OPEN Magazine 27 January 2014

The violent end of Karachi’s supercop

The sudden fame of Chandralekha Adoor

RS 35 2 7 Ja n u a r y 2 0 14

INSIDE The Ahmedabad that died in 2002 l i f e

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e v e r y

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S A I FA I M A H OT S AV

A TRIBE WITHOUT PRINCIPLES

Can our film stars ever take a stand?

Open Mail | editor@openmedianetwork.in Editor Manu Joseph managing Editors Rajesh Jha, PR Ramesh Deputy Editor Aresh Shirali Features and Sports Editor Akshay

Sawai

Senior Editors Kishore Seram,

Haima Deshpande (Mumbai) Mumbai bureau chief Madhavankutty Pillai associate editors Dhirendra Kumar Jha, Rahul Pandita assistant editors

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

and East), Karl Mistry (West), Krishnanand Nair (South)

Manager—Marketing Raghav

Chandrasekhar

National Head—Distribution and Sales

Ajay Gupta regional heads—circulation D Charles

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

While the plight of prostitutes in the dingy alleys of Mumbai is understandable, it’s not the case everywhere (‘Men, According to Prostitutes’, 13 January 2014). It’s wrong and dishonest to dismiss the entire profession or its clientele just because of the plight of a large sub-section of people participating in that profession. There are plenty of women who It’s wrong and work regular jobs but dishonest to dismiss want to monetise their the entire profession ability to attract men of prostitution or its with sex. Such women clientele just because make a conscious choice of the plight of a large of entering the professub-section of people sion and even enjoy participating in it what they do. On the other hand, there are men who simply choose to buy sex as a service. I personally don’t see anything wrong with this. Dismissing the entire profession because of the abuses and sufferings many of them go through today is like dismissing all kinds of factory work in the early 90s owing to poor labour conditions that existed back then.  letter of the week A Cautionary Tale

publisher

R Rajmohan

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Volume 6 Issue 3 For the week 21—27 January 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover design

Divyanth Jayaraj

Anirban Ghosh

it’s a terrific interview that reveals the fickle nature of the movie business (‘The Man Who Knows Too Much’, 13 January 2014). It also reveals so much of Khalid Mohamed, who comes across as schizophrenic to say the least. He used to be a good critic and a good journalist, but ultimate power corrupts ultimately.

How biased and openly dishonest he became in his later years! As a director, he was, simply put, awful. How dare he praise his filmmaking skills? His movies were unwatchable. I feel sorry for him. And this is a cautionary tale for every film journalist who thinks he’s ‘tight’ with the stars.  Vishal Madan

What’s Immoral Sex?

this refers to ‘Not Just a Moral Question’ (20 January 2014).

Everyone should be aware of 27 january 2014

the basic ground reality of India that an overwhelming majority of its citizens do subscribe to the notion that pre-marital sex is immoral. Maybe the younger generation in the cities has become liberal, but that might constitute a minuscule minority in India. Even if 50 million Indians are okay with sex as an individual’s choice not related to one’s marital status, it still constitutes less than 5 per cent of India’s total population.

Of course, I belong to this minority. The issue we need to debate in 2014 is this: why is post-marital sex immoral if it is with someone other than one’s wedded spouse? Yes, we need to grow up.  Sachi Mohant y

Defining Rape

thank you for writing this piece (‘A Tale of Two Rape Cases’, 13 January 2014). As a woman, it is equally disturbing and disgusting to think

that our judicial system can so easily play havoc with the life of some men in the name of upholding some ridiculous notions about Indian culture and Indian women. The reason such complaints are reported is because these notions do exist among vast sections of our society, but when a court perpetuates such a culture, it does a huge disservice to the process of fostering healthier interactions between men and women.  A arefa

Seldom by Choice

i know there are others who say that prostitution is not a choice that sex workers make, or one that they accept happily, etcetera (‘Men, According to Prostitutes’, 13 January 2014). They are forced into it by society because they lack education and other skills. But then, isn’t that how we value each other? A person finds her/his place in a given job/industry by the value s/he adds. Sure, the reasons that lead to this state of being are not the best and should be improved upon, and there are several things contributing to them.  Ruchir Bhat t

this is a well written article, and it is important to generate public awareness of these problems repeatedly. I have the fullest sympathy for sex workers. The easiest way I can contribute is to give monetary help to NGOs that work for these women, and I’ll do that at the first opportunity.  adit ya menon

open www.openthemagazine.com 1

openmagazine to 56070

Doing Away with the Bar Code intolerance

A Kerala lawyer suspended for speaking about sexism on Facebook is ready to fight it out

Anima Murayath, a young lawyer who has been suspended from the Calicut Bar Association for her Facebook post revealing the sexism of male peers, is in no mood to take the arbitrary action lying down—she is going to fight it out. “I have already filed a criminal complaint against a few lawyers who tried to manhandle me in the general body meeting. I am also exploring legal options to move against the suspension,” says Murayath.

This was what she wrote in

kochi

27 january 2014

Malayalam on Facebook: ‘It has been five month since I started practising as a lawyer in Kozhikode Bar. I don’t know whether the workplace in all other places in this world is like this or not. I met several silly people of my age in the Bar as well as at my office. They address women as ‘Sugar Candy’ and follow up with comments like ‘You are so beautiful’. All of them follow the [yesteryear superhero] ‘Prem Nazir’ style in old Malayalam cinema. I think they don’t see new movies.

They patronise women and

view them as lovers, or sisters.

I express my contempt of all those who follow such a style.

Interestingly, there are some elders who make marriage proposals on seeing a woman. Are these people marriage brokers or uncles?’

It led to an angry response from male lawyers in the Bar, leading to Murayath’s suspension. A general body meeting, conducted with the intention of making Murayath apologise, saw her being verbally and physically abused. Chairs were thrown at Murayath and

another lady lawyer who supported her.

While she has found a lot of support on social networking sites and elsewhere, the Bar Association remains unrepentant. “Will she make such comments about her family members? We consider the Bar Association our family.

We gave her sufficient time to give an explanation but she was not at all polite,” says advocate BN Bineesh, former secretary of the Bar Association, who took the decision to expel Murayath. n Shahina KK

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ima babu

small world

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contents

10

The deadly local

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cover story The brazenness of Bollywood

elderly

Abandoned at Guruvayoor

gujarat

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angle

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A story of moving on after 2002

28

opinion

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AAP: hope or hype?

Person of the Week uttam khobragade

The village that switched countries in 1971

‘The goverment [knows] this is a conspiracy to frame Devyani’ Uttam Khobragade, father of diplomat Devyani Khobragade, says he will contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls haima deshpande

Don’t you think you are interfering too much in your daughter’s case?

I am not so powerful as to dictate to the Central Government a path for my daughter’s growth. She has worked hard to be where she is. She has not needed any props for her growth. And she has not been even remotely connected to this so-called visa fraud. That is why her case needs no interference. But I am her father, so obviously I’ll do what I can.

Mayawati says since Devyani is a Dalit, the Centre was slow in reacting to her case.

This is wrong. The caste angle should never have come in. She is a diplomat and diplomats are not [appointed] on the basis of their caste. An angle which was never there should never have been brought in.

How have you felt about this case?

It is a trauma but I never felt helplessness during this entire incident. The entire nation is with us. I am moved by their support. The events and counter events happened fast. When you are confident that there will be a logical end to it, there is never a sense of helplessness. The Government is fully convinced that this is a conspiracy to frame Devyani.

Who do you think is behind this conspiracy?

I do not know who is behind this.

But I know this is a conspiracy.

What is your view of Devyani’s domestic 4 open

help, Sangeeta Richard?

The case is now with the police. It depends on how they want to proceed with it. It is for the Government to take the case forward. They have said so. It is a false case and the charges against my daughter are

false. It is for the Government to see that the charges against her are dropped.

How has Devyani taken it all?

She is tough. She is my alter ego. My daughter is a very bold person who is not easily intimidated. Right now she’s an anguished mother waiting for her children to come to India.

Did you get a feeling that journalists in India do not want to get on the wrong side of the United States in this case?

(Laughs) This I cannot comment on.

Political parties have approached you and the Samajwadi Party wants to give you a ticket for the Lok Sabha elections...

Political parties have not approached me.

They have been openly supporting me during the entire crisis. I am definitely politically inclined. I am keen on entering electoral politics. If a political party gives me a ticket, I will definitely contest.

Politics needs focused people.

So you will join politics?

Wait and watch... watch and wait.

Do you have a particular constituency in mind?

All of you will come to know at an appropriate time.

Will it be for the forthcoming General Election?

Yes, I will contest the Lok Sabha elections. n

27 january 2014

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black metal

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How I Write: Ved Mehta

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life & letters

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f o r staging her own death so

she could elope with her lover 48-year-old Thane-based Marathi actress Alka Punewar disappeared on 27 December, after telling her husband she was driving to Pune for a performance with her theatre troupe. When her family hadn’t been able to reach her for two days, they contacted the police. Her car

EDM and the superstar deejay

and cellphone were found in a valley off the MumbaiPune expressway, leading to speculation that she’d had an accident, or been kidnapped, or murdered. Which was the intention, as it turns out—the accident was staged by Punewar, her boyfriend and a Panvel-based friend so that the two lovers could elope.

After a ten-day search, Punewar was found in Chennai with said boyfriend, 24-year-old Bangalorean Alok Paliwal, who she had met four years ago through a social networking site while he was studying engineering.

After she was found, Punewar was emphatic that she didn’t want to return to her husband. Which is romantic and all, but her three adult children and second husband could probably have done without the trauma of her death. n

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Shah Rukh’s reconciliation

Within two days of defending his idea of addressing public grievances via public meetings, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal decided to abandon his ‘Aam Junta Durbar’ tw i s t

“We want to work with people. I could have put a board outside my office saying ‘Public meeting between 10-12’. My guard would let 15-20 people in, and at 12, tell them, ‘Please go now, time is up’”

“I will meet people once a week.

People can post their grievances online, we will set up a call centre.

People can also send in their complaints via post” —Arvind Kejriwal, 13 January 2014

—Arvind Kejriwal, 11 January 2014

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NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

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Tagore: a poet betrayed by translation

on able Pers Unreasotnhe Week of

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Fresh Fodder for Your Twitter Feed but Twitter seems to be the Achilles heel of Minister of State Shashi Tharoor. On the night of 15 January, over 2 million followers of his were made privy to intimate messages posted on his account. While Tharoor said his account had been hacked, his wife Sunanda tweeted that she had posted the messages through Tharoor’s account, claiming they’d been sent to Tharoor by a Pakistani woman journalist Mehr Tarar. In subsequent posts, she accused Tarar of being an ISI agent who she claimed was ‘stalking my husband’.

Tharoor remains one of the most followed Indian politicians on Twitter and once landed himself in controversy with a tweet about

Call it bad luck

27 january 2014

travelling ‘cattle class’. This latest controversy has left Tharoor red faced once again.

In a last ditch effort to salvage the situation, Tharoor issued a ‘joint statement’ on Facebook asserting that they were ‘happily married and intend to remain that way.’

But about the same time, Sunanda was appearing on TV channels saying she felt “destroyed as a wife and a woman” and that she would seek a divorce from Shashi Tharoor. Will we see a ceasefire or will there be yet another salvo? Keep scrolling up and down your Twitter timelines. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

On the Contrary

Blood on the Tracks Mumbai’s fatalistic acceptance of suburban railway deaths M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

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rafiq maqbool/ap

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t the very least, the suburban train in Mumbai needs to come with a disclaimer like the one on cigarette packs—it can be fatal to those who travel on it. And instead of a photo of cancerous organs, the railway warning can have a photo of the two severed hands of Monica More.

There is something horrifically wrong in a system where a 16-year-old student steps out of the house on an ordinary day and by evening has no hands. In a clip of CCTV footage on Youtube, you can see Monica running along a train to board it at Mumbai’s Ghatkopar station. The train has started moving, but boarding a running train is something almost every passenger in the suburban rail network has done before. Many do it daily. The footage doesn’t show the actual accident, only a sudden rush of people towards the spot where she fell into a pit on the edge of the platform and her hands came under the wheels.

With no ambulances on call, Monica, one hand barely attached with a handkerchief and the other completely severed and wrapped in a piece of cloth, got taken to a hospital in an auto rickshaw. The compensation from the Railways for someone who has lost one’s limbs is Rs 4 lakh. That amount will probably not even cover hospitalisation costs, but Monica will get donations because of the publicity around her case. That only leaves the thousands of others who are similarly injured every year.

An RTI application last year showed that over 11 years up to 2012, more than 23,000 people had been killed on Mumbai’s rail network. Ullas Abraham, a journalist, was one such person. He died a day before Monica’s accident. He was merely going with his family to the suburb of Kalyan when he fell off the train. It was so crowded that his brother-in-law accompanying him did not even notice.

What is frightening is the blind spot the city has developed towards such deaths.

The causes have been plain for decades— incredible overcrowding, with compartments packed with numbers three times their capacity; the network being an arm

crush Women rush to board a local train in Mumbai, one of the world’s most crowded cities

of the Indian Railways controlled by Delhi, and local commuters having little say in its improvement; and the inertia that characterises everything in India. The system has imploded but passengers have no choice; if you have to go to work, there is no alternative.

Bureaucrats and politicians have given up on ever being able to solve the problem.

The strategy is to create alternative networks like Metros and monorails, spending tens of thousands of crore; meanwhile, the deaths and accidents keep piling up. If terrorist attacks were to kill 3,500 people a year in one city, there is not a shadow of doubt that the entire machinery of the State would be deployed to address the problem.

An RTI application showed that over 23,000 people were killed on Mumbai’s rail network over 11 years. If terrorist attacks killed 3,500 people a year in a city, the State’s entire machinery would be used to address the problem

For any solution, someone has to first start looking for answers. For example, it might be impossible to lay new tracks because the land for it is just not available.

But is there a reason why local trains cannot be turned into double-deckers or triple-deckers? It wouldn’t need impossible infrastructure overhauls. There is, in fact, a double-decker train running on those same tracks, plying long distance to Gujarat. If one train can run on those tracks, it is within the bounds of possibility that many such can. Instead, what is happening now is that trains are expanding in length, from 9-coach to 12-coach to 15-coach, expanding capacity minimally until they are so long that they go all the way from the first station to the next.

There are compromises people are expected to make in urban life. They live in smaller homes, sleep less, eat worse and waste hours going from one place to another. But risking death is not part of the equation. In Mumbai, it has become so for a vast majority. Almost certainly, Monica’s family and Ullas’ family will continue travelling on those same trains in their daily life, with those same odds of death. n 27 january 2014

real

india

A Hurried Man’s Guide to India becoming polio-free

India is set to be formally declared a poliofree nation after it recently completed three years without a single new case of the disease emerging. The World Health Organization, which observes a gestation period of three years to declare a nation polio-free, is expected to make the announcement by March end.

It Happens

A Taxi for Tommy A cab service for pets gets going in Bangalore Anil Budur Lulla jyoti karat

Historically, India has been considered the largest endemic reservoir of polio in the world. According to reports, anywhere between 50,000 to 100,000 paralytic polio cases occurred each year in the period between 1978 and 1995. In 2009, 741 new cases of polio was reported, 42 in 2010 and one case in 2011. The last case was reHistorically, ported from West Bengal, India has been when an 18-month-old girl considered the was found to have contractlargest endemic ed the disease. Currently, reservoir of Afghanistan, Pakistan and polio in the Nigeria are the only counworld tries in the world where the disease remains endemic.

sanjeev verma/ht/getty images

India with its widespread poverty, large population, poor sanitation, high levels of migration and weak public health system had been considered one of the toughest places in the world to eradicate polio. In the past few years, a large number of volunteers, doctors and medical workers were employed to carry out a rig-

orous campaign across the country to vaccinate children. Help was sought from religious leaders to convince people of the importance of immunisation. Migrant families were targetted at bus stations, on trains, at construction sites and at local festivals. Since 1995, the Government has spent about $2.5 billion on this drive.

In 2012, the WHO took India off a list of countries with active, endemic, wild polio transmission after it passed one year without registering any new case. There has been a fear that the virus could enter from Pakistan, where a spate of cases has lately been reported, but Indian officials have been able to check that by setting up immunisation booths at border crossings with Pakistan. n

four-legged passengers Pet Cabs charges a minimum of Rs 100 a ride for a distance of 4 km

W

e have heard of people who go unusual lengths to pamper their pets, but a taxi service? In Bangalore, that is now a reality. A service started this new year offers owners the facility to dial a cab to ferry their pets.

Santosh Shekhar, the man who has set up Pet Cabs, says he was partly inspired by watching a dog lover dropping off his terriers at a boarding kennel in his car. “The family was getting annoyed at their dogs, who were trying to bite the seats. They had also dirtied the expensive car,” he says.

Pet Cabs have three Maruti Omni vans with a partitioned driver’s enclosure giving ample space for the pet in the back. There is no upholstery in the pet area. Smaller and ferocious pets can also be transported in a modified cage or carry bag.

Each van has a first-aid kit, leashes and other safety features.

“We are already getting three-four pick-ups per day. There is a seat for one person to sit alongside pets at the back. Either the owner or our trained assistant has the option to sit

in the front seat,’’ he says.

A taxi service for pets is not just a luxury. Autorickshaw drivers either refuse or charge extra to ferry pets. Then, there is the constant fear of the animals jumping out in fast moving traffic. Pet Cabs charges a minimum of Rs 100 for four km, and Rs 23 per km thereafter.

The service was started on 5 January, and Shekhar says it is already doing thanks to The company well word-of-mouth. has three R Chakroberty, Maruti Omni who lives in the infotech hub of vans with Electronics the driver’s City, is moving enclosure out of Bangapartitioned off lore and is looking for her dog to be adopted. She got Pet Cabs to take the dog to the new owner’s home to familiarise it. Next week, she has an appointment with a veterinarian for a minor surgery. The pet will have to be picked up the next day and a week after delivered to its new owners. “She has booked our service,’’ says Shekhar. n 27 january 2014

business

Bollywood’s Banker Bashing Blockbuster rajanish kakde/ap

to have its music—forget broadcast media, even YouTube had little of it marketing genius? It’s a label that on offer—draw crowds into theatres has been slapped onto the actor over and over again. “The marketing often enough. And the scorching team at YRF was terrified,” Khan has success of his Dhoom 3—whether or been quoted by Reuters as saying, not you buy the Rs 500 crore “They were convinced we were box-office figure put out by Yash Raj doing something disastrous...”

Films—is reason enough not to Well, if defying a market norm dismiss the question. doesn’t take guts, what does?

That Khan considers himself an Guess what: beyond the movie’s actor-cum-marketer has been biker thrills, Kat skills and destiny evident for quite some time, long drills, not to before he subjected himself to mention its ridicule by wearing a bowler hat So, does the swipes at wherever he went—reportedly for success of Chicago School an entire year—to advertise the Dhoom 3 seal bankers, what hat-trick of hits the Dhoom Aamir Khan’s might have done franchise was betting on. So far, so reputation as the trick for it is ho-hum. He’d done much the same a market whiz? its love story. The with a bizarre haircut for an earlier film’s cornerpiece is an operatic song film. His KBC appearance and sequence, Malang, which features an Dhoom video game, again, were acrobatic Khan with a flame and a hardly the stuff of innovation. whirly Katrina Kaif in red-and-black, Ah, but as the film’s release date of and both in a dervish act of hypnotic 20 December approached, its hummability. The movie’s central marketers did something crazy. theme, however, is the story of one Instead of going all out with its Iqbal Haroon Khan’s progeny: a music soundtrack to generate a Zaahir Khan for the world at large, buzz, YRF decided to let it out only in and the other, a secret self held under dribbles. For some strange reason, cover to ensure that their acts of the studio erased the title track’s dikhayi and safai work in tandem for original back-up refrain, released mad hat marketer Aamir Khan and his out-of-the-box musical a Great Indian Stunt. only teasers of its other love songs, Stroke of genius or not, cracking a and tightened its screws on piracy in a way Bollywood had never seen. Planned as an all-digital show in complex market is no easy challenge—and few Hindi films have ever done such a spectacular job of it. Take another bow, Katrina over 4,000 halls, not counting the 500-odd for its Telugu and Tamil dubbed versions and 900 overseas, the movie’s strategy was and Aamir! Or is it Victor Acharya and YRF? n ARE SH SHIRALI Is Aamir Khan really a

The World According to Tarp Incoming US Fed chief Janet Yellen has noted the mild recovery of America’s economy; but should its bank bailouts and big-buck stimulus programme get credit for it?

Source: U.S. Commerce department compiled by Shailendra Tyagi

27 January 2014

6 4 2 0 -2 -4 -6 -8 -10

2008 2008

US quarterly GDP growth rate in %

2009 2009

2010 2010

2011 2011

2012 2012

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infographic by tarun sehgal

C IN E M A

“AAP is unwittingly playing into the hands of Indian oligopolies who were opposing FDI in retail so that they could have a monopoly... Which means it is okay for Indian corporates to rape India, [but not okay] for foreign retail... That’s exactly what crony capitalism is” eminent aviation entrepreneur and member of the Aam Aadmi Party, on the AAP government’s decision to block FDI-in-retail in Delhi

Captain Gopinath,

opinion general election

AAP: High on Hype?

A reality check for all those who are gung-ho about this new party’s all-India prospects PR Ramesh

T h e f l u x of expert opinions on the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) perhaps resembles the march of termites out of the woodwork after rain. If nothing, it is fun to watch, and worthy of a NatGeo documentary. These sober-looking creatures of the political kind certainly deserve praise for being largely uniform, and for moving in rhythmic cadence like soldiers before a roll call.

Alright, let’s cut to the chase: the intelligentsia, 24X7 television channels and the rent-a-quote mob are engaged in endless post-election analysis of the Delhi Assembly results that gave AAP 29.5 per cent of all votes and power to its ashish sharma

pivot, Arvind Kejriwal. According to them, a Kejriwal avalanche is waiting to hit the political landscape in less than 100 days, and the contest has narrowed down to a two-horse race—between the BJP prime ministerial nominee Narendra Modi and the Delhi Chief Minister.

Of course, there cannot be any quarrel with the assessment that the aam aadmi ring to the Delhi victory has spurred the hope that Aaya Rams need not necessarily be replaced by Gaya Rams. And the audacity with which AAP pulled off the numbers has strengthened the belief that there could be a real break from traditional collusive politics. The average

citizen, frustrated with spiralling prices, an indifferent system and thugs in top positions, now seems to believe that he, too, can do it.

To that extent, the AAP, in varying degrees, is a threat to established players: the idea has the potential to challenge vulnerable politicians, reality-challenged political parties and inefficient state governments. popularity contest AAP is the media’s current favourite, and in 2014’s electoral arena, Kejriwal will have media wind behind his back

Hope’s New Meaning The AAP is also gaining from the desire of Left and liberal opinion to see the BJP fail and Modi’s electoral project thwarted. A lot of intellectual energy is being expended in the expectation-enterprise of Kejriwal replacing Modi as the main talking point of political discourse in the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

The ‘media-tisation’ of politics—something that was evident largely in the West—is certain to help AAP in this perception war. With the homogenisation of aspirations, the media has acquired a role in shaping the preferences of the electorate. By all accounts, AAP is their current favourite, and in the coming electoral combat, Kejriwal will have media wind behind his back.

The new party is also fortunate to have got its Delhi mandate so close to this year’s Lok Sabha election. Before it faces routineisation or failures in Delhi, the next round of polls will already be underway across the country. The party will have the benefit of doubt and even a defeat will not be shown up as a failure.

The fascination of techies, academics and the glam crowd with this new idea has helped those spinning the impression that the Delhi debutant has already emerged as a significant force in the nation’s polity. Newspapers and TV channels routinely carry reports of AAP’s mushrooming across the country. And its backers are not willing to let details come in the way of their claims and theories.

Structural and strategic issues that play a central role in national elections are naturally inconvenient and hence brushed aside.

Pragmatism Inc Now, let’s face it: AAP’s electoral gains came from the central and eastern parts of the city state that accounts for just 1.4 per cent of the country’s population. It threw out the Congress from Delhi’s municipal area, which was the epicentre of the middle class anti-graft movement.

But when the battle terrain moved towards the suburbs that mimic the electoral behaviour of geographically contiguous states, AAP failed to make an impact.

To the discerning, there are three clear pointers. One, while Delhi’s municipal area—Kejriwal’s main staging post—got swayed by AAP, the territory beyond the municipal limits had a different electoral story to report; in these outlying parts of the city state, the BJP secured over 14 per cent more votes than AAP did.

Second, a national conquest will require AAP to build an organisation and 27 january 2014

leadership that can credibly challenge established players. With a general election barely three months away, this looks an impossible task. And if the current political movements are anything to go by, only those occupying balcony seats and those discarded by established players are crowding around AAP’s leadership table in state capitals.

This may not be enough to challenge the clout over the electorate of Modi, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, Raman Singh, Mamata Banerjee, Naveen Patnaik, Jayalalithaa, Nitish Kumar, Mulayam Singh and Mayawati.

Third, early estimates suggest that AAP could end up hurting the Congress as its focus could remain on allegations of corruption under its charge. This has been forecast by numerous pundits.

Pradeep Chhibber, political science professor at University of California, Berkeley, has listed reasons why AAP will

It would be complacent of the BJP to ignore AAP, as it is hogging the mindscape of the very voters BJP is banking on— the middle-class fed up with graft and inflation who believe they and India deserve better hurt the Congress more, robbing the GoP of India of its centrist narrative.

In fact, the Congress, which is offering external support to Delhi’s AAP government, will not be in a position to pull down Kejriwal and will be forced to put up with his reckless populism and adventurist governance. Delhi’s Chief Minister can be expected to use this latitude to cement his hold over the city state.

Big Threat: Really?

On the national stage, Kejriwal will be contrasted with Modi. Although the BJP’s prime ministerial aspirant is indeed part of the political establishment, he has been successful in projecting himself as an ‘outsider’ who has the wherewithal to challenge the status quo and steer India out of its political and economic gridlock. As Modi suggests, he truly stands outside the ‘elite’ intellectual-bureaucratic-political circles that tend to dominate Delhi’s hot house discourse.

Modi, by all estimates, has recharged his organisation, and even those who have traditionally been in lockstep with the Government at the Centre have

broken off to back the BJP’s candidate.

Can AAP be a contender for power at the Centre? Senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley is of the view that ideology and an agenda of governance are critical for the forward movement of any party. “AAP was born on an angry vote. What is on display now is an attempt to convert populism into an ideology and a governance model. It is already being pulled in different directions. The anarchists and Maoists in the party are seeking a referendum on every important issue—the deployment of security forces in border areas and [the country’s] approach towards Red terror,” says Jaitley.

The Congress appears to be looking the other way on dealing with AAP, which is running Delhi with its support. Leaders like Jairam Ramesh have been urging the party’s top leadership to work out a cogent strategy to deal with AAP. According to him, AAP is just a platform and not a party. But the platform has begun to challenge the leadership with attacks on people close to its First Family.

It would be complacent on the BJP’s part to ignore the AAP challenge. This is because AAP is hogging a significant part of the mindscape of the very voters BJP is banking on and who have lost faith in the Congress—the middle-class fed up with graft and inflation who believe they and India deserve better. For this, the BJP would do well to establish itself as India’s primary change agent.

AAP’s own sympathisers concede that Kejriwal will have to credibly manage the expectations of Delhi’s people. “His image is that of a determined defender of the aam aadmi. But he will have to work out a list of things that can be done. If he holds a janata durbar in an open stadium, he would be flooded with thousands of demands. It won’t be possible to regularise 80,000 contract employees with the stroke of a pen. If he fails to manage the expectations of people, disillusionment will set in and defeat the AAP idea,” says an AAP sympathiser who does not wish to be identified.

While optimism is often an adrenaline shot in politics, a Kejriwal meeting with controversial Muslim clerics such as Maulana Tauqeer Raza Khan, known for issuing anti-women fatwas, or a Yogendra Yadav trying to forge a non-Jat caste-oriented alliance in Haryana—or similar efforts—may not help the so-called aam aadmi that AAP represents turn into a superman who can stop a juggernaut in motion.

As with experts, crawling on to the next preoccupation comes so easy. n open www.openthemagazine.com 11

news

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challenges

The Scion’s Pursuit Why Rahul Gandhi won’t have it easy leading the Congress into the electoral fray

has finally shed his reluctance to spearhead the Congress-led alliance in the upcoming electoral bout, seen as a direct contest between the NehruGandhi scion and the BJP’s Narendra Modi.

Although the Congress’ ability to win the next big fight remains in doubt, the party’s focus will likely be on small tactical victories that have the potential to queer the pitch for the BJP. In Delhi, the Congress has propped up a government headed by AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal in the hope that it tempers the Indian middle-class fascination with Modi’s new right-wing politics that celebrates development and economic growth; in Bihar, it is in the process of aligning with Lalu Prasad to consolidate Muslim votes against Modi; and in Andhra Pradesh, it is trying to limit its damages by ensuring the support of a regional formation. But the ruling party’s main challenge is to find a winning message for voters, vast numbers of whom are upset with the way the Centre has handled things under the party’s charge. Rahul Gandhi believes that its entitlement agenda is a vote catcher, but many in the party are of the view that in a fasturbanising India, it is important to address aspirations of upward mobility. His rival Modi, who draws huge crowds in his campaign outings, has been tapping popular anger against the Congress over unmet aspirations, in-your-face corruption and roadblocks to enterprise.

Gandhi has a tough task at hand, as the Congress’ revival at this stage will depend on his ability to convey how things would be different under his charge. With a general election increasingly becoming an aggregate of state polls, the backing of regional players is critical for victory at the Centre; Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the states that helped the Congress retain power in 2009, now look alien land for the party. Consider each by turn. In the first of these states, the Congress cannot afford to let Telangana slip—if it fails to deliver on its statehood promise, it faces a rout in this region, and if it doesn’t, it will suffer marginalisation in Seemandhra. In Tamil Nadu, the party

ashish sharma

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Rahul Gandhi

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stepping up Rahul Gandhi has signalled he is willing to assume leadership of the Congress-led alliance

may be left without an ally. A section of the party has mounted an effort to get the DMK back into the UPA fold. While the AIADMK has declared that it will go it alone, the BJP is trying to woo smaller votes to make the most of pro-Modi sentiments in at least a couple of constituencies. In West Bengal, the Trinamool’s Mamata Banerjee has shown she can pull off victory alone. And the Left remains opposed to the Congress.

Gandhi has been trying to transform the Congress’ organisational hierarchy. But his efforts at the state level—Sachin Pilot’s appointment as Rajasthan’s PCC chief, for example—may not achieve anything to be optimistic about.

The Congress vice-president has larger problems staring him in the face, too. The economy has been looking anaemic for long, with both the average citizen and investor losing faith in the incumbent regime’s ability to steer its progress. A prolonged period of policy paralysis has spooked the ‘India Story’ and Indian businesses are now investing funds overseas rather than within the country.

High inflation has widened the emotional distance between the voter and the ruling

dispensation. This was demonstrated in the recent Assembly polls, which saw the Congress defeated comprehensively. The economy’s core weakness is visible in its double deficit: current account as well as fiscal. Of the latter, experts believe that the Government may not be able to achieve its target of 4.8 per cent of GDP, since it had already exhausted 94 per cent of its budgeted expenditure by November 2013.

On foreign policy, the party’s challenges are compounded by lack of strategic thinking. After 15 years of cosying up to the US in the hope that it would embrace India as a strategic partner, the country now realises that Washington DC is plainly transactional in its dealings with New Delhi. The Centre’s weak leadership has left India’s neighbourhood policy a mess, with even tiny Maldives displaying the audacity to take on India.

As for national security, the Government has routinely been identifying Red terror and India’s communal divide as top threats, but the Union Home Ministry has not shown the wherewithal to combat these. According to Ministry data, the first nine months of 2013 saw 93 communal clashes in Uttar Pradesh alone. n 27 january 2014

Ram Rahman

lo o k i n g b ac k

The Sadness of Letting Go A story of moving on after Gujarat’s 2002 violence AMRITA SHAH

“T

he pollution was so bad, sister, that if you

stood at a char-rasta you would feel suffocated.”

“At the end of the day your eyes would be burning!”

“Now it is good.”

“You can breathe freely.”

My fizzy drink is flat and warm; it tastes like orange candy. I take small sips, watching the level slowly recede. The boys quaff tobacco from small aluminium foil pouches with brand names like ‘Bhagat’, ‘Surily Sweet Supari’ and ‘Goa Silver’.

I sit alone on the bench. The boys stand around it, resting a foot on a stone, leaning their arms on the backrest, but keeping, at all times, a respectful distance from me. Sloe-eyed, looselimbed young men clustered about the cigarette stall ignore us but a woman with a notebook accompanied by a group of males cannot be a common sight in a municipal slum and I suspect curiosity lurks behind the expressions of studied disinterest.

There is much coming and going around us. People enter from the main road through a wide gap in the wall and head for the slum quarters, an identical stream flowing in the other direction. Women, richly dressed, appear to be on their way to a fine event, a wedding perhaps, but it soon becomes apparent that the lustre of cheap thread and gilt and the plastic confections in their hair are just part of their daily armoury against the world. The boys are dismissive of the passers-by. “Lot of new people now here, sister,” they say, conveying the information in a tone of scoffing derision. “Low people… vulgar types. Start fighting over every small thing. And curse—baap re baap!

Children. Even ladies. You can’t bear it.”

Beyond the oscillating thoroughfare rise the weather-beaten walls of a three-storeyed block of apartments. Iron poles thrust into cement prop up sagging balconies, and cracks like lightning streaks are visible on the drab façade, signs of the damage that occurred in the earthquake of 2001. The injured battlements gloomily look over this wide, open space with its ice gola cart, a cigarette and cold drinks stall, a solitary bench and a few tired, low trees. Shreds of patang flap from overhead wires. In front of us, a small fenced-off ground slowly fills up with rubbish. One of the boys gestures magisterially towards it. “We have a plan to make a garden here. Fill it up with grass.”

“And trees.” “...and flowers!”

“This Umesh’s nana, you know, was head maali for the government parks. His mother was going to help us before she expired. She made the garden for Sophia School. We are deterrevisit A photograph from Ram Rahman’s series on Gulbarg Society, ten years after the massacre of 28 February 2002

27 January 2014

mined to develop this vatika.”

I visualise the square with its limp fence and its drifting litter transformed into a patch of green. Gardens are all the rage now, a prominent feature of advertisements for upcoming housing projects. Across the river, swish new colonies have mini playgrounds with mock knolls and slides and swings. Perhaps the boys will try to replicate them, painting them in Disney reds and yellows. Or perhaps they will lay an angular strip of concrete, bordering it with beds of buoyant marigold and fragrant chameli.

Instinctively my eyes seek out Meraj, curious to know how he is feeling at this moment, listening to a plan for the future in which he has no part. The 34-year-old Muslim embroiderer is quiet. His eyes, sharp as diamonds, are adrift. The avid enthusiasm that had brightened his features and loosened his tongue, releasing memories and anecdotes of a past life not so much as an hour ago, has dissipated, the animation ebbing away like a retreating tide, making pronounced the hollows of his mildly scarred cheeks, leaving him looking haunted and forlorn. *** I first met Meraj in late 2007, in one of the ghettos that have arisen on the outskirts of Ahmedabad city to contain the flotsam and jetsam of Muslims thrust out by waves of communal violence, a trickle that started in the early 1990s and became a flood after 2002.

I had been meeting Muslims in the city. I had met Salim, sullen and distrustful, a witness in a case involving the atrocities of 2002, in one of the distant bleak apartment blocks built by an Islamic charitable trust. I had been to Juhapura, Ahmedabad’s largest Muslim ghetto, where alongside old, close-set hovels were tall arched entrances to new colonies for middle class Muslims and, across the road, sprawling bungalows with the nameplates of bureaucrats and businessmen who had recently moved to the ghetto.

In the Muslim-dominated neighbourhood of Jamalpur in the old city, I was surprised to see a giant kite on a building, which said ‘Happy 2008’ under a photograph of the Chief Minister Narendra Modi. In one of the shops in the lane, all owned by Muslims, were regular size white kites with a grainy picture of the chief minister and the slogan: ‘Modi is Great—Happy New Year’. The owner, a burly man with henna in his hair, muttering that “it is better to eat than to die,” admitted that the warmth towards their bête noire was strategic rather than real, and arising out of a fear of renewed attacks at the time of the state assembly elections that had just gone by. As we talked, the mock irony in his tone gave way to a gloomy dissatisfaction with the open www.openthemagazine.com 15

openly anti-Muslim posturing of the state government.

“Write,” he said, with a sudden flash of belligerence. “Write my name! We all have to die some day!”

A rickshaw driver, wiry and loquacious, with pictures of the Taj Mahal gleaming on his side panels, told me he and his friends had stockpiled arms in Jamalpur, ready for any attack from Hindus. “I may die but I will take ten down with me.” At a meeting organised to discuss the distribution of compensation awarded by the government for damages suffered in 2002, I heard young Muslim volunteers break into song: “No English in the land, still there is slavery/ Help ourselves must we/ Think, if we think of something, help will come from the sky.” I heard of random sweeps by the police on Muslim localities, scenes that seemed to belong to the West Bank, not to a sleepy neighbourhood in western India. A former corporator and Congress party man glumly contemplating his irrelevance in an avidly pro-BJP environment told me he was thinking of leaving politics. In one of the few remaining enclaves of Muslims west of the river, an elderly professor of English burst out: “this divide (between Hindus and Muslims) is smothering!”

And then there was Meraj. I met him while visiting a unit of Sanchetana, a non-governmental organisation working on health and education issues among the underprivileged. The local office was run by a group of largely Hindu women and while talking of the victims of 2002 they thought of their neighbour Meraj who lived across the street and they sent someone to fetch him. He arrived in his workaday clothes, a faded red T-shirt and pants. Wearing a bright shiny smile, he perched on the edge of a chair as if afraid to fully occupy the space or the moment. Of average height, sallow complexion, with short dark brown hair and a neat moustache, he was the kind of guy that would melt in a crowd. But there was an eager warmth about him that made him instantly likeable.

Meraj had grown up in the working class neighbourhood of Asarwa-Chamanpura. His family had lived in a compound of municipal workers where his father owned a pan ka gulla.

Meraj’s childhood was the ordinary childhood of the lower middle class Ahmedabadi. He went to the local municipal school, played with his friends in the open square in front of the colony or in one of the houses, flew kites on the terraces, participated in ceremonial swordplay with his brother on Eid. Growing up, he studied commerce at a college in Kalupur. Education was not a family forte but Meraj says he had had some notion as a young man of becoming a lawyer.

Why a lawyer, I asked. He smiled sheepishly saying it was something he had seen in the movies and fancied. And then, as if to convey to me that it had been a serious aspiration and something he had thought of in later times, with disappointment, he explained how it could not come about. In his late teens he faced a number of obstacles, he said. Helping his father at the shop in the mornings meant missing classes. Then, an outbreak of communal violence in 1992-3 meant he had to stop going to college altogether because the route took him through tense Hindu-dominated neighbourhoods. Worse, his father, fearing an attack, had sent everything valuable in the house to relatives for safekeeping. “Textbooks were considered valuable,” he explained. Inevitably Meraj failed his second year exams. “Once the line is broken,” he said, “it is very difficult to connect again”.

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Like other young men of uncertain means in the city, though, he had taken the precaution of providing for a back up in the form of a trade skill. He had enrolled himself in an embroidery course near Relief cinema on Ashram Road. There he had learnt ‘plain’ and ‘fancy’ embroidery and stitching. He had bought himself a machine and started doing piecework. In 1994 he got married. The wedding was in Mehsana, 76 kilometres from Ahmedabad, where the bride’s family lived; the feast was vegetarian out of deference to her Hindu neighbours. Meanwhile business was picking up. There was a great demand for embroidery and finishing on fabrics headed for the Gulf. Meraj did not deal directly with exports but took on orders from the Sindhi traders of Kalupur, Revdi Bazar and Hari Om Market.

He would cycle across every few days to meet with his clients, hiring a rickshaw to bring back the raw material or the ‘maal’ as he called it.

As the orders mounted, he bought more machines and hired workers. His workshop bristled with reams of cotton, polyester and pashmina, saris and kaftans. The orders were getting so voluminous that he was thinking of buying a second-hand Maruti van. By then he had three small children and a car would have been useful for family outings as well. But he hesitated. It was not his way to give in to momentary impulses. His priority was to expand the business and if he felt the money would be better spent on buying machinery and hiring workers, then comfort would take a back seat. It was the typically Ahmedabadi way, to suppress present gratification for future growth.

Meraj was the quintessential Ahmedabadi entrepreneur, living not randomly but according to a sagacious plan for business expansion. “I was always saving,” he says. “Saving, saving, saving. I would take the cycle instead of the bike to save on petrol. I would sacrifice all the time just to put money back into the business.”

On 28 February 2002, the mob had burst in and destroyed everything he owned: household conveniences, vehicles, machinery. “Cha!” he exclaimed, “cha!” still incredulous, six years later, at the manner in which the rioters, with their wanton destructiveness, had rendered his pragmatism impractical and foolish. The cheer faded from his face, his eyes. All at once

It was the first time, through the miasma of horror, callousness, opportunism and injustice that 2002 had come to represent, that I had heard the thrum of love and longing 27 January 2014

he seemed to be in a shadow.

In the Sanchetana office, in a room full of people, he was alone, wrestling with strangers, sudden and hostile assailants; alone with the ghosts of possessions collected with such care and consideration that they had a meaning beyond mere materialism; alone with the chagrin and the fury of having been demoted, for no fault or fair reason, from the bourgeois life he had so assiduously aspired to. I sensed that no list of damages, however comprehensive, could account for the feeling of betrayal and rankling injustice that rendered him temporarily incapable of speaking. Finally he muttered: “I should just have enjoyed my money instead.”

The moment of truculence passed. He resumed his story.

Sudden flight across the railway tracks behind his house, two years in transit between a refugee camp and relatives. And then he went back to Asarwa-Chamanpura. “My neighbours mobbed me,” he said, breaking into a smile, “someone passed a five hundred rupee note from one side, someone from another.

It was like I was the chief minister or something. I felt my house calling out to me. I felt so bad!” The family—Meraj, his wife and children, his brother and his wife and children and their father—again set up home in Asarwa-Chamanpura. On the face of it, things seemed okay but in reality they were living in terror of a recurrence of 2002. “Every time something happened, like a bomb blast… even if it was far away, it made us so anxious and frightened. We were always checking, fearful that the person away from home would not return.” Finally, tiring of the constant state of apprehension, they decided to move to an emerging ghetto.

Meraj fidgeted. He crossed and uncrossed his arms, smiled shyly. “I miss living among Hindus,” he said with a sudden beguiling ruefulness. “I am glad these benhs are here.” He indicated the Sanchetana activists in their cotton saris worn in the demure manner of Gujarati Hindu women. “When I see them across the street, I feel good, I feel like I am in my home in Asarwa-Chamanpura again.” The women laughed with gentle neighbourliness.

Asarwa-Chamanpura, what was it like, I asked him.

“Oh, sister!” The question seemed to turn on a light bulb in his head. All traces of gloom vanished in a blaze of incandescence. His eyes, his teeth, even the sandy streaks in his hair, lit up with a sparky luminosity, a dazzling effulgence of happiness. He spread his hands, rattled his head, indicating the impossibility of formulating a satisfactory answer. “My friends… the food… all my neighbours, Hindu, Muslim, we were… what can I say? It was just…great!”

I was struck by his enthusiasm. It was the first time, through the miasma of horror, callousness, opportunism and injustice that 2002 had come to represent, that I had heard the thrum of love and longing; an elegiac strain that had not been mutilated by the need to serve a cause, or render the instant; a residue that remained, like a wetness deep in the earth after the passing of thunder. “Would you take me there?” I spoke without thinking. I did not expect him to agree but he said ‘yes’ right away. *** Just before entering Asarwa, the road ascended, providing an aerial view of traffic scurrying in from the old highway, railway 27 January 2014

tracks headed for Himmatnagar, a petrol pump and a mill compound surrounded by ancient, burgeoning trees: jungli babul, aduso, limdo and peepul. An ugly modern sculpture raised its twisted discordant metal pillars skywards in the roundabout at Chamanpura Circle. We passed women in bright saris, milk booths, hawkers’ carts heaving with sugarcane cubes and bottles of kala khatta and hoardings for television brands. Here and there, a shopkeeper, with a smile of quickening recognition, raised his arm to wave at Meraj.

Asarwa was a village before it became a site for textile mills in the late nineteenth century. The old working class district was evident in the dark blue signboards of housing colonies, but one sensed a state of somewhat confused growth as well: in its bazaars, the small town; in its prolific businesses of steel, medical equipment, paint and textiles, the metro; and in the mill compounds and the sawdust fumes emanating from desolate lumber yards, the industrial suburb. Underlying these was the sense of old habitation, like a pair of shoes smoothened out by wear. Here were the residential quarters of lower levels of police and municipal staff—stable, securely employed government servants. Here were municipal schools and hospitals and cheap public transport. Here were the improvements made by generations of civic authorities: water supply systems, drainage, electrical lines and bus services. A long compound wall loomed, behind which the thin, stained facades of civic housing projects formed a continuous refrain. Meraj exhaled as if he had been holding his breath and slapped the side of the autorickshaw to indicate we had arrived.

A wide path ran in an arc, abutting a row of houses comfortably spaced out, each with a small yard out front, partially curtained off from the street by grills and asbestos sheets. Through the porous walls a hen levitated in a flurry of squawks and brown wings, setting her chickens a-scatter. Food cooked on old-fashioned coal stoves, a mother oiled her daughter’s long wavy tresses. A warm feel of rusticity hovered over those half paved narrow lanes. At the beginning of the arc, between the public thoroughfare and the residential part of the colony, in what appeared to be untended no man’s land, loose mud gave way to wild grass. Meraj stopped. He stretched out his arm, pointing at a spot where bent barbed wire poked out from a loose fence post. “My father’s pan ka gulla was here,” he said. The mob had torn it down. There was nothing there now; just a tangle of weeds. A few yards away was the house Meraj had grown up in. The doors were open and we walked in. A lady’s taut voice called out from somewhere: “Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” Meraj called back.

“Oh,” a woman with a pallu on her head and a baby at her waist appeared. “It’s Merajbhai!” she shouted out reassuringly to an elderly lady who I glimpsed hovering in the back.

The rooms were joined to each other like compartments in a railway coach. The new occupants seemed to be a typically sprawling semi-rustic Hindu family just laying down a baby on a mattress or stringing beans in a tray on the floor. There was no furniture, nothing on the walls. I recalled Meraj telling me that when he returned to the colony after the violence he had felt his house ‘calling’ to him, making him feel ‘so bad.’ I watched as he walked about, touching the walls with an eager, possessive wistfulness. open www.openthemagazine.com 17

On the path, I had suddenly become aware that we were not alone. A rake-thin man in a yellow shirt and a white widebrimmed hat had joined us. He had slipped in next to Meraj, matching his step with ours so unobtrusively that I could hardly tell he was there. Surprised, I slowed down. The stranger had prominent teeth and eyes that loomed owlishly behind thick glasses. No words were exchanged between the two men but I sensed something had occurred, like the sliding into place of grooves and ridges, the click of interlocking gears, so that though there were two, there could just as well have been one.

Meraj introduced us with a vague gesture: “Umesh”, a common Hindu name, particularly among Gujaratis. I smiled, nodded. The men stayed silent, sheepish. There was an evident closeness between the two; Umesh had been expecting us. But in my presence, a shyness had set in. I asked Umesh what he did.

I was not surprised when he said he was a tailor. Traditionally a textile manufacturing centre, Ahmedabad had become a supplier of stitched garments. The wholesale market at Gheekanta in the old city, a warren of thin lanes and hole-in-the wall shops spattered with kid-size jeans, polka dotted frocks, salwar kameez suits, zari-work chunnis and an abundance of men’s shirts, was estimated by some to supply half the country’s current demand for readymades. *** Meraj, Bharatbhai, an auto-rickshaw driver and I were at the back of the colony. Umesh had gone ahead, to wait for us at home. To our left, barely visible above the spreading jungli babul, aduso and peepul trees, was a terrace with a water tank.

Meraj pointed. All his life, he said, even at the worst of times when communal tension was running high in the city, he and his family had felt safe knowing that their friend, the influential Congressman Ehsan Jafri, lived so close, right there in the complex of buildings around the water tank known as the Gulbarg Society. Even that morning, the morning of 28 February 2002, he said his father tried to call and ask for guidance but Jafri had been in no position to help. When the mob arrived at the gate, Bharatbhai ran with Meraj and his family through the municipal compound to the back, here, where a ditch and a rough path led to the railway tracks. I saw the corrugated tin roof of a railway station and, across it, a temple shikhara bursting through the latticework of leaves. The signboard on the platform said ‘Asarwa’. The tracks raced like slivers of mercury.

“We ran across the tracks,” Meraj said, “just blindly ran.”

I tried to visualise it. Figures running, footwear falling, the old stumbling, children wailing. “Then I saw a mob, another mob coming towards us from there…” Meraj pointed at a spot further down the tracks. I felt his fear like a knife stab, the flat sunlight hot with menace. It was the first time I had heard of a second mob.

“Did you recognise anyone?” I asked.

“Who looked at the faces, sister?” he said wryly. “I could only see the swords glinting tim-tim.”

“Ey, Meraj!”

A woman’s voice called out from the upper storey of one of the drab buildings ranged on one side, delight in her voice, a startled joy at having seen him unexpectedly. Umesh’s home was approached through a small open yard. A few steps led to a 18 open

toilet which stood outside the house. The house itself was tiny, just a room about 300 square feet in size. One side of it was the kitchen, neatly arrayed with gleaming vessels; the other was the sitting area, furnished with chairs and a high bed that doubled up as a settee. The walls were decorated with myriad representations of Hindu gods and goddesses. Laxmi radiated rays of embossed silver, Shiva struck a pose of magnificent and graceful rage. Umesh’s father, an elderly man with a stiff manner that gave the impression of a physical handicap, was ensconced in a chair. Umesh’s sister, a pretty woman in a house dress, welcomed us with eager smiles and set about making tea.

Soon the small tube-lit room was reverberating with laughter. Umesh and Meraj ribbed Rajesh about his sartorial style: he was wearing a pair of dark jeans with chains looped at the knee.

All three men flaunted signs of their professional expertise.

Meraj had an embroidered detail on his shirt pocket and Umesh had gaudy patches on his stitched jeans. Rajesh, they informed me with an amusement the subject seemed to share, had a weakness for metal embellishments and because he was petite and could not get clothes his size in a store he was always buying jeans with metal doo-dahs and cutting them to fit. And then it was Umesh’s turn to be teased. “You see his hat?” Rajesh asked, at which Umesh grinned bashfully. “He always has it on. Not any kind of hat, only this kind that umpires and wicketkeepers wear.” Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Umesh was the wicketkeeper in their sometime weekly games. Like young men all over the Subcontinent, these three were passionate about cricket. In the past, on a Sunday, they would have been out playing in the open ground in front of the colony with a propped up thin cement sheet for a stump. Meraj, they told me, was a superb bowler, “faster than Shoaib Akhtar!”

I looked around the cosy room, at Umesh’s sister, a woman beyond the conventional marriageable age, enjoying the banter and arranging tea cups on a tray; at Umesh’s father whose dour silence I found unnerving though it did not seem to bother the young men one bit and they frequently brought him into the conversation with respectful allusions. Umesh’s mother, the woman with the green thumb who would have made a garden for the colony, had died some years previously. It seemed to me that an air of tragedy hung over the household; perhaps it was an intimation of ill health for a few months later, Meraj would inform me that the gangly Umesh, his best friend, had died in hospital; or perhaps it was just an unarticulated sense of loss. To the casual observer it would appear as if Muslims, Meraj and his family for instance, had suffered by being forced to leave their home; but in fact, this family of Hindus too had lost a source of sustenance and support.

I realised then that the fact of severance, and more importantly the reason for the severance, had been there all along.

Underneath the chatter and the joy of reuniting it was there, like moisture in the air or wires buried in walls, invisible but palpable, invisible but potent, a dull leaden consciousness permeating the everyday and the forever. Time had not altered anything. The consequences of 2002 were real and unrelenting. *** It is late afternoon when we arrive at the gates of the Gulbarg Society. The three Special Reserve Police personnel deputed to 27 January 2014

Accounts of the Gulbarg Society massacre convey the atmosphere of a gladiatorial arena with thousands surrounding the compound in a siege that lasted seven hours keep watch on the Society regard us with torpid, suspicious eyes. Meraj disappears and reappears having located the man who has the key to the compound.

The Gulbarg Society was built in the 1960s at the initiative of lawyer and politician Ehsan Jafri. Jafri was the son of a doctor who came to Ahmedabad from the Burhanpur district of Madhya Pradesh and set up a clinic in the city’s blue-collar district. Jafri, influenced perhaps by his father’s clientele of migrant mill workers, gravitated to leftist politics, joining the Congress in the early seventies attracted by the socialist rhetoric of its young leader Indira Gandhi. He was not untouched by the entrepreneurial tug of his adopted city, though, and proposed to his Muslim neighbours in Dr Gandhi’s Chawl in Asarwa-Chamanpura, where he lived, that they should take advantage of the liberal housing loans being handed out by the state, buy a plot of land, and construct a society. So Gulbarg Society came about, a genteel complex of bungalows generously spaced out with spreading trees and a high surrounding wall giving it a measure of privacy and exclusion rare in the shabby neighbourhood.

On 28 February 2002, however, Gulbarg Society became the scene of one of the most vicious attacks on Muslims, and Ehsan Jafri, the pogrom’s most high profile victim. Accounts of the Gulbarg Society massacre convey the atmosphere of a gladiatorial arena with thousands surrounding the compound in a siege that lasted seven hours. Sixty-nine Muslims, many of whom had crowded into Jafri’s house for safety, were killed.

Jafri himself was stripped, paraded, his fingers cut off, then his hands and feet, before being trussed by the neck with a forklike object and dragged down the road and tossed into a fire.

The Concerned Citizens Tribunal reports that residents of the area saw neighbourhood goons playing cricket with the skulls of the dead.

The most eerie thing about Gulbarg Society now is the sound of the leaves. They lie everywhere, shriveled, dry, yellow. They cover the neat wide pathways that run around the low whitewashed houses. They lie on the swelling mounds around the bungalows. They fall from the trees; dropping lightly, incessantly, softly to the ground. The cosy cul de sac is a ghostly place.

27 January 2014

The three-storey building, at the far end of the compound, a later addition comprising eight flats and a row of shops looms abjectly. All signs of life—and there must have been plenty of it here once: the aroma of food cooking, the colour of wet clothes on a line, the warbling of a television set, the shrieks of children at play—have been stamped out. With every step I crush leaves.

There is rubble in the houses and air conditioners bent with heat. The windows are naked, with glass panes occasionally cracked. The rooms of Ehsan Jafri’s house are bare. The bathroom has a smashed commode. Stones, thick dirt and the drying excrement of stray animals are on the floor. The ceiling and walls are blotchy and blackened with soot. The flames destroyed, among other things, Jafri’s library, his collection of books spanning a range of subjects: culture, religion, philosophy. The now ravaged room on the ground floor was once his office with a desk, a revolving chair, two sofas and his law books, including bound volumes of All India Reporter; Ehsan Jafri had returned to the bar after his stint in Parliament and was a familiar figure at the Mirzapur Courthouse. Meraj, coming up behind me, points. “His table was there… he used to receive visitors on a sofa there.” His tone is nostalgic, remembering a time before the brutality, an older time when Jafri was alive and eminent and exuded the expansive comfort of a banyan tree.

In many ways, Jafri was a throwback to the past. Photographs of him in earlier days show a handsome man in a safari suit with a broad forehead and a thick shock of hair, standing at the edge of a group around Indira Gandhi, leading an anti-war procession, fasting for communal harmony, joining an official delegation to Kabul in the 1970s, courting arrest in 1977 and so on.

In an old interview broadcast on All India Radio, he can be heard, talking in chaste Urdu, about the concept of ‘watan’ (homeland) and the natural beauty of Hindustan. Erudite, cultured (he was president of the Gujarat unit of the Indo-Soviet Cultural Society and wrote Urdu poetry), progressive and international in outlook, he typified the secular, intellectual Muslim that gravitated to the Congress party. His work for the party, as a member of parliament in 1977 and after, had made Gulbarg Society a bastion of the Congress. For Muslims, particularly those from the lower socio-economic class, used to being blown about like chaff by ordinary vicissitudes, he was a pillar of strength. By demonstrating Ehsan Jafri’s vulnerability, his assailants had also shown the ineffectuality of an ideology and a party. Indeed they had conveyed the message that under the new dispensation to be like him was to court trouble. Like the mafia the old godfathers had to be beheaded before the new could hold sway.

The air rattles with the scraping, scratching, sighing sound of leaves eddying with the breeze. There are no people here, just nineteen empty bungalows surrounded by a wall, a spreading limda tree and the carpet of yellow leaves. There is a proposal, I have heard, to turn Gulbarg Society into a museum, a memorial against communal violence. I think it could be left just as it is with its reproachful emptiness and its shocked wounds. n An extract from Amrita Shah’s forthcoming non-fiction book on Ahmedabad, Highway Dreams: An Old City in New India open www.openthemagazine.com 19

a s s a s s i n at i o n

Athar Hussain/reuters

Good Cop in a Bad Land

Dread and despair in Karachi after the death of Chaudhry Aslam Khan, the city’s most daring police officer Reem Wasay

A

n almost mythical figure in the

killing fields of Karachi, Pakistan’s most violence-wracked metropolis, supercop Chaudhry Aslam Khan, a superintendent (SP) in the Sindh Police Department, finally became the one thing that Pakistanis never expected of the burly crime fighter: another statistic in the country’s long-drawn fight against radical extremists. On 9 January, the police convoy in which Aslam was travelling was rammed by a vehicle laden with explosives, the impact of which obliter20 open

ated not just the policeman’s car but a number of nearby vehicles and buildings as well. An estimated 200 kg of explosives was used in this suicide attack, leaving no room for error.

It was a big bomb intended to take out, at any cost, an even bigger man. The suicide bomber has been identified as the son of a prayer leader from a restive neighbourhood of Karachi, betraying just how deep the ties between the city’s Taliban cells and locals have become. A police case has been registered against

the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has proudly claimed responsibility for the attack. The group has been particularly active within the country since 2007 when the army initiated an operation against Lal Masjid, a mosque in Islamabad that had militants and ammunition holed up on its premises right under the nose of authorities. The TTP has been ravaging the country since, bombing schools and shrines, attacking independent lashkars (militias), army officers, liberal politicians, minorities and indi27 January 2014

last man standing (Far left) Khan surrounded by guards after a suicide attack outside his home in 2011; Khan’s 2014 funeral procession

Wassef Khan/Getty Images

viduals like Aslam who have made it their life’s work to beat back the Taliban.

None of this has been without risk. In September 2011, a suicide bomber detonated a vehicle packed with explosives outside the SP’s house, killing eight and leaving a 10-feet deep crater where the policeman’s house used to be. Aslam and his family were not harmed, but his steely resolve was hardened further. “I will not spare them,” he said to TV cameras, and vowed he would bury the attackers right in the crater created by the suicide bombing.

For the next two years, the officer went on a spree, hunting down known suspects and criminals, dishing out calculated revenge for the wounds they left festering in the city. Known to hate militants and the restricted brand of ideology they represent, the tough cop was quite the character, dispelling notions of an officer-who-is-a-gentleman with his colourful language, lack of manufactured suave and propensity to stare opponents right in the eye. He was liberal in his views on religion and did what he did because of sheer conviction, an unheardof attribute in these restless times.

Believed by many to be invincible, Chaudhry Aslam was a barrel of a man, notorious for his disdain of the TTP, a sentiment that’s unfortunately shrinking in public space. The head of Karachi’s antiterrorism taskforce, Aslam’s views on his targets and no-nonsense attitude towards—literally—‘taking them out’ 27 January 2014

earned him a formidable reputation.

Whilst his death should come as no surprise, Pakistan is reeling under its impact.

He was seen as the last man standing.

The Pakistani media is on overdrive with coverage of the SP, portraying him as Karachi’s one-man army against terror, a saint and saviour all in one. Social media has made Chaudhry sahib a viral fixture, decrying the death of a man brave enough to scowl at the very mention of the Taliban. Social media is one of Pakistan’s few public spaces left where youngsters, liberals, moderates and farleftists can freely express their frustration at the mounting orthodoxy and terrorism that has made targets of all those who do not conform to a strict jihadi interpretation of religion. Tweet after tweet, one status update after another, bemoan the fact that a lone crusader dared to stand up against extremists in a city ravaged by turf wars, sectarianism and extortion, and paid the ultimate price.

Chaudhry Aslam was intimidating, and that is a dangerous thing to be in Pakistan if you are fighting the good fight. The mere mention of his name had murderers, kidnappers, extortionists and other unsavoury elements running in the other direction, a relatively rare feat for someone from the police force, one of Pakistan’s most corrupt institutions. Exacting his own style of vigilante justice, Aslam was not above suspicion himself; he was accused many a time of capturing suspected Taliban and crimi-

nals and killing them in staged ‘police encounters’, and that was a reason he was both feared and loathed by some.

Karachi has seen an upswing of a dangerous trend: the development of a nexus between Taliban militants and career criminals profiting from the city’s turbulence with the connivance of political elements. The police have been reduced to spluttering bystanders, unable to serve and protect people at large. In this dismal landscape, Chaudhry Aslam was a lone ranger, laughing in the face of accepted norms and doing things his way—unorthodox, yes, but lauded by citizens who were losing hope in a city where bloody cycles of target killings occur every few months. It is these people who are mourning his loss, coming to terms with the fact that the one officer who was looking out for them is no more.

The officer’s death comes as an sign of tougher times ahead for a country at war with itself. Pakistan’s democratic election in May 2013 heralded a new political order with the Sharif brothers forming the federal government in Islamabad, yet terror attacks have increased with alarming brutality. Last September, more than 85 Christians were killed in a church bombing in Peshawar. From the tribal regions known as FATA—a territory that doesn’t fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government—to the mean streets of Karachi, terror thrives with no sign of respite. Moderate voices are vanishing from public fora, politicians pick their words with care to denounce attacks by the Taliban; fears of reprisal are palpable.

In such a pathetic panorama of affairs, the murder of SP Aslam is a huge setback to all those who hoped to join the antiTaliban parade.

The darkness that prevails in Karachi has attained a darker tinge of dread and despair. The night raids that Aslam would carry out will continue, but without the bravado and surefootedness of a man who went into battle with his scars and integrity intact. n The writer is the op-ed editor of Daily Times, an English language daily in Pakistan open www.openthemagazine.com 21

naeem ansari

shame

The Brazenness of Bollywood Why their Saifai shindig was neither their first, nor will it be their last Lhendup G Bhutia

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n 8 January, seven chartered flights touched

down on Saifai’s airstrip in western Uttar Pradesh.

Aboard each of them was the crème de la crème of Bollywood. When Salman Khan, Madhuri Dixit, Ranveer Singh, Alia Bhatt, Zarine Khan, Hard Kaur and a number of other stars stepped out, awaiting them on the tarmac was a reception party headed by the gleeful nephew of Mulayam Singh Yadav, Dharmendra Yadav. That night, one by one, each star took the stage and performed at the finale of the Saifai Mahotsav, an entertainment extrav22 open

aganza organised by the state’s ruling Samajwadi Party.

The performers were cheered on by a crowd estimated at over 100,000, among them Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav and his wife Dimple Yadav, apart from Mulayam Singh Yadav and other SP bigshots.

According to media reports, the entire 14-day festival cost at least Rs 20 crore, although the Chief Minister has denied that figure. Apart from whatever fees the celebrities were paid for their performances, Madhuri Dixit’s just-released film Dedh Ishqiya also got a grant of 25 per 27 January 2014

amit dave

friends in high places Salman Khan shares a platter of traditional fare with Narendra Modi on Uttrayan, the kite-playing festival, in Ahmedabad.

(Facing page) Madhuri Dixit performs at the Saifai Mahotsav in Etawah district

cent of the film’s total cost as part of the largesse, a figure placed at Rs 1 crore.

In Muzaffarnagar district just 300 odd kilometres away, meanwhile, one of the biggest tragedies in the state’s recent history continued to unfold. In relief camps for victims of the recent riots, as various news reports have been saying for weeks, children were dying of cold and people were being forced out.

Akhilesh Yadav and his party members have been pilloried for holding a festival under such grim circumstances, but the Bollywood contingent got away lightly. And what followed was typical Bollywood PR overdrive.

Salman Khan, somewhat like a medieval king doling out money for his excesses, announced that he would fund 200 paediatric heart surgeries in UP and 100 in Maharashtra. He also said he had contributed Rs 25 lakh to a hospital in Aligarh. Madhuri Dixit, in between a barrage of tweets promoting her two new movies, also sent out a tweet saying, ‘As artists and celebrities, we believe in using our reach to help others through drawing attention to the needs of the day.’

Since then, there have been a number of flattering write-ups on Salman Khan in assorted newspapers. On 27 January 2014

three successive days, 11, 12 and 13 January, Bombay Times had a story about Salman Khan on its front page. One of these centered round how he spends 90 per cent of his earnings on charity, a claim supported by a solitary quote from his sister, Alvira Khan. According to a Hindustan Times report, the actor will be producing a film whose profits will be devoted entirely to charity. Khan, who rarely grants interviews, has also sat down for several of them in the past few days, though perhaps to promote his upcoming film Jai Ho as much as to shore up goodwill. In a Hindustan Times interview, when asked for his opinion on the flak he got for his Mahotsav performance, he said, “...we take that trouble [of performing]. They take back the pleasure of seeing their idol and hero who they will never get to see.”

No one expected any contrition on Akhilesh’s part for the festival, but the film stars could have done better than issue exhaustive lists of what they consider their do-gooder efforts.

Among the youngest of the Saifai performers was Alia Bhatt. A few days after her return home, one of the few people willing to speak about her presence at the event is her filmmaker father, Mahesh Bhatt. “I think I have failed open www.openthemagazine.com 23

Vishal Srivastav/express archives

family entertainment Akhilesh Yadav with music composers Sajid and Wajid (above) at the Mahotsav in Etawah; (left) Yadav’s wife Dimple and their daughter (centre) at the show; (facing page) relief camps for those displaced by the Muzaffarnagar violence

naeem ansari

as a father,” he says, in a muffled tone, “I should have stopped her from going. As someone who likes to believe I have an outward gaze, I should have been able to tell my daughter not to go.”

Mahesh Bhatt is known as one of the few Bollywood creatures who are willing to speak up on issues unrelated to their films. According to him, he has asked his daughter to exercise greater care in her choices from now on. “I don’t interfere in my children’s lives,” he says, “And Alia is a smart young woman. She knew what had happened at Muzaffarnagar. She wasn’t aware of its current severity.” This claim of awareness, of course, is questionable. Just a few months ago, when Karan Johar asked her on the TV show Koffee With Karan who the President of 24 open

India was, she replied “Prithviraj Chavan.”

Mahesh Bhatt claims the reason that Bollywood becomes party to such an incident is not that the industry’s individuals don’t care. “God only knows how much many stars silently contribute to society through charities,” he says. “They tend to be inward-looking and insulated from the real world. The industry often does not permit them to look at anything beyond themselves. But don’t accuse them of not caring.”

Dale Bhagwagar, a film publicist who has in his career of over 15 years worked with top stars like Hrithik Roshan, Priyanka Chopra and Shilpa Shetty, tries to throw light on the inner workings of stars. “They are mostly all clueless, really,” he says, “Each star can only function with a coterie of people around him/her, a team telling them everything that s/he must do—from the image to portray to the party to be seen at. They cannot decide anything for themselves.” By way of example, he offers the case of Vivek Oberoi’s press conference where the actor accused Salman Khan of threatening him: “Vivek’s instinct was to talk about it. And his then publicist encouraged it. That was insane, suicidal really. His career took a beating.” Bhagwagar was appointed Oberoi’s image manager after that incident.

One of Bhagwagar’s current clients, Evelyn Sharma, a little-known German-Indian actress and model, was also part of the Saifai Mahotsav. She went on stage a few days 27 January 2014

before the Bollywood heavyweights did. According to Bhagwagar, Sharma had no idea of the riots since she has been in India for only about two years. “An agency got in touch with Evelyn for the show,” he says, “The money was good and she readily agreed.”

Once Bhagwagar learnt that some leaders were speaking against the Mahotsav, he swung to her defence. He drafted a press release stating Sharma was disturbed by the controversy around her performance. Today, Bhagwagar appears disappointed that the performance of the other stars got more airtime than his client’s. “Remember,” he says, “I was the first one to get [the news] out.”

P

erhaps, as some suggest, Bollywood personalities

are too preoccupied to look beyond themselves, but to stretch this to explain their general insensitivity is to miss the point. Stars actively seek out politicians for patronage. According to Abha Singh, a well-known advocate and human rights activist who has been trying to hasten the court proceedings against Salman Khan in his 2002 hitand-run case, “Someone like Salman, because of his cases, requires protection. He will claim he is politically naïve, yet he will be seen campaigning and promoting politicians of all kinds. So if a leader like Mulayam wants him on stage, why will he refuse?”

According to Abha Singh, while other hit-and-run cases in Mumbai—like those of Alistair Pereira in 2006 and Nooriya Haveliwala in 2010—have already seen convic-

tions of the guilty, Khan’s case has dragged on for nearly 12 years because of his cosiness with politicians. “Often we would find that the police had failed to issue Salman summons,” says Singh, “They would claim he was outside the city, and that same evening he would be seen participating in some event [in town].” It is thus not strange that an annual Mumbai Police show draws a Bollywood attendance unseen even at film award shows.

In 2013, eleven years after Khan’s hit-and-run incident, the magistrate hearing the case called for a fresh trial, ordering that the charges against the actor be changed from that of ‘rash and negligent driving’, which can get him at most a prison time of two years, to ‘culpable homicide not amounting to murder’, which attracts a maximum penalty of 10 years. While this increase in severity satisfies Singh, what this entails is that all witnesses must now be re-examined. Most of those who were injured in that accident, including the kin of the victim who died, Nurullah Sharif, were pavement dwellers who moved away from the area after the incident; their current whereabouts are unknown. “Now with their address unknown, I fear the case will drag on even longer,” says Singh.

The current parole of Salman Khan’s friend Sanjay Dutt also makes for a curious story. Since his imprisonment in mid-May 2013, Dutt has been able to get out twice for a period that adds up to almost two months already. In October, he was granted a 14-day-long furlough, and another 14 days were added as an extension on the grounds of his ‘ill health’. He was again out in December on parole raul irani

for 30 days, and has now applied for a 30-day extension citing his wife’s ill health.

“How is it that he has gotten paroles and furloughs so easily, while the pleas of many others involved in the 1993 blast case have been ignored?” asks Singh, “The medical reports Sanjay surrenders when applying for furloughs and paroles are hardly ever scrutinised carefully.”

Before Dutt applied for an extension of parole on the plea of his wife’s illness, it’s interesting to note the media coverage her health got. “Once, it was a tumour in the liver, and now one hears tuberculosis,” says Singh, “But the most interesting bit is how it [regularly] appears, supported by quotes from an anonymous source, in newspapers.”

A

few years ago, when Amar Singh was still a power-

ful politician in the Samajwadi Party and a close friend of Amitabh Bachchan, he got involved in a spat at a film awards show in Dubai. Says an individual well acquainted with Bachchan and who was present at the event, “[Bachchan and Singh] came in later for the Zee Awards show and were seated in the eleventh row. Amar Singh created a big scene then, and Subhash Chandra of Zee in solidarity walked up to Karim Morani [the organiser of the show and a friend of Shah Rukh Khan] and slapped him.” Later that night, when Shah Rukh Khan came across Amar Singh, he told him, “Aap kaafi goondagardi karr rahein hain (You are behaving like a thug).” According

“I think I have failed as a father,” says Bhatt... “As someone who likes to believe I have an outward gaze, I should have been able to tell my daughter not to go” to the source, Singh was so incensed that he called all the big distributors in UP, asking them to ban all Shah Rukh Khan films from theatres. “The distributors didn’t want to do that since Khan was the biggest star then and they made most of their money off his work, but who could refuse Amar Singh then? This ban was only lifted later, once Amitabh Bachchan called the two (Khan and Singh) over to his house and made them bury their differences.”

According to this source, even a Shah Rukh Khan, with all his connections, isn’t powerful enough to take on a politician. “Stars simply can’t afford to have themselves in their bad books,” he says, “Because when a situation gets tricky, no one’s going to be around to support you.”

This was on clear display back in 2010, when the Shiv Sena threatened to ban Shah Rukh Khan’s film, My Name Is Khan. Few other top stars thought it wise to intervene on Khan’s behalf or offer him their support in public. And when Jaya Bachchan was asked about her family’s silence 26 open

over the issue on NDTV, she said with palpable restraint, “I had my battles. I fought it single-handedly—with the support of my family. Nothing happens.”

T

here is nothing more palpably hypocritical about

the Hindi film industry than its sudden engagement of society on larger issues whenever a film is set for release. Apart from routine appearances on comedy skits and soaps on TV, these stars suddenly pop up on news channels discussing issues of national importance—or attaching their names to social causes.

Thus you will see a farcical debate—as one did last year on Headlines Today—about whether porn encourages men to become rapists, with the cast of Shootout at Wadala providing their views on the subject seated cosily in front of the film’s posters. You will see an Imran Khan, on the anvil of his film Delhi Belly, filing a PIL challenging Maharashtra’s ban on anyone under the age of 25 drinking liquor. And you will see Salman Khan defying grammar and spellings in a tweet like this: ‘Request the to the awam of pakistan, member’s of the press, govt of pakistan, president zardari, a humble request’, ‘It would be the most amazing gesture, to send surabjeet back to his family after 30 years. Hope u support me like its your own cause’ and ‘B a part of 1 family’s happiness’. What’s the big occasion? Well, there’s his first Indo-Pak spy thriller, Ek Tha Tiger, up for release.

O

r consider what happened by the sea in Bandra on the night of 30 December 2012. A group of individuals, alleged to be bodyguards of Salman Khan, dragged fishing nets, plastic sheets and other fishing equipment off some boats parked outside a Koli household of traditional fisherfolk on Chimbai Beach, and burnt them. The only people in the house were three women, all of whom confronted the men. The bodyguards, they claim, were inebriated, and in the ensuing melee, the men hit them with a bamboo stick.

It was the conclusion of a fight between Salman Khan’s family and the Falcons, the Koli family. The latter claim the Khans want them to sell their property to them.

In 2011, Salman’s father Salim Khan had bought two seafacing bungalows that look the Falcons’ home. “I believe our house, boats and nets spoil their sea-facing view,” says Lawrence Falcon, the 65-year-old head of the family.

The police filed a non-cognisable offence report against the bodyguards, but no arrests have been made so far.

Ironically, Lawrence Falcon has been working as a watchman at Galaxy Apartments, where the Khans live, for over 40 years and has known Salman Khan since he was a child. Once, when the actor was on his way out of home in his car, he summoned Falcon. “Have you become a dada to put in a complaint against me?” Falcon recalls Khan asking him. n 27 January 2014

identity

Suddenly Indian Turtuk was a border region in Pakistan until 1971. One fine day, it became a part of India.

The unsettling effects of this switch are still visible Shubhangi Swarup

O

n 14 December 1971 , Sanaullah

Khan was 13 years old when the Indian Army captured his village, Turtuk, from Pakistan. At the edge of Baltistan, enclosed by the Karakoram mountain range with the Shyok flowing in the valley below, Turtuk was one of four villages captured by Indian forces.

As a boy, Sanaullah was afraid of both, India as a country and the actual LoC that bordered some farms. The sight of the

Indian Army patrolling the other side was frightening. Pakistani newspapers were filled with stories of Muslims being tortured and persecuted in India. History textbooks also vilified Indians. Couched within this fear was a child’s curiosity: what must Indians really be like?

Sanaullah remembers his father, Maulvi Abdullah Karmapa, a visionary Maulvi, playing a decisive role that morning as a village elder. Villagers from 27 January 2014

life at the LoC An aerial view of Turtuk village, visible on the left of the river Shyok; (below) Children play in the village

photos Salim Kharmang

a closeby village Chalungka had fled overnight. But Sanaullah’s father urged the people of Turtuk to stay put. Though most discredited him as a man who’d had the audacity to send his daughter Rehma Begum to school (the first female to be so educated in Turtuk), he had a point. If they chose to run, they might have had to be on the run forever. Not only would a generation be lost to displacement, they would lose something they valued dearly: the idea of home. They would never find the same comfort anywhere else.

With the lucidity of hindsight, Sanaullah and his peers can now appreciate the Maulvi’s wisdom.“In the old times, people may have been illiterate, but they had a lot of knowledge,” says Sher Ali, Sanaullah’s brother-in-law. He 27 January 2014

remembers his grandfather returning from seasonal work in Simla and Mussoorie with news of the atom bomb, of Germans and of India’s freedom movement. The elders had lived through World War II, Independence, Partition, and now this, the grievous loss of Bangladesh. They had once considered India and Pakistan one nation, and were aware—in spite of State propaganda— that millions of Muslims still lived and thrived in India.

Then, early one winter morning, Major Chewang Rinchen of the Ladakh Scouts of the Indian Army came on a courtesy call to Turtuk. The hero of the conquest, the Major would be awarded another Mahavir Chakra for this, making him one of only six Indians with two such honours to date. ‘Major Chewang Rinchen had not only captured Point 18,402, the highest post ever captured, but also liberated an area of 800 sq km from PoK (the largest area captured in the 1971 operations),’ writes Claude Arpi, an academic, in his tribute to Rinchen on Rediff.com. The Major had captured Turtuk with ‘hardly any supplies and no artillery support’.

Sher Ali, then just 17, remembers the moment the Major knocked on his father’s door, requesting a cup of tea and indoor warmth. Before Partition had slit the landscape in 1947, Sher Ali’s father Ghulam Hussein would travel to Nubra valley in Ladakh for trade. He would go there to barter yak cheese, butter and apricots for essentials like tea, clothes and vessels. Hussein had also been to Major Rinchen’s home village and asked him if he knew Khunzang, an old friend of his who had two sons; Hussein wondered how they all were. Major Rinchen, it turned out, was one of those boys. That was the ice-breaker. Sher Ali would meet Major Rinchen on all his visits to Turtuk from then on.

Till the night before, India had been a feared enemy. All the villagers had been saddened by the news of East Pakistan’s breakaway. The next morning, the Indian Army was at their doorstep— with Major Rinchen as an emissary, here to welcome them to India. As Indian citizens, he told the villagers, they had nothing to be afraid of, not even the Army, which was there to protect them. The Army gifted the villagers tea and sugar. open www.openthemagazine.com 29

The women of the village organised a cultural procession in return, giving the soldiers apricots and other gifts.

With the conquest of Chalungka, Turtuk, Thyakshi and Thang villages, a thin slice of Baltistan was now under Indian control. Overnight, the LoC had moved. It was a tactical victory, given the terrain, that offered Indian forces new vantage points, and the success would come to drown out the inevitable narratives of separation, heartbreak and hardship the villagers endured as a consequence.

L

ast September, I visited villages of the Turtuk region for a week as a volunteer for a local organisation, Avalotikeshwara Trust, and taught English at government schools. The village elders I met said that more than 300 people of the villages captured by India were left behind in Pakistan that day. These were people who were away from home for education, employment and trade. Children had been separated from parents, siblings from one another and farmers from their fields. Once the dust settled and these villagers realised that their return would be impossible (even on a temporary visa), couples caught on opposite sides were compelled to divorce.

Thyakshi and Thang, the villages closest to the current LoC, are still out of bounds for outsiders, while Turtuk was opened for tourism in 2010. No aspect of life here remains untouched by the turbulent narrative of nation building, not even State education.

Thyakshi’s high school is housed in a building that was constructed by Pakistan’s government and inaugurated

by India’s. The senior teachers here were educated under the Pakistani education system. In Turtuk, Rehma Begum, principal of Yul Primary School, is one such teacher. The first woman to get an education here, she had only studied till Class IX when the Indian Army took over, halting her schooling. In 1977, the Indian Government offered her her first job—as a primary school teacher. Asked to compare the education systems, she speaks of how education was compulsory for all in Pakistan under a scheme called Apni Madad Aap, long before India 30 open

instituted its Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.

Though it was relatively easy for locals to accept employment as teachers, joining the Indian defence services or state police was difficult. “For 20 years, our Balti elders didn’t allow the young to join the Ladakh Scouts or the police,” says Haji Abdul Qadir, the nambardar (headman) of Thyakshi. “What if Pakistan took over once again?” The same men would be persecuted as enemies or banished as refugees.

Ali Hassan had retired as a naik of the Pakistani army when India took over Turtuk, denying him access to his pension. He complained to Lieutenant Major Arjun Ray, the force behind the Indian Army’s Sadbhavana project, and LK Advani on their visits to the region, demanding that they either take it up with the Pakistani government or pay him his pension. But nothing came of it. Instead, his only son, Habibullah, joined the Indian Army against his advice.

Abdul Qadir remembers how all the women folk arrived at Lieutenant Gen Arjun Ray’s doorstep one day in tears. “I was a councillor then, and he asked me why they were crying,” recounts Qadir.

“They had come to tell him not to take Habibullah into the Army, but I lied. I said these were tears of joy, that they had come to thank him.”

During the Kargil War of 1999, Abdul Rahman, principal of the only school in Thang village, saw a Bofors shell land in the school compound. “We knew of the war in Kargil, but didn’t know firing had begun here too. I was sitting in class when shells began to hit our mountain.

We ran immediately. Then another came down. For two months, our school was closed. Each day, we would retreat to our bunkers from 2 pm to 10 pm as the shelling took place.”

According to Rahman, the shelling didn’t stop for five years—until 2003, that is. War, they sadly note, is inescapable in this border region.

O

ne evening, I was invited to give a

talk on journalism to a crowd of more than 30 boys and young men at the Yul Youth library, a cattle pen which had been revamped as a study centre. No one was interested in journalism. Instead, they wanted me to share their opinions

with the rest of the world.

Nazir Hussain, a teacher, had this to say: “Living on the border, we have sacrificed more than the army.” During the Kargil War, all of Turtuk’s villagers were evacuated to Hunder, where they spent three months in what the boys describe as an open jail, while able-bodied males were made to transport goods to the LoC “like mules”. Cattle, meanwhile, perished in the shelling by the hundred.

Homes were destroyed too.

“The media cries for war at the smallest sign,” sighs Inayatullah Khan, a 19-yearold student of aerospace engineering, referring to recent Chinese incursions, “They think not for a moment about us people living on the border.” He summarises a fictional story he had written to illustrate his point. It is about two brothers from Turtuk separated by the events of 1971 as infants, each living in ignorance of the other’s existence across the LoC. As adults, both join their respective armies, and confront each other— without knowing it—as enemies at the Battle of Siachen. True to its dramatic premise, one kills the other. The moral of the story: “It doesn’t matter which side wins, the blood that is shed is ours.”

Thang is the last village before the LoC—for us Indians, the final frontier.

“Very few people visit Thang. To come here is a matter of destiny,” says Abbas, our 23-year-old driver. The son of Thang’s nambardar, he is the only one who owns a car in Thang. And what makes Thang so special, I ask him. “Pakistan,” he replies.

One can see Pakistan from every corner in Thang. Below, the river Shyok takes a sinuous turn, separating Thang from the next village, Phranu, in Pakistan, on the other side of the bank. People in Thang can’t help but envy the 24-hour electricity that lights the other side up, compared to their own rationed hours. They can’t help feeling forsaken. “The Indian Government doesn’t want to invest in us because our future is uncertain,” a villager tells me. There is also a Pakistani post on the peak of the hill that Thang is on.

“Pakistan sits on our head,” he jokes.

Lower in altitude than other villages, Thang is remarkably hot, smouldering under the sun’s glare. These are the Karakorams, barren and naked. The only school is a state primary school. One of its meagre possessions is a cracked globe.

27 January 2014

team spirit A polo match between the young and the old of Turtuk at its highaltitude polo ground

Hidden in this village of infernal heat and forced oblivion is a fragile dream.

Compared to the rest, the house of Thang’s nambardar stands out as a humble Taj Mahal, and he, a modern-day moghul. Built in the most verdant part of the village, the heat vanishes among the trees and creepers that shade his verandah. Nearby, artificial ponds have been built for fish, decorated with floral designs. Attached to the house is the idea of a menagerie. Turkeys, rabbits and hens occupy cages. Portions of the home have been decorated with patterned tiles, and father and son, we hear, painted the living room in bright colours themselves.

Among objects like vases, artificial flowers, carpets, Islamic wall hangings and the mounted head of an ibex, are the following words painted at the entrance in English: ‘The life is blessing of the God’.

P

akistan was under martial law dur-

ing the 1971 Indo-Pak war. It is how most elders here remember the country. “Corruption was very little in Zia ul-Haq’s time,” says Abdul Qadir. “I myself had blacklisted a few contractors for cheating. Unless a job was completed, a new one wouldn’t start.” This, he claims, is in sharp contrast with their experience of democracy, and he believes that India would go much further if it were under martial law. Qadir considers India more progressive than Pakistan by way of opportunities, amenities and ideals. “We understand what it means to be Indian

27 January 2014

more than Indians,” he tells me, describing the country as a vast ocean that makes it possible for all kinds to merge.

In October 2013, a miracle was said to have occurred in Turtuk when Mohammad Bashir, Sanaullah and Rehma Begum’s eldest brother, returned home from Pakistan after 43 years. It has been excruciatingly difficult for those left in Pakistan to get an Indian visa and visit Turtuk; the last time that happened was two decades ago. “A corpse has come back to life,” was how Rehma Begum described her brother’s return. Mohammed Bashir stayed in Turtuk for 35 days till his visa ran out. “Allah has been kind,” sums up Rehma Begum. But not everyone has had Bashir’s luck. Many refugees, unable to return home, died with broken hearts.

O

n my last morning in Turtuk, I vis-

it Sher Ali’s home to say goodbye. He is amicable and approachable in his demeanour, eager to answer every question I have. He tells me about his cousin, an 80-year-old man who moved from Pakistan to Canada. “He yearns to return to his home here,” says Sher Ali, who hears from him on the phone at least a couple of times a week. “‘Is the rose tree in my farm still there? The crooked wall in my house, has it been fixed yet?’ [he asks]. He speaks to me for three to four hours about these things.” The man from Canada had made it till Leh a few years ago, but the administration did not allow him any closer.

Sher Ali takes me through an album of photographs, one that has been browsed so incessantly that pages have come off.

Of lives most cherished, all that remains is a single page of photographs. He shows me photographs of his eldest brother who was left behind in Pakistan. He was helpless, he says, as he watched his brother age in the passport-size pictures he would keep posting. By the time telephone lines reached Turtuk six or seven years ago, 30 years had already passed.

His brother’s voice wasn’t as youthful as Sher Ali remembered it. Given his job as a teacher in a Pakistani army institute, Sher Ali knew his brother would never be allowed to visit Turtuk. Their irrational hope of seeing each other again vanished with his death last year.

In 1971, Sher Ali’s brother had left a wife and daughter behind in Turtuk.

After a divorce, Sher Ali remarried his brother’s wife and raised Ayesha, his niece, like his daughter. The next page in his album is dedicated to Ayesha. She was the first woman to become a doctor in Turtuk, he says with pride. But she had poor health, and died in her twenties of anaemia.

The people in these photographs, like the owner of this album, have known tragedy intimately. Yet, they have also known resilience. When Sher Ali had a daughter himself a decade later, he named her Ayesha in her memory.

She is also very intelligent, he tells me.

He hopes that she, too, will be a doctor one day. n open www.openthemagazine.com 31

s h e lt e r

At the Mercy of God Guruvayoor temple serves as a refuge for the elderly abandoned or turned out by their children Shahina KK

L

akshmikuttyamma,

80

years

old now, had three children—one son and two daughters. The son died in an accident in 1992. The elder daughter, a nurse, married a doctor from Karnataka and settled in Mangalore.

Lakshmikuttyamma, widowed 30 years ago, lived with the younger daughter in Kerala’s Kottayam district.

Hers was not an easy life. Her son-inlaw was an alcoholic who used to beat her and demand money. She had forty cents of land and a house. They wanted her to hand over the property to them.

“All my property would have gone to them anyway after my death. My only son is dead, and I have not heard from my elder daughter. But they did not want to wait till I died. I lived with this harassment for years,” she says.

One day in December 2004, she was tortured and locked in a room for three days and given almost no food. On the fourth 32 open

day, she was let out. When her daughter and son-in-law went out on some errand, Lakshmikuttyamma left home and sought admission at a government hospital. She was very weak and bore wounds on her body. She spent a month at the hospital. “I then boarded a bus to

Guruvayoor [in Kerala],” she says.

She lived on the temple premises, sleeping in some corner of its tiled floor with many others like her. Like all places of worship, Guruvayoor has a large floating population. There is food, freedom, devotion and recreation here. The old 27 January 2014

photos ima babu

A place of their own The temple at Guruvayoor where the elderly find food and shelter

men and women often do not want to go back. They find life at the temple better than with their children. A couple of weeks ago, Laxmikuttiyamma was shifted to an old-age home run by the Guruvayoor municipality, and she is not happy. “I am not allowed to go out. They 27 January 2014

curtail our freedom. They don’t even give us sufficient food.”

T

emple towns are known to be easy

resorts for those who don’t want to assume responsibility for their elderly par-

ents. Recently, there have been reports in the media of abandoned parents living on the premises of Madurai temple in Tamil Nadu. The world’s largest religious carnival, the Maha Kumbha Mela in Allahabad, is known for the abandonment of the old. The availability of food open www.openthemagazine.com 33

of no fixed address The auditorium of the Guruvayoor temple where the elderly are welcome to sit around; (far right) The municipality’s shelter where some of the elderly have been rehabilitated

at temples is one reason why people often leave their parents there.

Guruvayoor is one of the most popular Hindu places of worship in south India.

The police, activists and officials of Guruvayur Devaswom Board—the body that looks after the temple administration—say there is an alarming rise of old people being abandoned or coming here to escape their children.

It was 23 years ago that 82-year-old Ponni was brought to Guruvayoor from her residence in Kottayam for a visit by her son and family. They left her in a crowd and disappeared. She, too, was recently shifted to the shelter home following local media reports about ageing parents abandoned at the temple. When I meet her there, she is reluctant to speak.

Her caretakers said that her son had abandoned her; Ponni tells me that she has neither husband nor children. She tries to look indifferent, but, as we talk, she cannot control her tears.

This is not only the story of mothers.

There are many fathers, uncles and aunts abandoned in the twilight of their lives.

The story of Ramachandran Nair is similar to that of Lakshmikuttyamma. He is 71 years old, and hails from Thiruvilwamala in Palakkad. He was a stenographer at the Bombay High Court.

A bachelor, Nair dedicated his entire life to taking care of his widowed sister, her six daughters and three sons. He spent all his earnings on their education and marriages. “I spent even the last penny in my pocket. When they realised there was nothing left with me, they started showing their true colours. One day, my sister told me that life had become expensive and she was unable to provide me food. I left home that day,” he says.

Nair directly came to a shelter home at Guruvayoor recommended by a Panchayat member. He did not have to sleep on the tiled floor of the temple like many others. “All of them (other old people) are uneducated. I have nothing to communicate with them. Here I have frequent visitors even from outside Kerala,” he says.

Nair does not blame his sister or her 34 open

Officials of the Guruvayur Devaswom Board say there is an alarming rise in old people being abandoned or coming here to escape their children children. “If this is what is destined, nobody can change it,” says the 71-year-old, “I used to think that I would not have been thrown away had I married and had children of my own. But I realised how wrong I was when I reached here. Most of the people living in and around the temple had children of their own.” He now often gets work as a translator for visitors who don’t know the local language.

“Most of them know either English or Hindi; I am the only person who can translate,” he says. It helps maintain his self-esteem.

N

o one really has any idea of the

number of abandoned old people who have made Guruvayoor their home.

“It is not possible to collect the data. As you see here, there are hundreds of people sleeping on the premises of the temple. Many of them are devotees who have come for a short visit. Most of them are old. How can we identify an abandoned person in this crowd?” asks RK Jayaraj, assistant commissioner of Police.

Joffi Chovannur, a journalist who runs a local cable network that has been consistently reporting the plight of the elderly at Guruvayoor, does not entirely endorse this view. “It is difficult, but not impossible. If there is effective networking between the municipality, Devaswom Board and police, the data can be gathered,” he says. Chovannur says that it is the responsibility of the Devaswom Board to ensure the elderly proper shelter and medical aid. The 27 January 2014

alised she was trying to poison me.”

Jayaraj has initiated a programme titled Sneha Sparsham to create a network of senior citizens in Guruvayoor. He observes that abandoned parents typically blame the daughter/son in-law, and rarely find fault with their own children. “In fact, the daughters-in-law who harass them only do it for their husbands,” he says.

Board says they are unable to do this. “If we provide shelter to all those who end up on the premises of the temple, it would send out the wrong message. They will dump old parents at the temple without any guilt. The number of such people being abandoned will only increase,” says T Chandramohan, chairman of the Devaswom Board.

Most stories here have a similar narrative: of the elderly being cajoled to give away their property to their children, and abandoned. Kalyanikuttyamma is 71 years old. She arrived at the temple 20 years ago from Thrissur. She, too, was picked by a recent rehabilitation drive by the municipality, and stays at the shelter.

She lived with her younger son before coming to Guruvayoor. “His wife disliked and harassed me. My son was unconcerned. One day, she served me food, it tasted strange. After a few minutes, I felt nauseous and started puking. I re27 January 2014

“It is not possible to collect the data. As you see here, there are hundreds of people sleeping on the premises of the temple.

Many of them are devotees... ” r k jaya r aj ,

Assistant Commissioner of Police, Guruvayoor

Rajamma, who is 81 years old, arrived at Guruvayoor 17 days ago. She used to live with her husband in her home in Chettikkulangara in Alappuzha district.

Her sister died some years ago and her niece invited the couple to live with them. She advised them to sell their property and deposit the money in a bank. “I didn’t realise it was a trap. Soon, she started asking for money. The first time, she asked Rs 50,000 for her son’s admission.

On another occasion, she demanded Rs

25,000 for her husband’s business. She found fault with whatever we did.

Finally, we left home and sought shelter in an old-age home nearby. She made no attempt to meet us. Both of us were happy there,” says Rajamma. But her husband died, and she could not bear to remain at the old-age home without him.

She came to the temple. She slept on the temple grounds for a couple of days before the police picked her up and took her to a nearby private shelter home run by a retired teacher.

Lack of coordination between the Devaswom Board, the municipality and the police is evident. The shelter run by the municipality has only 21 inmates, while the buildings can accommodate about a hundred. The municipality says that the Devaswom Board should take on more responsibility for the elderly, as the latter provides food to inmates.

It is debatable whether putting hundreds of old people in an old-age shelter is a solution. Most do not want to be cooped up inside. Outside, they enjoy the mobility and freedom their children denied them. Thrice a day, they get meals from the Devaswom Board. At the temple, there is music and dance every day, and the steady thrum of pilgrims and devotees. Their abandonment is tragic, but the fact that they have found some comfort must count for something. n open www.openthemagazine.com 35

weirdos Black metal band Blasphemy survived two years before being banned from most venues. Once, the band’s guitarist ripped out a drip needle during a performance

genre

A Violent Music From drinking goat blood to worshipping Satan, the story of Indian metal bands and how they have mellowed in recent times Drashti Thakkar

ravi shekhar

S

creeching women flail their arms wildly and run into one another. A couple of them stumble and fall midway. They look embarrassed and surprised. A set of female hands promptly helps them get up.

They are in what’s called the ‘mosh pit’ at a live 2013 performance in Pune of the post-hardcore band Scribe at NH7 Weekender, one of India’s most happening music festivals. Mindless collision fuelled by metal aggression is routine at meta concerts. The women are abiding by the pit’s sacred code of behaviour: helping a fallen ‘mosher’ up.

Vocalist Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy has a cheeky smile on his face as the band plays a metal cover of Justin Timberlake’s What Goes Around Comes Around. The men in the audience, who have formed a circle around the women, keep their hands to themselves or clasped round phone cameras.

Awestruck at the spectacle, they egg on the all-girl mosh pit in the centre.

‘T

he Indian metal scene is in its

nascent stage.’ I’ve heard variations of this sentence a million times, sometimes spoken apologetically and sometimes assertively. But this is not accurate. An all-girl mosh pit might be a contemporary phenomenon, but the Indian metal scene has for some time had cult personalities who inspire scenes and reactions just as frenzied.

At the fag end of the 1990s, a notorious Chennai-based band was doing the rounds of the Indian metal scene. Aptly named Blasphemy, the black metal band was on a mission to shock listeners with music.

Among the many notorious incidents their vocalist Phebeian Johnson tells me about was one that took place at Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and

Research (JIPMER) in Puducherry.

“It was a dry day, but we managed to score a bottle of Monk [Old Monk rum].

I remember paying for it under the table,” says Johnson. When a very drunk Blasphemy reached the venue, the audience did not know how to react to what they heard. And saw. The bassist, Vasanth, unable to hold his bursting bladder, took a piss on stage right beside the monitors. “After that,” he says, “the drummer gives a four count with his sticks, and we get into the next song like nothing’s happened.” For many in the audience, it was their first tryst with black metal, a subgenre of metal infamous for its controversial musicians.

Black metal bands are frequently characterised by scandalous incidents more than their style of music and instrumentation. From mock crucifixions to featuring impaled animal heads on stage to burning churches and murdering fellow band mates, the genre that was once hailed as the voice of dissent now comes across as a twisted version of its former self—with pretentious eye-popping rituals assuming priority over non-conformist beliefs.

Another major Blasphemy moment was the band’s song Garland of Guts, about Rajinikanth. They had the guts to perform it at JIPMER in a part of the country that sees the Tamil filmstar as a god. It was 1999, and an explicit combination of scandalous lyrics and indecent stage acts left the faculty—and even some students—seething. “It was the axe effect,” says Johnson, laughing.

“There was a meat axe that belonged to my brother’s grandma. It was part of our stage act. That night I almost chopped the head off this guy in the audience in all the frenzy. Sadly, that axe had a very sad and unworthy demise. Aunty sold it off to the scrap iron man for Rs 15.” The night ended with an angry mob chasing the band away, while

nishant shukla

policemen tried in vain to keep things in order. Understandably, Blasphemy was banned from returning to JIPMER. The next year, however, the band sneaked back onto JIPMER’s campus under a slightly-different name, Blaspheme, and a slightly-different lineup, but with the same temperament. “That year, we drank so much before the show, horse brandy and all,” says Johnson. The band’s guitarist suffered alcohol poisoning and slipped into coma. “We rushed him to hospital. It was pretty serious, his pupils were dilated… we thought he was gone.”

The normal thing to do would have been to cancel the performance. The band, of course, did no such thing. In defiance of medical advice, the guitarist reached the venue with a drip needle in his forearm for the next evening’s performance—a needle that was ripped out on stage as part of their performance.

That was not the end of all the gore that night. Later into the performance, a headbanging fan injured himself near a barricade. “A stray needle had induced a deep cut stretching from his forehead to just above his eye,” says Johnson. The fan got six stitches. But before that, he got the band’s personal attention; they tended to his wounds with sugar. “It was our remedy to stop the bleeding.”

Blasphemy was founded in 1999 and survived only two years. After the band’s first round of shows, it found itself banned at most places. Its story had begun with a local gig that a friend secured for it, a performance being filmed for TV broadcast as part of a cultural festival of sorts. A prerequisite to a performance here was a song in any regional language.

“We didn’t know any Tamil at all, but we had Hindi in school, so we decided to write a song in Hindi,” Johnson recollects. “Me and Mario [Feegrade, guitarist in 1999] were quite deep in the dark magic scene at the time. Have you done table tapping? You know, people sit around the table and call on spirits of dead people?

It’s quite interesting if you get the right kind of spirit.”

That was a regular pre-performance ritual for the band. It also served as inspiration for a song. “We got in touch with the spirit of this lady who had been murdered. We wrote her story in a song titled Bees Saal Baad.”

In addition to performing a Hindi song 40 open

listening at their risk Audiences at metal performances are known to have suffered injuries during shows

inspired by the vengeful wish of a spirit, Blasphemy showered the State-run channel’s cameras with generous amounts of profanity and debauchery. Asked to leave, they threw the mic at the anchor.

The band’s track titles have always been edgy. And if songs like Dead Bodies in the Basement, Sledge Hammer Blow to the Balls of God and Genital Cancer were a cultural shock to people, their belief in Satan worship was harder still for some to handle. For black metal bands, though, such worship is routine. Satan, to them, is a metaphor of freedom, an embodiment of the forces of chaos and anarchy they champion against the covert evil of organised religion. Blasphemy’s method was to shock audiences out of complacency and into reality. For some reason, it did not work.

“We had difficulty finding a stable lineup,” says Johnson, “No one wanted to play the songs we wrote. One dude came to audition for the position of a bassist. He got selected but quit because his mother thought we perform animal sacrifices.”

In 2000, Blasphemy played a set at IITMadras. “The axe on the mic and drums got us sent off and they didn’t like my T-shirt either,” says Johnson. “It was a DIY shirt which read ‘Fuck religion, fuck the police, fuck boy bands, fuck IIT, and if you don’t like it, fuck you too’.” A faculty member forbade him from getting on stage with that T-shirt, so Johnson wore another one over it, got on stage, and then took his cover off. “Needless to say, we got

our set cut short. But the wackos in the crowd loved us, we were called back on stage for an encore, and the management went berserk trying to cut off the sound while we played.”

A

nother popular Indian band of

the genre is Cosmic Infusion. Formed in 2003, it has its origins in the unlikely setting of Ambernath, a distant suburb of Mumbai. “The music you make is inspired by the environment you live in,” says Sushan Shetty, who handles keys and vocals for the band. “Where we lived in Ambernath, the area was filled with forest growth and dilapidated bungalows. It was in one such bungalow that we began to jam.” As he recounts the story that led to the band’s discovery of its unique sound, I can’t help but think of Black Sabbath. Arguably the pioneer of metal music, this band found inspiration for its 1973 album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath within the eerie confines of Clearwell Castle in The Forest of Dean.

Influenced by its surroundings, Cosmic Infusion’s songs express a fascination for death and the supernatural.

Black metal came to the group naturally.

The lineup has changed considerably since its inception, but Cosmic Infusion has had some of the most eccentric musicians. Take, for example, Chetan Tadke.

Five years after the band came into existence, it was raising hell at Marine Centre, a bar and restaurant in the Mumbai suburb of Vashi. The restaurant, 27 January 2014

a popular venue for metal concerts, had Cosmic Infusion—fronted by Tadke— among the bands on the bill one fine night. “I don’t really remember which song it was. I had my hands full with the keys, but we had talked this through. It was the band’s decision,” says Shetty.

Tadke picked up a bottle that was lying on stage and poured the contents all over his head, drinking some and letting the rest soak his face and torso. It was goat’s blood. This incident remains an urban legend, one that Shetty confirms as having happened: “We were a black metal band like any other black metal band.

Our songs were about satanic rituals. Our rituals did not involve anti-Christian sentiments, only blood from time-to-time.”

Tadke has now detached himself from the scene, but the eccentric vocalist with his long orange hair is one of the best frontmen the domestic scene has had.

Once, on a local train to Ambernath, Tadke is reputed to have beaten up a couple of hecklers who mocked his hair. He is also known to have passed out several times on stage with a bottle of alcohol in hand. The last time he did that, he almost took the drumset down with him.

“I met him about two years ago,” says Shetty, “He is a different man now. I think he is somewhere in Sangli looking after his parents.”

Resurrected recently, the band played its first gig after a long hiatus at Marine Centre. Many things have changed since the old days. For one, the venue also hosts Bollywood music. If one walks out of the hall near its bar where metalheads beat each other up in a mosh pit, one would be greeted with the sound of old Bollywood songs emanating from a classic pair of Ahuja speakers, complete with karaoke backing tracks.

T

he new version of Cosmic Infusion

is big on corpse paint, another tradition typical of black metal bands; this Halloween, a fan even requested the band members to lend him some corpse paint for a party. Shetty has assumed control of the band as its frontman and lead vocalist. “The band has given up on most stage gimmicks. Now we are more about the music. Hopefully, our fans will appreciate that,” he says.

Still, wild events are characteristic of

27 January 2014

the metal scene as a whole. Metal is strong music, the objective being to hit you with the music. If, in the process, it leaves you hammered, even better. Some musicians, though, take this hammering rather seriously. In 2005, Vishal Dadlani shoved a microphone stand at a fan in the audience, causing him serious injury.

The story goes that someone in the audience threw a plank, studded with spikes, at the bassist. Dadlani lost his cool and threw the mic stand in the general direction of the offender, accidently injuring an innocent attendee.

Something like that happened again during Scribe’s performance at NH7 Pune. There is some dispute over what exactly transpired, but word goes that someone in the audience kept disrupting the set and abusing the band’s guitarist.

Scribe’s vocalist and frontman Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy warned him off a few times, but to no avail. Vishwesh then decided to resolve the matter himself, and

Chetan Tadke of the band Cosmic Infusion poured goat’s blood over himself and drank some of it during a performance at a restaurant in Mumbai asked the audience in Hindi to “teach him a lesson in the mosh pit”. Not a very sporting request for a vocalist of the most popular metal band in India.

Several of these reckless episodes may be blamed on the adrenaline rush of live metal concerts. A similar kick caused a metalhead to jump off the mezzanine floor into the crowd at Razz (Razzberry Rhinoceros). TJ Morey remembers his fall at that fateful Resurrection gig. “It was the 3rd or 4th edition of Resurrection as far as I can remember,” he says. “I got hammered beyond my comprehension, climbed on the first floor balcony, and did a leap-of-faith of sorts, only to realise that the bitch of a crowd parted way for me like the sea did for Moses and I ended up flat on the ground with a broken bit or two.”

In 2009, several injuries were reported at Delhi’s Great Indian Rock concert.

“Our performance saw an insane number of members of the audience getting injured,” says Shashank Bhatnagar, lead vocalist of metal band Undying Inc. “Two guys sustained serious head injuries, five people broke some bone or the other, and six came down with ligament injuries.

One of them later came backstage to get his head bandage signed.”

Veteran metalhead Ravi Balakrishnan recollects another such incident from 1997-98 when VJ Danny McGill performed with his underground band Power Onions at Rang Bhavan in Mumbai. “He stage-dived into the crowd.

I’ve heard two versions of what happened next. In one, the crowd parted all around him and he crashed to the ground from quite a height. In the other, they did this thing that was in vogue back then— public dhulai. It was this gag where one of your ‘friends’ grabs your eyes while the others smack you on the head. When McGill got back on stage, he realised his pager had been stolen.”

Inevitably, some of these hell raisers have now matured. Johnson lives in Dubai and is happily married with a fiveyear-old daughter and an 18-month-old son. Cosmic Infusion has sobered up and been making music at phenomenal speed. As I talk to Sushan Shetty, he insists that these antics were a part of their past, and that they’d rather people listened to their music than talk about these incidents. Both Vishwesh Krishnamoorthy and Vishal Dadlani have at some point expressed their regret, and apologised, for their behaviour on stage. Metal is much more than a few crazy episodes, which is why these wild stories have died down.

Yet, the metal scene continues to thrive. It has become significant enough to accommodate its very own humour blog by the name Metalwikileaks.wordpress.com. The writings feature mock reports on people from the scene—musicians, organisers, fans. There is also the web series Headbanger’s Kitchen, pitched as a ‘heavy-metal cooking show’ that doubles up as a talk show.

The show has featured nearly all of India’s metal musicians, with host Sahil Makhija, frontman of the band Demonic Resurrection, cooking for invitees, followed by a discussion over dinner. So far, goat blood has not been served. n open www.openthemagazine.com 41

s e n s at i o n

The Lullaby That Led to a Dream How a clip of Chandralekha Adoor crooning Rajahamsame went viral on YouTube and turned her life around akshaya pillai

I

nside a rented Ambassador cab parked halfway through a playground in Kollam, somewhere behind the makeshift stage where she is scheduled to perform in another half hour, 34-year-old Chandralekha Adoor finally finds some time for my questions.

The conversation begins with a yawn for which she begs my pardon: “I have had a very long day. I woke up at 5 in the morning, travelled to Kochi for a shoot and then travelled all the way to Kollam for this function and tomorrow morning, at 5, I have a flight to Bahrain.” She looks at her watch: 11 pm.

Chandralekha, 34, is used to waking up early. Till about three months ago, she would rise at 5 am in her thatched home in Vadasherikkara, Kerala, to the shrill wake-up call of the neighbour’s rooster. She would draw water from the well and sauté vegetables for her husband Reghunath’s lunch. Reghunath works as a Life Insurance Corp (LIC) agent in the small town of Pathanamthitta. She would bathe and feed her toddler son Sreehari before dropping him off at the nearby anganwadi school and return home to her chores.

She washed the dishes, swept the front yard, all the while humming to herself, sometimes in sync with songs from the TV soaps her mother-in-law would watch inside the house.

42 open

This was before YouTube blessed her.

At a family get-together for Onam in 2012, Chandralekha’s brother-in-law, Dersan VS, shot a video of her singing Rajahamsame, a popular two-decade old Malayalam film song originally sung by KS Chitra. She sang so well that the clip became an internet rage and turned Chandralekha’s life around.

Today, her itinerary is packed. She has already sung in two feature films (Love Story and an untitled Tamil project) as a

At Onam in 2012, Chandralekha’s brotherin-law shot a video of her singing a popular Malayalam film song originally sung by KS Chitra playback singer. Her main concerns now revolve around missing a flight, or the traffic blocks that might delay her as she shuttles north and south of Kerala performing stage shows. She still enters her kitchen early morning, but household chores have now moved a step lower on her priority list. The first task of the day is filling her thermos flask with hot water, boiled with a piece of dry ginger.

I

n the life-changing YouTube clip,

Chandralekha’s hair is tied into a messy knot. She has a towel on her left shoulder and her son on her hip. She sways to and fro as she sings a cover of Rajahamsame.

Sunlight filters in through a bamboo curtain from behind her, and in the backdrop, we hear vehicles pass by and the incoherent muttering of kids. Just another afternoon in the life of a housewife.

“It was during Onam,” says Chandralekha, “We were at a relative’s place and my brother-in-law, Dersan VS, asked me whether I could sing a song.

This wasn’t new. During most family gettogethers I am made to sing, so without a second thought I sang my favourite song. About the rest, I am clueless.”

It all started with Dersan’s curiosity of his new Nokia C503 phone. “I just wanted to check the video recording and audio clarity of my new phone,” he says.

“When I shot the video, I wasn’t thinking of uploading it anywhere, I just wanted my friends to hear how amazing her voice is.”

As an animator, Dersan was familiar with much more than email, Facebook and YouTube. While doing his sketching or colouring, he would listen to Coke Studio Pakistan on YouTube. Hoping to launch his version of this music show on YouTube, which he proposed to call FolkStudio, he recorded videos of a 27 January 2014

sivaram v.

the internet star at home Chandralekha and her son Sreehari walk down the steps from their home in Pathanamthitta district of Kerala

couple of friends and relatives who sing well. One of these was Chandralekha’s.

For a YouTube video to go viral, a messiah is a must. For instance, Rebecca Black’s Friday was just another homevideo until the comedian Daniel Tosh decided to post a link to the video saying ‘Songwriting isn’t for everyone’. That set the clicks rolling. Friday now has 200 million hits.

For Chandralekha, the messiah wasn’t a celebrity but a community. First uploaded on YouTube on 22 September 2012, the song managed just 412 ‘likes’ in one year. “The video did a couple of rounds on Facebook, mostly among friends, then was forgotten,” says Dersan. But on 1 October 2013, a non-resident Indian named Praveena shared it on her Facebook wall, after which the video went viral and was shared approximately 300,000 times on Facebook in 27 January 2014

just three days. “Someone named Prakash PK downloaded the same video, reposted it on YouTube on 12 October 2012 with advertisements. He has 700,000 hits, and he is sure to have made a lot of money from it. But what matters is how it helped Chandralekha reach music lovers.”

About 883,300 of the nearly 1,750,000 Indians in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are Malayalees. A majority of them would shed a tear at the mention of paddy fields, monsoons or payasam.

It was perhaps the unaffected air of a Malayalee housewife, the brick walls of her kitchen and her traditional voice that reminded them of lullabies back home. Prashant Pillai, a pravasi (expat) from Qatar who hasn’t been home for three years, says, “It was during a Saturday night booze party that a friend first mentioned this housewife-turned-

singer he had heard on YouTube. The entire night, we played her song on repeat, longing to be home. Her voice has that ache that resonates with our homesickness. Nowadays, when Shreya Ghoshal is singing most Malayalam melodies, to hear something so soothingly familiar was a unique experience.”

Kevin Allocca, trends manager with YouTube, says, “We all want to be stars— celebrities, singers, comedians, and when I was younger, that seemed so very very hard to achieve. But now, web video has made it such that any of us, or any of the creative things we do, can become famous in some part of our world’s culture. Any one of you could be famous on the internet by next Saturday. But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded on YouTube every minute. And of that, only a tiny percentage ever goes viral, and gets tonnes of ‘views’ open www.openthemagazine.com 43

just another housewife Clips from the YouTube video of Rajahamsame where Chandralekha appears with a towel on her left shoulder and her son on her hip

and becomes a cultural moment. So how does it happen? Three things: tastemakers, communities of participation and unexpectedness.”

Chandralekha was not on Facebook.

The viral compliments were merely hearsay to her until she gave away her phone number in the video. “The phone has literally not stopped ringing [since],” she says. “There have been calls from abroad, from the media, from musicians and from music lovers.” On 31 October last year, Chandralekha signed her first playback song for the Malayalam film Love Story.

I

n the Ambassador cab, Chandra re-

members the time she would cross her arms and coyly sing old Malayalam songs at school and family functions.

“They have all always praised me, my parents, relatives and teachers,” she says. Midway through the sentence, she hums few lines of her favourite Lata Mangeshkar song, Aa jaa re pardesi from Madhumati, for which she used to eagerly tune into Vividh Bharati. No one thought of sending her to a music school or finding her a tutor. After her father’s death, her mother brought up five kids, including Chandralekha, on the little that she earned by weaving cane baskets. Music was a luxury. As a little girl, Chandralekha spent hours by the radio listening to kacheris (classical concerts) and hymns chanted in local temples during festivals.

Apart from being a pilgrim stopover on the way to Sabarimala, Vadasherikkara 44 open

is a small town with not much to flaunt.

It is not a surprise that she did not have email or Facebook accounts. “Even now, I do not own a computer or manage my Facebook page, I have a couple of old classmates who help update the page and they do this from their homes,” she says.

Getting a laptop is something set aside for later. For now, she is looking to move to a better location in her town, a place that is more accessible.

One might think Chandralekha owes her celebrity status to social media, to YouTube and Facebook, but she believes otherwise. “The video was there for

“Any one of you could be famous on the internet by next Saturday. But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded on YouTube every minute...only a tiny percentage goes viral” kevin alloca,

Trends manager, YouTube

about a year on YouTube with only a few hundred ‘likes’, but what changed it was the love and support of pravasis,” she says. From someone who did not own a passport to someone who has visited the UAE four times in December, she has seen her life alter dramatically. Her family’s life has changed too. “I don’t travel alone. My husband accompanies me and

my son too. Most of the time, my brother-in-law is invited too.”

B

efore YouTube made her famous,

Chandralekha was a history graduate trying to get a modest government job. If all this goes away just as it came, she’d be more than happy to get back to singing lullabies for her son. Not everybody can be a Justin Bieber. There is a new YouTube video going viral every other day. But how long might an internet sensation last? What’s her shelf life?

“She is a down-to-earth girl with a pleasing voice. So what if she hasn’t learnt singing, there are many in the film industry who haven’t,” says Hariharan, who has sung a duet with Chandralekha.

“She is no different. Why bother about shelf life as long as she is in the limelight? Let’s enjoy her singing.”

Chandralekha says, “I am still a housewife. This sudden fame hasn’t changed much. It has just made everything more hectic. What has happened to me is like winning a lottery. I would have no ache even if it just ends one day because I already have more than what I wanted.

All I know is that this has made it possible for a housewife to see a recording studio, sing with celebrities like Hariharan and Chitra, get on a flight and see the world. I would finish my chores early to watch musical reality shows. I never considered sending my name for them, I was too simple to be on television,” says the singer whose New Year resolution is to enroll for music lessons.

“Classical, of course.” n 27 January 2014

between the sheets

My Anti-Resolutions

This year, I resolve to give up on some parts of myself. And it feels fabulous sonali khan

B

y the time you read this column, we’ll be well into

the third week of January. Basically, almost six per cent of the year is already behind us. If you’re still determinedly plowing through your resolutions for 2014, you’re a better person than I am. In a moment of misplaced bravado, egged on by equally foolish friends and with enough alcohol sloshing about our insides to make it seem like a brilliant idea, the best friend and I aired our wildly unrealistic resolutions on Facebook, the official chronicler of poor decisions and embarrassing emotional outbursts since 2006. If karma is a bitch, Facebook is its record-keeping best friend. Dignity: exit, stage left. Acute mortification: enter, stage right.

Needless to say, the deeds of that night came back to haunt us in all its WTF-I-never-committed-to-that glory the next morning. Triple-digit ‘likes’ and double-digit comments on our promises to reduce our carbon footprints, spend at least 10 hours a week at home with parents (non-inclusive of time spent freeloading on their wifi) and generally behave like the love child of Mother Teresa and Madiba in 2014.

And then something wonderful happened. An angel in the form of a friend tweeted a link to an article that changed my life, titled, quite simply, ‘14 Fucks I Refuse to Give in 2014’. Its writer is my newest hero. And since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, here’s my list of the five things I shall not be wasting any more fucks on. It’s a celebration of all that’s delightfully mediocre and imperfect in me. I’m giving up on some parts of myself. And it feels fabulous!

Writing every day. For years now, I’ve faked it. ‘Of course I write every day. I have to. I need to.’ Bullshit. I meet most of my deadlines only after a generous gulp of a potent cocktail that’s one part panic and two parts the-editor-isgoing-to-shove-a-pole-up-your-pert-bottom. Suddenly, the fingers fly across the keyboard and I’m not tempted to gaze vacantly outside my window, mid-sentence. It’s the only way I know to write. I can almost hear the synchronised gasps of my Jaipur Lit Fest-ing friends. Oh well.

Not being obsessive. If there were a universal test of cool, I’d fail it spectacularly. I’m often told I need to learn to let things go. I’ve tried and it’s just too much work. So I’m going to make peace with the fact that I have detailed

Excel sheets recording which friend borrowed what book on what date and time. And now that I’m no longer pretending to be easygoing, if you’ve squirreled away one of mine, be worried. No, it doesn’t matter that it was a tatty second-hand copy, it’s still mine.

Travelling. I know it’s what all the cool kids do. It lubricates conversation and it gets you laid. I have friends who’ve used the ‘I got Leh’d’ line for years after their soul-searching, lifechanging, finding-the-purpose-of-life solitary sojourn to charm their way into women’s pants. There’s just too much pressure to find a corner of the world that six people in the world have heard about and travel to it. But I’m giving up on it. I’ve realised that even though I love all mountains, I like the ones with electricity and cottages with warm beds more. Freezing cold water in pipes and sleeping on a bed of twigs doesn’t build my character, it brings out the worst there is in it. So I guess I’ll get Leh’d when the guys at Holiday Inn do.

Running. Runners are the new writers. There was a time not long ago when everyone was writing a book. Now, everyone’s running. On an average day, I wake up to a Twitter feed buzzing with the kilometres these champion marathoners have covered at ungodly hours. It makes me want to dissolve into a puddle of shame. No more. I’ll amble, stroll and saunter; I’ll take longer than necessary to tie my shoelaces because I’m staring at the sea. And if you have a cute enough butt, I’ll stare at that too as you whizz past me.

Car-pooling. This one’s going to take some effort because I’m really not one of those douchebags who doesn’t care about what they’re doing to the environment. I spend thousands getting my car checked for efficient fuel consumption and emission. I’ve forbidden my driver from honking because God knows Mumbai doesn’t need more aggression or additions to its already deafening noise-levels. But I hate car-pooling with strangers. My car is as personal to me as my handbag. And you don’t allow strangers to dive into your bag, do you?

Wish you a guilt-free new year. n

If there were a test of cool, I’d fail it. I’m told I need to let things go. I’ve tried, and it’s just too much work

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

She drinks whisky, not Cosmopolitan 27 January 2014

universal history archive/getty images

life & Letters

mindspace Photo Studio in a Box

63

O p e n s pa c e

Salman Khan Shah Rukh Khan

62

n p lu

Dedh Ishqiya Inside Llewyn Davis

61 Cinema reviews

Mercedes S Class 2014 Hermès Dressage Chronograph Logitech Z50

60

Tech & style

The Dwindling Y Chromosome Critically Endangered Lions Caffeine Aids Long-Term Memory

58

Science

The Wolf and the Sheep: a Moral-less Parable

56

cinema

The Ubiquity of Electronic Dance Music and the Superstar Deejay

52

music

How I Write: Ved Mehta

Books

Tagore: Terrible in Translation?

48 64

Tagore A poet defeated by translation 48

e.o. hoppe/getty images

life & letters

The Elusive Tagore Searching for the poet’s genius amid the mediocrity of his English translations Philip Nikolayev

R

abindranath Tagore, more than anyone else, represents Indian poetry to the rest of the world. He does so in an iconic, canonical sort of way, with works of Renaissance-like artistic versatility and with his stately good looks and air of gentle authority.

The first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, friend to William Butler Yeats and interlocutor to Albert Einstein, Tagore helped strengthen the intellectual bridge between India’s civilisation and the West’s. Yet his poetry, which is admittedly his primary accomplishment, remains elusive in the English language.

As someone who does not know Bengali, I often wonder: why does Tagore seem so untranslatable? I must assume that he is terrific in the original. It is impossible to believe that he, who is held as the greatest Bengali poet of all time, could merely be mediocre, even if the English translations often make him seem so. Why then has he never been translated in a way that even hints at good poetry, let alone anything outstanding?

Variations on the question of Tagore’s poetic greatness have occurred to other non-Bengalis as well.

Often, these are muted by a cultural politeness, but a few notable writers have voiced their scepticism.

When John Berryman, the great American poet, gave a lecture tour of India in 1957, he fell ill ‘with virus and a high fever’. When he reached Ahmedabad, his condition worsened;

27 JANUARY 2014

by then he had become noticeably thin, already having lost ten pounds.

Still, he decided to proceed with his scheduled lecture. Berryman’s biographer Paul Mariani writes of this fascinating moment: ‘As Munford finished his talk, he saw Berryman standing in the doorway, trembling, his face drained of color. Then Berryman walked up to the podium and delivered a lecture unlike anything he’d given so far on his trip. For six weeks, he told his small audience, he had been told over and over by his Indian hosts that America had produced no poetry and that the Indians were the most poetic people in the world. But what he’d seen of Indian poetry seemed nothing more than a loose sort of “spiritual sentimentality.” Now he was going to tell them what real poetry was.

He quoted a passage from Rilke in German and then a passage from Lorca in Spanish, translating into English afterward for his audience.

Great poetry, he explained, sprang only from the pain and anguish of human experience. The audience sat listening to his stunning, fevered performance. If they felt angry or patronised, they did not show it.’

In this case, Berryman’s fever was the likely cause of his bluntness. He had come to Ahmedabad directly from Kolkata. Tagore would have been on his mind. There can be little doubt that in speaking of “spiritual sentimentality”, Berryman was referring to Tagore, whom he would have read in

translation. That’s exactly how Tagore comes off in English.

But it does not take a Westerner to question Tagore’s importance. In the novel Narcopolis by Indian poet and novelist Jeet Thayil, there is a character named Bengali, a peculiar street philosopher who makes profound pronouncements on all manner of philosophical, literary and cultural matters, including Tagore: ‘He shared the regional affliction that Bengalis were prone to, the conviction that they were the most artistic and talented people in the world. But Bengali was a maverick Bengali and some of his views were a kind of blasphemy.

What if Tagore had not won the Nobel Prize when he did? Bengali asked. How would it have affected his work? I suspect it would have made him more open to experimentation and more interesting in every way, especially in his poetry, which, I have to say, is not very good. And why shouldn’t I say so? The point about Tagore is that the whole was far greater than the sum of the parts. It is the composite figure that matters. But Tagore the mystic and poet? Tagore the painter? Tagore the composer? None of those Tagores is worth very much.’

Great poetry may be untranslatable, but why does it seem impossible to make Tagore sound not-half-bad in English? In some cases, translations of poetry can convey, if not the greatness of the original—that would be a rare achievement—then at least some inkling of it; some way of open www.openthemagazine.com 49

imagining what greatness there might be in the original.

While reading Tagore in English, it is hard to see where that greatness might reside. In English, the poems appear not to contain a single memorable line or notable thought. They are large, flat, belaboured, tedious clichés.

I

t will be pointed out in objection

that Yeats admired Tagore’s English translations of his poems and helped him polish them. Yet the truth of the matter is more complicated.

For Yeats, Tagore embodied the very idea of a Hindu mystic poet. Yeats’ fascination with Tagore has much to do with his lifelong preoccupation with various forms of mysticism and occult spiritualism, his interests in astrology and theosophy.

The point here is not to criticise these leanings, but to make clear that Yeats’ admiration of Tagore was not based on the quality of execution exemplified by Tagore’s self-translations.

‘Damn Tagore,’ Yeats wrote in a letter dated 1935. ‘We got out three good books, Sturge Moore and I, and then, because he thought it more important to know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English.’

Tagore did not have a sufficient command of English to pull off good poetry in it. Moreover, by choosing to translate his poems into free verse fraught with florid King Jamesian diction, he set the trend for many of his subsequent translators.

This was perfectly consistent with the contemporary practice of translating any poetry uniformly into English free verse. The twentieth century was an incredibly lazy one when it came to English translations of poetry. As a result, even writers who ‘do know English’ have not fared much better in translating Tagore than Tagore himself.

Let us consider a particular example, one from William Radice. His translations of Tagore are supposed to be among the best, judging from their critical acclaim. His translation of Tagore’s Maran-milan (‘Deathwedding’, 1902) can be found in his lecture on ‘Tagore’s Poetic Greatness’, originally delivered in Ahmedabad in

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2003. The first stanza reads: ‘Why do you speak so softly, Death, Death, Creep upon me, watch me so stealthily?

This is not how a lover should behave.

When evening flowers droop upon their tired Stems, when cattle are brought in from the fields After a whole day’s grazing, you, Death, Death, approach me with such gentle steps, Settle yourself immovably by my side.

I cannot understand the things you say.’

The Deathly School of Translation crunches up the unique character of any original into

faceless free verse with random-sounding line breaks. This school is founded on the

pandemic delusion that ‘poetry’ is more important than verse and that one can isolate the ‘poetry’ from its verse and translate the ‘poetry’ alone, skipping the verse and just ‘getting to the point’

In his lecture, Radice says about this translation: “In translating a poem of such technical and formal virtuosity, my first objective is to find an equivalent form in English that will not be the same as the Bengali but which will immediately convince the reader of the poem’s craftsmanship.”

This reader was not convinced of the

poem’s craftsmanship either immediately or afterwards. The text is downright terrible from the very start, devoid of the spark of poetry. It is of room temperature. It reads like a barely edited literal crib, with some foreign diction still creeping in. ‘Settle yourself immovably’? In English, we ‘sit still’.

It goes on like this for all of its eighty lines. Radice’s English is idiomatically awkward throughout, whether due to careless editing or to a deliberate effort at an outlandish quaintness of impression, perhaps to cloud the utter absence of linguistic sparkle or intellectual interest.

Where, for crying out loud, is the promised virtuosity? Where is a line worth remembering? As you read on you encounter ‘the serpents hissing round / his hair’; ‘the bom-bom sound as he slapped his cheeks’; ‘If I am immersed in work in my room / When you arrive, Death, Death, then break / My work, thrust my unreadiness aside’.

‘Thrust my unreadiness aside.’

Really? We don’t ‘break’ someone’s work in English, we interrupt it. The text plods on to this finale: ‘I shall go to where your boat is moored, Death, Death, to the sea where the wind rolls Darkness towards me from infinity.

I may see black clouds massing in the far North-east corner of the sky; fiery snakes Of lightning may rear up with their hoods raised, But I shall not flinch in unfounded fear I shall pass silently, unswervingly Across that red storm-sea, Death, Death.’

I had to force myself to finish reading it. There is no playfulness here, no humour, no magic in the language.

One may wonder how something like this could have fallen from the pen of an alleged genius. But I have no doubt it must all be extremely different in the original.

For what it’s worth, I do not believe that the entire class of educated Bengalis—no-nonsense literary scholars and writers, general readers and millions of Rabindra Sangeet fans—can be altogether wrong about their cherished master poet. I believe 27 JANUARY 2014

there is a ‘there’ there when it comes to Tagore. It is not a simple trick to be so loved. I ‘buy’ his greatness. His aura strikes me as genuine.

I strongly suspect Tagore’s poetic excellence stands upon the subtlety and freshness of his language, the first casualty of translation.

Furthermore, I notice when I read such translations as Radice’s, that they are nothing like the original in one crucial respect: Tagore’s writing is intricately rhymed and structured verse, while these translations are not.

Curiously, Radice himself is a sophisticated versifier. His original poetry—much of it hilarious and delightful light verse—shows he does not lack the right skills to attempt a more formally robust translation, yet he chooses not to engage those skills in translation.

Like numerous others, he is a victim of the 20th-century Deathly School of Translation, which invariably crunches up the unique character and distinct essence of any original into faceless free verse with randomsounding line breaks. This school is founded on the pandemic delusion that ‘poetry’ is more important than verse and that one can, moreover, isolate the ‘poetry’ from its verse and translate the ‘poetry’ alone, skipping the verse and just ‘getting to the point’, as it were.

Recall that Radice’s self-admitted “first objective is to find an equivalent form in English that will not be the same as the Bengali”. And that ‘equivalent form’ is usually presumed to be homogenised and suffocated free verse, very much of this kind.

Why would I care to read a translation whose first objective is not to be like the original? Granted, perhaps the translated form cannot be exactly ‘the same’ as the original, but how can one justify the absence of form as the best choice of an ‘equivalent’? In particular, if the original is rhymed and metrical, why not make a rhymed and metrical translation? What is a good reason not to do so, other than the inability to pull it off?

W

hile suffering through Radice’s text, I caught myself trying to imagine what it might feel like to read the poem in Bengali. To amuse myself, I wondered if I could

27 JANUARY 2014

not use Radice’s lines as a crib to the original’s meaning. Unexpectedly, the first stanza came out, and then the last. By and by, everything in between filled out too. The whole thing came to me naturally rhymed in couplets.

I even thought I could reconstruct all of Tagore for myself in this way, retranslating him from others’ attempts.

Perish the thought: I would rather learn Bengali, and in fact I still hope to one day.

Until such time, I will let my version, my hallucination of Tagore illustrate the closest I have come to grasping—or imagining that I grasped—something of his spirit. I am most likely wide off the mark here. Although my basis is Radice’s text, any errors and all subjectivity are entirely my own.

Death Wedding Why tread so soft, Death, Death, Creep up on me, all stealth?

That’s not how lovers act!

When evening flowers react To dusk, drooping their shields, When cows return from fields Filled with chewed wealth of health, Come quiet to me, Death, Death, Sit still by my side, stay, Though I don’t get a thing you say.

So, will you take me, Death, Like thieves, masters of theft, Anoint my eyes with sleep Before you make your steep Descent into my heart, Let your soft slow pace beat My blood pulse, your ankle bangles Lull my ears with their jangles, And when I lie all filled with dreams, Whisk me away in your cold arms?

Death, Death, your wedding style Seems strangely dry and stale, Lacking the spark of prayer.

Bring on your shock of hair, Hair-raising, inspiring dread, Coiled crown of tantric dred.

Who, waving your victorious banner, Will light along our holy river Sad red-eyed torches in your wake?

Won’t the earth itself quake?

When Shiva came to claim his bride, He rode his fearsome bull in pride With all the proper trappings, His posh tiger-skins flapping.

Fierce cobras hissing in his hair,

His horn erupting with a blare, He slapped his cheeks like hollow drums, Swinging his necklace of wild skulls: That’s a superior way to wed, Death, Death, to how you wed the dead.

On hearing that approach of his, Gauri’s eyes wept their tears of bliss, Her sari quivered at her chest, Her left eye fluttered ah so fast.

Her heart, Death, Death, was pounding A drum rhythm beyond counting.

The rest was filled with thrilled delight.

Wild soared her fancy at great height.

Mom smote her head and dad cried doom At the prospect of such a groom.

Why do you always, with your swift ease, Death, come in the wee hours, like thieves?

Nay, bring on not those wails of mourning, But party instead all night till morning, Blow your victory conch, wear blood red, Hold my hand, partner, make me drop dead!

Fear not what others might think, Death, Death, I’ll gladly follow upon your path Of my very own free will If you but beckon me, grand-style.

And should you find me all wrapped up In work, by all means interrupt, Or should you find me, not yet dead, Asleep in the comfort of my bed, Or half asleep, gripping my heart, That’s where you play your mighty part, That’s where you fill your conch with breath, Your deadly breath, Death, darling Death.

You fill the conch with breath and blow— Fleetly to you I’ll up and go.

I’ll run to where your boat is moored, Death, Death, unto the windy sea shore Where darkness will roll and roar at me Like waves out of infinity, Where jet black clouds lie piled up high At the northeast end of the sky.

A fiery snake of lightning’s hood Will rear up, but fears, unfounded, Won’t drive me from my silent path Across your red storm-sea, Death, Death. n open www.openthemagazine.com 51

Books

How I Write

The Man of a Hundred Drafts Ved Mehta on a life of writing SOHINI CHATTOPADHYAY

raul irani

interviews, which can be found handily collated on his website. There are also some marvellous, fantastical anecdotes that make an appearance in various interviews, such as that splendid one about a reader not believing Mehta was blind because of his famously detailed descriptions, and making faces before an impassive VS Naipaul, whom he mistook for Mehta. The reader came away convinced of ‘Mehta’s’ blindness.

This offers testimony to the considerable regard Mehta holds for episodes of his personal life, and indeed what a careful chronicler he is of the everyday, of what is often dismissed as the commonplace. This is borne out in his ‘million-word plus’ 11-volume autobiography Continents of Exile—comprising well-known accounts of his father,

Mehta’s speech takes the elegant, fully formed shape of the polished, copy-edited sentence, perhaps thanks to his years in the error-proofed offices of The New Yorker, or those long years of dictation

T

he stories writer Ved Mehta— polite even when he edits your English, soft-spoken, precise in speech—tells you in person are very often anecdotes you would find recounted in his enviably large body of work.

Or observations he has made in other

27 january 2014

Daddyji, his mother, Mummyji, and his uncle, Mamaji, and ending with Red Letters—which he began in 1972 and completed in 2003.

In a 2009 article for Business Standard, writer and critic Nilanjana S Roy notes that ‘Nothing is exempt from Mehta’s need to set it all down , not the years of apprenticeship with Mr Shawn, the legendary New Yorker editor, not his blindness, not his sessions on the psychiatrist’s couch.’ ‘[Mehta] was so adept at using small stories to cast light on a big picture,’ writes critic Jai Arjun Singh on his blog, ‘that his mentor, the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, developed a new rubric—“Personal History”—especially for his profiles.’

‘Mehta’s writing… often reaches large questions through small local instances,’ observes critic Michael Wood in the London Review of Books. ‘Wellchosen details represent more than

themselves… The trick is to choose the details, which Mehta does with consummate, sly skill.’

W

e start our conversation with

the time he began to write, and he speaks of a girl in his college—Pomona College, California—he was in love with. He was 20, and had decided to embark on writing his autobiography that summer. He asked her if she would take dictation for a fee. She agreed, and by the end of the summer, he had 200 pages of what was to become his first book, Face to Face. He had been told his English was ‘shaky’. No one encouraged him to write, but she did. “Do you know the word ‘amanuensis’?” he asks.

I reply that I do not. He explains that it means an assistant who is more than a scribe. “She was my amanuensis.”

It is a word that comes up more than once in the conversation; he is clearly taken with it. Later, I discover that he has used the word in the prologue to the first piece in The Essential Ved Mehta, the smart, stylish new anthology of his work that has just been published by Penguin.

Mehta’s speech takes the elegant, fully-formed shape of the polished, copy-edited sentence. Perhaps this is thanks to all those years in the hallowed, error-proofed offices of The New Yorker, or perhaps the result of long years of dictation beginning with the amanuensis he wanted to impress that summer.

Mehta has always dictated his writing, though he does know how to type, and types for his personal work often.

But the fact that he can’t see his errors, that he can misspell ‘taxi’ as ‘taxy’ and not know it, bothers him. “I can’t see what I write. I wish I could see my sentences taking shape. But well, that can’t be helped I suppose,” he says. Mehta was left blind around the age of 4 by an attack of meningitis. Yet his writing contains delightfully detailed description. ‘I didn’t want to be a blind writer, an Indian writer, a travel writer or any other kind of specialised breed,’ he writes in another prologue in the new anthology, ‘I wanted instead to be just any old writer.’ Singh’s conversationopen www.openthemagazine.com 53

based profile of Mehta offers an excellent account of how Mehta goes about achieving this.

“I thought dictation was a terrible way to write [when I started writing],” he says. “At the time, there was this notion that writing was manual labour, and you avoided manual labour if you could afford it. Then, I learnt some very celebrated writers dictated their works; Henry James, for instance, never wrote by hand. Then… uhm… James Thurber.”

Sixty years into his writing career, Mehta maintains formidable work hours, starting at 9 am after breakfast and working till 7 pm. “All of this time is not spent writing; some of the time is for reading,” he says. At the offices of The New Yorker, he was provided with an assistant from 10 am to 6 pm who read to him and took dictation; a second assistant came in to work after 6 pm. Until recently, he would continue working after a sandwich and a glass of wine till 10 or 11 pm.

Mehta is open about his love of the good life and about working hard to afford it. “I like good wine, I like good restaurants. I have to pay my rent. I married at 49; I had to take the people I was seeing to good restaurants. I had to be able to afford it.”

Mehta says he works on close to a hundred drafts of each chapter before he can send it off to the publisher.

“Everything is in the rewriting. I don’t see anything in the writing until it is polished,” he says. Some of this fastidiousness must come from the impeccable standards of The New Yorker; every piece that was accepted for publication in his time was read 16 times, he reckons. “Once for fact-checking, once for spelling, and so on. We had a very good system in that the editing process was anonymous; writers never knew who was editing their [work]. This averted considerable animosity, because we writers can be possessive.”

There are certain structural co-ordinates he has in place before he begins a work, but not a detailed blueprint.

Mehta’s books take shape as he works.

And so, he says, he delights in the little thrills of the writing process, the pleasures of the beauteous sentence, as much as the architecture of con54 open

structing a large work. “You need both.

If you can’t take delight in the shorter elements of writing, you’ll find working on the larger structure tedious,” he says.

I tell him I am too easily distracted by the beauty of the graceful sentence, the well-chosen word, and Mehta asks if I think this might have something to do with my sex. “Do you?” I ask, taken aback. “No, I am asking,” he says, evenly. “It is a question.” It is a

“If you can’t delight in the shorter elements of writing,” says Mehta, “you’ll find working on the larger structure tedious.”

Especially since his books often take shape as he works thought that has never crossed my mind; I tell him so, and we leave it at that. Later I wonder if it is not an unusual (and reductive) thought for a man resistant to labels, who strove to be known simply as a writer, not a blind writer or an Indian writer. The question asked of me amounts to an easy classification, does it not—whether I might be easily distracted because I am a woman?

Curiously for a man of his abundant output, 27 books in 60 years, Mehta de-

tests deadlines. The way The New Yorker worked when Mehta was on its staff was deliciously open-ended: ideas were encouraged but no deadlines were issued, and there was no guarantee that the story borne of the promising idea would be carried. It meant uncertainty of income, but there was time to write. “Deadlines are basically destructive, artificial constraints. As a writer you seek to be free of such constraints,” says Mehta.

Later, when he left The New Yorker, Mehta says he was lucky to be an established writer even if his books were read by few. “There was this one time when I was writing a book about contemporary theology [The New Theologian]. Fortuitously, this was when everyone was writing about the new theology, and there was some pressure on me. Other than this, I have been able to successfully avert deadlines.”

Mehta also dislikes, and shuns, the promotional endeavours expected of authors today—the multi-city book launches, the appearances at literary festivals. “Any literary event with more than three or four writers is not a festival. It is a mela,” he says.

“It all takes away time from writing. I should be dead by now; I want to use my time well.” Yet, in spite of his impatience with melas and presumably interviews, he is faultlessly courteous.

My colleague requests Mehta to stand for a photograph, and he is annoyed but calm.

There is an astonishingly nasty story on Mehta floating around on the internet in a magazine called Spy, which describes him as a slave-driver, his assistants christened ‘Ved-ettes’. The article, whose accuracy cannot be verified, describes him as cruel, personal in his comments and sexist with assistants.

But the Mehta I meet apologises for not offering me coffee.

At one point he corrects my English: “There is nothing called ‘line-edits’. You edit sentences, not lines. Text-editing is better,” he says. But almost immediately, he apologises, “It is rude to correct people’s language.” And when we say goodbye, he inquires almost avuncularly, “Are you sure you have got everything you need?” n 27 january 2014

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music

The Parties of Tomorrow...will still be worth going to.

Electronic dance music predates the superstar deejay and will outlive him SIMRAN SINGH

I

t seems the era of the ‘superstar

deejay’ is upon us, to quote that ode to the 90s, Hey Boy Hey Girl by The Chemical Brothers. In 2013, deejays filled stadiums and superclubs in Vegas, Ibiza and Buenos Aires.

According to Forbes, Tiesto made about $32 million last year (not as much as the Kardashians possibly, but who’s counting with that lot) and he still didn’t make the top spot. That went to a certain Scottish gent named Calvin Harris, who took home a whopping $46 million this year, thanks to collaborations with Rihanna and LMFAO. Skrillex won three Grammies, same as he did last year (not that that means much in the age of Miley Cyrus). And Deadmau5, with his Mickey Mouse headgear, became a new signpost for cultural iconography, a bit like the music world’s Banksy.

Pop is now so electro that to have a separate genre for electronica seems

a bit ridiculous. From dubious chart toppers such as Lady Gaga and Kanye West, to critics’ darlings Daft Punk, to Robin Thicke and Pharrell William’s ‘song of the summer’ Blurred Lines, with its gently ripped off Marvin Gaye hook—they’ve all got smooth electronic grooves. So smooth, they’re practically flat. So smooth, they don’t stick.

The Vengaboyz started this when they decided to go to Ibiza. Back in school, I was surprised to hear my classmates singing inanely to the most horrible tune I had ever heard: “We’re going to eat pizza.” Why? Was this a song?

Was it a metaphor? I gave up, put my headphones back on, and cranked up Use Your Illusion II. What we call Electronic Dance Music (EDM) is now squarely in the realm of the commercially successful, the very antithesis of cool—let’s hear it for a gentleman who calls himself Pitbull.

Forget dropping the bass, this sounds

more like dropping the ball. Ubiquity is dilution rather than assimilation.

Combining the obscure with the populist is not new. When done well, it can be rather good. Exhibit A: The Beatles— light pop harmonies, a bit of blues in the vocals, some psychedelia and viola, you have The White Album, a masterpiece by any standard.

And then we have Bollywood, which went techno a long time ago. Wasn’t it Himesh Reshammiya who did us some nice clubby anthems?

I love EDM. I really do. It changed my life—a little while after Roadhouse Blues

by The Doors did, but anyway. The Prodigy, Apollo Four Forty and Leftfield set the stage for my appreciation of synthetic sound (so long as it wasn’t The Vengaboyz). A dude behind a stack of speakers twiddling a set of knobs gets me as excited as Keith Richards wielding his guitar circa 1976.

Like many urban Indians of my gen-

baden roth/corbis

ubiquity is dilution ‘Swedish House Mafia apparently burned up the dance floor at an upmarket Delhi club not too long ago, so it seems the bane of my raving days is alive and well’

eration, my late adolescence was mindblasted by that wonderful phenomenon known as psytrance. I spent a good part of my youth bobbing along frantically at various farmhouses littered around the outskirts of Delhi, and trying to find my brains on the beaches of Goa. The psytrance experience led to personal discoveries of sublime, surreal arrangements of noise one would never have thought possible, such as the obscure and weirdly wonderful Finnish Suomisound, the aggressively groovy tongue-in-cheek artistes like Texas Faggot and MandalaVandalz, and the heavy industrial crunches, cranks and moans of Sprillianz and Wizzy Noise.

These primordial/post-apocalyptic collisions of sound made Nine Inch Nails sound a bit like, well, The Vengaboyz.

D

econstructing EDM starts simply.

First, it is electronic music generated by synthesisers and constructed by a deejay. I don’t mean to insult anyone’s intelligence, but this explanation is crucial to get to the heart of it all, which is, in a word, innovation. Innovation and the amazing ability to use technology to fashion what is, at its best, an ultimate reflection of human creativity and resourcefulness.

Synthesised music has been mainstream (ish) for a while. The seminal, genre-pushing Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield released in 1973—you might find the intro familiar from its use in The Exorcist. Better known is Pink Floyd’s concept album released that year, Dark Side of the Moon. Jean Michel Jarre’s wholly electronic album Oxygène, recorded in a makeshift studio at his home, sold an estimated 12 million copies in 1976. Brian Eno’s wonderfully experimental Music For Airports followed in 1978.

Taking a long step back, Disco is clearly the musical grandmamma of EDM, defined as it is by reverberating vocals and syncopated bass lines, laid down to a 4/4 beat in the studio, using complex layering and orchestration, with as many at 64 tracks of vocals and instruments. Donna Summer’s 1977 hit, I Feel Love—produced by EDM guru Giorgio Moroder, who also produced Blondie’s

27 January 2014

Call Me—was well ahead of its time, and the first hit of the genre to have a completely synthesised backing track.

Whither the deejay in all this? While Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Lee Radziwell were having a grand old time at Studio 54, the ghettos of South Bronx became block parties with DJ Kool Herc and MC Afrika Bambaataa plugging amps and speakers into lampposts, mixing and sampling records while rapping. Taking inspiration from African roots and Jamaican dancehalls, these were modern day urban griots, turntabling their way out of the ghetto into cultural significance and musical revolution. As with Disco, technology was crucial, with sampling and drum-machines creating home ‘music production centres’, which became the sonic building blocks of the global phenomenon called Hip-Hop, a precursor of which was disco darling Debbie Harry

The spirit of invention that defined EDM seems to have left our superstar deejays. I can’t think of a single Tiesto song that makes me want to dance like no one’s watching of Blondie rapping in 1981’s Rapture.

All of these were baby steps to a wholly electronic form of music generation.

A pioneering new sound came out of Chicago in the early 80s, in the form of the very first House music productions.

Around the same time came the Detroit techno scene. Inspired in part by the automotive industry, this sound was characterised by hard bass lines that were meant to sound futuristic. Like the Chicago scene, this sound crossed the Atlantic to fuel Britain’s House movement. The mid-1988 UK release of Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit saw for the first time the use of the word ‘Techno’ to describe this new genre, setting it apart from House.

At the same time, New Beat appeared in Belgium. MTV Europe got going in the summer of 1987, bringing the term to the UK. Acid House, with its fat squelching sound, had by then made its

way into mainstream music and popular culture in Britain. London’s club Shoom opened in November 1987, bringing in the so-called ‘second summer of love’ and its association of smiley faces, ridiculous clothing and E-tardism.

The rest, as they say, is history.

A

t its best, EDM brings people together into a single seething entity, a delightful individual and collective pleasure. Perhaps that is why commercial pop music has so easily and overwhelmingly co-opted electronically generated musical sounds.

Sadly, the spirit of original invention that drove the beginnings and defined the pinnacle of this movement seems to have left the house, at least in terms of our vanguard of superstar deejays. I can’t think of a single Tiesto song that makes me want to dance like no one’s watching—not before half a dozen Jaeger-bombs at any rate. That said, I am sure there are underground sub-genres standing right now in mute counterpoint to the Electro-pop/ Techno gods that represent EDM today.

The finest aural pleasure of electronica is that it allows the listener to generate her own associations with the soundscapes it creates. The absence of lyrics lends itself to creative engagement with musical structures without the rigidity that language imposes. This was made obvious to me when I played my favourite Jalebee Cartel song, 33 beyond a Hundred, to my dubstep-loving friends in England. I said it brought to mind tropical beaches and dancing by the seaside; they said it was more like the soundtrack to a drug deal gone wrong in Eastern Europe.

Whatever you make of EDM, it’s here to stay. And thank heavens for that, as it is the soundtrack to parties everywhere, past, present and future. To get a party started, there’s nothing like a bit of disco from the 70s (anything but ABBA), followed by a bit of 80s synth indulgence, rounded off with solid 90s techno—Pump Up The Jam anyone?

So long as the beat goes on, tomorrow’s parties will be worth going to.

Even if the knob-twiddling superstar isn’t invited. n open www.openthemagazine.com 57

CINEMA The Wolf and the Sheep The Wolf of Wall Street is a parable for the Occupy generation—an irreverent morality tale that, fittingly, lacks a concluding moral DIVYA guha

“A

nd to celebrate with a weekly act of debauchery, I have offered our lovely sales assistant Danielle Harrison ten thousand dollars to have her head shaved!”

Jordan Belfort arrives at his first day of work on a bus—which reminds one, perhaps inauspiciously, of Arvind Kejriwal’s swearing-in ceremony— beginning his journey as a standard middle-class aspirant. But within six months of working in the hallowed halls of Wall Street’s brokerage firms, he has completely lost the plot, turning into a drug-addicted hustler of penny stocks doing unspeakable things with dwarves, hookers and candles.

Martin Scorsese, obviously a smart man, spotted in the real-life Jordan Belfort’s story an opportunity that suited his style. He gave a financial thriller the frat boy comedy treatment. It seems he wants to replace our wistfulness at the misery wrought by profiteering Joes with angry laughter at their pathetic tawdriness.

It is a relief that Scorsese completely skips moralising in this three-hour film, providing no moral ending—an aesthetic choice that movie-goers have taken exception to. But this stand is a sound one. After all, who went to jail after the most recent financial meltdown in 2008? Nobody. In the film, at least, Jordan and Co were arrested and fined many millions of dollars.

Given the film’s third-degree debauchery, it also comes as a surprise that US film authorities gave the Christmas release an R rating, meaning it contained some adult material, but was on the whole benign for all spectators to consume. Though given the other stuff children are watching these days, which involves them killing other children to survive and beating up prostitutes after robbing banks, this is hardly fare we can’t wink at. Hopefully, when the Occupy generation replays 58 open

Wolf for their children—if they can afford to have any—they will do so in a world where rampant capitalism in its prevalent form will seem as old-fashioned as a BlackBerry And really, what are we complaining about? There are serious moments in Wolf—at least two. One is when Jordan rapes his wife and hits her. This is when he achieves demonic status.

It is clear he’s no complex anti-hero, but an arrogant ass who is not merely difficult, but impossible to like. This is the moral pivot of the film, the moment when you must dispel illusions and make your mind up about the lead character, but not worry too much about considered character analysis.

The other serious moment is when Jordan risks the lives of his crack-smoking fake best friend and business partner Donnie Azoff, his wife Hildy, and his own wife Naomi in order to forge dead Aunt Emma’s signature before anyone notices she’s died. He must hurry because the fake signature would make him her first nominee on a Swiss bank account that holds money she has been laundering for him. He forces

the crew to take a difficult route, navigating a storm which shatters his fancy boat and tips over the helicopter parked on the boat’s roof extension—a storm they scarcely survive themselves.

At this point, when the FBI is also hot on his trail, but his wife is still with him, Jordan wonders if he should pause and count his blessings. This almostepiphany occurs when he sees a rescue plane he has summoned explode in the sky, killing the three people who were coming to rescue him. He wonders if he hasn’t just been given a second—or a fourth—chance. The audience, too, sees that Jordan has been given many chances—by powers sacred and profane—to reform and repent.

But he does no such thing.

Like wolves led only by instinct, Jordan and his minions—mostly men—guiltlessly return to hunting in their pack on Wall Street, laundering money remorselessly. It makes you wonder if economic models such as the Efficient Market Hypothesis don’t make people behave like the selfish calculating beings whose actions they presume to understand and predict.

As the black comedy bungles hilariously along, we learn that Jordan is one-dimensional, though afflicted to a pathological degree. An addict, he returns to making money fuelled by a drug that once helped bored housewives cope with sleeping disorders.

The obvious parallel here is that wolves ail from the same illness as sheep—that everyone in the 70s and the 80s was depressed.

At the end, when Jordan has cleaned up and is making money conducting leadership seminars, and we know he has turned out alright after all, Scorsese turns the camera at Jordan’s audience, which, one suspects, might be us, watching open-mouthed, mesmerised with money, platinum blondes and a toy helicopter. n 27 january 2014

science

west african lions They are genetically distinct from the lions of East and southern Africa.

They are closely related to the extinct ‘Barbary lions’ as well as the last Asiatic lions that survive in India

The Dwindling Y Chromosome Why is it shrinking at such an alarming rate? And does it spell the end of men?

Critically Endangered Lions

T

here has been a fear that in the

distant future, the male sex will become extinct, leaving women to come up with a new method of reproduction. The fear arises from the fact that the Y chromosome has been shrinking at an alarming rate. The pairing of the two human chromosomes, X and Y, determines the sex of an offspring. A baby with XY chromosomes is male, and XX female. The Y chromosome was once the same size as the X chromosome, both of them carrying some 800 genes. But today, the Y chromosome carries only 27 such genes, leading many to theorise that the Y chromosome will continue to shrink and eventually disappear completely.

A new study has, however, found that these fears are unfounded. It argues that the Y chromosome is unlikely to disappear. According to this study, the Y chromosome will maintain its current size and remaining genes and thus survive.

For the study, conducted by researchers from University of California and published in PLOS Genetics, the Y chromosomes of eight African and eight European men were examined. The researchers

60 open

found that not only had the Y chromosomes’ rate of loss dramatically reduced, the Y chromosome among the people being studied were nearly identical. This similarity is strange, given the geographical distance between them.

The researchers claim that the reason for this similarity is natural selection; the Y chromosome has been shedding genes and selectively purging itself of harmful mutations. In the case of the X chromosome, the reason that it does not need to shed its genes and purify itself is its inherent nature. In females, in the event of harmful mutations, the X chromosome has a partner with which it can swap DNA and repair itself. Males do not have that luxury since they possess XY chromosomes. And according to the researchers, since this combination cannot fix itself in case of genetic mutations, they simply shed faulty genes.

The lead researcher of the study, Melissa Wilson Sayres, told the Guardian, “Natural selection is acting on the Y chromosome and has maintained the genes pretty well... All the evidence points toward it not disappearing.” That’s a relief! n

The West African lion is facing extinction, according to a study paper published in PLOS ONE. The West African lion once ranged continuously from Senegal to Nigeria, but the new study reveals there are now only an estimated 250 adult lions—restricted to four isolated and severely imperilled populations. Led by Panthera’s Lion Program Survey Coordinator, Dr Philipp Henschel, and co-authored by a team from West Africa, the UK, Canada and the US, the study’s results represent a massive survey effort taking six years and covering 11 countries where lions were presumed to exist in the last two decades. West African lions have unique genetic sequences not found in other lions. n

Caffeine Boosts Memory

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found that caffeine has a positive effect on long-term memory in humans.

Their research, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, shows that caffeine enhances certain memories at least up to 24 hours after it is consumed. “The next step for us is to figure out the brain mechanisms underlying this enhancement. We can use brain-imaging techniques to address these questions. We also know that caffeine is associated with healthy longevity and may have some protective effects from cognitive decline like Alzheimer’s disease. These are certainly important questions for the future,” says Yassa, senior author of the paper. n 27 january 2014

burmester 3d surround system

tech&style

To deliver a unique 3D listening experience, two loudspeakers are installed in the car’s roof panel, while another in its overhead control panel. A 3D algorithm was developed especially for Mercedes’ S-Class to offer three-dimensional sound

Mercedes S Class 2014 The new S-Class sets benchmarks for infotainment and multimedia as well gagandeep Singh Sapra

Hermès Dressage w Chronograph

Price on request

Rs 1.5 crore

The latest creation in the Hermès Dressage chronograph collection comes in two versions: one with an opaline silvered dial and a matt havana alligator strap; and the other with a black dial and a matt black alligator strap. At its heart beats its Manufacture H1925 (mechanical self-winding) movement, named in reference to 1925, the year when the first chronographs bearing the Hermès signature appeared. n

Logitech Z50

T

he brand new S Class is here.

It looks beautiful, and has a powerful 4.6 Litre V8 engine that can do a 0-100 in 4.8 seconds, peaking at 250 kmph. This is one car that is truly loaded when it comes to hi-tech .

The key to the car is virtual on your iPhone, and you can unlock the door, locate your car, flash its lights and even monitor it just in case you had a valet park it. Get in and you are wrapped in luxury fit for a king; its seven-colour ambient lighting with a choice of 5 dimming options offers top-notch comfort. It has two 12.3inch high-resolution multifunction screens—one for key driving functions, and the other for entertainment, navigation and convenience options. Animated menus visually match how your hand operates them, and a voice-control system even lets you talk to the car.

The car comes with a high performance Burmester 3D surround 27 january 2014

sound system with 24 speakers that has an output of 1,540 watts of hi-fidelity sound.

Not only the seats, but the armrests, steering wheel and even the doors can be heated. The 14 air chambers in each seat deflate and inflate via fast-responding solenoid valves, developing a wave like massage affect. You can change the massage function for full back, lower back or just a shoulder massage, and also set the duration of each.

A new collision prevention system employs radar-based technology to alert you if you are approaching a vehicle at a speed and distance that suggest a collision, and engages its adaptive brake assist. For added safety, there is a 360° surround view system that uses cameras to compose a single live overhead image of your immediate surroundings, displayed on the in-dash screen during lowspeed manoeuvres. n

Rs 1,995

These new Z50 speakers from Logitech come in pink, grey and blue colours. A 2.5 inch driver that powers each speaker is capable of putting out 5 watts RMS of pure music, and it uses a 3.5 mm audio line to hook up to your PC, laptop or smartphone, and just in case you have one of those old generation MP3 players, you can use it with this speaker too, as these are wired. The speaker is small enough to be carried around but sadly uses only AC power to run. It comes with a pretty long 1.8 metres cable, so you can place the unit easily where you want. Logitech also assures you a 2-year limited warranty. n Gagandeep Singh Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He can be reached at gadgets@openmedianetwork.in

open www.openthemagazine.com 61

CINEMA

the vishal bhardwa j staple Desh Ishqiya (and Ishqiya) director Abhishek Chaubey has been part of every Vishal Bhardwaj film since the director-composer’s film debut in 2002 with Makdee, with the exception of Saat Khoon Maaf in 2011

Dedh Ishqiya The dead genre of the ‘Muslim social’ has been revived to deliver a smart sequel ajit duara

o n scr een

current

Inside LLewyn Davis Directors Joel and Ethan Coen cast Oscar Issac, Carey Mulligan,

John Goodman Score ★★★★★

in Dixit, Naseeerudd Cast Madhuri Qureshi ma Hu i, rs Wa Shah, Arshad Chaubey Director Abhishek

S

equels are usually deathly dull,

but Dedh Ishqiya does something very interesting—it makes excellent use of an old genre in Hindi cinema.

The ‘muslim social’ was dead and buried by the early 90s, but it is suddenly and most entertainingly revived here in the continuing story of two scoundrels, Uncle Khalujan (played

by Naseeruddin Shah) and nephew Babban (Arshad Warsi).

Pakeezah (1972) was probably the pinnacle of this genre and Guru Dutt’s Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960) its most aesthetically pleasing. The nawabi culture of Lucknow and the poetic use of Urdu make for a perfect setting. So a similar ambience is created for Dedh Ishqiya in Mahmudabad, where the widowed Begum of this town is setting a grand mushaira. The best poet at the gathering will win the hand of the Begum (Madhuri Dixit) and will become the next Nawab.

Naturally, there are fake poets, and there is, of course, fake royalty galore, the most entertaining being old Khalujan, now posing as the ‘Nawab

62 open

of Chandpur’. The other is a gangster called Jaan Mohammad (Vijay Raaz) who has developed a unique method of circumventing ‘writer’s block’. He kidnaps the one and only genuine poet in the vicinity and recites his lines, faltering hilariously when asked to explain the more elusive metaphors used.

Funny as the film is, a serious undertone is introduced in the persona of the Begum. This comes through when she talks about her late husband, the Nawab of Mahmudabad, and how she was trapped in a sexless marriage with a man who was gay and kept her as furniture for his home. Clearly, this is a reference to Ismat Chughtai’s Lihaaf, and in that classic story, ‘Begum Jan’ finds escape in her own relationship with a maidservant called ‘Rabbu’.

So too in Dedh Ishqiya. Here Muniya ( Huma Qureshi) plays the role of companion and lover.

In short, this is a well-acted comedy that is both funny and touching. Theoretically, that combination shouldn’t work, but it does. Kudos to Madhuri Dixit and Huma Qureshi. n

Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk were contemporaries and struggled early on, performing often at the ‘Gaslight Cafe’ in Greenwich village. One became a legend, the other was a very important voice in the revival of folk music in the 1960s, but never a celebrity. Naturally, the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, are interested in the one who didn’t become a star; as they do in most of their films, describing talented people, born of the great American landscape, but often alienated from it.

The most evocative scenes in this movie are of that landscape, the characters it continuously spews out and the extraordinary music it inspires. Llewyn Davis, the fictional Van Ronk, takes a futile ride from New York to Chicago to meet a recording agent, and hitches back. We rarely see this America in mainstream Hollywood; people living on the edge, dollar to dollar, with no warm clothes, their nature turned mean by the constant hostility in the human and natural environment.

Davis (Oscar Isaac) doesn’t have an agreeable manner and this puts off people from his obvious talent. This is so sad, particularly in the context of the haunting music he makes. Do not be late for this film, as you may miss the opening song, Davis’s rendition of Hang Me, Oh Hang me. n ad

27 january 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Lucrative Liaison

For all the bitching and moaning during the making of Ek Tha Tiger, it appears that director Kabir Khan will work again with his blockbuster hero Salman Khan. During promotions for his latest film Jai Ho, the actor revealed he has committed to star in Kabir’s next, although no start date has been locked for the project yet. Salman is currently filming Sajid Nadiadwala’s Kick, and will move on to Boney Kapoor’s No Entry sequel and Sooraj Barjatya’s next. Kabir is busy completing Phantom with Saif Ali Khan and Katrina Kaif.

Kabir and Salman famously had trouble while working on Ek Tha Tiger, neither able to adjust to the other’s working style during the first schedule. Salman has even admitted that producer Aditya Chopra had to intervene when things came to a head. Apparently, Salman envisioned the film as “an out-and-out masala thriller”, whereas Kabir would’ve preferred to take a docu-drama approach, particularly to the film’s espionage portions. According to Salman, it was Aditya who encouraged them to find a middle ground, one that both actor and director were comfortable with.

The film’s colossal box-office success reportedly washed away whatever quibbles the two may have still had with each other, and Salman has told friends he likes Kabir’s “grand ideas” and “his slick approach to action”. He finds it a refreshing change from the South-style exaggerated fight scenes he’s been doing in the string of Telugu remakes he’s been in recently.

The big hiccup, when Salman and Kabir work together again, could well be the casting of the female lead. Kabir’s soft spot for Katrina Kaif is no secret—Phantom is the third film he’s directed her in, after New York and Ek Tha Tiger—but it’s anybody’s guess whether Salman will continue to work with Katrina now that they are no longer a couple—and are unlikely to be in the future, given that Kat is earnestly dating Ranbir Kapoor.

Koffee with Khan

It turns out Shah Rukh Khan may show up on Koffee With Karan after all. The star, who appeared in the first episode of every previous season of the talk show hosted by once bum-chum Karan Johar, was robbed of that honour this season in favour of Karan’s “new good friend” Salman Khan.

Salman and Shah Rukh, once good friends themselves, famously fell out some years ago over a heated argument at Katrina Kaif’s birthday 27 january 2014

party. Since then, battle lines have been drawn and common friends expected to take sides. Karan, who’d worked with Salman in his debut film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in 1998, had pledged his loyalty to Shah Rukh, his friend and subsequently co-producer and business partner.

But their relationship reportedly soured sometime last year, when Karan directed Student of the Year, his first film not starring SRK. The rift widened when the star allegedly began distancing himself from old trusted friends and managers, and surrounded himself with ‘new people’. Though Karan and Shah Rukh have maintained a façade of friendship in public, friends of both insist they are contemptuous of each other in private.

Yet sources involved with the show reveal that overtures have been made to welcome Shah Rukh on the season finale. The actor, currently busy filming Farah Khan’s Happy New Year in Mumbai with Deepika Padukone, Abhishek Bachchan and Boman Irani, has apparently said ‘yes’, he’ll do it, but hasn’t committed a date yet.

A Friendship Lapsed

Another friendship in tinseltown appears to have gone bust.

These two male actors who once took holidays together with their families and didn’t miss any opportunity to party as a group, have distanced themselves from each other.

At a glamorous awards ceremony some months ago where one of the two stars was to be felicitated, his people reportedly made it clear to the organisers of the event that he wanted to be seated nowhere near the other star. The two men were to be kept at an arm’s length from one another, and even their appearances on the red carpet had to be carefully timed to avoid each other.

On occasions when they have bumped into each other, they have politely exchanged a few words—apparently for the sake of public decency—but friends will tell you that battle lines have been drawn. The artiste management company handling both stars has apparently dropped one of them because it makes the other more successful star uncomfortable that they’re being represented by the same people.

Their differences, close friends say, are personal and deeply complicated, and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, if ever. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

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Photo Studio in a Box

by r au l i r a n i

If you find yourself passing through the town of Mawana in Western UP, you might chance upon a roadside photo studio run by 32-year-old Naushad Khan, who charges Rs 50 for 42 passport-sized photos taken with an old-fashioned wooden bodied camera he claims is about 80 years old. With an exposure time of upto a minute, the subject must stay perfectly still to avoid a blurry image. An initial print of four passport-sized photos on a single sheet is produced, which is then copied several times over. The entire process of shooting and developing the photos takes 1015 minutes in all. It is unlikely that there are more than a handful of such cameras still in operation anywhere in the world; they are now generally regarded as antique collectibles

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27 january 2014