his serpent Sesha wealth to get on whose coils he reclined himself a wife on the ocean of milk. This and home on was Tirumala, the sacred hill. Homesick, he wished earth. One who to settle here, but for that rejects Lakshmi he had to marry the local cannot expect to princess Padmavati, born have a home or of a lotus flower. Her father, the local king, demanda spouse e ed a huge bridal price. Without Lakshmi by his side, Vishnu was the impoverished Daridra-Narayana, and so he had no choice but to take a huge loan from Kubera. This narrative demonstrates the value of wealth in society; even Vishnu needs wealth to get himself a wife and home on earth. One who rejects Lakshmi cannot expect to have a home or a spouse. News of Vishnu’s marriage to Padmavati upset Lakshmi who came to the wedding and demanded her place in Vishnu’s chest. So Vishnu expanded his chest to accommodate his two wives. He placed the celestial Lakshmi (Sri-devi) on the left side of his chest, near his heart and the terrestrial Padmavati (Bhu-devi) on the right. This Vishnu at Tirumala is trapped and needs the help of his devotees to repay his debt, so that he can return to Vaikuntha. He is called Venkat, he who can destroy (kata) bondage (vern), for in exchange of the wealth received, he grants his devotees the wisdom of yoga that explains the relationship one should have with wealth in order to be truly happy. This is further demonstrated in the ritual of giving wealth to transform Daridra-Narayana (the poor Vishnu) into Lakshmi-Narayana (the rich Vishnu): when Lakshmi is used to enable others to repay their debts, Vaikuntha is established and Lakshmi becomes a tool for liberation. n Excerpted from 7 Secrets of the Goddess by Devdutt Pattanaik, Westland 290 pages | Rs 395. Pattanaik is the author of 25

books on mythology

open www.openthemagazine.com 39

open essay

BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN

ritesh uttamchandani

The Day He Was God with a Bat of Clay

From an India of mediocre cricket writing comes a minor classic on Sachin Tendulkarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inglorious Final Test

eading greedily about the game is the mark of a true cricket devotee. In India, however, cricketwriting is a bastion of journalistic mediocrity, which forces the literate Indian fan to survive on a diet of foreign writing. The best of this is to be found in the London newspapers (accessible online), where the game is still paid its due Tunku respect by writers of real pedigree. The Varadarajan correspondents on India’s sports pages is the Virginia are invariably trundlers—the Paras Hobbs Carpenter Mhambreys and Suru Nayaks of the Fellow in keyboard—who specialise in a banal Journalism at the and un-penetrative form of mediumHoover Institution paced reporting, with no swing, no cut, at Stanford no seam, and no variation. University. He is The Indian cricket fan, ill-served for working on a book years by Indian cricket writers, has, at last, a reason to rejoice: Dilip D’Souza, on the political a Mumbai-based journalist, has publegacy of the Shah lished a book called Final Test, on Sachin Bano case, The Tendulkar’s last Test match for India in Divorce That November 2013. It is an unusual cricket Rocked India book, being both unyieldingly microscopic and sweepingly contemplative, and brimming with digressions into politics, literature and sociology. It is an account, also, of India’s penchant for reverence, and of the unselfconscious way in which the country came to worship this always-dignified overachiever ‘from the heartland of middleclass Maharashtra’. D’Souza’s is a tick-tock narrative which focuses chronologically on the three days of the Test against the West Indies at the Wankhede, from the very first ball, bowled by Bhuvneshwar Kumar to Chris Gayle—‘who knocks it firmly away to…well, who else, for this first ball of his farewell Test? Tendulkar…’—to the last ball, bowled before lunch by Mohammad Shami on only the third day of an embarrassingly one-sided Test. Shami bowls, ‘and just like that, Shannon Gabriel’s middle stump is flat on the ground,’ giving India victory by the sort of margin the West Indies once meted out to opponents: an innings and 126 runs. This book is not a love-letter to Tendulkar, who many (but not D’Souza) believe to be the finest cricketer to have played for India. It is, instead, an unsentimental but always gracious account of the last occasion Tendulkar turned out to play for his country. D’Souza writes not merely of the action on the field—the strokes, the runs, the wickets, the collapses—but also of the adulation of Tendulkar by Indian cricket fans. He is critical, and rightly so, of the way in which the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) gave Tendulkar a retirement Test that was tailored as closely as a bespoke suit of clothes to the great batsman’s personal measurements. What a borderline-sycophantic farewell it was, with the BCCI bending over double to accommodate Tendulkar with a series of two

Tests ‘jimmied into the regular schedule, the hand-picked venue, the mediocre opposition, the assurance of being selected for a final two Tests, the over-the-top hype.’ Tendulkar retired after his two-hundredth Test, a statistical pinnacle unlikely to be scaled by another cricketer, what with the continuing devaluation of Test cricket as the currency of excellence. But D’Souza does not shy away from asking whether the Mumbaikar deserved to have been playing at all, given the frankly unimpressive form he had shown over the two previous years. Final Test is a chastening, and occasionally rather amusing, account of how a team game can be hijacked by sentiment toward one man. Cricket has always been the least collective of all the team sports, but this last Test of Tendulkar’s came to be such a brazen one-man tamasha that all the other players—and there were 21 of them—were reduced to supernumerary status. Spare a thought for poor Shivnarine Chanderpaul, the Guyanese batsman, whose one hundred and fiftieth Test match this was. No other West Indian had reached this milestone—Courtney Walsh, long retired, is the next best at 132 matches—and yet there was scarcely a public acknowledgement of Chanderpaul’s feat in all the fanfare over Tendulkar. D’Souza stops short of blaming Tendulkar himself for this unseemly overkill. The deification of “Sachiiin-Sachin”—the chant by which Indian crowds pay him obeisance—was not the cricketer’s own doing. He had God-like status thrust upon him, and having had that happen, did what any other rational being would have done in his position: He retreated into a fiercely protective privacy, into the fortress of his family, and comported himself in public with a dignity and caution that added a further layer of bullet-proofing to his persona. D’Souza is not a cricket writer by profession, and is at his best when he addresses issues that lie ‘beyond the boundary’. As he describes the proceedings at the Wankhede, he dwells on the irony of the press box there being named after Balasaheb Thackeray, the Maharashtrian strongman-chauvinist who was no friend of the press, and whose followers once dug up the pitch at the ground to prevent Pakistan from playing there. In writing about the atmosphere at the ground—the son et lumiere, as it were—D’Souza chides the BCCI, a body bloated with wealth, for treating the paying spectator with such contempt. Nothing escapes his critical eye, not even the relentless ads for ‘fairness’ creams that blight Indian stadiums, endorsed by cricketers who ought, he suggests, to be setting a better example. (Heartbreaking, here, is a digression in which D’Souza tells us of how he and his wife tried to adopt a child from a Mumbai adoption agency. Late in the process, he discovers that there had, in fact, been a child who was available, but had not been offered to the couple for adoption—because it was thought to be too dark-skinned.) This is the India in which Tendulkar played. Flawed, fevered, hierarchical, complexed. D’Souza is our guide to it over three days: three days of abjectly uncompetitive cricket played before a Sachin-mad country that had eyes only for one man. n

D’Souza is critical of the way in which the BCCI gave Tendulkar a retirement Test that was tailored as closely as a bespoke suit

27 october 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 41

KAILASH SATYARTHI

People are happy but Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m telling them this happiness brings more responsibility, moral responsibility, especially to my fellow Indiansâ&#x20AC;?

raul irani

THE FATHER FIGURE

The new Nobel laureate for peace began his struggle for children’s freedom when he was a boy by Sunaina Kumar

n Friday, 10 October, the day of the announcement of Kailash Satyarthi’s Nobel Peace Prize, two tables and a chair broke in his office. They were discovered later by his staff. “There were so many people! We weren’t prepared. Even that bathroom had media persons inside with cameras,” says Paroma Bhattacharya, who heads communication for Bachpan Bachao Andolan, pointing towards a poky little corner on the first floor, just next to where Satyarthi sits. By Saturday, the clamour had only grown louder. Ecstatic members of the movement were dancing on the street. Inside, every available surface was covered with bouquets. At the reception, people were pausing to check the blackboard that measures the work done by BBA. The total number of children saved from slavery is updated every day: 83,525 was the number for 11 October. In front of it, a message on a whiteboard read, ‘Congratulations to Bhaisahabji’. The man himself, lovingly called Bhaisahabji by those who know him, was surrounded by television crews all day before he left to meet the Prime Minister in the evening. On Monday afternoon, he is back in his office after meeting Sonia Gandhi, barefoot and dressed in his favoured white kurta pyjama, as his family and staff fuss around him, forcing him to take a break between meetings. His wife

Sumedha Kailash, who is called Bhabhiji by everyone, puts dal and sabzi on a plate and threatens to cancel all interviews unless he has his lunch. Satyarthi accepts the plate, smiles, and says, “In the old days, this would have led to an argument. But now that I’m a figure for peace, I can’t say anything.” Satyarthi, a master of the art of communication, shows no sign of fatigue from ceaseless media interactions as he accepts my congratulations and warmly congratulates me in return, adding disarmingly that we should all feel proud and participate in the victory. I ask him to sum up what the last three days have meant to him. “It’s quite overwhelming, it’s quite hectic,” he says, “People are happy but I’m telling them this happiness brings more responsibility, moral responsibility, especially to my fellow Indian brothers and sisters. If they feel joy and pride today, they must feel the responsibility, for not using child labour, not accepting child labour.” It remains to be seen if child labour will become the issue du jour, the way sanitation and women’s rights have become in the recent past, but as Satyarthi says, “These two three days have given so much visibility to the cause of children which has not been given in the entire history of humankind.” A sudden reckoning has begun to take place of what some call India’s ‘hidden shame’, though child

These two-three days have given so much visibility to the cause of children, which has not been given in the entire history of humankind” Kailash Satyarthi

labour is everywhere and in plain sight. Chottus and Munnis, who weave carpets, make crackers, work on construction sites and in domestic drudgery, have been front page news this last week. According to the 2011 Census, India has nearly 4.3 million working children. The United Nations puts the figure much higher than that. “This cause has been ignored, because the children are ignored. That’s why this big award is dedicated to millions, hundreds of millions of children who are deprived of their childhood, freedom and future. Honours like this are commas, but not full stops. A full stop will come when every single child is freed and enjoying the fullest of childhood,” says Satyarthi. In an interview last year, Noam Chomsky spoke of the thing he finds most baffling in India, the particular indifference of the privileged to the misery of others. Satyarthi too has been unsparing in his criticism of the middle

and patriotic. I read of the lives of Swami Dayanand, Vivekanand, Bhagat Singh and Mahatma Gandhi, all the Indian heroes. All of them influenced me. I was also born in a place where Hindi was our natural language. There was no influence of English at all. It has greatly shaped my personality and thought process. There was not any singular religious or political ideology. It was everything together.” In a way, Satyarthi represents the last of his generation of activists. He takes pride in being a jholawala. “When we started working, it was called the voluntary sector. Those who worked in it did so from a deep-rooted conviction of the betterment of society. We didn’t have terms like ‘civil society’ and NGOs supported by government and foreign donors at that time. Our generation was shaped by the events of the 70s, the turmoil in India after the Emergency. Some of us joined mainstream politics of the Janata Dal

an open house, cooks for everyone and recites the poetry he writes. The early years were filled with struggle. All members of the movement recount stories of being beaten up and threatened at some point. Two BBA activists lost their lives in stone quarries in Faridabad. The office has framed photographs of Kalu Kumar (standing next to Bill Clinton in one), a rescued child who grew up to join BBA but passed away during fieldwork some time ago. Satyarthi himself bears the brunt of the violent nature of his work with multiple injuries over the years. The raid and rescue operations of BBA in recent times have faced criticism as contrived-forpublicity events. The years were difficult but also eventful. His wife Sumedha and daughter Asmita help fill in the blanks. A confident young woman of 29, Asmita is completing an MBA at the Indian School of

Honours like this are commas, but not full stops. A full stop will come when every single child is freed and enjoying the fullest of childhood” Kailash Satyarthi classes and the dark side of India’s celebrated growth story. The middle classes demand cheap, docile labour, and the cheapest labour in India are children. The Nobel Laureate has spoken widely about the time when as a child he saw a young boy working as a cobbler outside his school. It was a moment that stayed with him and shaped the course of his future. “I found it difficult to grasp, this whole idea of some people blighted by poverty while others were spared,” he says. He would begin by setting up book banks for children when he was 11 years old. He took a degree in electrical engineering, but was soon drawn to work for the people. In 1980, he founded Bachpan Bachao Andolan that functioned primarily on the ‘raid and rescue’ model. His work ironically has found greater sympathy outside of India. The social activism in India of the 1950s and 60s has played a part in shaping his approach. “It’s difficult to say, what I have been most shaped by,” he says. “I was a book lover in my childhood. I read all sorts of books, spiritual, religious, social 44 open

and then, disillusioned by that, took up guns and Naxalism. The rest of us had our jholas.” He laughs and says, “Those were our options, guns or jholas.” Rakesh Senger, who has worked with him since the 90s, first met him when he was a student of law at Allahabad University. He remembers being mesmerised by his message of a people’s movement. Senger, who comes from a zamindar family in Uttar Pradesh, says it was the first time he ever thought of poverty and of children who work under oppressive conditions. “When I started working with him, I didn’t know it would bring us here. But after all these years, I can’t imagine doing anything else.” He says Satyarthi takes pride in leading a simple life. “He will never wear linen, he’s always in khadi. At one time he would only wear sandals made out of old tyres. Every time I would give him a better pair of footwear, he would give those away to someone and come back barefoot. His only indulgence in life is technology, he loves his smartphones.” When Satyarthi is not working, he has

Business in Hyderabad. When she was 10 years old, she addressed the US Congress in a speech where she spoke about the issue of child slavery. “We’ve all been part of the work, part of the movement,” says Asmita, “I was very involved as a child, sloganeering and campaigning, interacting with the children. I didn’t know any other way of life.” She says of her father, “He has a child-like innocence and simplicity which helps him connect with children. What has stayed with me all these years, are all of the moments he would interact with the children after they’d been rescued, a lot of them would be crying, in pain and unable to speak, the way he would talk to them, draw them, give them that love and empathy that was missing in their lives.” Life for the Satyarthi family will never be the same again after the call from Oslo. The laureate’s wife says, “As a family, we don’t how to react. We are still coming to terms with it, and understanding how it will change our lives.” His daughter pipes in, “I think every day will be an adventure.” n 27 october 2014

cinema

BRIDGE OVER MUSIC Music, friendship and Thaikkudam Bridge 50

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Arjun Kapoor on his art and fears

46 64

mindspace

mahadevan thampi

india today images

cinema

46 open

27 october 2014

Power of the Ordinary The new star of Hindi cinema sees himself as a work in progress. Arjun Kapoor on his art and fears Priyanka Pereira

he year was 1992. On the sets of Boney Kapoor’s most ambitious project, Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja, Anil Kapoor was shooting for the song Parda Utha with a horde of background dancers. Later in the day, the same set was then converted into the villain Jugran’s (Anupam Kher) den. While director Satish Kaushik captured these moments on camera, there stood a boy in one corner of the studio watching the shots, taking in the atmosphere of a film set, his eyes wide and full of awe. The lights that lit up the set, the constant chatter of the crew, the enthusiasm of the actors and idea of making something look larger than life mesmerised him. He decided at that moment to be a part of this magical world of cinema. That boy was Arjun Kapoor. On a humid October afternoon, he is a few minutes late for the interview which is scheduled at Sunny Super Sound in Juhu where he is dubbing for his upcoming home production Tevar. As soon as he drives in, he apologises for the delay. “I live alone and I have to take care of everything by myself. That’s why I got delayed,” he explains. He then greets the people waiting to meet him with warm handshakes before getting down to business. No starry tantrums, no entourage, he even makes sure his phone is on silent mode while he is at work. He parks himself on a chair to give a quick television bite to a waiting crew. “Quickly, ask now! I have to dub also in an hour. If I delay, my father will kick my butt for wasting his money,” he says

27 october 2014

with a poker face as everyone around him smiles. Arjun isn’t hyper-energetic or brazen like Ranveer Singh, nor is he goofy and talkative like Varun Dhawan. He, however, has an easy charm and this goes down to his dressing too. While most actors would refuse to do a television interview without hair and makeup in place, and in a pair of shorts and T-shirt, Arjun, much like his mentor Salman Khan, is comfortable in his own skin. “As an actor, I am supposed to look best when I am shooting for a film. Everything else is forgivable,” he says. At a personal level, he doesn’t have an issue with vanity. “How much can one control? When I am eating at a restaurant, a fan will want a selfie with me which will be uploaded on a social networking site. You’ve got to accept that you’re not going to be perfectly turned out all the time.” Arjun suggests that we do the interview in the artist room on the third floor, where we will not be disturbed. As we wait for the elevator, he climbs the stairs. “A way of keeping fit,” he smiles. While most actors hope to debut with

Aditya Chopra told me not to be too bothered about my looks and to concentrate on my acting... I’m not a chocolate boy Arjun Kapoor, actor

a candyfloss romance, Arjun debuted as an anti-hero in Habib Faisal’s Ishaqzaade (2012). His second film Aurangzeb (2013) was a gritty thriller in which he had a double role. Three years in the industry, he opted for a slice-oflife English film Finding Fanny (2014) despite its commercial limitations. “It is because of that feeling you get at the pit of your stomach when you are doing something adventurous,” he says, as his assistant hands him a cup of espresso. Arjun talks with a maturity that belies his age. He’s just 29. It wasn’t an easy journey for him. Being an overweight teenager, acting was a far-off dream. He started off as an assistant director. Salman Khan spotted him and urged him to lose all those extra kilos. Casting director Shanoo Sharma of Yash Raj Films spotted his pictures on Facebook and called him for an audition. He is well aware that he does not meet the standard definition of ‘movie star looks’. “I have always maintained that I am an ordinary looking guy. If anyone were to meet me on the road, they will not point out to me and say, ‘Kitna good looking hai. Bilkul hero type dikhta hai’,” he says easily. It makes him a bit of an anomaly as a Bollywood star, this lack of discomfort in talking about his limitations. His responses at no point seem rehearsed, but they seem all rather well thought out. His increasing confidence as an actor stems perhaps from the fact that despite his ordinary looks, he has been wholeheartedly accepted by audiences. He goes on to talk about the time that Aditya Chopra first met him and told open www.openthemagazine.com 47

him that he wasn’t a quintessential good-looker and movies like Bachna Ae Haseeno or Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na will not come his way. “Adi told me not to be too bothered about my looks and concentrate on my acting because I wasn’t a chocolate boy,” recalls Arjun, who stayed true to Adi’s words and focused on being a better actor with each film. Ali Abbas Zafar, who directed him in this year’s Gunday, a crime thriller that did not do too well, spells out the reason for Arjun’s success as a hero. “Before Arjun came in, for over ten years we were hit by the Urban Cool Youth Syndrome. A metrosexual image of a man had taken over Bollywood and this was repeatedly observed in films. Arjun, along with Ranveer [Singh] walked in to fill the gap of a macho man, much like Anil Kapoor and Jackie Shroff in the 80s. Arjun’s body structure, his built, his speech and his raw appeal is what separated him from the rest, making him stand out.” Arjun’s acceptance in the industry is a result of Bollywood churning out real stories that require understated and more relatable faces, and those that come with no baggage. For a while, the industry was driven by a handful of male actors—the larger-than-life Khans and handsome stars like Akshay Kumar and Hrithik Roshan—but the last few years have challenged the status quo. Arjun belongs to a new generation of leading men in Bollywood, those who 48 open

Arjun Kapoor in (clockwise from left) Ishaqzaade, Aurangzeb, Finding Fanny and his upcoming home production Tevar

are actors, not stars. While Ishaqzaade worked for Arjun, his second film Aurangzeb was a flop at the box-office. His credentials as a solo hero were questioned by an industry that is more and more mercilessly driven by ticket sales. However, 2014 has proved to be his year. With 2 States (2014), he proved that he can carry a film on his shoulders. He could portray subtlety as well as machismo in Gunday. “My role in 2 States was the anti-thesis of a Punjabi hero. It was real and believable and got me a family audience.”

n the other hand, Finding Fanny was an experiment. Arjun was aware of its lack of commercial value even before the movie went on floor, but the challenge of working in an English language film and with stalwarts such as Pankaj Kapur and Naseeruddin Shah excited him. Homi Adajania, who directed the film, has an observation to

share: “When I watched Arjun’s debut in Ishaqzaade, I was impressed by how effortlessly he played a character so far removed from himself. I found him very convincing and consistent. During our first meeting on Finding Fanny, I liked Arjun’s mature sensibility, his approach, and instinctively I felt that he’d totally get [his character] Savio.” His ability to submit himself to a character and allow the director to mould him to that role is a quality all his directors point out. Having a producer father, Boney Kapoor, he learnt early that a film is a collaborative effort and not a medium for self-indulgence. He has grown up seeing his uncle Anil Kapoor’s journey; has witnessed the rise and fall of several actors in the industry; and most importantly, understood the box-office statistics that make or break a film. Talk to him about the business of cinema, and his face lights up instantly. He can rattle off statistics on films as if he were a distributor. “This has helped me in 27 october 2014

His relationship with his father has changed since their decision to work together. For the Kapoor lad, his next film Tevar is a homecoming of sorts. Boney Kapoor is producing the film along with paternal uncle Sanjay Kapoor. He describes it as the biggest film of his career so far. “It is Ishaqzaademeets-Gunday—a believable action film.” Working in a home production is “draining out”, he says. “You sometimes don’t know where to draw the line between personal equations and professionalism.” Being of different generations, Arjun and his father did have several on-set discussions that would sometimes border on arguments. But, they would go home to sleep content that it was for their film and not to push any personal agenda. The film, says Arjun, also helped him develop a good rapport with his father. “Earlier I used to have a formal relationship with him and that is because we did not live under the same roof. But while shooting, I was free and blunt with him. On the set, we connected like an actor and producer, but at the end of the day I know a father was proud of his son.” understanding my position in the industry and being realistic about my place in the industry. When you have grown up seeing Anil Kapoor and Salman Khan, your idea of stardom is at a different level. I am far away from that still,” he says. Steeped in the world of cinema, he has not limited his ambition to acting. He speaks animatedly about how he wants to write, produce and direct—in short, be involved in every aspect of filmmaking. Adajania, talking about Arjun’s progress, says, “I’ve known Arjun through the last decade. So while it may be observed with a smile, I know he has busted his ass more than most to get where he is. I think he has a unique inner strength owing to the personal journey he has had to tread. He is wiser beyond his years as an actor with an impressively vast knowledge of all aspects of filmmaking.” During his debut release, he had to deal with the death of his mother, Mona 27 october 2014

Shourie Kapoor, apart from all the media scrutiny of why he chose not to debut under his father’s film banner. His thorny equation with his father has been a subject of much speculation. In interview after interview, he has spoken about the influence of his mother in his life. His grounded attitude towards stardom is a result of his mother’s upbringing, he says with a lump in his throat. “Whatever I am today, I owe it to her. As a person, I am a reflection and interpretation of her.”

I know he has busted his ass more than most to get where he is... he has a unique inner strength Homi Adajania, director, Finding Fanny

here is a marked difference in how he handles the media from the time he was first launched and now. He talks openly about his life in the public sphere and is friendlier. “When you are brought up in this industry, you are guarded and overconditioned to [treat] the media with [wariness]. But when I was touring with Ranveer for Gunday promotions, I realised that you can make media a part of your family too. He really helped me open up,” he says. Arjun has recently joined Twitter to interact with fans. His disarming honesty, which his Tevar co-star Sonakshi Sinha points out, is perhaps his most endearing trait. “I have achieved quite a bit today, but I am still a work-in-progress,” he states. Three years and five films later, he is on the verge of entering the industry’s league of self-sustaining successful actors. He knows there is no room for complacency. “My biggest fear is disappearing from the industry or becoming a has-been.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 49

music

ma ha devan

th am pi

a synonym e m co e b s a h la ra e K h on NH 47 in tc re st A s g n o S r e v o Bridge

haikkudam Bridge, a narrow corridor con-

necting the Vyttila-Alappuzha stretch along NH 47 in Ernakulam, Kerala, was known for accidents, traffic jams and lack of street lights until July 2013. That’s when a Malayalam TV channel, Kappa TV, telecast its show Music Mojo with songs performed by a bunch of young musicians who’d happened to come together to fulfil their passion for music. They had gathered in a rented room near the bridge for practice and had composed a few songs of their own, apart from doing some cover versions, spanning genres from heavy metal and melody to Carnatic and Hindustani. They had no plans to form a band and had no name either. But the reality show’s producers insisted on one, saying their music could not be aired without a band name. That is how they picked ‘Thaikkudam Bridge’. Suddenly, the stretch between Vyttila and Aroor along NH 50 open

47 was known for music more than its traffic. The irony is that the name was chosen only after the shoot was over. “We all slept over it, but nothing worked out. It was Piyush Kapoor, a vocalist and guitarist of the band, who suggested this name. He is from Lucknow and Thaikkudam Bridge was the only place he knew in Kochi, hence he suggested the name of that place for the band. Initially it sounded funny,” says Peethambaran Menon, the only senior citizen in a band that has broken barriers and won hearts in Kerala with its music. Thaikkudam Bridge is a 14-piece multilingual, multi-genre band with a unique blend of classical, rock, reggae, folk and Hindustani. It began as no more than an idea of making a sample track of a Rahman medley, and it was the singer cousins Siddharth Menon and Govind Menon who were keen on it. “Siddharth was so passionate about singing. He desperately wanted to become a singer. I have been a keyboard program27 october 2014

kudam Bridge ik a h T t e e M c. si u m t a for gre

Shah ina K K

A 14-piece multilingual, multi-genre band with am Bridge’s d u k ik a h T i, n usta folk and Hind , e a g g re , k c ro d of classical, n le b e u iq n u a greatest strength lies in its versatility

mer and had no ambition to become a vocalist. We thus did a cover and sent it to the team of Music Mojo. They responded positively and asked us to do a few songs,” says Govind Menon. After they got an invitation from Kappa TV, Govind and Siddharth roped in a group of like-minded friends and colleagues in Mumbai, Chennai and Kochi. “In the beginning, we had no plans to form a band, we had never imagined that such a band would be born and would go viral as it does now,” says Govind, “We all gathered on a common theme, which is music, that everyone was fond of only for the reality show because everyone had their own careers in music.” The team was asked to prepare 12 songs for the show, which at first seemed like a target too high to achieve. “We even thought of dropping the idea of performing for the reality show because we were not sure how many of our friends would be able to dedicate time for it, but all of them were ex27 october 2014

cited about the show and were ready to spend time on it. All of them were either my friends or Siddu’s friends,” says Govind, who believes that their bonds of friendship and passion for music combined to give the band its success. So far, Thaikkudam Bridge has performed on 64 stages in India and overseas. What is the USP of this Kerala-born band? Versatility. “We do all genres of music,” says Govind, “We have eight vocalists and most of our team members are multi-taskers. I believe that in itself is the strength of the band.” Rock and folk, Western and eastern, old Malayalam melodies and fast numbers—anything that makes for rousing music. No Malayalee can resist Fish Rock, for example. The lyrics of this song, composed in folk style, sound like a delicious list of a variety of fish. Then Nostalgia, composed for the reality show, is a fine package of the evergreen melodies that every Malayalee keeps close at heart. Thaikkudam Bridge’s remake open www.openthemagazine.com 51

of Michael Jackson’s Beat It, released last year on the late icon’s birth anniversary of 29 August, has had half a million hits on YouTube. Many of the Malayalam hits of the 80s and 90s have been resurrected. The band was careful not to ‘meddle’ in a way that would kill the soul of the original, though. Not-socelebrated tracks, such as Haq Allah from the film Black and White, were performed too.

Band members (from top to bottom) Peethambaran Menon, Govind Menon and Ruthin Thej; Siddharth Menon (bottom right)

he band has musicians who are specialists in various genres of music. Mithun Raju, the lead guitarist, was a former member of the band Motherjane. Krishna Bongane and Nila Madhav Mohapatra, the star vocalists of the band, are originally from Mumbai and are disciples of Ustad Rashid Khan. Piyush Kapoor, the rock specialist and guitarist, is from Lucknow and has been a friend of Siddharth Menon. Ashok Nelson, who would have joined politics if he had not been a musician, plays the guitar. The only son of former minister and CPM politburo member MA Baby, he was encouraged by his father to take up music. “I started learning the guitar forced by my father. Later, I realised my passion for music, but even after that I had no plans of choosing music as a career.” Ashok pursued a degree in law and then migrated to Chennai to study sound engineering, where he had Govind as classmate. Vian Fernandez, a vocalist and guitarist who was a finalist on Sony TV’s X-Factor; Anish TN , a jazz player; and Vipin Lal and Christin Jose, vocalists, were among those who gathered in the room near the bridge in support of their friends Siddharth and Govind. Despite the band’s success, Govind is modest about his own talent as a singer, saying he prefers to play the violin, programme the keyboard and compose music. “I do sing, but I know better than anyone else that I am not a good singer.” As the lead composer of songs that have gone viral, such as Fish Rock and Nostalgia—which he rendered as a vocalist as well— and Siva, Govind believes that he was born to be a music director. He said goodbye to formal education after class 10. “I had already informed my parents that I had no plans to study further. Then I joined a polytechnic for a diploma course, which I

“Once I was deeply touched by a call. A girl told me ed. She would s ly a r a p s a w r years as she fo n e d id r d e b er had been often listen to our song that her moth s... and had improved co nsiderably ”

dropped in six months. I knew that I was not capable of doing anything other than music. Hence, I boarded a train to Chennai to study sound engineering.” Even that, he soon realised, was not exciting enough. “I lost interest, though I completed the course.” Govind, who started his music career as a keyboard programmer, has been in the film industry for over seven years. Before the accidental birth of Kerala’s own multi-genre band, he had been busy composing songs and background score for movies. His long cherished dream was to get a career in film music direction. Today, he does not want to elaborate on the hard battles he fought to get an entry to the film industry and make space for himself. “It is the same old story of knocking each and every door, begging for an opportunity, being humiliated and hurt. Everyone in the industry may have such stories to tell.” Even the bitter experience of being slapped by a celebrity musician in a studio only gets a shrug from him. “He did not like my composition and slapped me in front of others; I was deeply hurt, but did not react. I only cried.” Peethambaran Menon, Govind’s father, was once an engineer in the state irrigation department, but is so involved with music now that he can’t get enough of it post retirement, touring within and without the country with his son and his friends. At 58, his grey-haired presence in monotone shirts and a mundu and red head-band gives the band a special appeal that has captivated multiple generations of Malayalee music lovers across the world. “I am so lucky to have such an exciting retired life,” he says, having reclaimed a passion that he had kept buried deep in his heart for some 30 years while he went about his job trying to make ends meet. When Govind received the channel’s invitation, the first name that came to his mind was his father’s. “I wanted him to sing,” he says, “I wanted him to come back to the world of music.” In the old days, he had won several district and state level music competitions as a student. He later joined Voice of Thrissur, one of the most popular music troupes in Kerala during the early 70s, and had been a lead singer. Music directors like the late Johnson and Ouseppachan were part of the team. Peethambaran Menon once even had an opportunity to share a stage with the famous KJ Yesudas. But he had to give it all up. “I found it hard to maintain my family and music together. [The latter] demanded extensive travel which was practically impossible for me. I had to choose. Rearing kids was more important than my love for music. I almost stopped stage performances after joining government service. I was very close to Johnson. He used to enquire whether I was still singing, going for gaana melas. I often lied to him that [my

siddha27rtoctober h menon2014

schedule] was packed with these, because it would sadden him to know that I had buried my passion for music.” One among the 12 songs composed by Govind and his team for the reality show was a lullaby that his father used to sing for him when he was an infant. It was a song from a Malayalam movie of the 60s, rendered by Peethambara Menon in a distinct style. “Initially, I was slightly hesitant,” he says about joining the band, “I was not sure whether I would be able to meet the expectations of Govind and his friends. But I managed.” The songs he has sung, all have a folksy flavour and took no time in going viral along with the other old Malayalam melodies and rock numbers performed by other band members.

ho is the star attraction of the team? Govind has no doubt that it is none other than his cousin: “It is incredible to see the kind of madness expressed by girls for Siddharth.” The sparkling eyes, curly hair and innocent smile of the 25-year-old lead singer go well with his melancholy voice, especially while singing old melodies. Born and brought up in Mumbai, Siddharth did a degree in commerce, for which he had never developed a passion. After his BCom, he too migrated to Chennai to study music where he met most of the band’s members. Now in the spotlight of popular attention, he wears his stardom lightly, admitting a fan following only when pressed with the evidence. “A girl used to call me very often. Now, I cannot attend all calls. She was madly in love with my songs and fell into a kind of depression when I ignored her calls. Surprisingly, she was a medical student. Once her mother called me and requested me to talk to her as she was not even eating and sleeping properly. I talked to her and tried to make her understand the reality. She does not call so frequently now, but often sends messages. I respond sometimes because I want her to be happy.” He has other such stories to tell. “Once I was deeply touched by a call. A girl told me that her mother had been bedridden for years as she was paralysed. She would often listen to our songs, especially melodies like Nostalgia, and had improved considerably. The girl told me that her mother looks happy and has started smiling.” Siddharth has carved out a niche for himself as a playback singer in the Malayalam film industry as well, and his songs are widely appreciated. He is also interested in having a go at acting and modelling if the chance arises. He has a few offers, but nothing has been finalised yet. The story of Thaikkudam Bridge is not only one of bonding over music. It is also about the unconventional teaming up of a father and son. “When I stopped schooling by class 10, my father did not force me to continue. He stood by me in all my uncertainties. He supported me, even though I had no definite alternate plans other than a vague idea of living with music. He dropped music to rear my siblings and me. That’s why I want him to sing again,” says Govind. “I will sing as long as my son asks me to. He is God’s gift,” says the father. Peethambara Menon refused to measure his son’s success by the traditional yardsticks of a career, and it has worked out well for everyone. Not least, for Kerala’s music lovers. n open www.openthemagazine.com 53

books

The New Heroes of MBA Lit The rise of authors from the IIT/IIM milieu gives Chetan Bhagat’s audience the stories of the homes they adopted and the ones they left behind—in Devanagari Snigdha Poonam

young man from a middle class family in a small

town has just ‘finished his graduation’ from a local college, and is sent off to the nearest big city to attend coaching classes for the CAT, that gateway to the Indian Institute of Management (IIM). There will be all-night parties in hostel rooms where he will drink beer. He will slowly get to know girls; both good girls (who will keep it to coffee dates at Café Coffee Day) and bad girls (who will kiss him after getting him tipsy on vodka they have stolen from their father’s cupboard). There will be some drama, but he will make it to a decent-enough MBA school and find the girl he will eventually take home to his parents. One of the set models of thriving IIT/IIM-centric English fiction, inspired by indefatigable financier-turned-author Chetan Bhagat— except this is the plot of a Hindi novel, Kulfi & Cappuccino

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(Hind Yugm Prakashan, 2014), by Ashish Chaudhary, a 28-year-old content writer with the BBC. Chaudhary, too, was once a young man, packed off from his hometown in Udaipur to the state capital, Jaipur, to attend coaching classes for MBA entrance tests. Today, he’s a man on a mission: “Hindi mein popular fiction ko zinda karne ki chaahat pale baithe hain; pagal hain” (The writer’s cultivated the desire to revive popular fiction in Hindi; he’s mad), says the bio. His ‘madness’ is the result of deep frustration with the dominance of the English language over the imagination of the young. ‘Saare love story angrezi mein hi kyon, Hindi padhne wale pyaar nahin karte kya?’ (‘Why are all love stories in English? Don’t people who read in Hindi fall in love?’), asks one of his posts on the book’s Facebook page. Earlier this year, Flipkart agreed to open advance booking for a Hindi 27 october 2014

rajendra singh

Ashish Chaudhary

“Don’t people who read in Hindi fall in love?” This BBC content writer and former MBA aspirant now dreams of reviving popular Hindi fiction book for the first time, and 200 copies of his book , priced at Rs 132 on the e-retailer’s site, were booked before it released in April, says his publisher, Hind Yugm Prakashan’s Shailesh Bharatwasi. “If Chetan Bhagat’s books sell more in Hindi translation than in English,” he argues, “we haven’t even begun to meet the demand for Hindi popular fiction.” Chaudhary isn’t the only one dreaming. Over the past five years, a whole crop of young Hindi writers has risen to challenge the monopoly of English-language publishing over the readership for Indian commercial fiction (in the same price bracket), and to re-establish the idea that reading a Hindi book is no less fun that watching a Hindi movie or listening to a Hindi song. Mostly made up of men—Divya Prakash Dubey, Chandan Pandey, Nikhil Sachan, Prachand Praveer, Ashish Chaudhary—the new wave also features some women, like Anu Singh Choudhary. They are uppercaste and upwardly mobile, from engineering or management backgrounds (IIT, BHU, Symbiosis, Roorkee), and have left small towns in the Hindi-speaking belt (Benares, Munger, Lucknow, Barmer, Devaria, Ranchi) to make it in the big city (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Gurgaon). Most Hindi writers market their books through the inter27 october 2014

net and social media, more so than their English counterparts, perhaps. Chaudhary is in the middle of producing the second music video to promote Kulfi & Cappuccino; Praveer’s website already has a video outlining the premise of Alpahari Grihatyagi (Harper Hindi, 2010), and Dubey uploads a video trailer on YouTube, using cinema, animation and text, before the release of every book. Almost all contemporary Hindi writers have active Facebook fan pages for their books; for many, the internet is the only way to cultivate a reader base. “Aapne dekha hai Hindi books ko kahan rakhte hain Crossword mein (Have you seen where they keep Hindi books in Crossword bookstore)?” Chaudhary asks. “At the very back, piled atop each other.” Chaudhary wanted his book to be launched at a shopping mall, because that is where his potential readers were going to be, “not at India Habitat Centre”. Not everyone is writing in Hindi for the same reason. Some do it because they are more comfortable in Hindi than they are in English, some because they believe there are stories that can only be told in Hindi, and some because they feel they can only be honest as storytellers if they write in Hindi. The success of Hindi blogging, the faith of indie Hindi publishers and the emergence of e-retailing and social media mean that these young writers are telling the stories of their time in their language, as well as bringing back characters and ways of life that no longer appear in popular Indian fiction.

oaching institutes are their first point of contact with the big bad world, and many of these writers are doing wonderful things with how they impact the social life of small towns; the stories of Divya Prakash Dubey, for example, sharply explore how a family’s social capital is interlinked with how well its children do in entrance tests. In ‘Time’, a story from Dubey’s Masala Chai (Hind Yugm Prakash, 2014) an IAS couple in Kanpur keeps up a subterfuge that will alienate their son forever: they see no reason why their friends and family should know their son isn’t at IIT but at a bottom-rung college in Delhi. In Kulfi & Cappuccino, the hero’s father wryly proclaims at the outset: “Har daur ka apna ek gur hota hai (Every era has its one big pull), while sending him off on his great journey: “Aur package iss daur ka gur hai” (and the one for this era is the salary package). He wants his son to work at an MNC, like the children of Vermaji and Sharmaji, so that he too can go around the mohalla showing off the plane ticket when the corporate executive son flies home on company expense. ‘Package’ is indeed the biggest leveller of our time, and the authors of Hindi’s new wave have personally had to contend with it. At 21, having finished a year at the coaching institute in Jaipur, Chaudhary told his parents that an MBA was not for him; 32- year-old Dubey, from Kanpur, works in Mumbai as a marketing manager at the telecommunications company Idea and has recently started writing for Bollywood. There are other realities of the quest for the New Indian Good Life that young Hindi writers play with, such as the perceived relationship between the English language and modernity. In Kulfi & Cappuccino, the students of Total Success Academy (an actual coaching centre in Jaipur), are open www.openthemagazine.com 55

Divya Prakash Dubey

This 32-year-old Kanpur native works in Mumbai as a marketing manager and film writer. Masala Chai follows his debut, Terms & Conditions Apply

courtesy: hind yugm prakashan

stunned to discover a class in personality development, where they are asked by a polished, suit-clad ‘ma’am’ to introduce themselves in English. In Dubey’s ‘Ruby Spoken English Class’, a story from his second book, Masala Chai, a similarly appealing teacher puts the students through ‘social activities’; guys have to talk to girls in English while looking them in the eye. Once this hurdle is overcome, ma’am perhaps knows, a young Indian man can conquer the world; they could be asking a girl out to Café Coffee Day next. In several stories by contemporary Hindi writers, young people begin the life planned for them all along—of marketing targets and project reports, rented apartments and roommates, live-in partners and movies and dinners at the mall— and often end up confused or lost. The difficulty young men face in dealing with the idea of newly liberated women, which they conflate with the emphasis on self-gratification in their materialistic world, is the base for a powerful existential crisis. One of them is ‘Revolver’, an ingeniously crafted, achingly persistent story of failed love in the collection Ishq Fareb (Penguin Hindi, 2010) by Chandan Pandey, winner of Hindi literature award Jnanpith Navlekhan Puraskar (the prize is Rs 1 lakh and publication). In Pandey’s story, the protagonist doesn’t only hold his old lover responsible for betraying him, but also her new life, which set her on the path to deceit and manipulation. Would she still have thrown him out of her life if they had never left Benares, if she didn’t live alone and take her own decisions, if she hadn’t been carried away by the money-obsessed, morally vacuous world of advertising? Many mix the stories of young people learning to live on their own with the stories of characters they have left behind 56 open

in their hometowns, sometimes negotiating caste, class and religion with a maturity rare in their contemporaries in English fiction; a Durjoy Datta or Ravinder Singh. ‘Bisesar Bo Ki Premika’ from Anu Singh Choudhary’s collection Neela Scarf (Hind Yugm Prakashan, 2014) is the story of Bisesar Bo, the wife of Bisesar, whose family has worked for generations at the house of a zamindar for very little in return: a few bags of grain at harvest-time and luga-dhoti-bichiya (a gift of clothes and a silver toe ring) at weddings. Their time is spent fulfilling every need of the patron’s family, from bringing the right flowers for the malkain’s (matriarch’s) puja to applying a paste of chandan on the badki kaniya’s (older daughter-inlaw’s) back. And now, Bisesar and his family must pass the ultimate test: the older son has asked Bisesar to send his wife unescorted to him. Never to be fazed, Bisesar Bo sets a condition that will rankle for the rest of his life: she will sleep with him if he lets Bisesar sleep with his wife. Choudhary, a 35-year-old media professional working in Delhi, grew up in the Bihari town of Siwan in a similar set-up, and the Bhojpuri wedding songs scattered through the story are reproduced from her mother’s notebook. In one of the stories from Namak Swadanusar (Hind Yugm Prakashan, 2013) by Nikhil Sachan, Bhau Saheb, a smalltime, saffron-bathed demagogue locally equated with the jungle lion, rouses the people of a Hindu mohalla, Lalkuan, to avenge the rumoured destruction of the tatti ghar ke pas wala mandir (the temple by the public toilet) by people of a Muslim mohalla, Pilkuan. An 11-year-old named Chhuttan is anointed Chhota Bhau and entrusted with the plan to break the masjid and build a temple in its place; instead of playing chor-police at school, he now leads the children in a game of 27 october 2014

mar-kutauwal, in which kids don saffron T-shirts and turbans, and pretend to turn the opposition into a pile of corpses. Thirty-year-old Sachan grew up in Kanpur, studied at IIT and IIM, and currently works as consultant at KPMG, a business advisory firm in Gurgaon. He went to a Hindimedium school, with a deep “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] ethos”, and fell in love with its library, where he read the whole sweep of Hindi literature, from Kabir to Uday Prakash. On 14 September, which is observed as Hindi Diwas, a Hindi news channel ran a programme that reverse-mocked the idea of Hindi as an inferior language by celebrating “Hindi Medium Types”. Sachan was the star of the show. “The occasional recognition didn’t mean my life is any easier as a Hindi writer,” Sachan says. “One day my publisher, Shaileshji, and I went all around Connaught Place asking the pavement booksellers to keep copies of my book, but none wanted to take the risk,” he said. “We are still living through a time where most English medium schools punish their students for uttering a word of Hindi. There’s a long way to go.” Language is a contentious issue within the community of contemporary Hindi writers, marked by sharp divisions in how it is approached on the page. Choudhary’s book uses a Hindi-speaking, Tier II city-based 18-year-old’s casual vocabulary (example: “Flirt kar rahe ho?”). Dubey’s books are littered with English words, but he employs Devanagari for everyday words and Roman letters for others, with long emails between MNC employees written in the latter. Choudhary prefers her English words in Devanagari; “If Hindi can accommodate words from Urdu and Farsi, then English too deserves a chance.” Prachand Praveer, a 32year old from Munger in Bihar who works at a company in Gurgaon, presents the stories in the second part of Alpahari Grihatyagi with this remarkable proposition: the stories, originally written in English and missing several pages, were found in an exercise book at a raddi shop in Patna and were translated—and thus completed—for Hindi readers by the great poet Pandit Sashidhar Shastri. (Praveer dedicates this section of the book, titled ‘Gul Factory Ki Mahan Dastan’, to Don Quixote.)

literary-minded Hindi-bhashi from that time, he started curating a Hindi blog, Hind Yugm, which became, with some help from Orkut, a large enough community of writers, poets and editors for Bharatwasi to venture into Hindi publishing in 2010. He identified his target readership: “People who have recently seen money. They have moved to cities, started speaking in English, but still want their entertainment in Hindi.” Bharatwasi, who took on this last name (literally: a person living in India) at the age of 16, when he moved out of his caste-ordered village, runs a one-man operation. He receives about 100 proposals every month, many over Facebook, which he sifts for distinctive voices; a network of literarily-inclined civil service aspirants in Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar edit and proofread; and a small press in Mayur Vihar prints the books, which are sold on e-retailing websites such as Flipkart, Infibeam and Homeshop 18, priced between Rs 100 and Rs 200. He complains about the lack of a centralised distribution network for Hindi literature and the monopoly of old Hindi publishers over the existing channels, which together make it impossible for him to get his books to stores. Also, the indifference of the Hindi literary establishment, the fact that a bestselling Hindi novel is limited to sales of 2,000 copies and that he is yet to make money on his enterprise—but he doesn’t consider his achievements to be small, either. Hind Yugm Prakashan now publishes close to 30 titles a year. And, according to an update, Kulfi & Cappuccino is now sold out on Flipkart every three days. It marks a beginning. Early this September, in a first-of-its-kind initiative, Delhi’s Connaught Place outlet of Oxford Bookstore organised a panel discussion on young Hindi writing. There was an audience of no more than 50 people—readers, students, professors, writers—but the air was so taut with nervous excitement you worried you would destroy the moment even by shifting in your chair. Internal differences aside—“Do heroiney aapas mein kabhi dost nahin ho sakti” (like actresses, Hindi writers can never be friends with each other), says Ashish Chaudhary—everyone hopes that there will soon be a day when they can live off their writing, when a Hindi writer will be able to advertise an upcoming book on the cover of The Times of India, like Bhagat. “Ho sakta hai agle JLF mein Hindi popular fiction par bhi baat ho (Perhaps the next edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival will have a session on Hindi popular fiction),” says Bharatwasi. Not so big a mainstream dream for writers who are already shaping the future of popular Indian publishing. n

Over the last five years, the success of Hindi blogging, the faith of indie Hindi publishers and e-retailing mean that a small crop of young writers are telling the stories of their cities and hometowns in their own language

any popular Hindi titles are published by Hind Yugm,

a publishing company which has just moved to a middle -income apartment in Mayur Vihar; formerly run out of a room in Delhi’s Jia Sarai, surrounded by IAS (Indian Administrative Service) training institutes and academies offering mastery of 1,800 English words required to crack most entrance exams. Publisher Shailesh Bharatwasi, a 31-year-old engineering graduate from Mathura, came to Delhi from Uttar Pradesh eight years ago to prepare for the Indian Engineering Services (IES) entrance test. Like many a

27 october 2014

Snigdha Poonam has written for The New York Times and other publications in India and abroad open www.openthemagazine.com 57

bookE sR PRIZE Book of Life Richard Flanagan has won the Man Booker for his epic around the Burma Death Railway RAJNI GEORGE

‘E

lectricity and radio were

yet to arrive and were it not that it was the 1920s, it could have been the 1990s or the 1850s.’ A remote Tasmanian hamlet of 40 is home to surgeon Dorrigo Evans and the stoic men who have survived the depression of the 1890s, when men died of starvation: this stark idyll begins a long journey. Thereon, we visit the Javanese highlands, where Dorrigo leads a thousand imprisoned soldiers, mostly fellow Australians, to the Line; an illicit affair between Dorrigo and his uncle’s wife, unfolding between Melbourne and a Japanese prisoner of war (POW) camp on the infamous Burma Death Railway; and the chilling post-war Tokyo adventures of Major Nakamura, the POW camp commandant who kills for a new identity. Such is the epic trajectory of 2014 Man Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan’s panoramic tale of love and war, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto Windus, 480 pages). On 14 October, 53-year-old Flanagan became the third Australian to win the prestigious award for this solemn, lyrical novel written in many drafts (reportedly burned each time) over 12 years and completed the day his father—one of the POWs—died. The ‘Death Railway’, the 415-km long ‘Line’ created by Japan’s Imperial Army in 1943 as World War II came to a boil, was used to move troops and provisions between Bangkok and Burma during Japan’s Burma campaign, and 9,000 Australians were among the many captured and put to work. “I do not come out of a literary

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Richard Flanagan

tradition,” Flanagan said in his acceptance speech at London’s Guildhall. “I come from a tiny mining town in the forest on an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.” Flanagan hails from Longford in Tasmania, whose capital, Hobart, he now calls home. The island state is part of Australia, itself a part of the Commonwealth united by the British Empire, that outdated yet culturally potent legacy. This descendant of Irish convicts became a Rhodes Scholar, reading history at Oxford and going on to create a steady and colourful body of work reflecting the necessary hybridity of post-colonial, post-global existence. He has always been ambitious, always taken risks. Flanagan began with four works of non-fiction, one of them the autobiography of a notorious conman, John Friedrich, which he is said to have ghostwritten. In 2002, he won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001), an unlikely

account of a nineteenth century forger which New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani pronounced ‘phantasmagorical’ and, ultimately, ‘stunning’. The fantastic canvas of criminality and vice propels the arc of many of Flanagan’s dramatic tales. Death of a River Guide (1994), about a drowning man’s reminisces; The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997), a bestseller about Slovenian immigrants which was made into a film; The Unknown Terrorist (2006), about a pole dancer accidentally entangled with a suspected bomber; and Wanting (2008), twin stories of Dickens and an Aboriginal orphan. The books have been published in 26 countries. It is a pity that it is one of his least inventive—and perhaps one of his less even—novels which has won our attention, but if his oeuvre is any indication, this will be the beginning of an even more interesting era. As Flanagan said at Guildhall, “Novels are life, or they are nothing.” n 27 october 2014

science

stroke It is caused by a blood clot blocking blood flow in the brain, which results in shortage of oxygen. Many nerve cells die, the upshot being motor, sensory and cognitive problems

After We Die A study of the near-death experiences of people who suffered cardiac arrests points to a possible afterlife

Fish Move Poleward

s there some scientific truth

to the existence of an afterlife? According to a new study in Resuscitation, there appears to be an afterlife, although the evidence currently suggests only a brief version. For the study, the researchers spent four years examining cases of people who suffered cardiac arrests at 15 hospitals in the UK, US and Austria. A total of 2,060 people suffered cardiac arrests in these hospitals during the time frame. Among them, a total of 360 people had been revived after the heart attack. About 40 per cent of the revived patients who were able to undergo structured interviews reported experiencing a type of ‘awareness’ during the period when they were ‘clinically dead’. About a third of them reported experiencing feelings of slowing down or speeding up during the time, and about one in five said they had felt an unusual sense of peacefulness. Thirteen per cent of the individuals claim feeling separated from their bodies. Another 13 per cent felt their senses being heightened. Some others claimed seeing a bright light, the appearance of the sun, or the

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feeling they were drowning. Among the individuals, an unnamed 57-year-old social worker from Southampton described vividly how he felt leaving his body and watching the medical staff try to resuscitate him from the corner of the room. This individual, although clinically dead for three minutes, was able to accurately describe the people in the room and the sounds and activities of his resuscitation. His medical records corroborated his account and specifically supported his descriptions and the use of an automated external defibrillator. According to the researchers, many more people who are revived after being clinically dead probably have such experiences. However, brain damage or the use of drugs when trying to revive them stops them from recalling such experiences. The researchers write in the journal: ‘Cardiac arrest survivors commonly experience a broad range of cognitive themes, with 2 per cent exhibiting full awareness. This supports other recent studies that have indicated consciousness may be present despite clinically undetectable consciousness.’ n

Large numbers of fish will disappear from the tropics by 2050, and changing temperatures will drive more fish into the Arctic and Antarctic waters, finds a new University of British Columbia study. Using the same climate change scenarios as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, researchers projected a large-scale shift of marine fish and invertebrates. In the worst-case scenario, where the Earth’s oceans warm by 3° C by 2100, fish could move away from their current habitats at a rate of 26 km per decade. Under the best-case scenario, where the Earth warms by 1° C, fish would move 15 km every decade. This is consistent with changes in the last few decades. n

Brain Can Replace Injured Nerves

According to a study published in Science, researchers at Lund University and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have shown that following an induced stroke in mice, support cells, so-called astrocytes, start to form nerve cells in the injured part of the brain. “One of the major tasks now is to explore whether astrocytes are also converted to neurons in the human brain following damage or disease… If the new mechanism also operates in the human brain and can be potentiated, this could become of clinical importance not only for stroke patients, but also for replacing neurons which have died, thus restoring function in patients with other disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease,” says Olle Lindvall, Senior Professor of Neurology. n 27 october 2014

tech&style

Sony 4K Ultra Short Throw Projector It beams huge 4k images on the wall from less than a foot away gagandeep Singh Sapra

video unlimited 4k This service from Sony Entertainment Network is the world’s first and only 4K Ultra HD video download service that provides access to a regularly updated library of fulllength feature films and TV shows in 4K Ultra HD. It was launched in September 2013

Runabout Frederique w Constant

Price on request

The Runabout range by Frederique Constant is a tribute to the legendary Runabout gentlemen’s sports boats of the 1920s. Presented in stainless steel, the 43mm bevelled case is hand-polished. The marine heritage of the Runabout watch is shown on the case back with an engraving of the propeller of the yacht and a sapphire crystal through which the movement can be clearly seen. n

$50,000 Bose Soundlink Color Bluetooth Speaker

ith Sony’s state-of-the-art 4k

Ultra Short Throw projector, you can convert any wall in the house into a movie screen, adding luxury to your home entertainment. The laser light source of the projector can put up an image as big as 147 inches, transforming your living space into a movie hall. The laser light source has an automatic optimisation feature that enhances the contrast in accordance with the scene. This results in a bright image with high contrast. The engine in this projector ensures that peak brightness is achieved at least 10 times faster than conventional projector lamps. Its ultra short-throw lens lets you place the projector right next to your wall—so no viewer shadows to interfere with the projection. You can adapt your image size anywhere from 66 inches to 147 inches diagonally. The Picture Position function allows you to instantly zoom in and out to get the size you need.

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The projector is designed to blend with your home decor, and its refined aluminium finish adds a luxurious look to your living room. The unit comes with speakers and a cabinet to accommodate other home electronics, giving you not only a neat storage unit, but also doing away with exposed cables. Place it next to an open wall, plug it to a power source and start experiencing large screen 4K Ultra High definition movies. It is that simple. The projector connects to cable and IP feeds, and with its built-in Netflix app as well as Video Unlimited 4K, you get a wide range of content at the touch of a button. Sony also provides you with some free ambient content that can turn your living room into a relaxing lounge for a great art experience with your friends. The projector is available only in New York right now, but will start rolling out to other cities across the US over the next few years. n

Rs 11,138

Designed to be a travel speaker with 8-hour battery life and weighing nearly 500 gm, this speaker uses voice prompts to connect with Bluetooth devices. It comes in black, white, blue, mint and red colour options. The speaker recharges using any micro USB charger. Bose combines an exclusive dual-opposing passive radiators and two high efficiency transducers in this small portable package to ensure rich, deep and crisp sound output. There is also a 3.5 mm jack to connect your speaker to a wired source. Essential controls are on the unit itself, so you can manage your playlist directly from the speaker. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

HAUNTING holly wood The real Annabelle doll, which inspired Annabelle, was a ‘Raggedy Ann’ doll gifted as a birthday present by a mother to her daughter Donna in 1970. The doll was believed to be possessed by the spirit of a dead child. The doll lives on as an exhibit in a private museum in Connecticut

Annabelle Unable to frighten or snap out of its trite references to classics, this horror flick disappoints ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Tamanchey Director Suryaveer Singh Bhullar cast Nikhil Dwivedi, Richa Chadda,

Mahesh Balraj

Score ★★★★★

on, Annab Cast Ward Hort R Leonetti Director John

elle Wallis

he doll Annabelle is not a debutante. She made her first Hollywood appearance in The Conjuring (2013), when paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren exorcised ‘the devil’ from her and placed her as exhibit ‘A’ in their museum. Now, apparently, she has put on some fresh mascara and eye shadow and is out on another date with Satan. This time she’s joined the exotic doll collection of Mia Gordon (Annabelle Wallis), a mother and housewife, circa 1969. This was the era of the automation of American suburbia and thus all kinds of things start happening to the gadgets. The record player suddenly starts up on its own accord, as does the electric sewing machine. There is static on the radio and the phones and the popcorn maker explode. Mia and her husband, John (Ward Horton), are forced to move out and into an apartment building for their own safety. Annabelle the doll, identified as the culprit, is thrown out into the trash can,

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but mysteriously turns up again for a fresh bout of haunting. Unfortunately, the poltergeist activity in this movie is not up to the mark. The images are culled from many previous classics— particularly The Omen, in scenes involving the church, a priest as a central character and a symbol of the devil that keeps appearing. But where the film really falls short is in maintaining a balance between the aberrant occurrences and ‘normality’. This is the key to a good horror film, and because the characters in Annabelle are put on tenterhooks from the word go, you are always waiting and ready for a shock, but not once are you caught unawares. Annabelle, herself, though, does have her moment in the sun. In a scene where Father Perez (Tony Amendola) volunteers to put her away in his church, where he presumes her evil will be neutralised, she protests most emphatically to keep her final date with Satan. The film is well shot, but disappointing in its genre. n

Tamanchey looks like a movie where the financiers got robbed, considered filing for bankruptcy, but then decided to go ahead with the shooting anyway. It is a rather strange sort of ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ experience. Often, in one scene the characters sit down and talk about what they are going to do and then in the next scene, they sit down and talk again, and you suddenly find out that they have already done what they said they would do. It was done offstage. An outlaw movie emerges with a con girl (Richa Chadda) and a con boy (Nikhil Dwivedi) living a life of crime. They meet in a police van and soon realise that they are made for each other. The con girl can drink any man under the table, shoot straight and deal with sex like a commodity of exchange. The con boy has skills of his own and is a smooth operator who can talk the hind legs off a donkey. Together they work for a local drug lord, and when that isn’t enough, turn into bank robbers. The whole thing is suicidal bravado. ‘Kaun Marega Crorepati?’ is the joke, and the boy and girl hold hands with all guns blazing. Bonny and Clyde couldn’t have had it better. Avoid this movie. n AD

27 october 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

The Homely Girl is Much at Home

Who’d have thought Salman Khan could go all red in the face when it came to romance? Well, apparently the Kick star is finding it hard to strike up a winning chemistry with Sonam Kapoor, his co-star in Sooraj Barjatya’s Prem Ratan Dhan Payo. Salman reportedly told Sonam that he finds it hard to look into her eyes and go all moony over her (even just for the sake of the camera) because she reminds him of her father Anil Kapoor. Ouch! Sonam herself has said she has no problems pretending like she’s in love with Salman “because he’s sooooooo good looking.” It probably helped that she had worked with him earlier in her debut film, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya, in which Salman had a small cameo opposite her. The actress has also revealed that she feels completely at home in the Rajshri film: “It’s the kind of wholesome family movie that I think I suit perfectly.” As it turns out, that role was famously offered to Deepika Padukone before it landed in Sonam’s lap; DP has told close friends she politely declined the offer because the script just didn’t work for her. Salman, meanwhile, has publicly declared that Sonam is the right choice for the film: “There’s something simple and homely about her. And that’s the kind of actress that fits into Sooraj’s films.” ‘Simple and homely’. Not sure Sonam’s smiling now… is she?

Sports over Slapstick

John Abraham recently returned from Abu Dhabi, where he joined Anil Kapoor, Nana Patekar, Naseeruddin Shah and Shruti Haasan for the shooting of Welcome Back, in which he replaces Akshay Kumar as the male lead. John was reportedly roped in when producer Firoz Nadiadwala fell out with his old pal Akshay over money issues. Slapstick comedy isn’t John’s forte—a fact that became painfully clear in Sajid Khan’s Housefull 2— but in Welcome Back, the actor apparently saw an opportunity to top-line a big-budget multi-starrer film, and succumbed when Mr Moneybags, Firoz, dangled a fat pay-cheque before him. It’s clear, however, that John is more excited working on Force director Nishikant Kamat’s 27 october 2014

next, and Shoojit Sircar’s period film that’ll likely go on the floors after the director wraps the Amitabh BachchanDeepika Padukone project that he’s currently filming. John’s film with Shoojit, their follow-up to last year’s Madras Cafe, is the true-life story of Kolkata’s now-legendary Mohan Bagan football club and its historic victory against the East Yorkshire Regiment in 1911. The actor’s love for football is no secret; in fact he recently acquired a sizeable stake in the NorthEast United FC team of the Indian Super League(ISL), which kicked off last week. John roped in popular singer-composer Papon to create an anthem for his team, and has apparently promised to boost his team’s morale by travelling with them throughout the ISL.

Studio Prodigal’s Desperate Moves

They may go hoarse in the face insisting that they’ve delivered a hit in their recent overpriced actioner, but the trade is sniggering at this studio’s inflated box-office numbers and its refusal to accept that recovery of investment is an unlikelihood in the case of their latest film. Insiders at the studio are closely watching the desperate measures that the honchos must take to maximise revenues. Turns out the marketing department had lined up a cross-promotional tieup with a leading electronics brand for the film, and had received roughly a dozen high-end smartphones and tablets as part of the deal. As the bosses scurried around looking for just about any means to bridge the wide gap between the film’s landing cost and its collections, one smart-alec executive reportedly came up with the bright idea to sell off these electronic items received in lieu of the deal and add the money received from the sale to the film’s recovery numbers. A junior was apparently entrusted with the responsibility of signing up on a popular trading website and peddling the items. The amount from the sale, as you can imagine, will likely be peanuts, given the film’s ridiculously high budget. But this incident is clearly a good indication of just how pressed-to-the-wall the studio is over this expensive folly of a film. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

reuters

Fast and Furious

A man carries his wife to safer ground as Cyclone Hudhud blasts—with gusts of up to 195 km an hour—a beach in Gopalpur in Ganjam district of Odisha on 12 October . The deadly cyclone has ravaged large parts of India’s east coast and killed 24 people. Around 80,000 huts were destroyed in Odisha and 6,500 homes were wrecked in Andhra Pradesh. Rescuers evacuated over 150,000 people in both these states. By 14 October, heavy rains touched off by the cyclone left behind a trail of destruction in many parts of Uttar Pradesh and killed 18 people. The name ‘Hudhud’ was contributed by Oman; in Arabic, it refers to the Hoopoe bird

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27 october 2014

AN ICON JUST GOT LARGER

GET IT ON

THE NEW NAVITIMER 46 mm