OPEN Magazine 3 February 2014

Befriending the bug inside us

TM Krishna: the argumentative musician

RS 35 3 f e b r u a r y 2 0 14

INSIDE What to expect next from Kejriwal l i f e

a n d

t i m e s .

e v e r y

w e e k

E L EC T I O N S 2 0 14

The baiting of the middle class This 300 million strong constituency is now clamouring for political attention—and getting it too

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,

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Volume 6 Issue 4 For the week 28 Jan—3 Feb 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

cover illustration

Pawan Tiwary

3 february 2014

MY SHARIFF

The arrival of Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP on the political horizon has brought about a silent revolution— shocked some, amused some and brought hope to the common man that there is going to be definite freedom from the clutches of highly corrupt, greedy, selfish, self-centred politicians, gross misrule, policy paralysis and an economic crisis (‘AAP: High on Hype?’, 27 January 2014). The popularity and credibility of AAP forced other political leaders and ministers to even ape Kejriwal. Yes, the mishandling of his janata durbar, Somnath Bharti’s spat with the Delhi Police, Rakhi Birla’s street The AAP is undergoing actions, Binny’s revolt, the usual hiccups and and the recent protests gestation period before a demanding disciplinary party stabilises itself action against the police, all point to immaturity and activism that are still in their veins.

But the Congress and BJP would have experienced similar situations in their formative years. Kejriwal’s style of governance and reaching out to people is unique and it cannot be labelled as anarchism. The AAP is undergoing the usual hiccups and gestation period before a party stabilises itself. The Chief Minister should concentrate first on governance, rein in his ministers, MLAs and other party workers, to gain his party a permanent place in politics.  letter of the week Dirty Politics

this refers to ‘Death in Tollywood’ (20 January 2014).

The actor-turned-politician ratio is much higher in the southern states than in other Indian states. Power ushers in megalomania and Chiranjeevi is no exception. India can never divest itself of dynasty rule in some form or the other (politicians and their descendants or actors and their progeny). It is difficult to believe that the young actor committed suicide, especially if the goons of the so-called actor-politician could have used extreme pressure-tactics to ‘suppress/obliterate’ something that the ‘Chief’ despised. I am proud that you have brought up a sensitive subject to light in a very

When such realities are ignored under the pressure of expectations, the cost may prove high. AAP’s government in Delhi may or may not last, but its emergence is a declaration that India is changing. The rush of people to join the party tells its own tale, even if many of them may be motivated by personal gain. The new India out there is tired of criminality and corruption in public life—and knows that the entrenched parties that caused the rot are incapable of ending it. If AAP goes, this new India will invent another AAP.  Colonel A J Bahadur

Scary Track Record

elegant and thought-provoking way, leaving readers like me to come to their own conclusions.  Venky Subramaniam

AAP Forever

the aap has its share of frailties and contradictions that can lead to its collapse one day. At the same time, warts and all, it represents the people’s desire to end the diabolic political system that has been holding the country to ransom (‘AAP: High on Hype?’, 27 January 2014). The gravest danger facing the AAP is that it becomes a victim of its own good intentions. What is popular may not always be practical; what needs to be done may have to wait until the ground is prepared with care.

this is a good timely article (‘Blood on the Tracks’, 27 January 2014). Being a daily commuter on Central Railway trains, I am always afraid of losing my life. In Mumbai, most people already spend 3-4 hours daily commuting within the city. How much more time can one waste waiting for a less crowded train that is quite impossible to get?  Maya Pillai

singapore and Manhattan have higher population densities than Indian cities, and people there don’t seem to die like cockroaches. One possible solution to overcrowding is to move state capitals to smaller towns.

It kills two birds with one stone: no more reason for companies to set up headquarters and offices in just one part of town closer to politicians, and secondly, it helps develop another city somewhere else.  Sachi Mohant y

open www.openthemagazine.com 1

openmagazine to 56070

The Day of the Don’s Son legacy

How Sunder Shekhar can now call himself the adopted son of Haji Mastan

Haji Mastan, one of Mumbai’s first underworld dons, married twice. He had three daughters from his first wife, and no children from his second. He also raised a boy, Sunder Shekhar, whom he treated and referred to as his son. When he formed a political party, he reportedly asked Shekhar to take it over after his demise.

For the past few years, Mastan’s youngest daughter, Shamshad Supariwala, has been unsuccessfully trying to gain control of the party, formed as Bhartiya

mumbai

3 february 2014

Dalit Muslims Minorities in 1989 , later renamed the Bhartiya Minorities Suraksha Mahasangh. When she wasn’t able to dislodge Shekhar, she contested that he was adopted

by Mastan. The don had not adopted Shekhar legally.

In 2012, a civil court ruled in Supariwala’s favour. Shekhar appealed the matter in the Bombay High Court. Last year, the court ruled in Shekhar’s favour, stating that he had been ‘orally adopted’.

Seated on a reclining leather seat in his office in a crumbling building in Byculla, Shekhar

raises a finger adorned with a gold ring shaped like a snake’s head: “From being the son of Haji Mastan, I was suddenly, with the previous (court) ruling, a nobody.” The 55-year-old is a throwback to the underworld days in Mumbai. He is in an all-white safari suit, surrounded by burly men who titter at every joke of his. Apart from running the party, he claims he does social work and runs a real-estate business.

Shekhar’s biological father died before his birth, his mother at childbirth. He was raised by relatives in Chennai and

became a petty criminal. He moved to Mumbai as a kid and came across Mastan. “Just like Mastan, I could speak Tamil.

I think it was language that brought us close,” he says.

Shekhar did various jobs for Mastan. “He was happy to have a son to carry on his work and renamed me Suleman Mirza. He attended my wedding as my father. When he died, I conducted all the rituals as his son,” he says. “Now I spend almost every day in this office, and not a day passes when I don’t remember him.” n Lhendup G Bhutia

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ritesh uttamchandani

small world

14

contents

cover story

bravery

The baiting of the middle-class

6

angle

28 A soldier’s mother

12

Compassion on death-row

Sports

It’s not easy being a fan

24

news reel

hemraj

Kejriwal: the paradox of power

Person of the Week neeraj hatekar

36

Those he left behind

‘The whole structure of Mumbai University has become a farce’ Economics Professor Neeraj Hatekar is on a mission to straighten out the administration of the University of Mumbai Haima deshpande

N

eeraj Hatekar, professor of Economics at University of Mumbai, is not a man who is easily intimidated. When he raised a banner of revolt against Vice Chancellor Rajan Velukar, Hatekar was well aware that the former would continue to remain firmly in the saddle. Despite this, the professor took on Velukar as he believes that though not all resistance may be successful, there must be resistance.

He was suspended for informing the media of alleged irregularities committed

by Velukar, thereby breaching the code of conduct. A sustained agitation by university students and teachers made the administration revoke his suspension. He is firm that he will not give up or give in, whatever the consequences.

From being unsuitable for the job to irregularities in administration, the vice chancellor is mired in controversy. Why does he continue to hold job?

The VC is a very powerful man with political connections. He enjoys the backing of Sharad Pawar and Chhagan Bhujbal and is therefore difficult to dislodge. There are cases against him in court, but the courts are moving slowly on them, the media is not too keen on looking into the allegations, and the Chief 4 open

Minister is not even replying to our letters. The NCP has been trying to tell me to be more ‘accommodating’.

So is the University in a mess?

Definitely. The VC’s policies have eroded the structure of the university and the quality of education. The VC is using small groups of unqualified people to run his own fiefdom. Several co-opted members on the Board of Studies are not qualified to be there, there are malpractices in the conduct of examinations and dilution in the qualifications for being a PhD guide. The whole structure of the University has become a farce.All he is doing is manipulating and playing games instead of turning it into a world-class university.

Why did you take classes on the pavement? Did you want to send a message to the university administration?

I was

suspended, so could not take classes on the university campus.

Besides, there is a university rule that teachers cannot call students home for classes. My students were losing out on classes and they were worried. I decided to teach my students on the pavement to help them finish their portion.

All major political parties

have jumped on to the Hatekar support bandwagon. Why?

Probably due to the mass support I was getting. AAP was the first political party to approach me. Probably, the other political parties did not want to be left behind.

Is there any threat to your life?

Yes, I think so. I have received text messages warning me of dire consequences, I have been ‘advised’ by some people against going out alone or leaving my family alone. I will not be intimidated by these. What has to happen will happen and I am not giving up.

Has this agitation shaken up the VC?

I don’t think so. He has not learnt his lesson. I have been told by people that I am dealing with a very devious man.

Will there be any action taken against the VC or at least some explanation called for?

I did not think and still do not think that he will be changed. He appears to hold some power over all those who can take a decision to sack him. He has started a witch hunt to unearth some ‘dirt’ against me. The university administration is going over all my papers, testimonials etc, and digging deeper. But I know that there is no dirt. So let them keep looking.

With your suspension revoked, has your agitation hit a pause?

No. It will continue until all the mess is cleared and this man is shifted out of his job. n 3 february 2014

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red light

Whores and lovers

NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

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cinema

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Our own porn memories

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Katrina keeps her friends

m life & letters

music

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Me and Mrs Sen

TM Krishna: the argumentative musician

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Somn

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arti

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f o r being unrepentant over his

‘raid’ targeting African nationals As if conducting a midnight raid in his constituency accusing a few African nationals of prostitution and making racist remarks against them was not enough, Delhi’s law Minister Somnath Bharti continued courting

controversy. He said he wanted to spit on the faces of BJP leader Arun Jaitley and former Solicitor General and Supreme Court lawyer Harish Salve after they criticised his midnight raid in Delhi’s Khirki Extension last week. Salve and Jaitley had been critical of the AAP stance on the raid and the dharna staged later. Salve is also representing the Ugandan women who were accused of prostitution by Bharti. While the AAP has condemned Bharti’s behaviour and warned him against such vigilantism, it is time that the law minister took some responsibility and at least showed up before the National Commission for Women, which has taken up the matter. n

Congress-leader Mani Shankar Aiyar retracted his infamous ‘tea’ comment on Narendra Modi and fell back on attacking Modi on Gujarat 2002 o l d h at

“I promise you in the 21st century Narendra Modi will never become Prime Minister of the country ...

But if he wants to distribute tea here, we will find a place for him” —Mani Shankar Aiyar at an AICC meeting, 17 January 2014

turn

on able Pers Unreasotnhe Week of

“I was misquoted. I don’t have a job for him. Put him in jail for Godhra”

—Mani Shankar Aiyar on Times Now, 17 January 2014

around

Dark Ages Act in West Bengal I n c i d e n t s o f crime against women in West Bengal, ruled by a woman Chief Minister, do not appear to be abating at all.

In a ghastly act of violence, a 20-year-old tribal girl was gang-raped by 13 people allegedly on the orders of a panchayat in Birbhum district as punishment for her relationship with a boy of another community. The woman has been admitted to a hospital where doctors described her condition as critical. The state government immediately swung into action and all 13 accused were 3 february 2014

arrested after the family lodged a complaint with the police.

The incident has sparked an outrage, with West Bengal Governor MK Narayanan calling for corporal punishment of the accused. Womens groups have termed the incident shameful and said that it is the responsibility of the Chief Minister to ensure that women are protected. The state Congress chief Pradip Bhattacharya criticised CM Mamata Banerjee for her handling of crimes against women and said that all gram

panchayats were controlled by Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress.

Derek O’ Brien, Trinamool member of the Rajya Sabha, is currently on a tour across West Bengal. On 22 January, he posted a tweet quoting one of his colleagues saying that ‘In 3 months, a set of keys to the 7 RCR will be with a lady in Kalighat, Kolkata’. He was referring to his boss. But with the deteriorating law and order situation in her state, the lady from Kalighat may find it difficult in future to hold even the keys to Writer’s Building. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

On the Contrary

Right to a Decent Execution What the Supreme Court’s guidelines about death-row convicts tell us M a d h ava n ku t t y P i l l a i

T

mutation of the sentences of 15 death row prisoners because of delays in carrying them out is one of the rare occasions in recent times when you can find some hope for the idea of India as a liberal democracy.

At the end of the judgment, the court frames guidelines ‘for safeguarding the interest of death row convicts’. This means that even the worst of prisoners—the ones who have committed the rarest of rare crimes, the dregs at society’s very bottom who have lost the right to participate in it—have to be treated with decency.

Consider some of the guidelines: legal aid should be provided at every stage; if mercy petitions get rejected, convicts must know in writing instead of orally and with a copy of the rejection letter; there must be a 14 day interval between the rejection of a mercy petition and the date of execution so that the prisoner can meet his family, wind up his affairs and ‘make his peace with God’; prisoners must be mentally and physically healthy before they are executed; before any execution, prison authorities must facilitate a final meeting of the prisoner with his or her family; post mortems must be performed after execution so that the cause of death can be ascertained.

To understand how sensible some of these guidelines are, take the last one on post mortem. There is a reason for it.

Hanging is a painless and instantaneous death only if the neck breaks; if the rope is not properly placed, death is by longdrawn strangulation. Till now, after centuries of this practice in India, there has been no evaluation of how exactly a prisoner died, and whether it was really by the snapping of the cervical vertebrae, as is claimed. Post mortems must examine this, and if it is found that many die due to strangulation, there will then be data to support a move to a better form of killing, like lethal injections.

The necessity to frame these guidelines actually show how basic dignities are not available for death convicts at present.

Take the rationale given for the 14-day interval between the mercy petition’s 6 open

krishnendu haldar/reuters

he Supreme Court’s com-

justice? Afzal Guru and Ajmal Kasab were put to death in secrecy, denied a meeting with their families

rejection and the execution. The judgment says it ‘allows the prisoners’ family members to make arrangements to travel to the prison, which may be located at a distant place, and meet the prisoner for the last time. Without sufficient notice of the scheduled date of execution, the prisoners’ right to avail of judicial remedies will be thwarted and they will be prevented from having a last and final meeting with their families.’

If one is forced to accept capital punishment because it is legal, then such a measure seems morally appropriate; a kind and just way to kill. But then you take a glance back at the recent execu-

In the centuries of death by hanging in India, there has been no evaluation of whether a prisoner died by the snapping of the cervical vertebrae, as is claimed, or by a painful longdrawn strangulation

tions of Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru and find that even this basic courtesy was denied them. They were killed in secrecy without an opportunity to meet their family. Most of this country saw little wrong in this because they were terrorists. But it signalled that the State had decided, purely for reasons of political convenience, that it was alright not to be compassionate in carrying out capital punishment.

In the case of the 15 prisoners now, the State swung the other way and refused to kill them because it was morally problematic. But at the same time without the courage to commute the sentences (as the SC has now done). The prisoners were kept in limbo on death row in the hope that society would gloss over their existence.

It is this attitude that the Supreme Court has said cannot be permitted in a civilised country; there must be a price to pay for cowardice and cruelty by the State when it tramples over the rights that all human beings—even terrorists—are born with. n 3 february 2014

Predictions For 2014

Feb 19, 2014, ITC Grand, Mumbai

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india

A Hurried Man’s Guide to Lupus

Lupus, one of the ailments that the late Sunanda Pushkar suffered from, is an autoimmune disease where the body’s immune system destroys healthy tissues.

It Happens

Just Not Cricket A jealous woman cricketer allegedly sends threatening messages to a young rival O m k a r K h a n d e k a r mathew lewis/icc/getty images

real

According to Hindustan Times, Pushkar underwent treatment at the Kerala Institute of Medical Sciences days prior to her death.

According to the paper, the hospital’s report said, ‘Lupus and Sjogren’s Syndrome are auto-immune disorders. The term ‘overlap syndrome’ is used when many of these diseases and others co-exist. Auto-immune disorders are conditions in which the person’s immune system mistakenly... destroys healthy body tissues.

There is no cure for these diseases.’

Though Pushkar’s condition was not life threatening, it was a mental and physical hindrance. The hospital report also said she suffered from arthritis and heightened photo-sensitivity. Pushkar revealed she had visited KIMS in one of her last tweets. She wrote, ‘Got so many issues diagnosed in KIMS that now who know when I got 2 to go with joy hastay hua jayegay’.

Women are diagnosed with lupus nine times more often than men

ashish sharma

The Lupus Foundation of America says women are diagnosed with the disease nine times more often than men. Though the exact caus-

es of lupus are not known, it is believed lupus results from both genetic and environmental factors. The latter include stress, smoking, exposure to sunlight, certain prescription medications, infection with Epstein-Barr virus, and exposure to certain chemicals.

The higher number of lupus cases among women may suggest the disease can be triggered by certain hormones. Doctors believe hormones such as oestrogen regulate the progression of the disease because symptoms tend to flare before periods and/or during pregnancy.

Symptoms of lupus include achy joints, swelling of the hands and feet due to kidney problems, fevers, fatigue, butterfly-shaped rashes, anaemia and hair loss. n

foul play An FIR has been lodged against former Maharashtra cricket captain Anuja Patil (centre)

W

ith fame comes bou-

quets and brickbats.

However, for a young cricketer representing Maharashtra, her steady rise brought threatening text messages and a fake Facebook account. The perpetrator, it is alleged, is her teammate and former captain of the Maharashtra team, Anuja Patil.

The 17-year-old victim and Anuja, 22, both hail from Kolhapur. They were groomed by the same coaches and played a number of matches together. In June 2013, the victim started receiving threatening messages from an unknown number. “[The text messages] happened over the span of seven days in June,” says the father of the complainant.

“When I saw the fake Facebook account [made in the victim’s name], I met the police and went to its cyber security cell.”

It was found that the number used to register the fake account belonged to Patil’s mother. Patil denied that she had played any role in the matter, and no formal charges have been pressed against her by the victim’s family.

But the situation worsened

thereon. The victim’s father says that Anuja and the victim played more matches together over the next few months. In December, in a match in Bhubaneswar, Patil is reported to have once again tried to intimidate the minor.

“If she had apologised, the matter was over,” says the father. But seeing how it was affecting his daughter emotionally, he registered a complaint in the last week of The victim December with received the Kolhapur threatening District Cricket Association. On messages 5 January, a First from an Information unknown Report (FIR) number was lodged against Patil and a certain Bharat Purohit, who is alleged to have harassed the victim and helped Patil set up the Facebook account.

The investigating officer on the case, Chandrakant Khaire, refuses to comment on the matter. The KDCA chief Bal Patankar says that Patil has been temporarily suspended. Patil refuses to speak without consulting a lawyer first. n 3 february 2014

business

E- B I Z After reluctantly opening up India’s multi-brand retail sector to foreign players last year, the Government has floated a ‘discussion paper’ to seek others’ views on allowing FDI in Business-toConsumer (B2C) e-commerce, the space in which internet retailers like Amazon operate. “It was long overdue,” says Harminder Sahni, managing director of Wazir Advisors. But one big fear, he adds, is that the Government may impose conditions—such as local sourcing norms— that foreign online retailers may find unreasonable. These could dilute their core strength: the global sourcing of products at competitive prices. “Such conditions imposed on e-commerce should not... scare global players away,” cautions Pranay Chulet, CEO of Quikr.com.

Online retail in India has seen a spurt of sales in recent years. As a sector, e-commerce overall is estimated at $13 billion in annual revenues and has been expanding at a clip of about 35 per cent every year. The B2C segment is dominated by travel facilitators such as Makemytrip.com, Yatra. com and IRCTC, which together reportedly represent over two-thirds of all consumer transactions online, with Flipkart, SnapDeal and others making up the rest.

Usually, e-retailers use a model that combines high sales volumes with low transaction and inventory costs to offer price discounts. If global players set up India-specific online stores with domestic delivery networks, then their global scale of operations may give them a structural

Pushp Deep Pandey/2kPhotography/Getty Images

Click Here for an E-Commerce Debate

India will see local players selling either whole or partial ownership stakes to them. Indian websites that are already ahead of the curve may seek to retain their independence, confident that it is not easy for latecomers to play catch-up on the internet because of the so-called ‘network effects’ advantage of a market leader.

The big picture constraint on B2C e-commerce is India’s low internet penetration. As the discussion paper notes, this places a limit on its near-term domestic potential. Nonetheless, expect this policy proposal to attract controversy.

After all, it involves foreign profit seekers and Indian jobs. n SHAILENDRA TYAGI

advantage over local players. They may also wield more bargaining power. If local retailers are forced out of business by this, then it may result in job losses in India, a risk acknowledged by the Centre’s discussion paper.

Internet sales Chulet of Quikr, are expanding however, calls this a rapidly in India. “myopic view” and Should foreign says that “while players be occupational profiles allowed entry? may change”, organised retail—both online and offline—would “actually create more jobs in the economy”. Sahni predicts that letting global e-retailers into

“This tactical offer will encourage corporates and leisure travellers to plan short-term travel. We have already seen response picking up from those wanting to take a quick break before the onset of summer”

Online Indians Are Still a Minority The mass success of e-commerce in India depends on how many shoppers have access to the internet, but its penetration here is still weak in comparison with other countries

11% 538 137

India

China

40%

40%

15%

15%

79

3.2

29

Brazil

Sri Lanka

Pakistan

Internet Users in Millions

Source: Forrester McKinsey Report 2013.

Percentage of Total Population

compiled by Shailendra Tyagi

3 February 2014

John Nair, Head of business travel at Cox & Kings, welcoming the recent wave of big discounts being offered by airlines in India for the lean flying season

news

reel

The Rebel As the debate over Telangana rages, the Andhra Chief Minister is gearing up for battle

T

he time has come to bite the bullet

for Andhra Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy. Well, almost. As the state assembly reverberates with the Telangana statehood debate, political observers are keenly watching the next move of this cricketer-turned-Chief-Minister who is expected to launch a new party once the current Assembly session ends on 23 January. If he does indeed go ahead and form a new party, he would join his bête noire Jaganmohan Reddy, who did this a couple of years ago with his YSR Congress, breaking free of the mother party and challenging it, no-holds-barred.

The wait for the final outcome of the Telangana Reorganisation Bill debate may get extended by a week, at the time of writing, as the current Government has requested the President to grant it such an extension to debate the Bill. Even if the extension comes through, this will only enable the integrationists to posture even more aggressively to safeguard their respective political spaces and voter support bases. As of now, no one doubts that Sonia Gandhi will go back on her announcement to create a separate Telangana.

It is interesting to look up Kiran Reddy’s political track record over these past four years. Actually, none gave him an outside chance of survival when he was sworn in

as the 16th Chief Minister of the state on 25 November 2010 as, at the ground level, Telangana statehood was a raging fire all across the region. From then on, he has survived dissidence, defiance and detractors who refused to see him as a leader occupying the top slot for more than three years now.

Reddy, who was the unanimous choice for the Speaker’s post after the UPA’s return in 2009, has shown how lightweights can rattle the Delhi Durbar much more than experienced netas. In this regard, political observers point out how his seniors like PV Narasimha Rao have done it with panache; Rao was Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh during the tumultuous Naxalite era of 1971-73.

Over the past two decades, the Congress party has come to power only in intermittent phases when it has pipped the Telugu Desam Party. A scrutiny of the ‘Reddy Reckoner’ of state Congress politics reveals that Kiran finds place much above fellow Rayalaseema politician and party veteran, Kotla Vijayabhaskara Reddy. The latter managed two stints as Chief Minister for a total of 905 days (around two-and-a-half years) over 1982-1994. Kiran Reddy’s political mentor Dr YS Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR) lorded over the state for nearly five-and-a-half years from May 2004 to September 2009.

Even as the Telangana region has been baying for his blood since the 30 July statehood declaration, when he openly declared his intention to keep the state united, Kiran Reddy has encouraged all manner of speculation about his future

dark horse None gave Andhra CM Kiran Kumar Reddy any chance of survival when he was sworn in

mahesh kumar a./ap

moves. His calculated steps have been to defy and deny state observers any inkling of his plans, and he has surprisingly managed to portray the image of a strong leader. The current kite-flying about the new party being launched by him is yet another example of this. n K Nare sh Kumar

Mumbai’s New Peacock

The city’s new state-of-the-art terminal, T2, is to start operations on 12 February

M

uch like most of Mumbai’s infra-

structure projects, there’s always been a shroud of secrecy around the modernisation of the city’s international airport. All one heard about were the various delays and difficulties: the struggle to acquire airport property which had been occupied by slum dwellers, in one case, the trouble in convincing political parties of the need to relocate a Shivaji statue so that a new terminal could be built on that spot. The neighbouring airport that was to come up in Kharghar and ease the congestion in the current airport is still to take off. With such news, and those of other delayed projects like Mumbai’s metro rail and mono rail, it appeared that this project, too, would lead to disappointment.

However, when Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL) recently opened the doors of this new terminal, T2, to journalists and invited guests, there was nothing but awe. The new terminal is set to become operational from 12 February.

After which, the two old terminals, domestic and international, will gradually be demolished, so that T2 can be turned into an integrated terminal for both domestic and international flights by the following year.

With an area of over 4,39,000 square metres, the new terminal is a modern four-level terminal that can cater to 40 million passengers annually. The facilities are top-notch. Instead of the old terminal’s 80 immigration counters, there are 140 counters. Nine stories of one building, three floors underground and six floors above ground serve as a car park for over 5,000 vehicles. A total of 37 travelators, 48 escalators and 72 elevators help passengers get around within the airport, and a six-lane elevated road connects the Western Expressway to the terminal.

3 February 2014

In fact, much of the work is not visible to passengers. Veena Chiplunkar, spokesperson of MIAL, claims two runways were re-laid, new taxiways were built and a number of buildings in the vicinity were rebuilt. “We even re-routed the Mithi river that flows within the airport [area]. All of this, without disturbing the current airport’s operations,” she says.

The terminal’s design—by the Chicago-based architecture firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which incidentally also designed the Burj Khalifa in Dubai–is inspired by India’s national bird, the peacock. One can see this motif in the terminal’s various pillars and marble floor. There are more than 7,000 artworks from various parts of the country on a three-km-long Art Wall within the airport. At the inauguration of the airport recently, Sanjay Reddy, vice chairman of GVK Power & Infrastructure, the firm that built the new terminal, said, “The Louvre Museum in Paris receives about 9 million visitors a year, Jaya He Museum [the name of the art project within the terminal] at T2 will get 40 million visitors.” Chiplunkar explains, “Increasingly, Indians are losing touch with the culture and art of the country.

This project in a way is to check that.” The pieces are as diverse as totems from Nagaland to installations by artists like Vivan Sundaram. An iPad app by which people can read more about each artwork and contact the artist concerned if they want to purchase any piece from him/her, has also been created.

“Sometimes, it looks like a marvel,” Chiplunkar says about the completion of the terminal. “We had to deal with so many encroachers and government bodies, that it sometimes appeared like it was jinxed.” Although 2,000 acres were promised for the new terminal, because of various encroachers and government offices that were not willing to move out, eventually only 1,400 acres was made available, leading to the building of this ‘vertical airport’ of four levels. n Lhendup G Bhutia

Real vs Reel The fuss over Mohanlal’s new film in Kerala

I

t seems that Malayalam cinema has

become a target of the Kerala Police.

Following state transport commissioner Rishiraj Singh’s recent instruction that all two-wheeler riders in films should wear 3 February 2014

moral policing Mohanlal on the sets of the superhit Drishyam, which has been criticised by a senior police officer for encouraging ‘wrong ideas’

helmets, the recent Mohanlal movie Drishyam has been slammed by TP Senkumar, DGP of jail administration, for promoting ‘wrong ideas’. The film, in which Mohanlal plays the protagonist, a school-dropout farmer who succeeds in concealing a crime, has garnered an enthusiastic response from viewers. The movie, which is being deemed the super hit of 2013 in Malayalam cinema, depicts tensions in a family when four members—two young girls, their mother and father (Mohanlal)—are involved in a murder. The hero, Mohanlal, cooks up a well-knitted yarn to cover up the crime, and misleads the police successfully. The family commits the murder because the elder daughter was being blackmailed by a teenager (who is murdered). He had captured a nude video of the girl while she was having a shower while she was on a school trip.

DGP Senkumar has come down heavily on movies that might justify criminal activities. He has criticised Mohanlal for acting in such a film: “Mohanlal should have thought twice before committing to such a role,” says the DGP. “If such [blackmail] happens, people are supposed to inform the police, not kill the culprit and hide the crime,” says Senkumar.

Jithu Joseph, the director of the film, agrees with Senkumar to the extent that if there is blackmail, the first thing one must do is inform the police. “But cinema is cinema, and it cannot follow all the rules and regulations set by the state. In most of the films, the villain is killed by the hero.

Isn’t that a violation of the law of the land?” asks Joseph. “Besides, the villain in

this film is the son of the director general of police. Hence, any prudent man would be sceptical about whether he would get justice if he goes to the police with a complaint in a legitimate manner.”

There are dissenting voices within the police itself to Senkumar’s critique of Drishyam. Additional Director General of Police R Sreelekha opines that cinema must be viewed only as it is. “It is a form of art, the question is whether we enjoy it or not,” Sreelekha said in an interview to a television channel, and added that she had enjoyed Drishyam very much.

Such policing of cinema does not go down well with social media users, it seems. There has been widespread criticism of police intervention in cinema on Facebook and other social media platforms. Transport commissioner Rishiraj Singh’s recent attempt to make helmets compulsory for two-wheeler riders in movies met with heavy criticism.

Facebook was full of questions such as whether scriptwriters have to get a clearance certificate from the police.

‘Either the hero has to wear a helmet or he has to die in a road accident if he rides a bike without helmet’, one Facebook post slams the police.

Drishyam also depicts a policeman being extremely cruel, inflicting third degree torture upon a child to squeeze out a confession. It is a valid question to ask whether the police in Kerala could be misled by such a depiction or not.

Senkumar says this is an irrelevant question, for it has nothing to do with the point he has made. n Shahina KK open www.openthemagazine.com 11

news

reel

delhi

The Paradox of Power Kejriwal may have lost some goodwill, but remains clear about AAP’s electoral strategy mihir Srivastava E v e n t h e R a i n G o d Varuna seemed set against the latest protest mounted up by Delhi’s Chief Minister and self-declared ‘anarchist’ Arvind Kejriwal.

It was an agitation that brought central parts of the capital to a grinding halt for two days. The CM’s demand was that control of the Delhi Police—under the Union Home Ministry—be turned over to his government. According to the AAP leader, this is the only way to ensure its accountability to the electorate of Delhi.

Anger against the police in Delhi has been mounting for years, not just for its corruption at various levels, but also for the force’s dismal track record at ensuring women’s safety. The recent gangrape of a Danish citizen near New Delhi Railway Station in the fading light of a cold evearvind yadav/hindustan times/getty images

ning has served as a reminder of how bad things have become. And of Delhi’s former CM Sheila Dikshit’s comment that “it’s unfair to dub the city the rape capital [of India]” a month before she lost her job to Kejriwal.

Yet, few had expected a Chief Minister to lead a street protest against his own state’s police force. What set the stage for a standoff between the police and the AAP was Delhi law minister Somnath Bharti’s run-in with them over a raid the minister demanded for an alleged ‘sex and drugs racket’ being run by a group of Africans in a South Delhi locality. With the police refusing to budge without proper authorisation, Bharti led a crowd of vigilantes to conduct this late-night raid, and it was in defence of this action that AAP asked the

Centre to suspend the officers who dared stonewall the minister.

The boorish—even racist—behaviour of the vigilantes has been condemned by observers, as also Bharti’s outsized ego in trying to push police officers to abandon the rulebook, and appropriately so. The Rule of Law cannot be given the go by, least of all on the orders of a law minister.

If he now has the image of a petty street prowler on the lookout for criminals as he sees them, he only has himself to blame.

“Bharti and also Kejriwal have to understand one thing,” says a 27-year-old African woman who studies at JNU and rain check Kejriwal during his latest protest in front of Rail Bhavan in New Delhi

lives in Munirka, “the law applies equally to the law minister. His rights and privileges as a minister don’t give him the liberty to trample on other people’s right to live with dignity and freedom. This was not expected of AAP.” Others are also vocal about their disappointment. “I like Kejriwal. He has set high moral standards in politics. But now I am disillusioned,” says Amar Gaur, a student from Patna who has joined AAP, “I cannot defend this action of Kejriwal and Bharti.”

The last time Bharti earned such criticism was when he publicly cited the name of a rape victim, something he as a lawyer by training ought to have known is against the rules. That he got away by calling it a slip-of-the-tongue left many of his own party members suspicious of his earnestness. By backing his law minister, Kejriwal has risked losing much of the goodwill the party has garnered in such a short span of time.

Kejriwal finally called off his agitation on an assurance by Delhi’s LieutenantGovernor Najeeb Jung—appointed by the Centre—that two of the five police officers in AAP’s line of fire would be packed off on fully-paid leave until an enquiry report on the incident is filed. This is just a face-saver for AAP, but the CM has portrayed it as a victory for the people of Delhi. “This should be seen as the first step towards seeking control of the Delhi Police and making the capital a safe place for women,” he said, calling off his protest.

H

owever, while AAP’s mode of functioning has raised eyebrows, it is also true that vast numbers of people have rallied to the party’s side against a police force of corrupt bullies, as they see it. And by making such a show of himself, Kejriwal did manage to signal a strong intention to gain full statehood—and thus command over the cops—for Delhi.

This is a major issue, and his cabinet colleagues complain of a bureaucracy that is reluctant to take orders from the state government. Officials take days before they provide the files needed to initiate action on the promises the party made in its electoral campaign. Critical files related to the Delhi Jal Board and Commonweath Games, for example, took weeks to reach the concerned ministers.

All sorts of pretexts are being offered, say cabinet members, to delay sending the relevant files. Some of these have even gone missing, possibly because they contain information that could land powerful people in trouble.

The Kejriwal government is faced with a multiplicity of uncooperative agencies that run Delhi’s other public systems. It 3 February 2014

does not help that the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) is under the BJP’s control. Or, that the Delhi Development Authority reports to the Union Ministry of Urban Development.

As Delhi’s transport minister has found, his office has no say in the running of the Delhi Metro, though the Delhi government shared half the project’s cost.

There have been other frustrations as well. The Kejriwal government wants to empower Delhi’s defunct AntiCorruption Bureau by appointing five police officers to it. Some of these officers, recommended by the CM, have met Lieutenant-Governor Jung but they declined the offer; according to a source, they didn’t want the thankless task of policing other police officers (and the bureaucracy).

One way out for Kejriwal would be to heed his predecessor’s advice. “I run Delhi on goodwill,” she once told Open. She used her political stature to get things done— she sought the help of Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar in trying to keep onion prices down in Delhi last year. She

If the Congress had any illusion that Kejriwal would be a pushover once he discovers who really pulls the city’s strings of power, the CM has taken it apart also maintained a good rapport with the Union Home Ministry, Cabinet Secretariat and Prime Minister’s Office during her tenure. But then, she’s a Congress leader.

Kejriwal is a Congress basher and cannot count on that party’s help.

AAP insiders are certain that India’s ruling party is waiting to watch the CM tie himself up in knots. They are convinced that the Congress cajoled Kejriwal to form a government only to help him make a spectacle of his own failure. This, they say, is clear now that Congress support has not translated into co-operation.

In fact, they add, if it were not for Lieutenant-Governor Jung, Kejriwal would be entirely isolated in his efforts to run Delhi the way his party wants.

Moreover, Kejriwal does not want to plead helplessness. He wants to see things done. Notably, the Kejriwal government has been quick to take substantive steps in areas where he exercises executive control. Water supply, for example. The AAP decision to supply water free up to a limit—based on a model of cross subsidisation—has been welcomed by house-

holds across the city. AAP’s reduction of power tariffs by half has also been hailed as a success. So, too, is its order of an audit

by CAG of the books of private power distributors—Delhi’s so-called discoms— that Kejriwal has accused of financial misdeeds. Last but not least, the new government has committed resources to state-run schools and primary health centres that suffered decades of neglect.

To get his way in other areas, the CM may have to adopt innovative methods.

Taking the moral high ground has been his trademark so far, and it may yet be possible for him to convert his government’s weakness into a strength simply by highlighting how his popular moves are being thwarted by an establishment resistant to the changes that people at large are keen on. Even a CM, he has made clear, can play the revolutionary. His ‘anarchist’ self-claim was perhaps aimed at reinforcing this stance.

The Centre, he has said, should not try to play puppeteer with Delhi’s governance. This statement by Kejriwal is significant. He said in Hindi: “If the Delhi Police Commissioner is to determine what is good for the city, then why have a chief minister? Why hold Assembly polls? Have the people of Delhi given [Union Home Minister Sushilkumar] Shinde the right to make decisions for them? I am the elected Chief Minister of Delhi. How can Shinde ask me where to sit in protest in Delhi? I will tell him where to sit.”

On Sunday morning, as he began his sit-in, the CM tweeted: ‘I alongwid all ministers and MLAs, will sit on dharna outside home min office for the sake of women security.’ He summoned his party workers and people at large only after he was stopped near Rail Bhavan.

I

f the Congress had any illusion that Kejriwal would be a pushover once he discovers who really controls the city’s strings of power, the CM has taken it apart. He has made it clear that he did not seek the ruling party’s support, and was intent on doing only what his party had assured its supporters.

With that in mind, Kejriwal is now preparing for another confrontation with the Centre: this time, over the Jan Lokpal bill in the first week of February. He cannot be sure of Congress support. But, while he may have alienated some people by backing an impetuous law minister, he senses that winnable numbers are still ready to support a movement and party that seeks to overthrow politics-as-usual.

With a general election on its way, it’s a momentum he will not want to lose. n open www.openthemagazine.com 13

E L EC T I O N S 2 0 14

Out to Bait the Middle Class

anirban ghosh

In addressing their party workers, both Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi have made a bold pitch for the votes of this rapidly expanding section of the electorate. This is now an electoral compulsion, not coincidence PR Ramesh

I

t was 2007. Ankit Verma was making lakhs of ru-

pees in profit every month feeding employees of an MNC in Gurgaon—he supplied everything from salt to soft drinks to its office canteen. He also bought himself an apartment in this suburb of Delhi, and rented another for his cooks and other help. His newlywed wife thought he had a Midas touch, turning everything he chanced upon into gold. He had struck gold, almost. But by 2011, he was beset with troubles. He lost his MNC contract. Two months ago, after struggling to pay monthly bills for almost a year, he sold his apartment to shift to a smaller flat he took on rent. “They say opportunities are still there,” he says, “Where?” He is angry that his dream has turned into a nightmare.

Like Verma, Pankaj Giroti too had a dream: to strike it rich so that his children don’t end up struggling the way he did, financially, through college and then to make a living. Giroti, who shifted from Lucknow to Noida in 2005 and became a successful auto parts dealer, saw his fortunes tumble by 2009, losing out to bigger competitors.

He is planning to start from scratch again, this time in a business of artificial jewellery. He has yet to recover from huge setbacks in his business. Much to his anguish, doctors have advised him to go slow—all that stress has taken a toll on his health, he says.

These two men belong to a burgeoning demographic segment—India’s middle-class—that is angry at their plight and increasingly so at an anaemic economy. The irony is that they are part of an elite that has over the decades since India’s Independence reaped most of the benefits of public office, gained from a system that helps entrenched interests and their crooked cronies, and been a vocal part of a political discourse that at times seems unconcerned about their anxieties.

The Times They Are a-Changin

A closer look reveals changing collective traits of this humongous group: gone are the days when they did not have the shape or clout of a homogenous social class. Yet, strangely, middle-class issues are no longer the stuff of out-of-touch elitists. This may be an error they live to regret. “The middle-class in India, both urban and rural, is an ever-expanding category and forms around 40 per cent of the population,” says senior BJP leader and former Union minister Yashwant Sinha, “No political party can ignore the middle-class and hope to do well in an election.

If this aspirational section feels that its condition will improve [under] another kind of regime, it will be inclined to support a new government.”

Encouraged by a belief in their influence, they are now barging into the political frame and punishing those who 3 February 2014

are seen to hobble their growth and prosperity. They are sick of being taxed so that subsidies can be doled out to others. They are no longer okay being taken for granted by the political class. This ‘new’ middle-class feels it has had to bear the brunt of the current economic slump, no matter what the truth is.

Social scientist Shiv Visvanathan has given a lot of thought to this shift in perception and perspective among this section of India’s population. “The new middle-class seeks more than mere entitlements as propounded by Amartya Sen,” he says, “They are seeking rights as a matter of right, with equity and dignity. And they want it to happen with greater speed.”

Which is why it surprised none that when India’s two principal contenders for power at the Centre, Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi, came out to take on each other at two separate conclaves in the national capital last week, they made a direct appeal to middle-class voters.

It came naturally to the BJP candidate Modi, who has been celebrating the upward mobility of the middle-class and the emergence of a neo-middle-class. He sharpened his economic argument to ram home his point that he has an economic solution to India’s woes: he promised to generate jobs, offer better infrastructure and opportunities, and tried to endear himself to the middle-class by dwelling at length on what appears to be a ‘pull-up’ strategy— as suggested by the renowned economist Jagdish Bhagwati—to focus on economic growth as a means to pull people out of poverty.

Modi also attacked the Congress, which has ruled the country for almost a decade, for losing sight of those aims.

He asked India’s middle-class not to put up with a Congress that has failed to deliver prosperity. “The country needs 100 new cities, faster urbanisation, creation of infrastructure, world class educational as well as health institutions. There will be a major spurt in investment and jobs will happen,” he told his audience at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan amid loud applause.

If Modi’s speech held resonance among middle-class listeners, Sinha explains why. “The problems that have been created by the Congress Government controlled by Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have hurt the middle-class the most,” he says, “More than any other section, they are looking for relief. And they are now convinced that a government led by Narendra Modi can provide this relief.”

Reality Bites, and then Dawns

Two days earlier, there were signs of a rhetorical shift in the approach of the Congress, whose last hope, Rahul Gandhi, moved beyond his fascination with the ‘other India’ that his party believes can be swayed by a rightsopen www.openthemagazine.com 15

based agenda (‘adhikaar ki sarkaar’), to spell out his plans for India’s middle-class. He said that the UPA’s third avataar, if elected to power, would ensure a growth story that would hasten the country’s demographic transition as people move from agricultural to industrial and service sector jobs. And, capitulating to this section’s pressure, Gandhi asked the Prime Minister to raise the quota of subsidised gas from nine to 12 cylinders a year.

It is another matter that his speech invited comments like “Those came looking for a Congress prime ministerial candidate went back with three additional cylinders of gas”, or a rebuke from fiscal conservatives for treating the Centre’s treasury as a candy dispenser.

Gandhi’s inclusion of issues that have so far been whitewashed off Rahul Gandhi’s campaign folklore signals a clear reassessment of the electoral power of the middleclass by the Congress. The party had considered these voters as its own in the belief that a section influenced by ideas of secularism, liberal values and religious tolerance will not elect a party it has long portrayed as a disruptive influence. “The middle-class now has its own code of conduct,” says Visvanathan, “This middle-class wants development to reach faster. Patience is not a virtue.”

While Gandhi has made a mention of it, the promise to ensure a faster transition of the underprivileged to the middle-income bracket has been a key theme of Modi for

photos raul irani

the same ‘middle’ ground Rahul Gandhi at the AICC meet in New Delhi on 17 January; (facing page) Narendra Modi at the BJP National Council meet in New Delhi on 19 January. Both spoke of reaching out to the middle class

the past two years. In Gujarat, the state of which he is Chief Minister, he has assiduously been cultivating a section that has been newly empowered in economic terms—a group of people more interested in earning their own money than in getting government hand-outs.

Political observers and social scientists admit that the first generation beneficiaries of India’s liberalisation—a section that has just moved above the poverty line—have begun to mimic the behaviour of the middle-class.

Incidentally, Modi had identified them in his last Assembly election manifesto as the ‘neo-middle-class’.

Even as Modi tries to hold India’s neo and old middleclasses under his sway, Gandhi is making an attempt to move beyond his by-now-famous ‘Bharat and family fables’ line to woo voters who the party has alienated with its constant harking back to the Nehru-Gandhis and its dole-driven governance.

The New Middle Class

Academics such as Ashis Nandy have noted that this new class has emerged as a formidable force in the country.

According to the sociologist, they constitute more than one-fourth of the population. He maintains that parties will vie with one another far more vigorously than ever to placate this vote base.

India’s two major national players are not the only ones displaying an anxiety to appease the middle-class. Some years ago, regional leaders such as Mulayam Singh Yadav poured scorn over the upwardly mobile in the confidence that other interest groups can pull off an electoral victo-

ry. That things have changed was evident when he leaned on his young son Akhilesh Yadav to cash in on the antiBSP sentiment in Uttar Pradesh for the state’s Assembly polls in 2012. In neighbouring Bihar, not many will contest the argument that the middle-class played a critical role in the ‘status upgradation’ of Nitish Kumar as a development-oriented leader a few years ago. Since then, however, he appears vulnerable on this point of appeal.

The changed approach of political parties to the middle-class is seen by observers as a welcome development.

The bulk of the benefits of runaway economic growth in the first decade of the new Millennium accrued to this class, especially in urban areas. This is most visible in shifting consumer behaviour and an overt spurt in consumerism, captured so vividly by the rapid spread of shopping malls, low-cost airlines and multiple choices. Effectively, in less than a decade, the Indian consumer

has begun to dictate choices in multiple fields of activity.

This change has not come about overnight. It has been in the making for the past three decades, ever since the country inked its first loan programme with the International Monetary Fund in 1981. This process accelerated in 1991 and provided the basis for the rapid spread of consumerism and expansion of the country’s middle-class.

Numbers Tell the Story

The 2011 Census reveals that urban areas, including census towns, now account for 31 per cent of the country’s population, while it was 23 per cent in 1981. The growth in the number of towns in the past decade rose by a sharp 50 per cent. In some states such as Kerala, the pace of urbanisation rose from 26 per cent in the decade ended 2001 to 47.7 per cent over the phase that ended in 2011. As India’s middle-class grows, some place this demographic segment at 300 million: roughly a fourth of the overall population.

Interestingly, what is also emerging is a spurt in their aspirations, regardless of whether they live in urban or rural areas. Consumption habits are actually displaying a convergence that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Data put out by the National Sample Survey Office recently showed that for the first time more than half of all rural consumer spending is on non-food products like consumer durables, clothing, footwear and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs). Similarly, surveys on the state of education in rural areas by Pratham, an organisation that tracks this factor, reveal that even the poor are paying for private inputs in educating their children.

Everybody with exposure to the larger economy, it seems, has sensed education as a ticket to upward mobility.

This dramatic upward shift in aspirations— yes, the likes of Verma and Giroti are likely to put their foot down on it—can prove a gamechanger in the upcoming General Election.

A restive middle-class may have helped the emergence of an upstart Aam Aadmi Party in constituencies that form part of the Delhi Municipal area, and some observers see it as an answer to their woes. But the events of the past week in Delhi nearly proved that AAP, which was born out of a middle-class resentment against corruption, is rearing its working class bias, rapidly degenerating into a roguish protest movement. In most other parts of the country, the re-engagement of the middle-class with the political process is certain to help established players who are seen as better equipped to handle their aspirations. n open www.openthemagazine.com 17

VIGNETTES

Books Do Matter.

Or Do They?

Reading into the Jaipur Literature Festival DEVIKA BAKSHI

T

he Jaipur Literature Festival is an event for the sort of person who is worried that she is not reading enough or the right things, and is convinced it is important. I am that sort of person. I spent five days swaddled in a shawl and my absurd, neurotic preoccupation with literature in a palace full of writers only to emerge with a greater urge to read and a deeper anxiety that I won’t. I probably deserve it.

The absence of controversy illustrated why one is useful: being attacked is the best reassurance of worth. The Rushdie Episode of 2012 gifted everyone in attendance that year the feeling of being part of the bastion of free speech, and that is nice. Absent such a sense of purpose, all you have left are books and the unsubstantiated sense that they matter.

No matter how certain you are that they do—and that talking about them matters too—it is hard to escape a sense of self-indulgence while attending a literature festival. It’s one thing to be earnestly devoted to literature in private, but owning up to it in public feels unseemly. ‘Look! We’re readers!’ It’s the sort of thing you want people to know, but you don’t want to have to say, mostly because you’re afraid someone might turn around and ask ‘so what?’

The calmest people at the festival were those unconcerned with projecting literariness, like the cluster of five dudes in shades breaking the flow of the Sunday why read? In a panel on Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha, actor Irrfan mused about the explosive capacity of story 20 open

crowds. I cut in to ask them if they have come to see anyone in particular and one of them lowers his sunglasses to explain they are just here for the, um, atmosphere.

During a quick drive-by chat on the festival’s final day, Philip Hensher reasoned cheerfully that a festival is a great place for young people to “get off with each other” and I wonder whether the sea of young faces so many writers find so encouraging are indeed here to have a bit of a gander not at the books, but at each other. There are worse places to have a romance, though the coffee could be better.

The best way to identify an actual ‘young reader’ is by the copy of The Immortals of Meluha under his arm. The Sunday afternoon session with Amish Tripathi was the clearest, most engaged

interaction between reader and writer I witnessed during the whole festival. It was clear from the pointed philosophical questions asked and the patient counselling answers given that Tripathi had become somewhat of a sage, a position he was serious about. Not so serious that he couldn’t admit to being ‘a Shiva worshipper’ in response to a question about marijuana, but serious enough that he ended with, “Try spirituality. It’s a much longer lasting high.”

He is mobbed immediately after and sportingly signs book after book. A woman in her fifties emerges triumphant from the signing booth with three brand new copies; they are for her son in England, who is a big fan. She grabs my arm repeatedly as she explains how im-

Among those not bestowed with the special privileges of a press or delegate badge were passionate attendees disappointed at how paltry the interaction with writers was. This year, the security detail outside the writer’s lounge was fiercer than ever, protecting the festival’s precious minds from its fervent crowds, ravenous for handshakes and selfies. An eager child shepherded by his eager mother stands outside, notebook outstretched, trying to catch someone going in or out. He spots me and asks me for my autograph. I gape. His mother asks if I am not Manmohan Singh’s daughter.

But lest I get too high on my horse, I should admit I felt the same sort of impulse when confronted with Katherine Boo’s delicate frame at a publishing party on the first night—a weird non-specific urge to make contact, to approach and say something, no matter how generic and absurd. This impulse is the glue that holds an event like JLF together.

There was genuine anger at the signing booth after Jhumpa Lahiri’s sedate solo panel. Apparently there were signed copies of The Lowland available at the book-

store, but the writer herself would not be signing books. The signature, of course, is never the point. The point is to discover that notorious grump Jonathan Franzen is, in fact, quite affable, even while signing his hundredth copy of Freedom.

“When Jonathan and Jhumpa are done, they disappear,” says Reza Aslan after an hour spent at the bookstore taking photographs and speaking to someone’s dad on the phone, “I don’t.” Aslan was one of the big hits this year, winning hearts with his American ease and animated, emphatic way of speaking. A group of grey-haired ladies from Delhi pronounce him a rockstar, which probably has at least in part to do with his aviators. He is utterly at ease with his function at the festival, happy to “go out of my way to honour the people who like me”. “This is not a job,” he says, “digging a ditch is a job. This is thinking out loud for money.”

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, author of What if Latin America Ruled the World? and sole representative this year of the Spanish-speaking world, was another of the more visible writers at the festival, easily spotted by a distinctive haircut.

photos ashish sharma

portant it is that children read and how proud she is of her doctor son who reads “even on the toilet”.

That young people be made readers of seems a high-stakes concern across the board—even writers are worried their kids won’t read. Peter Godwin says valuing literature is “evidence of a soul” so it isn’t hard to understand why he was worried his 14-year-old son Thomas wasn’t a reader. After watching Life of Pi last year, Thomas read the book several times and wrote to Yann Martel. To Godwin, his son’s future as a reader hinged on Martel’s response, and he considered intervening through an agent, but to his relief, Martel wrote back—a handwritten four-page note now framed on Thomas’ wall.

A literature festival, Godwin says, is important because it “encourages and proselytises reading and writing”.

Whether or not it actually makes new readers and writers, it certainly confirms those already inclined. What could be more persuasive to an aspiring writer than a palace in which a writer is the greatest celebrity? On the other hand, what could be more ridiculous?

Optimistic about the exchange of ideas a literature festival facilitates, he was also inclined to agree with his friend Jon Franzen that it was a good opportunity to carve out some time after panels to write, musing that Franzen must have slipped out early to go birdwatching.

Oscar entertained several of my needling questions about whether it was possible to have a global literature not centred on the English speaking Atlantic, and his spirited discussion of the conversations within Spanish-language literature buttressed my suspicion that our best chance of an alternate axis for such a global literature lies in Latin America.

Though I will be accused of not paying enough attention, it did seem that there were a disproportionate number of English writers this year, and far too few non-diasporic writers from the Rest of the World. But it feels passé at this point to criticise JLF for narrowness, and naive to expect that it be exhaustive. Organiser William Dalrymple comes across exasperated and bruised at the criticisms, and seems genuinely committed to the festival’s mission to showcase global literature to India, and Indian literature to the world—but I wonder if it ought to be untethered from the latter responsibility.

Perhaps we might shift our attention to the scores of other literary festivals emerging across the country, curating the best of Indian language literature.

One festival cannot be all things, and after all, the preferences of JLF’s urban middle-class audience cannot be laid at Dalrymple’s door.

Year after year, meticulously assembled ‘bhasha’ panels are overshadowed by the appearance of some global literary star or other. Though this year, the inclusion of Irrfan Khan in a panel on Dalit literature was a genius attendance boost— and he wasn’t just a pretty face either. In another panel on the Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha, Khan spoke of the ‘explosive’ capacity of a kahaani, and how Detha’s writings helped give Rajasthani the status of a language.

After a Hindi panel, I spotted a nearblond head rising from the audience. I asked if he spoke Hindi. “Main Hindi samajhta hoon,” he responded. An American studying Dalit literature, he said he’d found the Hindi panels at the festival much more engaged and conver22 open

sational. I certainly found them much less defensive and tense.

At an intimate session on the final morning, Ashok Vajpeyi diffused a charged question on the hegemony of English by making a distinction between English as an imperialist language and English as a great and useful language.

Later, in a casual conversation, he reassured me I needn’t join in the IWE handwringing over the death of Indian language literature. He spoke of translating Polish poetry into Hindi, bypassing English entirely, but also acknowledged the intermediary function English sometimes served.

A couple of days earlier, sitting on the ‘global novel’ panel with Franzen and Lahiri, Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo said she chose to write in English so she could have a voice to speak of something ignored; language, she said, could be a passport, but it was “a dubious, dangerous

Though there did seem to be a surfeit of English writers this year, it feels passe to criticise JLF for narrowness and to expect that it be exhaustive passport, too”. Minutes later, she asserted that American literature was “massively overrated”. An American near me smirked, but Guo won me over for sheer gumption. I bought her book.

It became clear that past the shiny global names that get top billing in press releases, a whole range of conversations was going on. Marcus Du Sautoy wondered if prime numbers were the most macho, and Jim Al-Khalili taught people how to time-travel. Benyamin, author of Goat Days, spoke of reading Marquez and Coetzee in Malayalam, and of how much he enjoyed the panel titled ‘Three Women, Three Africas’. I too enjoyed hearing Maaza Mengiste, Nadifa Mohamed and Taiye Selasi-via-Skype take apart absurd literary labels and resist the expectations that come with being called an ‘African writer’, a ‘woman writer’, a ‘war novelist’.

It was particularly heartening to hear

Nadifa Mohamed voicing the fear that writing might be irrelevant—that people could read her book, put it aside, and go on with the blindnesses she sought to address. She later answered her own question, and echoed Guo’s urgency, saying that just writing yourself could be a way of carving out space for yourself, and suggesting that the worth of literature was in its capacity to be political.

Which is odd because JLF this year seemed determined not to be. There were fewer panels this year on ‘the challenges facing India’ and so on, perhaps as a way of avoiding everything boiling down to the question of who should win the coming general election, but angst did not go unexpressed. Coded warnings against tyranny and conservatism appeared everywhere—most powerfully, perhaps, in Gloria Steinem’s assertion that “you don’t get democracy outside the home until you get democracy inside the home.”

Organiser Sanjoy Roy joked that reporters had expressed concern they wouldn’t be able to justify the trip if something didn’t jump off the books pages soon. He also said he wasn’t surprised the festival had become a platform for protest, considering the sheer number of journalists there, but he did take the mic after one session to tell the Aam Aadmis in the crowd that the Jaipur Literature Festival was not about “group politics”, but “individual thought”. Nevertheless, after a mere three days of pamphleteering outside the festival gates, even the man selling kachoris was wearing an Aam Aadmi cap.

On the festival’s final evening, the determinedly political Jim Crace confirmed my private suspicion that writing and reading, though valuable, were minor endeavours, confessing that he often wakes up in the morning and is ashamed of what he does for a living. He talks about his discomfort of living a life that is “not as stitched into the real world as one would hope.” But he goes on, “because I can, and because it’s fun and because I’m weak and because I’ve been trapped by my own success.” And with that, cheerfully, he heads off to Ranthambore to spend time with the natural world. I wonder if he’ll find Franzen there, looking through a pair of binoculars. I doubt either of them will worry about what to read, or whether it’s the right thing. n 3 February 2014

once upon a picture Khum Kala holds up a photograph of herself with her husband, Hemraj, in happier times

t r ag e dy

Those Hemraj Left Behind When a victim’s loved ones are victimised Mihir Srivastava photographs by raul irani

K

hum Kala heard of her husband

Hemraj Banjade’s murder two days after he was killed. A domestic help who worked at an apartment in Noida’s Jalvayu Vihar, he had died on the night of 16 May 2008, around the same time as a 14-year-old girl whose murder hogged the news headlines at the time: Aarushi Talwar, the daughter of Hemraj’s employers Rajesh and Nupur Talwar.

While Aarushi’s murder came to light on the morning of 17 May, Hemraj’s bludgeoned body was found only a day later—on the terrace of the flat. Their mortal remains bore similar injuries.

They had both suffered fatal blows on their foreheads by a blunt object and had their throats slit by a sharp object, clearly the handiwork of the same murderer/s. The Talwars, both dentists by profession, have since been convicted of the twin murders.

The case has been one of India’s most closely followed by media audiences, but lost in all the coverage has been the grief of Hemraj’s family back in Dharapani in the Arghakhach district of south-western Nepal, some 1,500 km away from the scene of the crime.

Dharapani is a long drive through high brown mountains that winds through dusty towns and villages before you reach this habitation nestled in a verdant valley. The village is home to about 50 families, all very closely knit. They had been shocked by the sight of Hemraj’s snapshot on Indian television within just a few hours of his corpse’s recovery.

For a while, none of them dared tell Khum Kala. She would be unable to deal with the news, they feared, maybe even lose her mind.

The villagers were not entirely wrong.

When Kala finally heard of her husband’s violent death, she was struck dumb. She didn’t cry. Her tears froze in her eyes, say those who were around her.

Nor did she betray any other emotion.

She just stood numb. She couldn’t feel her limbs, she says. For the next two weeks, she had no strength to attend to her daily chores. She was bedridden for months.

Now, says Khum Kala, she has finally come to terms with the reality that her husband will never come back to her and she alone has to take care of their son Prajwal, now 12 years old. “My limbs hurt, my heart aches,” she says. And she

3 february 2014

suffers from acute arthritis.

Prajwal, reed thin with ankle-exposing trousers that suggest a rapid gain in height, is seated by his mother’s side in the verandah of their mud house. The dwelling is more than a hundred years old, and Prajwal is the fifth generation of the family that first moved into the house. He looks at her mother’s face with an uncertain gaze. Behind his stoic exterior, he appears to hide an unrest he is too young to articulate. The only time the boy speaks is to spell his name out—in confident English.

The villagers gathered around are impressed. “He learns English and is a student of commerce,” says Bhuprasad, a distant uncle of Hemraj in his early sixties.

Asked if he has any memory of his father, Prajwal nods. All this attention from a visitor has already made a hero of the boy among his peers, who crowd around to complain that he doesn’t play with them. By his mother’s side, Prajwal listens attentively to what is being said

“The body didn’t look like his.

The killer and the summer heat had deformed it beyond recognition” Villagers in Dharapani, Nepal, who performed Hemraj’s last rites in Delhi

about him. There is no change in his facial expression. “He is weak with a chest infection,” says Khum Kala in his defence, “He can’t breathe properly.”

Khum Kala depends heavily on the support of her elder brother Saligram, who lives in Arghakhach and helps take care of the family. He took Prajwal to Varanasi, a 15-hour journey by bus, for treatment of his asthma. Financially, the family has fallen on hard times. They once had several cows, but now all they have is three goats, and their meagre land holdings don’t provide food enough even for three months’ sustenance.

It is a traditional home. In its middle is a circular chula —a depression in the mud floor where a fire may be lit to warm the house. This is where the family huddles during the bitter cold of winter. Prajwal

runs upstairs to the hut’s cramped attic, a bedroom he shares with his mother, to get Hemraj’s pictures. The pictures are in an envelope under a pile of clothes in a big trunk, hidden away from daily sight, a reminder of happier times. One of the pictures has Hemraj in Malaysia, all suited and booted. He’d lived there for three years, though the family doesn’t know much about what he did there.

They just know he didn’t like it. He said he’d never go back.

The third member of the family is Krishna Kala, Hemraj’s mother, who is now 80 years old. He was her only child.

Hemraj’s death to her was a cruel repetition of history, since she’d lost her husband in a freak accident some 40 years ago when he was working at a mill in Sonipat, Haryana. Hemraj was of Prajwal’s age at the time.

Krishna Kala looks at her grandson with an air of sadness, but doesn’t speak.

She has been going deaf, of late, but is aware of who the visitors from Delhi are here to talk about; her swollen eyes are wet. She stays in a room attached to the main mud house that also serves as a storehouse of fodder and firewood.

Khum Kala is unable to say whether it is hatred of the Talwars or a desire for justice that has kept them going over the past five years. She has not had closure over Hemraj’s death. She didn’t even get to see his body, and it has left an emotional void, an ache from which there is little relief.

In the village, the story of Hemraj’s murder has acquired folklore status. It is told over and over, never failing to attract listeners. It was some of the village’s menfolk who went to Delhi to perform his last rites. “[The body] didn’t look like his,” they say, “The killer and the summer heat had deformed it beyond recognition.” They don’t want to talk about it any further.

T

o Hemraj’s family, for five elongat-

ed years, each day since his death had seemed like a day of lost hope. It was only after life sentences were awarded—on 25 November 2013—by a special court to the “Dr Talwars”, as they are known here, did they see a flicker of justice.

Khum Kala thanks the Indian Judiciary for doing a poor Nepali justice despite a vicious campaign run by a wellopen www.openthemagazine.com 25

off Indian family to malign his character.

However, she doesn’t believe the prosecution’s allegations: that the Talwars killed their daughter in rage on finding her in a ‘compromising position’ with Hemraj.

“This is not possible,” Khum Kala remembers, “Hemraj often talked about Aarushi. She was a bright girl who was respectful towards Hemraj and called him bhaiyya. Aarushi had even sent a gift for Prajwal with Hemraj.”

Hemraj would not talk much about his work with his family, but he did complain that Rajesh Talwar was strict and finicky. Hemraj would often be hauled over the coals by Rajesh, she explains. “Dr Talwar was very particular about what was happening in the house.” So there was no question of Hemraj hosting friends for drinks? She clinches her teeth to reply: “He cannot have hosted friends for drinks because he was a teetotaller and he didn’t even host people here in the village. If he had to see someone, he’d visit them. Stop maligning a dead man.”

Hemraj’s son-in-law Jeevan was picked up by the Noida Police the same morning that Aarushi’s body was found. He was detained illegally for nine days

Her emotions of loss appear to have metamorphosed into a deep-seated anger that surfaces with the slightest mention of ‘Dr Talwars’. The only encounter she has ever had with the Talwars has been via TV. “I felt like breaking into the TV set and grabbing them by their necks. If I see them, I will pour kerosene oil on them and burn them alive,” she says in Hindi, shaking in anger before she bursts into tears. “They have destroyed my life. God will never let them rest in peace.”

Hemraj worked for the Talwars on a monthly salary of Rs 3,000. The last time Khum Kala met him was three months before he died. He didn’t send a single paisa for that period, nor did the Talwars bother to send them his dues. “They instead send the police after us,” she says. “I have to live without my man. They never tried to contact me. They have big mon26 open

ey to pay, big lawyers to hire, but didn’t bother to pay Hemraj’s dues. They have said so many wrong things about my husband to save [themselves]. I am sad Aarushi is dead. So is my husband. But no one talks about him because he is a poor man. I know he didn’t do anything bad to Aarushi. I wish Aarushi was alive to say he is innocent.”

She is hurt at having been subjected to nasty words and allegations against the man she lost. “I know [Hemraj] cannot do anything wrong to Aarushi,” she says, repeating herself.

H

emraj’s son-in-law Jeevan was asleep in his room when the police knocked on his door early morning on 17 May 2008. Jeevan was a household help at Samir Singh’s house in Noida, and, like Hemraj, lived in a servant’s quarter attached to the flat. Hemraj himself had worked at Singh’s place for four months before he took up his job with the Talwars.

The police questioned Jeevan about Hemraj’s whereabouts and searched his room. He was handcuffed and chained and taken to a police station. He was slapped and beaten up, despite his telling them all he could. The police took his mobile to check the calls he’d made and never returned it, leaving him unable to get in touch with his family and friends.

His employer Samir Singh, who heard the commotion and came out of the house to see what was happening, was confronted by the cops who said they were looking for Hemraj who’d fled after killing Aarushi. They had been sent there by the Talwars.

The same evening, a team of three policemen took Jeevan along and left in a car to nab Hemraj from his village. They travelled the whole night to enter Nepal from Nepalganj via Bareilly, Lahimpur Khiri and Nanpara by morning, pasting hundreds of pictures of Hemraj along the way that described him as a wanted killer. One of the policemen who made this journey told me that the Talwars had offered Rs 15,000 for the trip to Nepal to nab Hemraj, though he was not sure if his senior colleague took the money. The police were under pressure to catch Hemraj.

The police stopped and checked every bus entering Nepal from India. All this

while, Jeevan sat handcuffed and chained. Once they reached the village, he was asked to direct them to Hemraj’s family, just as they had made him point out his associates in Delhi (such as Hemraj’s brother-in-law Rudralal, who lives and works in Bhajanpura). Jeevan was held and questioned for days.

By late afternoon, Jeevan could see that the three policemen had something hot to discuss. What it was, he had no clue, but they abandoned their search for Hemraj and decided to return to Noida.

They did not tell him that Hemraj’s body 3 february 2014

the family we forgot Hemraj’s mother stands in front of their home in Dharapani village in Nepal; further in sits his 12-year-old son Prajwal, with Khum Kala by the door

had been recovered at the Talwar residence. They reached Noida the next day, and Jeevan, who was dumped at a police station in Sector 20, was still not allowed to contact anyone.

At the police station, Jeevan met a local reporter who informed him that Hemraj was murdered the same night as Aarushi.

Desperate to join his family, Jeevan created a ruckus. Why was he being held?

Why was the police not going after the real killer? Why was the police trying to pin Aarushi’s murder on a Nepali? He was not released. Instead, he was ferried 3 february 2014

from one police station to another over the following week.

Finally, the police sent a message to Samir Singh to have Jeevan picked up— after nine days of detention without any evidence against him. That this was illegal was entirely ignored by the media.

But when Rajesh Talwar was arrested on 23 May, the media went berserk. No one had a thought to spare for Jeevan and the rest of Hemraj’s family.

A police officer who was involved in the operation confirms that the police had believed the Talwars when they

pointed a finger at Hemraj as Aarushi’s murderer. That the parents could be suspects just did not strike the cops. Set off on a false trail, the CBI team had interrogated Jeevan and Hemraj’s other friends.

In all, the Talwars had it easy—until the evidence began piling up against them.

The ‘guilty’ judgment against the Talwars has come as a relief to Hemraj’s family. “Now I can concentrate on working to improve our lives,” says Khum Kala. She has made up her mind on one aspect of this, though. “I will never send Prajwal to work in India.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 27

After her son was killed in Kashmir, Anuradha Gore made it her life’s mission to have other youngsters join the Army Ashlesha Athavale

I

t had been a quiet day at their home

in Mumbai when Anuradha Gore had a difficult promise to make. Her son, Vinayak, a Captain in the 31st Medium Artillery Regiment, had learnt that he had been posted near the border, and that too, at the height of the insurgency in Kashmir. “Promise me you will not cry if something untoward happens,” Vinayak asked of her, “Remember you are a captain’s mother.”

Gore gave her son that assurance in the hope she would never have to honour it.

On 26 September 1995, however, he was killed in Kupwara. He was just 26 years old. True to her word, Gore never cried in public after his death. But she also made herself another promise: that she would keep his memory alive.

I

n the 18 years since Vinayak died,

the retired school principal has done her best to fulfil her oath. She has given talks to students and others on the Army, soldiers and their work. She has written columns in newspapers on the same. She has authored eight books in Marathi, most of them about soldiers, and is presently penning what could be the first book in this language on Siachen and what it takes to guard it. She has inspired a large number of young men and women in Maharashtra to join the Army.

At the age of 65, Gore also teaches children as part of her voluntary work. The day before we meet at her home, Gore had taken a group of deaf-and-mute students to see a Navy submarine.

Gore’s living room has a large image of Vinayak. He has his mother’s smile, and resembles her in a few other ways as well.

28 open

s e rv i c e

The Bravery of a Soldier’s Mother Below this photo is another small picture of him with his unit. It was found among his belongings by a colleague and sent to her after he was shot—a victim of terrorists, as she writes in one of her books. In this frame, Captain Vinayak sits looking seriously into the camera. He has the bearing of a soldier, but there is also an air of innocence on his face.

Back in 1991, this house, a ground-floor flat in a housing complex surrounded by many others in a quiet lane of Vile Parle, is where the family—Anuradha, her hus-

band, and their daughter—had celebrated Vinayak’s joining the Army. It had been a moment of jubilation. He had gone for entrance tests to Dehradun’s Indian Military Academy (IMA), and Gore had received a phone call from two boys with him who were on their way home because they did not clear the tests.

One of them told her that Vinayak was still there as he had to undergo medical tests. “When we learnt that,” says Gore, “we realised he had been selected by the Academy. Medical tests are usually con3 February 2014

a fitting salute Anuradha Gore has authored eight books in Marathi on soldiers

Indian Express, apart from chapters of the Gita. “Perhaps that made him aware of the political situation,” says his mother, “He was also influenced by the talk of Krishna, who tells Arjun to pick up arms to fight injustice.”

It was while he was in school that Vinayak said he wanted to join the Army.

His family encouraged him, and he started working towards that objective, excelling in academics and sports.

In 1992, he graduated as an officer from the IMA. He had returned to duty after a visit home when he was killed. Gore does not want to talk about it, but says, “There were different versions of the incident. I decided to just accept that my son was dead and not go into the details.”

F

Ritesh Uttamchandani

ducted after all other tests. We were sure he would clear them. We decorated his room in celebration.” Later, when Vinayak left for his training, he was seen off at the railway station by his entire family, including some relatives from Calicut in Kerala.

Gore talks about her son with pride: Vinayak had always been different. Her uncle and aunt lived nearby, and, as a boy, he would often spend time at their house, where her uncle, a voracious reader, regaled him with tales of valour. Gore is 3 February 2014

from Satara and her mother’s house had a sword, an ancestral heirloom, that Vinayak would play with on visits there during vacations. He was an avid reader; by the time he was in class VI, he knew by heart almost all of Babasaheb Purandare’s 700-page biography of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the region’s great warrior-ruler of the 17th century. The boy’s father, Vishnu Gore, who later retired as an ICICI executive, would sit with him every evening and make him read aloud the main editorial of The

or a month after her son’s death,

Gore stayed cooped up at home in grief. But people didn’t let the family grieve alone. Strangers kept visiting and writing to them. Their neighbourhood did not celebrate Navratri, Dussehra or Diwali that year.

What changed Gore’s course of life was a phone call a few days later. It was from the principal of the school where she taught. She wanted Gore to resume work.

“Countless Vinayaks are waiting for you,” she said. And this is when Gore felt the need to do something for those who had stood by her in her grief. “I felt I owed something to them,” she says. Soon after, a school in Thane invited her to give a talk on Hutatma Diwas. It was the first time that she spoke about soldiers and how hard they worked to defend the country. After this, she made a speech to thousands of listeners at a stadium on the invitation of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the Sangh Parivar’s youth wing. She held the audience in rapt attention, and was convinced that this was a good way to support the forces and their cause.

“Vinayak used to say ‘I am on two missions’,” says Gore, “One was Mission Kashmir and the other was Mission Join the Indian Army. He used to walk up to youngsters chatting by the roadside or open www.openthemagazine.com 29

wasting time in college canteens and talk to them about joining the Army. Soldiers normally don’t do this. But he would go out of his way to try to convince them of the adventure awaiting them if they joined. I decided I would give talks in at least 100 schools in the same way. I have long since crossed that number.”

O

nce, after listening to her talk, author Dinkar Gangal approached Gore and said, “You must pen down your words. Else they will melt in the air.” Gore took his advice. Her first book, Waras hovu Abhimanyuche, published in 2009 and translated later into English, was on soldiers from Mumbai who had made the supreme sacrifice; its first chapter was on Vinayak. After that, came a book on stories from wars after 1947, and then another on individual heroism, followed by one specifically on the 1971 Indo-Pak war and yet another on stories of bravery. She remembers the response to her first book. “I came home after the launch and by 12 am, a reader had called to say, ‘I cried, but I couldn’t put the book down until I finished it.’” The mother of a soldier told her that their locality in Ambarnath didn’t know of his martyrdom until they read about it in the book.

“This soldier’s mother said, ‘You have made my son immortal’.”

For years, Siachen had been at the back of Gore’s mind. She laughs while recalling how Vinayak, as a little boy, would sit on the tallest stool in their house and say, “I am in Siachen.” She was to learn a lot more about this icy battlefield after her son’s death, when a mountaineer called Harish Kapadia, whose son Lieutenant Nawang Kapadia had also been killed in Jammu & Kashmir, gave her a book on it.

Kapadia was among the few civilians to have visited the glacier (only the armed forces are allowed there now). Gore realised there was no book on Siachen in Marathi, and decided to write one. “My book is not based just on information from other books,” she says, “I have also spoken to many retired soldiers who served there.” An officer once asked her how she would write such a book without having been there. “I told him it is like the classic story of the six blind men interpreting an elephant,” she says, “So some people may think it is like a rope, 30 open

some may think it is like a fan. I just want them to know more than what they do now about the hardships our soldiers face in Siachen.”

All that the typical Indian knows of Siachen is that it is the world’s ‘highest battleground’. But it is also the harshest.

Temperatures dip to –50º Celsius, the only drinking water available is molten ice, and with all the lack of oxygen and perils of frostbite and avalanches, soldiers are at constant risk of disorientation. One cannot eat spicy food as digestion slows down, and the extreme cold causes ailments that make water gather in the lungs or brain.

Gore has collected many experiences of soldiers who served in Siachen— which ironically means ‘the land of abundant roses’. One officer told her about a post with which communication was lost. It took about 16 days for soldiers from another post to get there. They

The mother of a soldier told Gore that their locality in Ambarnath didn’t know of his martyrdom until they read about it in her book found it buried deep in snow along with the eight soldiers posted there.

She tells the story of an officer who fell ill in Siachen. He could not be evacuated in time because of harsh weather conditions. When he recovered, his entire right leg and part of his left leg had to be amputated, and his body’s left half remains paralysed. He does a desk job now.

“Yet,” she says, “His last wish is to be born again to join the Army.”

T

he Indian Army has been in Siachen

since the 1980s. It was only after soldiers began being posted there that the Army got round to dealing with its extreme conditions. At first, there were many fatalities. It was only later that the Army realised that a soldier can only be safely posted there for 90 days at most.

Gore speaks of one officer who went blind because he could not be relieved of

duty by another officer in time. He recovered, but still suffers memory lapses. But, she says of the spirit of Indian soldiers, “Despite knowing the difficulties of serving in Siachen, most soldiers want to serve there. One soldier named his children after Siachen. Sia and Sachin!”

Gore doesn’t know when she will finish her book. Each day brings with it new information. Each day also brings with it some other task to be done to fulfil her promise to Vinayak. His colleagues, and even those who joined the unit after him, have kept in touch with her. Meanwhile, she fights hard to stop herself from crying and keep her voice in check in public.

As a martyr’s mother, she knows she must soldier on.

Gore’s friend and former Deputy Secretary of Maharashtra for Irrigation, Madhuri Talashikar calls Gore a very brave woman, always ready to help others. “Everyone in Vile Parle knows her,” she says, “The building where she lives is going to be redeveloped and she is looking for alternative accommodation until then. Many people whom she approached to rent their flat told her, ‘Ma’am, we won’t say anything. You decide the rent.’”

Many others have been deeply influenced by her courage. Rohini Gokhale, a well-known Bharatnatyam danseuse, for example, was worried when her son wanted to join the Army; media reports of Vinayak’s death had left her disturbed.

But she decided to visit Gore to find out more about the forces. And when she saw Vinayak’s picture, she broke down. Gore and her husband consoled her. “She said there is a need for intelligent officers, for young men and women to serve the country,” says Gohkale, “I am sure she remembers her son every moment. But she never shows it in public. She never cries in front of people. That is a big responsibility. How will people allow their sons to join the Army if someone shows their loss? Her work is very important.”

Gore is stoic in her maternal sacrifice for the nation. “What happened was destiny,” she says, “There are very few women in India who can say they had a son like Vinayak who sacrificed himself for the country. I regret that politicians forget what our boys have done for the country. But I don’t regret that Vinayak joined the Army.” n 3 February 2014

immunity

anirban ghosh

Ancient Friends, Modern Enemies

New research claims that even more than our genes, it is our bacterial composition that determines our health. And our happiness and moods Thomas Crowley

T

he fever was so high that my fin-

gers started tingling. Waves of nausea washed over me. The antibiotics in my stomach would soon be expelled, along with the few spoonfuls of khichdi I managed to stomach. Okay. Time to go to the hospital.

My body was being held hostage by a recalcitrant bacterium: Salmonella enterica enterica, serotype Typhi. Put simply, I had typhoid fever.

It was mid-August, Delhi. The weather was still hot and clammy, but I was chilled to the bone, even with the fan switched off. At the hospital, the doctor stated the obvious: my body was not responding to antibiotics. After three days of medication, my fever had only climbed higher. The doctor noted matterof-factly that he had seen several cases like this recently, with patients not responding to oral antibiotics. It was time to step things up, and start delivering antibiotics directly into my bloodstream.

Chained to an intravenous drip for 24 hours, watching the light change outside the hospital bed window, listening to a sudden rainstorm pour down, I had plenty of time for reflection. About the monsoon, which brought agricultural fields to life but spread disease across overcrowded cities. About the miracles of modern medicine, and its terrors.

It was unnerving to watch a full bag of fluids empty slowly, ineluctably, knowing that all these fluids were flowing into my body.

Soon, though, the mysterious fluids began to work their magic. There were signs of transformation: the purifying sweat that accompanies a fever dropping; the relief of being able to sip a cup of milky chai without gagging. I was lucky, at least, to be suffering an illness that responded to a straightforward treatment: bacteria, meet antibiotics. The monsoon had also brought a dengue epidemic, caused by a virus that does not respond to any known medications.

3 february 2014

V

are generally much more difficult to treat than bacteria.

Despite the existence of some vaccines and antiviral medications, the vast majority of viral diseases cannot be countered directly by medicine, and must just be waited out. This doesn’t stop doctors from treating viral diseases with antibiotics, in part just to look like they are doing something, in part because patients have come to expect it. This is certainly the case in Delhi; in my limited experience, the doctors here give out antibiotics like candy. But the same is true in my home country, the United States, where one-third of all patients seeking treatment for the common cold—that quintessential viral disease—are given prescriptions for antibiotics.

The over-prescription of antibiotics is, by now, a well-known issue. The problem iruses

The over-prescription of antibiotics is, by now, a well-known issue. The problem is that bacteria are nimble, quick-evolving creatures is that bacteria are nimble, quick-evolving creatures, and when given ample opportunity to interact with antibiotics, they will inevitably evolve to become antibiotic-resistant. This is especially true when people don’t take their full dosage of antibiotics, which results in killing some bacteria, leaving the strongest alive: a perfect scenario for the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

This is not a new problem; penicillin, the first antibiotic, was discovered in 1928, and penicillin-resistant bacteria had already developed by 1940. With the widespread use of antibiotics around the world, the problem is quickly worsening, and many wonder if it will spiral out of

control. Some warn that, soon, antibiotics will cease being effective.

In a recent article for the American science and technology magazine Wired, Maryn McKenna, who describes herself as ‘strangely excited’ by emerging diseases, details what would happen in a ‘postantibiotic era’, when bacteria finally outsmart all available antibiotics. Some of the consequences McKenna lists are truly shocking: difficulty in treating traumatic accidents and ensuring safe childbirth, the inability to effectively treat cancer or perform organ transplants since these procedures require suppressing the immune system and opening up the body to bacterial diseases, and, of course, much higher fatality rates from diseases like, say, typhoid fever.

But some of the other consequences McKenna lists don’t sound so dire. For instance, McKenna points to the use of massive amounts of antibiotics in factory farms in the US, which allow farmers to cram animals into inhumanely small living spaces. In a post-antibiotic age, meat in countries like the US would become more expensive and the animals would have to be given more spacious, comfortable living conditions. Is this such bad news for countries like America, where people already eat an unhealthy amount of meat and treat their farm animals abysmally?

Let me be clear. I am not pining for a post-antibiotic age. But McKenna’s alarmist approach is limited, as is evident in her apparent nonchalance towards the evils of factory farming. McKenna herself recognises that the overuse of antibiotics, both in medicine and in agriculture, is a problem, and in another article, she points to successful regulations to curb this abuse in northern European countries (as opposed to the asinine Free Market approach in the US, which simply involves asking farmers and doctors to behave better, and has been remarkably unsuccessful). But McKenna still open www.openthemagazine.com 33

sees antibiotics as the weapon, and bacteria as the enemy; she merely advocates a more judicious use of this weapon.

Her articles are largely based on interviews with allopathic doctors, who have, on the whole, viewed bacteria as evil beings to be crushed by the force of antibiotics. The downsides of this kind of ‘shock and awe’ approach to bacteria have become clearer in recent years. Of course, there is the overuse that McKenna rightly criticises. Further, the sheer, overwhelming power of antibiotics makes it possible to do things that, all things considered, may not be so wise: packing cattle into painfully tight spaces, say, or performing elective surgeries like liposuction.

A

more nuanced approach to bac-

teria is emerging, which doesn’t see antibiotics as a cure-all. Antibiotics have long been criticised by countercultural health movements, and the Kambucha (fermented tea) craze in the United States shows the widespread popularity of probiotics. But this emphasis on the potential positives of bacteria, which used to be a fringe view, is now finding widespread acceptance within the Western medical community. As quote misattributed to Gandhi says, ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’ Top medical schools around the world are now conducting research meant to showcase bacteria’s complexity.

This more nuanced approach to bacteria takes a more historic view, or—more accurately—a prehistoric view. Bacteria is beyond primitive; this group of organisms is almost unimaginably old.

Modern-day bacteria are close relatives of the very first organisms that came into existence: single-celled, nucleus-less creatures that emerged four billion years ago. Bacteria have survived and thrived in just about every place on earth: deep in the sea, in the soil, in hot springs, even in radioactive waste. And, of course, in human beings. Bacteria and humans have coexisted for as long as the human race has existed. In the human body, bacteria cells outnumber human cells by a ratio of ten to one. If all bacteria were just harmful germs, we would all be dead.

Instead, bacteria have had a largely 34 open

symbiotic relationship with humans.

Without bacteria, we wouldn’t be able to digest our food, or manufacture certain vitamins, or ward off various illnesses. In this more balanced view, bacteria like Salmonella enterica enteric should be treated as rogue operatives, not as representatives of their entire biological kingdom.

(Side note: should we really still be using such patriarchal, authoritarian language for biological classifications?) There are about a hundred trillion bacteria within a single human body, and most of them are good guys, so to speak. Besides this, there’s the crucial work that bacteria do in soil, recycling nutrients and ensuring that the land is fertile. Humans depend on bacteria in more ways than one.

Researchers are just beginning to comprehend the fundamental role that bacteria play in human health. Some doctors now claim that, even more than our

In the human body, bacteria cells outnumber human cells by a ratio of ten to one. If all bacteria were just harmful germs, we would all be dead genes, it is our bacterial composition that determines our health. Scientists have a fancy name for all the bacteria that populate the body: the human microbiome.

Understanding this microbiome is an complex task, akin to analysing a complex ecosystem. In fact, writers like Michael Pollan have urged us to view our own bodies in just this way—as diverse ecosystems in which bacteria may be the biggest player.

In this human ecosystem, bacteria have an impact not just on physical health, but also on our moods and mental dispositions. Studies have shown that intriguing things can happen when you transfer bacteria from one organism to another. In one especially surprising experiment, bacteria from the guts of adventurous mice were transferred into the guts of more timid mice. Lo and behold, these mice became bolder and more active.

Unsurprisingly, with the ever-growing use of antibiotics, the human microbi-

ome has become considerably less diverse, much like the modern monocultures of industrial farming. Medical researchers speculate that this loss of diversity may be contributing to the rapid rise of chronic conditions like asthma, Type 1 diabetes, sinusitis and obesity.

People in more isolated, less industrialised communities today still have a much more diverse microbiome than their urban, high-tech counterparts.

Already, doctors are trying to find a way to apply these findings. One microbiologist, a pioneer in the field, dreams of the day when we can give young children an implantation of bacteria to give their microbiomes the proper diversity, then give them antibiotics at a later age to cull the unnecessary bacteria. Perhaps, such internal ‘ecosystem services’ will one day be possible for the human body, but researchers and doctors should not make the mistake of their antibioticpushing predecessors. Modern science has often underestimated the complexity of ecosystems–both external and internal–and has acted with considerable hubris while destroying diversity in pursuit of its goals.

The answer is not neo-primitivism— abandoning antibiotics and other technologies that have had tremendous benefits for humankind. Rather, it is to recognise that these technologies have their dark sides. Relatively new scientific fields, including ecology and bacteriology, have demonstrated the remarkable complexity and interrelated nature of life on earth. Making changes to one part of an ecosystem, whether it is in a forest or in human guts, will likely have myriad unintended consequences. This calls for humility in dealing with organisms who have been around billions of years longer than us—not for bacteria’s sake, but for our own. If, as some environmentalists predict, humans cause catastrophic changes that result in the end of human existence, we can be sure that bacteria will survive the apocalypse.

As I type this, my nose is overflowing with mucous and a dry cough is distracting me from my work. I am suffering a common cold. But I am not taking antibiotics. I’ve learned too much about the trillions of friends living inside me, and I don’t want to unleash a cyclone on my inner ecosystem. n 3 february 2014

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FA N D O M

The Agony of Obsession It’s not easy being a sports fan AKSHAY SAWAI

H

ong

Kong

International

Airport. 12 November 2011.

Around 10.15 pm.

Alaham Anil Kumar has just boarded a Dragonair flight for Bangalore. He gets a call from his wife, Sridevi. The news leaves Anil shaken. He finds it hard to eat or sleep on the flight. He spends a good part of the journey pacing up and down the plane’s aisle.

What happened? Had all Davangere benne masale places in Bangalore shut down? Had Deepika Padukone decided to get a size zero body? What tragic fate had befallen mankind?

Nothing of the sort. But Peter Roebuck had died. In the big picture this wasn’t a major development. And Roebuck, with due respect, was mixed up in some unlawful business, the kind that made the mint-tea-andtweed-jacket set employ euphemisms like ‘flawed’ or ‘troubled’ in their descriptions of Roebuck.

For Anil, though, Roebuck’s death was nothing less than a Kennedy moment. Kumar is a rabid sports fan, and Roebuck’s writing on cricket was nearly as essential a requirement for him as a Rahul Dravid straight drive.

Anil says, “There was a time when I didn’t read his column for a couple of weeks. I got his email address and wrote to him. He wrote back, saying, ‘Relax Anil, I’m on holiday’.”

Welcome to the world of obsessive sports fans. These are people who go to extreme lengths to follow their sport, and who experience soaring highs and deep lows depending on the performance of their favourite team or player. Sport extracts a price from

36 open

you. Often that price is your sanity.

And this is a breed that does not mind paying. Even when it does, it can do little about it.

Anil, a book trader with a base in Hong Kong and another in Bangalore, is one such fan. In Hong Kong, a couple of years ago, he went one early morning to a restaurant just to watch cricket between Pakistan and New Zealand.

The place was not open yet, but he convinced them to let him sit there and watch the cricket. He is a man who is such a Roger Federer fan that he and wife Sridevi, a Rafael Nadal fan, watch matches on separate televisions when the two play.

The acclaimed American writer Gay Talese is famous for writing about losers. He found them rich material.

Similarly, while fans no doubt enjoy the wins of their favourite team or player, the pain they experience when they lose is enriching in its own way.

It leads to acceptance and a more mature relationship with the game. The

conversations with sports fans in this article are about such moments of agony and introspection in the aftermath of the failures of their team or favourite athlete.

Subash Jayaraman, director, technical training, TechKnowServe Corporation, Pennsylvania, US, and a cricket blogger and podcaster, names two events when asked about his darkest moments as an Indian fan. One was a defeat (the World Cup 1996 semifinal against Sri Lanka), while the other was a wicket (VVS Laxman bowled by Jimmy Andersen at Trent Bridge, 2011).

“I was there at the ground,” he says of the Laxman dismissal during India’s chase of a near impossible target of 478. “We were just returning to our seats after lunch. Then I heard the roar of the crowd and I knew what had happened. This was one of the last times that Laxman and Dravid would be batting together. There were memories of Kolkata 2001 (when Laxman’s 281 and his 376 run partnership with Dravid brought India a mythical win against Australia at the Eden Gardens).

As a fan, there is hope and there is expectation… you want a miracle. It hap-

3 February 2014

raul irani

pened once, and you think it can happen again. It was like someone ripping your heart out of your chest.”

But as someone in his late 30s, he takes setbacks in his stride. “When you are a young fan, it is all about the bottomline, the wins and the losses. As you get older, you understand the game and life better.”

The notorious 1996 World Cup semifinal turns up again when one speaks to Gaurav Sethi, head of advertising agency Naked and a cricket nut who blends sport and humour in the portal BCCI (Bored Cricket Crazy

Indians), of which he is founder. That World Cup should have been ours, just as the 1987 World Cup should have been ours. World Cups like 1991-92, 1999 and 2007, we agree, we didn’t have a chance. Even in the 2003 World Cup, we came close—Australia outplayed us in the final. But 1996 should have been ours. When that didn’t happen, it hurt. Especially if, like Sethi, it was your wedding sangeet that day.

‘Even before the first guests arrived, I knew Aravinda de Silva would spoil my party,’ Sethi writes in an email message. ‘By the time the people-trickle started, I decided to distance myself from India’s chase.’

Sethi says the crumbling of India’s dream resulted in even non-drinkers hitting the bottle that day. ‘My fatherin-law for the first time complained of a hangover the next day,’ he says. ‘As for me, I drank some, enough to distance myself from the TV. I just wish [Vinod] Kambli had been allowed to bat that day (the Bengalis predictably went bonkers and the match was called off due to crowd trouble). He

it hurts Many cricket fans like Gaurav Sethi hit the bottle to drown their misery after the 1996 World Cup semi-final fiasco at Calcutta

had [Anil] Kumble, a future Test centurion, for company. Damn you Calcutta.

And I haven’t even got started on Azhar and Jadeja and Mongia, who scored one run between the three of them. I survived the day, and was married on the Ides of March. The daggers, though, were out a lot earlier.’

For Chennai software engineer Murali Mohan, an obsessive fan of Sachin Tendulkar and India (and the Mumbai Indians), 2007 was torture.

This was the time when Tendulkar was frequently getting out in the 90s, and also the year India were bundled

out of the World Cup. “I remember Sachin getting out for 99 in an ODI against Pakistan in Mohali,” Murali recalls. “I hurled my mobile phone and the television remote.” Both objects broke on impact, earning him a dressing down from his father. He was 21 then, no longer a boy, which was the only reason he escaped a beating.

It took him about a month to recover from the World Cup reversal. “I become hard to handle for others,” he says of his mood when India lose or when Tendulkar did not perform. “I go on long walks, lose my appetite and watch old videos where India or Sachin have played well.” Murali got married in 2012, which changed things somewhat.

But not enough to stop him watching IPL matches till midnight. “For both me and my wife it was a huge learning curve,” he says. Now in his late 20s, he realises investing so much of himself in what after all is just a game is not healthy.

Yet, he cannot help it. “At times I wonder whether it is worth it. But then the next match comes along and I can’t stop watching it.”

A

shutosh Soman is a software en-

gineer in Pune. In August 2012, he spent Rs 30,000-40,000 and two or three months on developing an app about a man with no connection to him, nor to Indian sport. “People tried to advise me against it,” says Soman. “They said, ‘Laskarchya bhaakrya bhaajto aahes.’ (You are baking rotis for others/ you are barking up the wrong tree).”

He did not care. Soman has been watching sports for decades. But only this man made him buy equipment and sign up for lessons. Only this man made him spend almost Rs 40,000 and go to Dubai to watch him play. That man is… (drumroll) Rogerrrr Federerrrr.

Hiren Sanghvi, 35, is a financial trader in Mumbai. He was a major cricket fan till “certain realities” about the game caused him disillusionment. Sanghvi turned his attention to his other favourite sport—tennis, where every time one man won, he threw a party for friends. In all his life, this man has lost only one match at the French Open, an event he has won eight times. Sanghvi gave a party that day too, at the Thunderbird bar on 38 open

Mumbai’s Ghodbunder Road, just because he wanted the tradition to continue. The man in question is… (trumpets) RRRafaelll Nadallll.

While tennis has traditionally been a white collar sport, the epic contests between Federer and Nadal over the past decade captured the imagination of the world. Moreover, the two superstars polarised fans. Each side hates the other.

Victory and defeat, therefore, trigger very intense reactions. Recovery from a defeat takes days. Work and mental equilibrium suffer. And since Nadal has beaten Federer 22 times and lost just ten times, Federer fans have suffered more.

Gautam Puhan, a New Jersey-based psychometrician (applying statistics to the field of educational testing) and Federer admirer, says, “I used to get so upset [when he lost] that my wife’s cousin, who visited us often, joked that the day of a Federer final, he’d better eat a heavy breakfast because he was not sure if there would be lunch or dinner if Federer lost.”

Following a defeat for his idol, Puhan becomes a recluse for the next few days.

“The good thing is that since these finals are always on Sundays, the upcoming work week helps me forget about these losses quickly.”

Like almost all Federer fans, Soman too liked him for not so much the results but the way he played. Therefore, what troubles Soman more is that he is not hitting the shots he used to.

“I don’t care about the results. I just want to see those 10 or 20 great shots per match,” says Soman, who in the Doordarshan era would travel from Pune to his uncle’s house in Mumbai so that he could watch tennis telecasts uninterrupted (Pune did not get DD Metro, the ‘second’ channel). Nadal’s rise also does not give him sleepless nights. “It depends on how you define greatness,” he says.

“By numbers, there is a question mark over Roger, because he has lost so many times against Nadal, and Nadal might end up with more Slams. But for me it’s about the way someone plays. I also believe Federer and Nadal are much closer as players than 22-10 suggests.”

Which brings us to the peculiar situation at the home of Alaham Anil Kumar and wife Sridevi. As mentioned earlier, Anil roots for Federer, while Sridevi is

in Nadal’s corner. “I realised it was better we watched their matches separately,” says Anil. For some time now, husband and wife have been watching the matches on separate television sets in the same house.

“Nothing against Nadal—he is the most competitive player ever,” says Anil.

“I even ordered an autographed photo of his from Barcelona as a surprise for Sridevi, even though I have to see his face on the wall every day. But I like purists.

With players like Nadal or Djokovic, the beauty is lost.”

Arsenal are the Roger Federer of football. The club rarely dominated the game like Federer did in his prime. But the same aesthetic beauty and an element of tragedy Federer has about his career also defines Arsenal. And their fans go through the same ordeal, though this year is going better, with the Gunners currently on top of the Premier League table.

“Federer fans can blame his decline on age. A team does not have that excuse,” says Kunal Maajgaonkar, media manager of the Bangalore FC team and Arsenal devotee. “They have won nothing for eight years. It is disappointing and depressing. Most hardcore fans put up a brave front and maybe blame the referee sometimes, but inside, you are breaking into a thousand pieces.”

When Arsenal lose, Majgaonkar has a few ground rules in place. He avoids taking calls from friends who want to rub it in. He doesn’t single out players for criticism on public forums, because it is unfair and consequences can be serious for players. He also likes to be left alone. “I’m an easygoing guy otherwise, but for a couple of days I’m irritable or not in a mood to talk,” he says.

After a long time, this season, things are looking up for Arsenal. But their lead is slender and there is still about half the season to go. But the Gunners will always have the style points. As Pele once said, “If you want to see trophies, go to Manchester United. If you want to see 90 minutes of beautiful football, go to Arsenal.”

Says Majgaonkar, “It’s a bit diminished now, but [Pele’s statement] is still valid.

Even fans of other teams see it. They don’t admit it, but their silence says it. That’s enough for me.” n 3 February 2014

wo r k- l i f e b a l a n c e

anirban ghosh

Whores and Lovers

They might sell their bodies daily to men, but they also have tortured relationships with steady partners Chinki Sinha mumbai

T

hat morning, Sushmita Shetty’s

lover Kuttalingam Nadar slit her throat and ran outside the tiny room where they had been sleeping. She just sat there, cupping her hands to her neck as it dripped blood, too shocked to shout. She couldn’t have even if she’d tried. Her vocal chords had been sliced.

Nadar ran out screaming that Sushmita was having fits and that somebody’s ghost had taken over her body.

Outside, commotion ensued. A friend of Sushmita caught hold of Nadar, but he pushed her away, even though she managed to tear off his vest, a piece of it left in her hands as he tried to get away. He couldn’t. Other women chased and pinned him to the ground.

It was around 8:30 am, the stoves hadn’t yet been lit in Gulli No 14 of Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district, and most sex workers were either asleep or servicing the last of the night’s clients before they could doze off till noon, wake up to cook food and get ready for another round of men to arrive.

The police came and took Nadar away.

Short and dark, he used to be a truck driver and had been visiting Sushmita for a few months. They had become friends, and he had even loaned her some money. Some say he had asked it back and she had refused. That’s the version of the police. Others say she had taken another lover.

In the gullies of Kamathipura, that is one of many stories that sex workers tell of the love lives of their lot. There are many others. Murder cases left unsolved. Lovers who have disappeared.

Like in Gulli No 11, where Salim locked himself in a room with the body of his lover, a young prostitute, for some three days; and when the stench grew too strong, he left.

In the neighbourhood, people are afraid to speak about the case of a young man who moved in with his prostitute lover and killed her once he found she was not being faithful to him. A tailor next to the brothel where this happened about a year ago says that thick blood had seeped out, flowing into the drains.

That’s when he called the police. They broke open the door, and took the body away. At the Nagpada police station, the man in charge says it would be too much work to check in the piles of files the sta-

3 February 2014

tus of this particular case, but is certain it remains unsolved. In houses of sin, he says, many such things happen. And there are no lovers here, just men exploited by prostitutes—like in Sushmita’s case. She had taken Rs 40,000 from a truck driver who is now in prison.

Men are fools, according to the police officer. “There are many cases where men have been robbed, injured, or killed,” he says. “There are no stories here. You are in the wrong place, Miss.”

A policewoman is amused. She thinks the media is out to romanticise brothels.

“I wouldn’t go there. What are you going to ask them? Who are their lovers? I will tell you. Pimps and migrants. They feed off each other,” she says.

But there is love. And of many kinds.

Like Khaja Bi’s. They say she had a lover who lived with her for 15 years, and she returned to her brothel in Gulli No 1 only after he died. It is a nostalgic love she talks about. With reluctance. Love is a

What could a lover of a prostitute complain about?

The body is for everyone. It is loyalty of the heart one seeks, and that’s the most difficult to assure malady, she feels, a condition—a fatal one. Once you have known love, lived it, it is hard to survive without it, she says.

For a long time now, Khaja Bi hasn’t taken much time in front of a mirror. Just enough to keep her going. She has loved many men. Out of desire. Out of need. But the memories of her lover torment her on most nights. Seventeen years ago, she fell in love with a man she met outside a paan shop. They flirted with each other, and he became a customer. The love, misunderstood as desire at first, soon became an obsession. She would constantly need him with her, and the man eventually moved in with her in a small room that she rented near Gulli No 1.

Khaja Bi used to be a man once. Perhaps that’s why she understands a man’s need of freedom, his inclinations towards polyamoury. She refused to marry him.

They loved each other and lived together. She would carry on her dhanda as usu-

al, and he would wait for her to finish, and then they would lie down and talk.

Of household stuff. Of repairs. Of, say, a fresh coat of paint. His family came to see them and urged Khaja Bi to let him go.

But he said he loved nobody but the eunuch. He said he would marry her and nobody else. Love was enough to keep them together.

“I didn’t want to ruin his life. Eunuchs are not meant to get married. We are cursed creatures. I told him ‘Stay until you are done with me, but I won’t marry you’,” she says, resting her head against the dressing table at her Ramabai Chawl residence to which she returned after her lover died.

They say he died because of her: because he loved her too much. He would smoke too much garda. He was too possessive to deal with her work life.

Khaja Bi was with other men. It didn’t matter if she slept with them for money.

But if she was going to involve emotions in her job, it would mean a betrayal he wasn’t prepared to handle. What could a lover of a prostitute complain about? The body is for everyone. It is loyalty of the heart one seeks, and that’s the most difficult to assure. There are no red lines drawn. Expectations dilute love, and then they forget this is not the world outside. Here, love must be independent of carnal desire—of sexual jealousy.

It can take a hard toll. Unkept promises, desertions and betrayals have led to many a suicide. It is a merciless life for most of its victims, and Corex and Button and cheap liquor are not enough to erase the memory of lost love. But it’s a love of true passion. Not one of carnal fidelity, but of something that is dearer and deeper, a love that finds its way into whispers in the wee hours of the morning—after the end of work hours.

The truth is not unknown to them.

Some give up, a few hang on. Others move on.

“H

e used to be someone else’s cus-

tomer. One day, I was sitting outside, and he asked if I would come with him,” says Sushmita. “I don’t take gifts.

He paid me for sleeping with him… and he would come often. We became friends.

I started caring for him.”

She is tall and fair. She may even qualiopen www.openthemagazine.com 41

fy as pretty. Her lover, and she is quick to point this out, wasn’t a handsome man.

That he loved her was his problem, she says. “If he did, he could have told me,” she says, “There was no need to cut my throat. The scars will remain.”

Two weeks later, she has got past her anger. Her bandage has been removed.

But the scars divide her neck into two parts. The price of trust, she says.

Sushmita is young. One day, she landed in Gulli No 14 with a friend. They had come from their village in Karnataka looking for work and were told to come here. By the time they realised they were to sell their bodies, they were in debt already. Their induction was quick. The brothel’s madam said they should leave their morality at the doorstep, and start servicing men because they had children and parents to feed and their husbands had abandoned them. With little or no education, they didn’t stand much chance in a cruel city like Bombay. They had to survive, somehow. Lack of choice is misunderstood, says Sushmita. That’s what pains her.

Sushmita says Nadar wanted a gold chain that she had bought for her son, who lives in the village. He slit her throat because she wouldn’t give it to him. It took her years to save the money. In fact, she still wonders what drove him to it.

Handcuffed, he was taken to prison.

Sushmita sits outside her brothel all day long watching people as they come and go, sipping tea from a tiny plastic cup.

She is still not taking in customers. A few stumble in to check on her and then vanish into one of the other rooms. She is upset that she is not able to make money.

She needs to pay her son’s tuition and take care of her parents. There is also the rent that needs to be paid for her tiny hovel in Gulli No 14.

The night before the attack, her lover had visited another brothel where he drank with a Nepali prostitute and then came to her. They slept in her little room for which she pays Rs 5,000 every month to the madam. Sex workers don’t make much money, the going rate being just Rs 100 for a session. And she has to send Rs 2,000 home every month.

Along with Sushmita, there are four others who inhabit this small structure.

There is a small waiting area with benches lined and tiled walls that are scrubbed 42 open

ritesh uttamchandani

the scars of love Sushmita Shetty’s lover slit her throat with a knife and screamed she was possessed

clean every afternoon by a woman with a crooked smile. Along the wall, there are steel boxes with little locks.

These are vanity kits, and some have cigarettes in them.

“For customers,” a woman says. “They might want. We can sell these.”

Sushmita dismisses the police version of events, but says she doesn’t care. If her lover didn’t, she shouldn’t either. Life must go on—despite the scars.

“How much can you love? I have been here for eight years. I know better now. I thought he was a friend. Such a betrayal.

How does one go through life counting betrayals?” she asks. “It is okay. I understand. Did you meet him in the jail? You can ask him why he did what he did.”

“No, I didn’t. The police has got his version.”

“That’s bakwaas,” she says.

B

harti’s lover makes and brings her

tea and leftover food from the hotel he works in. She knows he is not a good man, but she has nobody else, really. And there she sits, defending her lover in a little office with other women nodding their heads. They have given up on her.

She had come in a few weeks ago with bruises. Her lover had beaten her up. But she says he won’t be able to do without her. That she means something to someone justifies her life.

She could die. She isn’t worried about

it. Because she has no future anyway.

Years of suffering, and she left her home at 14, have taught her patience. There is no hurry, no eternal love. Nothing that will last beyond the moment, she says, and looks away. You can delude yourself for a while, though, she adds.

Other women stumble in. They have come here to deposit money. It is a small bank, a microfinance unit started almost a decade ago to help local sex workers, pimps and others who languish halfheartedly in these cramped gullies trying to save money. They can deposit Rs 20 or Rs 100. The women who work here are counsellors. A few are friends. They listen to the stories and offer advice, which is almost never taken. Over the years, they have to grown to grasp the futility of it. But they won’t give up.

They advise Bharti to use condoms.

They tell her about the dangers of her attitude. But she says she doesn’t care if she dies. Then she whispers, “Didi, he says to me ‘Bharti don’t leave me’ and I can’t do it because he has nobody.”

She is only 17. She had come and slumped into a chair. It wouldn’t be too long before she delivers a baby at a nearby hospital. The child is not her lover’s— it’s an accidental pregnancy, just another occupational hazard.

A woman from an NGO walks up to her, pats her on the back, and tells her to be careful. “Their relationships are based on money. If the woman stops giving 3 February 2014

money to the man, he leaves. Till the child is born, maybe they are nice. These women have seen abuses. A few weeks ago, Bharti had covered her head. Her man had hit her while he was drunk,” she says. “These women are hungry for love.

Most, like Bharti, were trafficked at a young age. Some of them don’t know if they have a home. They are just drifters.”

Bharti left home in Latur district in Maharashtra when she was 14. Her mother kicked her out of the house. A woman saw her at Victoria Terminus station and brought her to Kamathipura, telling her she would find her a place to stay. She hadn’t reached puberty then. That’s how she began her other life in Gulli No 11.

A few months ago, she met Rajesh at a nearby hotel. He brought her tea and struck up a conversation. He later told her he was in love with her. They moved in together. “We will get married but he says ‘Earn money first’,” she says. “He used to say don’t do dhanda, but I know that I can’t be dependent on him.”

Breathing heavily, she sits straight in an iron chair lined against the wall of this small establishment. Offered a cup of tea, she hesitates before accepting it. Her hair is cropped short and she covers her head with a dupatta. She has bruises to hide.

This isn’t such an extraordinary place.

There are vendors selling vegetables, and women from ‘respectable’ families walking around haggling for better prices.

Cafes are doing brisk business. The normal intersects with the outrageous, and it looks routine in a way. Prostitutes can be spotted standing at various points.

Bharti came to the bank a few weeks ago and announced she was getting married. That’s unusual. But then, her lover—Rajesh, the hotel boy—advised her to earn more money so that she get out of here as quickly as possible. But he took his words back later. They need to survive, he said.

“Mera aadmi hai, mere paas aayega,” she says.

He even gave her a mobile phone, a gift she cherishes. “He has no mother, no father. He has nobody. I feel I must be with him,” she says. “There is so much sex here that you want love. Just to be in the company of someone who makes promises.”

Every night, he brings her food. Then he says he loves her, and moves his hand over her belly. Bharti smiles when she 3 February 2014

speaks about Rajesh.

“If he feels pain, I feel hurt. I don’t make that kind of money. He loves me and my child,” she says, pointing to her belly.

They have stopped having sex. He keeps her feet on hers, and they sleep through the few remaining hours of the night or wee hours of the morning.

“When I am with others, I think of him. It makes me feel better. He keeps calling my phone. He asks where I am.

Sometimes, we go for films,” she says.

Then Anjali of the NGO asks her why she is so reckless with her life.

“Marne doh mujhe,” she says.

“What about the child?” Anjali asks.

“I miss my mother. I don’t have her number. I miss everything that I can’t have,” Bharti says. “If this love is illusion, it is good for now. I don’t care.”

She walks out, and disappears into one of the lanes.

We don’t find her again.

“There is so much sex here that you want love. Just to be in the company of someone who makes promises” b h a r t i , a sex worker in Kamathipura

They ask us not to confront her lover.

She wouldn’t like it, we are told.

P

uja stands at the landing of Alexander Theatre in Kamathipura.

She spends most of her time here. In her choli, she has a mobile phone tucked that’s playing songs. Usual fare— songs of heartbreak. Bollywood and Farida Khanum.

I ask her if she has a lover. She had one, a Gujarati man who was much older.

They would spend hours drinking beer and talking about their lives. He would come on Sundays and take her out. Puja is from a village in Uttar Pradesh. She is beautiful, has a child to take care of and a family to provide for.

One night, she went to buy beer and he saw her. She had almost turned alcoholic, even had surgery to rid herself of internal stones. She was weak when she met

him. He was drinking beer alone and he bought some for her. They sat on the pavement, and he asked where she lived and worked. Puja had been married once and abandoned.

“I came here,” she says, “I had no education, and I needed money. Now, I am able to take care of my son and my parents.

Of course, they don’t know that I am a prostitute.”

She wears the vermilion of a wedded woman. She stopped questioning fate long ago.

“How much will a customer love you?

They are abandoned in their own way and so they come here. They get attached.

We both know there is no future for this love or whatever it is. But it is good while it lasts.”

Nobody takes you home, she adds.

S

eema is ready to tell her story. She is from Odisha and was brought here by someone from her village. Trafficked, as we would call it. She refused to budge.

Kept crying until she realised there was no way out.

“My first customer became my husband,” she says.

“Is it a happy love story?”

“Depends on how you look at it,” she says.

She is 32 years old now and arrived in Kamathipura with her daughter, who is now studying in a college and lives with the son she had with her lover in another part of the city. Her daughter wants her to leave the red-light district and lead a life of dignity. Not now, Seema tells her.

Seema recalls how her lover would pay the madam to come sit with her. One afternoon, they went for a film.

“He said ‘aaj mood hai’ and I thought I should oblige him after all,” she says.

That was 2002. She had come from a village where condoms were called ‘balloons’. She had no idea what they were meant for when first told to insist on these while servicing clients.

“What I liked about him is that he never demanded sex in those first few months. We married. We live together in that building,” she says, pointing to a building across the road. “I never loved him. But I am loyal to him. I don’t count on him. But it has lasted this long… I am doing my dhanda.” n open www.openthemagazine.com 43

between the sheets

Truth and Dare

Why I’d always pick the latter sonali khan

A

few days ago, another birthday whistled past.

One more year of my life’s ledger showing more red than green. Books I’d started reading but abandoned midway. Books I’ve started writing but haven’t completed yet. People I’d intended to meet. Milestones that shouldn’t have taken quite this long to reach. Friends I’d let down and those I didn’t fight hard enough to keep in my life. Money that I could and should have saved; or at least spent better. And the worst—falling recklessly, hauntingly and totally in love. At 27, so much red on my balance sheet should terrify me. For a while, it did.

Here is a gist of events in my life: January, week 1: Clearing my inbox, I chance upon an email a friend had sent about seven months ago. It’s a link to a column in The Indian Express. The writer, while ridiculing a popular columnist, had declared that she quite enjoys my ‘brave, unflattering truths’ and ‘lost-girl-on-the-vergeof-discovery’ ruminations. Makes for ‘delightful reading’? Really? Awww, thanks! But that was half a year ago.

Reading the column again, a fortnight before my birthday, feels like emotional and intellectual masochism. A few words leap out at me. Lost. Verge.

Discovery. How long was it okay to hover indecisively on the brink before you simply must take the plunge and discover yourself once and for all? And if there really was a prescribed time frame, why had it not happened for me? I feel like the Uday Chopra of the grown-up world. Was I going to go from still-testing-thewaters straight to a swan song? It’s a depressing thought.

January, week 2: I’m at a coffee shop, watching a friend digging into cupcake the size of a newborn’s head. I hide behind my laptop and pretend to type to keep my hands from reaching out and grabbing her food. “Whatchu writing?” she mumbles around a mouthful. “Between The Sheets.” Long pause. “Have you really had so much sex or you just make it up?” This time she enunciates each word.

Loudly. A couple of people turn around and stare. I don’t know how to answer. Fortunately, there’s no need to. “I think you’re incredibly brave and self-aware to put yourself so out there. I would never have dared,” she admits.

Again, a few words stand out. Brave. Self-aware. Dared.

Two women, two versions. One thought I was still discovering myself, the other believed I had a great

handle on who I was. Which version is more me? I didn’t know, and to my surprise, I didn’t care. Because I’d found the word I’d really been looking for: dared.

As kids, we’ve all played the game of Truth and Dare.

It’s always easier to pick truth, because you can lie and get away with it with no one the wiser. But each time you pick dare, the stakes are higher. To be truthful, you just have to lie masterfully. But daring is an epithet that requires actual earning of stripes. It can be frightening and addictive, usually both at the same time. And I have to admit, I’m hooked to the feeling. It’s not always easy—I may have lost count of the number of times it’s happened, but each time a hater sends an email volunteering to rape me to cleanse my mind of its depraved thoughts, I feel a little chill go down my spine.

It’s not limited to nameless, faceless strangers hiding behind the anonymity of the internet; sometimes, guy friends take liberties they wouldn’t dare in a million years with their other girl friends. One cornered me outside a bathroom once at a party and demanded that I show his girlfriend how a good blowjob is given. Another one, pissed after losing an argument, asked me what my going rate was.

Each time I’m faced with people and situations like these, it changes me in small, subtle ways. And the process of self-discovery starts all over again…

This birthday, I was surrounded by people who have been a part of all my worlds, seen me change into different people, some more likeable than others, and still loved each one of them anyway. Madonna once said that daring is a fun game to play, but only when you play with clever people. “Otherwise, you’ll find yourself French-kissing everyone in the room or giving blowjobs to Evian bottles.”

So this column is dedicated to the cleverest set of co-players I could ever have asked for; without them, life would be an unrelentingly boring series of truths and half-lies. And I’d be forced to discover myself and stick with that knowledge. Ewww. n

Thankfully, my life is not a boring series of truths and half-lies

44 open

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

She drinks whisky, not Cosmopolitan 3 february 2014

life and letters

mindspace The Little Ecologist

63

O p e n s pa c e

Nawazuddin Siddiqui Katrina Kaif Priyanka Chopra

62

n p lu

Miss Lovely Om Dar-B-Dar

61 Cinema reviews

Bose SoundTouch 20 Manero PowerReserve Xolo Q3000

60

Tech & style

Comedians and Schizophrenics Extreme El Nino Events to Double Brain Cells That Spur Fighting

58

Science

The Jounrey of Om Dar-B-Dar

54

roug h cu t

The Long Wait To Make Miss Lovely

50

cinema

TM Krishna

music

Mrs Sen and I

46 64

nathan g.

The argumentative musician A conversation with Carnatic virtuoso TM Krishna who is asking difficult questions of the classical music establishment 50

Express archive

life & letters

Mrs Sen and I Suchitra Sen signified the acme of modernity to the Bengali middle-class of the 1950s and 1960s playing characters who speak English with apparent ease, wear chic clothes, and have careers which they usually choose to put on hold. She was not an actress; her greatest performance was in playing herself: Suchitra Sen, the luminous superstar. And with her reclusiveness, she cannily created a legend of herself, notes Gouri Chatterjee

M

rs Sen touched my life, too.

Yes, the Mrs Sen whose body turned to ashes on a sandal wood pyre on 17 January, and no, I did not know her, never saw her in flesh, never even saw her movies when she was in her prime. It was Vanishing Prairies or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for children then, not the romcoms that were Sen’s forte. But growing up in Calcutta in the 1950s and 1960s, there was no escaping the larger-than-life persona of Suchitra Sen, on screen and off. It was also the time of Satyajit Ray, but the middleclass Bengali mind never fluttered at his masterpieces the way it did with the overly-romantic melodramas starring Suchitra Sen, never let him shape their lives the way she did.

My parents, uprooted by Partition, were painstakingly building a new life for themselves more in keeping with the changing times. And they got their cues from the Suchitra Sen-

3 february 2014

Uttam Kumar starrers that were their staple cultural diet. Soon, a decision had to be taken about my schooling.

My father was too busy; my mother, who had some education but no formal degree, found out that Sakhawat Memorial School for Girls was one of the more respected schools in the city and not too far from our home.

There I was admitted, the uniform was made, the books were bought when, a few days before classes began, my father realised what was about to happen. “No,” he burst out, “she will have no future unless she goes to an English medium school.” So I did; and it was all Mrs Sen’s doing.

Not that English diction was her strongest suit. Rather, the one English word in the challenge that Sen’s Rina Brown throws at Kumar’s Krishnendu in Saptapadi with whom she was yet to fall in love but who was to play Othello to her Desdemona in their college play—“Abhineyer samay am-

ake touch karte parbe na (You can’t touch me when we’re acting)—offers us a clue to why the director thought it wiser to let Sen give only lip service to Jennifer Kapoor’s rendition of, ‘And yet I fear you; for you are fatal then / When your eyes roll so: why I should fear I know not / Since guiltiness I know not; but yet I feel I fear’ (while Utpal Dutt reeled off the lines for Kumar’s Othello).

A mere detail. What mattered was what Suchitra Sen symbolised to the burgeoning Bengali middle-class: the acme of modernity, the new woman for a new age that was seeing a social churning with the Hindu law being reformed, caste and zamindari being abolished, universal adult franchise being instituted. Several of her 40-odd films made in the 50s and 60s, especially the ones that became superhits, from Agni Pariksha in 1954 to Saat Paake Badha in 1963, saw her in the role of a confident, educated, selfopen www.openthemagazine.com 47

assured woman, spouting English with apparent ease, an adored daughter of an affluent father who nevertheless had a career of her own, an independent woman who chose to put her career on hold to give primacy to the needs of the man she loved, a strong woman who was not defined by the men in her life but who, nevertheless, had due regard for the norms of marriage and familial ties, a stylish woman who set trends in fashion but was never risqué. Every proud parent’s dream daughter, indeed.

It helped that Mrs Sen commanded respect off-screen as well. Born into a professional middle-class family not from Calcutta, she was married while still at school into one of the city’s more privileged families. It was the year India became independent.

Her father-in-law was both a wealthy and respected lawyer. The snobbish Calcutta society was ready to defer to the daughter-in-law of Adinath Sen more readily than it was to, say, Kanan Devi, the star with humble origins who had dominated the Bengali silver screen just before Sen. Especially as she, already the mother of a one-year old child, had entered films not only with the approval of her well-regarded father-in-law but at the behest and active participation of her marine engineer husband, Dibanath Sen. True, he was thought to be a bit of a wastrel and a playboy, but no one could fault Mrs Sen for acceding to her husband’s wishes by joining a world that society still did not quite approve of. It was Dibanath who spoke to producers and studio heads for an opening for his wife, accompanied her to meetings with directors and screen tests. He has even been seen, in the early days, lolling against his Morris Minor outside a studio while his wife was busy inside. And, when things turned sour, the marriage faltered, Suchitra neither divorced nor publicly disowned her wayward husband. He died in America in 1969, away from his family.

The idea of films may have come naturally to Dibanath. Apart from being exposed to Hollywood films 48 open

from a early age, his father’s late lamented first wife had been the sister of Bimal Roy who was already on his way to becoming a legend in Bombay.

Despite the death of his sister, Bimal Roy had never lost touch with his sister’s widower and his family. No wonder that Mrs Sen’s foray into Bombay happened as early as 1955, barely two years after she’d entered show biz, as Paro in Bimal Roy’s Devdas.

Suchitra Sen, however, did not remain content with this thin veneer of social endorsement for protection in what was most emphatically a man’s—and rough and ready men’s—world. Instead, she built on it and converted herself, through sheer will power and personality, into a figure that commanded both respect and awe within the industry and out.

In a society that cannot express admiration without being familiar, she was, to one and all, never Rama, her given name, nor Suchitra, her screen name, nor even the ubiquitous ‘Didi’ but the distant and formal Mrs Sen, or Madam; someone you did not dare be intimate with. They said she was moody and unpredictable; they said she was difficult; a tough nut; they said she was standoffish and unapproachable. Small price to pay, surely, for demanding and getting, as she did, a make-up room all to herself, the first time a female artiste was given one in Tollygunge, a make-up man solely for her, a separate title card in the credits for herself, her name ahead of Uttam Kumar in the Suchitra-Uttam starrers, encouraging a more professional atmosphere at studios by banning outsiders, including journalists, during her shoots—raising in the process the profile of all women in the industry.

The kind of woman she played, and the kind of woman she was may have been the kind of woman our parents wanted us to be but there may still have been a Suchitra Sen mystique to unravel even if she had continued to act in films like Bhagavan Srikrishna Chaitanya, the 1954 movie that first brought her to public notice. That was when people first became mesmerised by her lovely, ethereal beauty, her

flawless looks that held her audience captive in her heyday and continue to cast a spell even today, as seen by the popularity of the reruns of her films on television.

Of course, this is beauty as it was understood in those innocent times when it was a face that drove droves of fans to the theatres, not a body. Mrs Sen never set out to be nor was she ever promoted as a sex symbol of any kind. Gazing at her, enraptured, the Bengali mind would quiver, but gently. She would create no ruinous storm.

It was all in her face, a face that the camera simply adored. Her liquid eyes, finely-etched brows, her striking forehead, her slightly arrogant nose, her enchanting smile, the black spot on her cheek (not being nature’s gift it appeared at times on her left cheek, at times on her right), her natural loveliness—nothing is dimmed or rendered unappealing whatever the angle of the camera. This is what gives her her much-vaunted screen presence, her hypnotic qualities, her unparalleled success.

No surprise that all her films are dotted with close-up after close-up after close-up—of her face. Think of Suchitra Sen and you think of the flick of her head, her raised brow, her saddened eyes, her trembling lips, her sculpted throat stretched taut—parts that add up to her whole captivating face. She had a relationship with light that was quite unbelievable; wherever you directed it on her face, it created luminosity, a play of light and shadow that wrought magic in those blackand-white days.

It stands to reason that some of her greatest hits emerged from the hands of cameramen-turned-directors like Ajay Kar (Harano Soor; Saptapadi; Saat Paake Badha) and Asit Sen (Deep Jele Jai; Uttar Falguni and its Hindi remake Mamta, helmed by Sen as well). And Mrs Sen knew it, too. She reportedly backed out of working with Ritwik Ghatak in Ranger Golam because the cameraman was not someone she was familiar with. She was not going to tempt fate just to work with a great director even if it was someone who was 3 february 2014

fond of her and had written the script of her second Hindi film, Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Musafir (1957).

In the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema

by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, the entry on Suchitra Sen notes: ‘Her assertiveness on screen was coupled with a personal anxiety over the way she was photographed while her rigid gestures and mask-like makeup at times contradicted her strong screen persona, dividing the star from the stereotype, e.g. Hospital.’

People have found simpler ways of saying Suchitra Sen was not as great an actress as she was a star (if that is what it means, I could be wrong).

Anyway, it takes nothing away from Mrs Sen’s greatness to say that it was by learning to play herself, and by continuing to do so, more or less for the whole of her career, that she became a screen icon and goddess.

Being herself hadn’t been easy.

She had had to work, and work really hard, at it. Initially even on her Bengali, struggling to remove her pronounced East Bengali twang picked up during her childhood in what is now Bangladesh and replace it with the clipped Calcutta accent that sophisticates were supposed to speak. The sartorial elegance of upper-class city girls (it was said she changed clothes 32 times in Pathe Holo Deri, one of her earliest colour films, to the extent of wearing one sari when she got into a taxi and another when she alighted from it) was also something she had to teach herself, as also the finer points of make-up and hair-styles.

So, wisely, knowingly, deliberately, Sen chose to stick primarily to what she could not fail in: romantic mush, avoiding other types of roles or demanding directors. Her capital, her bewitching face, is essential for a romantic heroine; it is to her credit that she made it a sufficient condition as well. That is the role she played over and over again, and not just with Uttam Kumar.

Even the Best Actress award that she received at the 1965 Moscow Film Festival—the first international jury award by any Indian actor—was for 3 february 2014

a romantic drama, albeit one that ended in separation and loss: Saat Paake Baadha.

She wouldn’t leave her comfort zone come what may, as a young Gulzar learnt to his cost. She had demanded changes in the first script that he had brought her because there were things in it that did not quite suit her. “I did

In her canny, hard-fought

battle for privacy, Mrs Sen established a model for superstardom that turns everything we know about

celebrity on its head. She was so successful at silence that she accomplished

a quiet revolution in mythmaking that must have today’s fame-seekers seething.

In a celebhungry age when any two-bit wannabe starlet gets more than her 15 minutes of fame, the real money is in mystique

not write the script to suit you,” an impetuous Gulzar is said to have retorted, “I wrote it to suit the character. You would have to change accordingly.” It wasn’t until he had a script that was a natural fit for her—the driven but heart-of-gold Aarti of Aandhi —that

they got to work together.

Around 1961, there was talk of her working with our greatest director, Satyajit Ray. He had approached her for the title role of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Debi Chaudhurani; she had agreed but then backed out, refusing to give Ray the exclusivity during shooting that he asked of her.

Ray never did make that film, but Mrs Sen did, with another director, in 1974. It was not one of her memorable efforts.

So it was almost inevitable that Mrs Sen would have to walk away from the film world after her latest release bombed in 1978. She was then 47, too old to be a romantic heroine, and she didn’t know, or wanted to know, anything else. She never made another film, never involved herself in anything related to films, never engaged in public life at all. She even refused the Dada Saheb Phalke award in 2005 because it would mean personally having to go up to receive the award from the President. Giving, in the process, a fresh lease of life to the myth and magic of Suchitra Sen. But actually, in her canny, hardfought battle for privacy, Mrs Sen established a model for superstardom that turns everything we know about celebrity on its head. She was so successful at silence that she accomplished a quiet revolution in mythmaking that must have today’s fame-seekers seething. In a celeb-hungry age when any two-bit wannabe starlet gets more than her 15 minutes of fame, the real money is in mystique — the gold standard of any cultural economy. And nobody sits on a bigger stockpile of mystique than a recluse.

In the end, I don’t understand why anyone who could choose to live as some sort of recluse wouldn’t do so. It seems such a perfect, elegant expression of control: to occlude the flow of trivia in one’s life; to accrue and manage fame on one’s own terms; to engage with people you trust and appreciate. Mrs Sen did just that—and managed to do so even beyond her passing. She was, and always will be, incomparable. n open www.openthemagazine.com 49

music

The Argumentative Musician In recent years, TM Krishna, one of Carnatic music’s top vocalists, has been mounting a radical critique of kutcheri, the south Indian classical music performance. His book, released recently, challenges the status quo in a way few ever have Sumana Ramanan

nathan g.

the maestro’s voice Krishna during a kutcheri at the Kothandarmar temple in north Chennai

O

n a Monday morning in

December, I made the error of arriving on time for Carnatic vocalist TM Krishna’s concert at one of Chennai’s oldest music organisations, the Sri Parthasarathy Swami Sabha, in the heart of Mylapore, a hub of Tamil Brahmin culture.

I walked in smugly, certain of get-

3 february 2014

ting a seat on a weekday morning.

Moreover, this wasn’t the Music Academy, the most prestigious venue for Carnatic music concerts, and dozens of other recitals were going on at the same time.

But I was startled to find not only the hall full but also the two courtyards outside, in each of which the organisers had set up huge screens, speakers and about a dozen rows of chairs to accommodate those who hadn’t been able to get inside. Knots of people were also standing outside the two entrances to the hall, blocking the view. I had no option but to join a group of people sitting on the floor in one of the courtyards. Punctuality was not good enough.

In the hothouse atmosphere of Chennai’s annual December music season, a nearly century-old festival of Carnatic music that draws thousands of local aficionados as well as music lovers from all over India and the world, performances by popular vocalists such as Krishna have an electrifying ambience that testifies not only to the singers’ allure, but also to the rasikas’ (connoisseurs’) passion.

Yet, on that day, behind the stirring scene of a serious musician enthralling an audience in love with this highly-sophisticated musical form, there crackled currents of subversion. For Krishna, while remaining highly classical in his renditions of individual ragas and compositions, was bending, breaking and overturning norms that have defined the Carnatic kutcheri (concert), for almost a century.

A few examples provide a flavour of his radical approach. He chose, for instance, to sing in the middle of the concert a padam, a fluid subtle form that is sung very slowly and almost always sung at the end. Then, he rendered an alapana (an introductory, improvisatory exploration of a raga without rhythmic accompaniment), but did not follow it by singing a composition in the same raga, a practice taken so much for

granted that it is almost sacrilegious not to do so. Sometimes, he says, he has nothing more to say about the raga after the alapana. Why continue for form’s sake?

A few days earlier, at another houseful concert, at the Krishna Gana Sabha, he chose to do a niraval (an improvisatory form that involves the musician creating his or her own melodic variations on one line of a composition to rhythmic accompaniment) while rendering a javali, erotic poetry set to music, which is almost never picked for such elaboration, perhaps, says Krishna, because of popular prudery over its explicit content. Yet, these have the musical potential for such exploration, he contends.

He is not posing these questions for the first time. About five years ago, he began reworking his concerts, offering brief explanations for his changes in the midst of performances. So far, despite scattered reactions of bewilderment, anger and dismay, he still has the ear of audiences, as I realised that Monday. Some admire him all the more, grateful that he is giving voice to their own longstanding—sometimes inchoate—disquiet about certain aspects of the modern kutcheri.

Now, with the release of his book, A Southern Music, his challenge to the status quo has found its most cogent expression yet. It has the potential to spark a deeper debate, drawing in the music community.

The book is a thoughtful and original exploration of the essence, history and sociology of Carnatic music by an artiste capable of reflecting deeply on his sphere of creativity and communicating his thoughts lucidly. Published

by HarperCollins, it was released by Amartya Sen in Chennai in December.

In this interview, Krishna, who epitomises Sen’s argumentative Indian, says he is not deviating from the system for the sake of it, but believes that mindless adherence is tantamount to losing the essence of Carnatic music.

At your concerts, you have been telling the audience not to think of what they are listening to as a ‘concert’. What do you mean by this? Is it not an irony? open www.openthemagazine.com 51

I actually say that they are not listening to a kutcheri. I do not use the word ‘concert’, which is a musical term.

The word kutcheri does not only denote a concert. It importantly denotes a certain specific method of presenting Carnatic music. When used in the Carnatic context, the kutcheri also carries the burden of addressing a cultural and social group. I would like to distance myself from this. My interest is only in the aesthetics of the art that can touch any engaged person. To me, a concert is a shared space for art. The musicians and listeners are there to experience the creation of this art. The integrity and honesty of the musician must be directed towards the aesthetics of the music.

The word aesthetics itself must be looked at deeply and must direct the presentation style and concert format.

This means that the listener too is immersing himself, or herself, in the aesthetics and letting the presentation flow according to the singer’s musical direction. Therefore, a concert is not a fixed box in terms of the experience it provides, but responds to the aesthetic direction taken by the musician without being bound by presentational traps and compulsions.

Over several chapters in your book, you develop your critique of how the format and compulsions of a contemporary Carnatic concert violate the musicality and aesthetics of the form in several ways. One such is the practice of singing so-called ‘light’ pieces at the end of a concert. Would you like to elaborate?

My point comes from the philosophy that any art music form is, by its very nature, a serious and intense experience. In a way, it is like connecting with a painting of Rembrandt, or feeling the movement in sculpture. Within this intensity, we experience various emotional shades, all drawn from life, but abstracted into the art. This is exactly what a Carnatic music concert should be. The problem with the lighter pieces at the end of a concert, tukkadas as we call them, is that they are meant to be presentations that need not have this serious, abstractive quality.

Some musicians argue that after the 52 open

‘heaviness’ of the concert’s main section, it is important to let audiences go home with lighter pieces that do not tax them. Therefore, the treatment of ragas in these lighter pieces is generally superficial. Musicians also use the term ‘light’ ragas. I don’t think there are light and heavy ragas. There are ragas, and all of them are serious melodic creations.

Light compositions are usually those that evoke obvious and literal religious fervour; sometimes, even romantic and patriotic fervour. But you may ask how is this lighter? It is so because it breaks down the basic quality of art music, which is to go beyond the literal to the abstract. When this is not considered a necessity in a rendition, then it ceases to be art music. This is unacceptable to me. Every piece in a Carnatic concert must be treated as be-

“The musician values his/her creation based on the loudness and length of applause. Isn’t this nonsensical? We are not looking at art here, only some kind of show that... tickles us” ing an abstracted art creation. If this is ignored, then these light pieces are unnecessary.

In your book, you have rued the fact that performers often work towards eliciting applause. Surely, it’s not wrong for a performing artiste to want applause? Do you not want it yourself? What does applause mean to you?

First, what does applause denote?

Does it denote musical appreciation?

An emotionally touched individual?

A moment of epiphany? Or, is it only connected to a high level of adrenaline, generated [by] speed, volume and power, as it is today? This I am not interested in. I also need to ask whether applause is the best way to show appreciation. Does silence actually do it better? Those few times that we hear a soft ‘aha’ from a listener, aren’t these the

real musical moments?

Applause has become routine. After every composition or alapana, we applaud. Do we know why? Are we reacting to the music or is this a mechanical interlude? Or, do we feel compelled to make the musician feel that he has done a good job? The musician values her own creation based on the loudness and length of the applause. Isn’t this nonsensical? We are not looking at art here, only some kind of show that needs to tickle us. This is not Carnatic music to me.

Also, I do have a problem when applause is the musician’s aim. This is the most dangerous trap. I can tell you now that I can choreograph a fullfledged concert, and tell you in advance the moments when I can force loud applause from the audience. This means that the concert is some kind of contrived presentation to elicit an applauded high. When the musician has mastered it, he can do the trick all his life and believe that he is creating art.

But is he, really?

I did do this for a period of time and played the same game, and then I felt that I was not creating art. True applause must happen when the music envelops everyone through the focus given to creating art objects by the musicians within the space shared by the listeners. The aim is not applause, but the spontaneous manifestation of emotion that sometimes can be in the form of applause. This is a rarity today.

From listening to your recent concerts, I get the sense that you seem to be trying to infuse a sense of repose into performances, reminiscent of the best Hindustani recitals.

Is this an accurate assessment? Were you partly influenced by the manner in which Hindustani music is rendered?

This is a very interesting question. It implies that repose is not an essential part of a typical Carnatic concert. This itself is a result of the modern kutcheri.

Yet, repose is embedded in the melodic and rhythmic movements of Carnatic music. Repose is also not just connected to speed. Repose can exist even within a lightning melodic phrase or a thundering rhythmic combination.

Repose is the balance, stability and still3 february 2014

ness that comes through the music.

But the pressure of the kutcheri and the drive to elicit excited applause has destroyed this largely, though there have been a few musicians who have tried and retained this quality. I am deeply influenced by the music of T Brinda, T Balasaraswathi and T Vishwanathan, whose music was all about repose. But I must say that I am also influenced by the best of Hindustani music, especially in the way every swara (note) is created like a complete musical quantity, looked at from every angle, letting various shades emerge, touching it, transforming it and letting it soak within the musician and all those present. I am deeply moved by the music of Kumar Gandharva.

It is important, though, that the musicians who agree with my thinking find their own way of creating a free and uncluttered artistic space, and not repeat what I am doing. It will take time for the music world to completely understand my thoughts, and there is no need for everyone to accept my interpretation. I also don’t expect anyone to come out in the open and say that they agree with or support me. I am happy to travel this path alone.

You have said that your views evolved from a deeper questioning of your own motives for singing Carnatic music. But your critique carries an implicit criticism of the way many musicians are performing today. Do you worry that you might ruffle feathers?

I am as much part of this community, and every criticism is addressed to me as much as it is to everyone else. May be, people will be upset. Anger is the normal initial reaction and I expected it. My only hope is that after it subsides, we can have a serious debate on these issues. I am not saying that I am completely right, but I do feel that the points I make deserve serious attention. Therefore, I hope that we can discuss these problems without getting caught in the personal.

You have said that you want people to engage with what you are saying, even if they disagree. Have they? In particular, what are other musicians, especially of your generation, saying?

Some musicians have spoken to me after my concerts and said that they understand what I have done. They have said that they can feel the space that has been created by redefining the approach to music and its presentation.

I also know that other musicians have been adopting a few of the ideas I have presented over the past five years without actually speaking about it. These are good signs.

3 february 2014

I felt there was nothing left for me to sing. Silence and solitude were the only things I needed.

I may have been able to sing for another hour, but would that have been music? I have reached this place many times but the ground reality of the concert hall has quickly taken over and I have continued. But on that day, I just moved away from singing any further and realised what I had done only [once] I got into the car to go home. Did I shortchange the audience? Some may believe that I did.

Moreover, it had nothing to do with the fact that the concert was free. The same thing may have happened even if it had been ticketed. Music is not about delivering a fixed number of hours’ worth of singing, but about transcending the earthiness of being. Is it correct for me to expect everyone present to share this feeling? Maybe not. But it happened. It may happen again. It is born [of] my giving myself up to music, which is the only reason I exist.

You are at the peak of your career—in an enviable position of being applauded by both the lay public and the cognoscenti. Have you not embarked on a risky path professionally by questioning the foundations of what has made you successful?

“At this stage, if I continue to do for the next 30 years what I have been doing for the past decade, I can retire as a successful, popular musician... it is crazy for me to do what I am doing”

Many people were upset that you had ended one of your concerts this season an hour before its scheduled time, saying you just couldn’t continue. What happened?

The truth is that this is a question that I would prefer not to answer, but I am going to try. I don’t believe that I terminated the concert, or ended it abruptly. Some wrongly think that I had hit a wall creatively, or that I was not in the mood. I had actually reached a point of fulfilment. In that state of repleteness,

I have thought about this many times.

Yes, it is risky. At this stage, if I continue to do for the next 30 years what I have been doing for the past decade, I can retire as a successful and popular musician. In a way, it is crazy for me to do what I am doing.

But I am not doing this for reasons that have anything to do with TM Krishna, the performer. I do not even like the title ‘performer’. I am in this mode because I passionately and insanely believe that music has given me a window into life that is taking me somewhere. This is what made me research history and understand technique, but at the same time breathe the music as art and let myself be embraced by its strength and grandeur. I am not afraid of disappearing from the popular stage. n Sumana Ramanan is the managing editor of Scroll.in, a digital daily. open www.openthemagazine.com 53

CINEMA Memories of Our Own Porn Miss Lovely began as a documentary project but director Ashim Ahluwalia had to drop the idea when his contacts refused to speak on camera. The story behind a film set in India’s C-grade smut industry Lhendup G Bhutia

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bout 14 years ago, Ashim

Ahluwalia, then an aspiring filmmaker, found himself getting drunk one evening with a man he had come to know as Shirish. This man worked as a pimp and doubled up a “ladies supplier” to India’s C-grade film industry. Ahluwalia was trailing Shirish so he could convince him to

be part of his documentary on the industry. In Shirish’s home, in a seedy locality in Mumbai’s Adarsh Nagar, the two were joined by Shirish’s women.

They drank, ate dinner and watched an episode of Kaun Banega Crorepati.

Ahluwalia couldn’t help but find that moment oddly beautiful.

The documentary never happened.

He went to the sets of Maut Ka Chehra, chased its makers, pursued other leads, spoke to other filmmakers and distributors, developed close friendships, but when he tried to make the documentary, none agreed to speak on camera. What these filmmakers and actors were doing was, after all, illegal. Days turned to months, and soon enough a

not a man for nostalgia Though Ahluwalia waited 14 years to make Miss Lovely, he was clear he didn’t want to romanticise the 1980s. Nor did he want to parody it

year and a half had passed. All he had with him were notes, interviews on his dictaphone, some footage he had shot while hanging around with the actors and filmmakers, but nobody was willing to be part of his project.

He put this disappointment behind him, and went on to make other films and commercials. But many years later, when he wanted to make his first feature film, these experiences proved valuable. His just-released film Miss Lovely was to be on the C-grade film industry.

T

he idea of a film on the C-grade

film industry first occurred to Ahluwalia in the late 1990s. Back in Mumbai after his filmmaking studies in the US, he had chanced upon the poster of a C-grade film. He had seen some of these smutty flicks as an adolescent; he was surprised to find that they were still around.

After following a few leads, Ahluwalia was able to make his acquaintance with the makers of the sexhorror film, Maut Ka Chehra. The producer turned out to be a dodgy builder who appointed a friend as his director.

Shirish came on board as the ‘ladies supplier’, pocketing a large amount of the film’s budget, and bringing with him a cameraman who could pull off, in Ahluwalia’s words, “nude shots quickly without his hands shaking”.

The film told the story of a serial rapist and contained gratuitous scenes of nudity and sex. It was shot in friends’ flats, abandoned warehouses, cheap ‘one-hour’ love motels in Madh Island and Andheri, and wrapped up in a matter of days. They were initially suspicious of Ahluwalia and called him an ‘English-speaking type’. But they allowed him on the sets, invited him to their after-parties, and let him attend distributor meetings. Soon, they became good friends.

Ahluwalia used this network to explore this world further. He met the famed C-grade filmmakers Kanti Shah (who directed films like Gunda) and Joginder (who made and acted in a number of films like Pyasa Shaitan).

He learnt that Joginder’s real name is

3 february 2014

Joginder Shelly. On their first meeting, Joginder showed him a photograph of a naked woman serving coconut water to the director and producer on a film set. “He told me, ‘My films are all about this. You understand?’,” Ahluwalia says. “Later, I discovered that [Joginder] had also enacted sex scenes himself, making no attempt to disguise his appearance. The idea of these guerilla filmmakers existing on the margins of mainstream society, with little experience in filmmaking, cranking out films in less than a week with little budgets… I found this idea terribly exciting.”

Ahluwalia learnt that many of these films were financed with money from smaller gangs, several of the actresses worked as prostitutes, and that the film came in two lots—the first lot, the

These films came in two lots: the first lot comprising the main plot would be passed through the Censor Board.

The second lot, known as ‘bits’ in Mumbai, featuring the nudity and sex scenes, would be added later main plot of the film, would be passed through the Censor Board. The second lot, colloquially referred to as ‘bits’ in Mumbai, featuring the nudity and sex scenes, would be added later. “These forbidden reels would make it directly to the projection booth of the cinema at night, carried by hand or on a bicycle. These sex reels would be spliced back into the main film, often in a random spot. So in the middle of a tragic death scene, it wouldn’t be unusual to suddenly have an eleven-minute female masturbation sequence,” he says.

He has met many of the women who acted in these films, most of whom worked under assumed names.

“They were mostly from outside Mumbai, who came to the city to become film actresses,” he says. They told him their stories. He remembers, in particular, an actress who called her-

self Karishma who had moved to the city from Kolkata. She disappeared one day and her headless corpse was discovered in a mangrove swamp a few days later. “It was disturbing. Suddenly, nobody wanted to talk about her. It was such a world. You ticked off the wrong guy, and you could land up buried in a mangrove swamp without your head,” he says.

Ahluwalia discovered that besides sex-horror films, the C-grade industry also spawned several sub-genres— such as the female daku (bandit) picture, the tribal exploitation film, the domestic lesbian tragedy and the impotent husband melodrama.

“The most intriguing, however, was the medical film. In movies such as IV Sasi’s Teen Love & Sex and anonymous fare such as Lady Doctor, Gupt Gyan and Birth of a Baby, audiences were shown graphic footage of childbirth and venereal diseases. The basic idea of these films cloaked in pseudo-science was to allow the mostly rural audience a guilt-free viewing of female genitalia. The camera would often participate like a doctor, probing the female body [as part of a supposed] medical check-up. Ghastly scenes would sometimes offer up diseased private parts for examination.

Animated eggs would float across the screen, fused with a barrage of creepy photographs and narration pinched from forgotten Italian sex education films,” he says.

As time went by and no one agreed to do the documentary, Ahluwalia felt he had overstayed his welcome. “I would be called to places, and no one would be there. There would be anonymous calls, questioning my reasons for hanging around the industry. Sometimes, late in the night, I’d get strange calls from women asking me to meet them.

My film was not working out. I was getting a little paranoid, and I had to get out,” he says. Ahluwalia changed his phone number and stayed away from the industry.

I

n the period following this,

Ahluwalia made a documentary called John & Jane, about people who open www.openthemagazine.com 55

worked in India’s booming call-centre industry. The film proved successful, and he won a National Award for it in 2005. He also formed a production company, Future East, to make films and commercials.

But the stories he experienced in the seedy underbelly of Mumbai continued to draw him. When he started working on Miss Lovely, he realised that the industry had collapsed.

Globalisation, the easy availability of porn on VCD and the internet had flooded the market and destroyed most demand for these underground sex films. “They exist [now] only as oral history and hearsay,” he says. “All we know is that thousands of them were made each year, hundreds would play every month. Most are now lost. It is still a mystery how these filmmakers and actors functioned in such a conservative atmosphere.” As he started looking for people who had once been part of the industry, he realised that some had started working in Bhojpuri films, while others had entered the straight-to-internet porn industry. He hired many of these old hands for his film, like one make-up artist who once used to specialise in the make-up of ghosts and monsters. Ahluwalia also sourced old C-grade footage, much of it sexually explicit, to be used for the film.

Nawazuddin Siddiqui, then an actor who had done a few bit roles in mainstream films and also starred in a few C-grade films, and Niharika Singh, a former Miss India, were screen-tested and awarded their first leading roles. The locations used by C-grade filmmakers had been long knocked down. So Ahluwalia made do with what he could find—using the space of old South Mumbai theatres that screened these films like Naaz Cinema on Grant Road, shooting at cheap one-hour hotels from Colaba to Yari Road. About the look of the film, he says, “We spent a lot of time dipping costumes into tea and deteriorating them. I wouldn’t let anybody take a shower or wash off make-up. I wanted things to look lived in.”

The film tells the story of two broth56 open

ers, an ambitious smut film producer and his younger brother who falls in love with a mysterious woman. The deteriorating relationship between the two brothers is set against the backdrop of the C-grade industry. The film itself is a difficult one to classify. It is strikingly original in narrative and

As Ahluwalia started looking for people who had once been part of the C-film industry, he realised that some had started working in Bhojpuri films, while others had entered the straight-tointernet porn industry pacing, with a 1980s Mumbai that is very different from anything yet seen on celluloid. The atmosphere it creates, the ambient sounds and lighting is hypnotic. Yet, the film appears fragmented and episodic. It feels neither like a mainstream film nor a traditional Indian ‘art house ‘film.

In an email, Ahluwalia explains, ‘Miss Lovely offers a sort of ‘revisionist’ history. Not because it documents the

history of exploitation films, for such a record has never existed, but because it can be seen as an attempt to address an inequality in our conception of Indian film history. After all, our filmic past is not just contained in the worlds of the mainstream and parallel/art cinema movements, but in this shadow cinema as well.’

Stating that he wanted to create a quintessential Hindi movie about a kind of Mumbai he knew— the villains by the pool, the cabaret—Ahluwalia says, ‘There were two things I was keen to stay away from— parody and nostalgia. It’s easy to fall into the 1980s thing and think it was great. I didn’t want to commodify or romanticise the period… I am not making fun of the scene or the people. I am not trying to say that it was a cool, funky time.

I wanted to give it a poetry that was real. I told Mohanan (the director of photography or DoP) that I wanted the film to be drenched in humidity. Everything had to feel like it was drenched in moss.’

The film has been travelling the festival circuit for a few years now, and was selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Regard Section two years ago. When it was sent to the Indian Censor Board for approval, the Board demanded 157 cuts. The director argued against the Board’s decision, and after four reviews, was able to get the cuts down to just four scenes. Most of the nudity now appears blurred, while scenes with cuss words have been edited out.

During the period that he stayed away from the C-industry, Ahluwalia once encountered the memory of someone he once knew from that world. Ahluwalia had been reading the Mumbai tabloid Mid-Day when he chanced upon a photograph of a man he had once had dinner and drinks with and watched an episode of Kaun Banega Crorepati. It was a picture of Shirish, accompanied with an article. Above the picture, a headline read something to the effect of ‘Porn racket busted’. This nudged him, he says. He knew he had a film to make. n 3 february 2014

rough cut

One Head Scratcher of a Movie!

Mayank Shekhar

How did an unknown and unreleased 1988 film, Om Dar-B-Dar, gain critical applause in 2014?

L

ike everyone else, I wank off in the privacy of home, ers an official place among artists of the Surrealist movealways behind closed doors. Some majestically do it in ment. Otherwise, film is considered too expensive a medifull public view by making a film. Om Dar-B-Dadar is um to experiment with such artistic anarchy. one such piece of visual masturbation.

The Government-run National Film Development Outlining its plot is impossible, so I take the help of a reCorporation produced Om Dar-B-Dar. Swaroop had strong view on TheSeventhArt.info that best explains what the credentials. He had graduated in direction from FTII, Pune. film is about. Rap this like We didn’t start the fire, if you like: He had directed Ghasiram Kotwal (1976) with Mani Kaul, ‘Horoscope. Dead frog. Cloudy sky. Radio show. Terrorist Saeed Akhtar Mirza and K Hariharan, written by Vijay tadpole. Caste-based reservation. Bicycle. Mount Everest.

Tendulkar. He assisted Richard Attenborough on Gandhi Women’s lib. Communism. Sleeveless blouse. Yuri Gagarin.

(1982). For his directorial debut, he approached the NFDC Miniature book. Nitrogen fixation. Computer. Man on with a completely linear synopsis of his script, which is moon. Biology class. Hema Malini. Turtle. Typewriter. Text clearly not how he eventually filmed it. The producers inside nose.Googly. James Bond. Severed tongue. Shoes outmust have been shocked by the outcome. Om Dar-B-Dar side temple. Gandhi. Hopping currency. Goggles. Helium didn’t get a release. The film went straight to the cans, inbreath. Diamonds inside frogs. God. stead of Cannes; however, it did prePromise toothpaste. Nehru. Aviation miere at Berlin. It didn’t make it to the centres. Potassium cyanide….’ Another Manjeet Bawa, Tyeb Mehta, Government’s Indian Panaroma section line from this review of the film, ‘The that ensures screenings at State sponVivan Sundaram, Akbar great Indian LSD trip’, adorned its poster festivals. Miraculously enough, it Padamsee... would watch sored in its first theatrical release this month, picked up the Best Film (critics) prize at it over and over again. about 25 years after the film was made.

Filmfare Awards, which was then more It helped Om Dar-B-Dar While the disjointed film defies dethan merely a television event. scription, it has enough genres heaped A thoroughly-confused Censor Board establish artistic cred on to it, recurrent ones being ‘post-modat the time didn’t grant the film a viewern’ and ‘avantgarde’. Now, I’m no art acing certificate. They believed that while ademic. But I suspect theorists will be able to find in the film they couldn’t make head or tail of the movie, there must be traces of Dadaism, which was a short-lived, anti-rational, subliminal, subversive messages being transmitted through anti-art movement (1916-23) in Europe. This is when artit that may adversely affect an unsuspecting public. ists felt that a world so much at war deserved no formal art Like illicit cargo, a spare VHS tape from the one that whatsoever. Marcel Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa and Swaroop had cut for the censors found its way to an arts a public urinal hung upside down are popular relics of that camp in Kasauli, thanks to art historian Ashish Rajadhmovement that attacked every existing ‘ism’. These works yaksha. This is where the film was perceived as being close were designed to offend sensibilities. Kamal Swaroop’s Om to artist Bhupen Khakhar’s works. The likes of Manjeet Dar-B-Dar seems like a response to Indian cinema’s serious, Bawa, Tyeb Mehta, Vivan Sundaram, Akbar Padamsee, I self-conscious art-house movies of the 70s and 80s that statam told, would watch it over and over again. It helped Om ed such obvious truths about the human condition.

Dar-B-Dar establish artistic cred. Copies of the VHS tape got The film is instantly surreal, making it an expression of into circulation. The print was viewed as staple diet by subsubconscious thoughts, or dreams. Dali was probably the sequent batches of Pune’s FTII. The gospel subtly spread dada of that genre, and Bunuel the baap. Together, they among young filmmakers with artistic aspirations. made a film called Un ChienAndalou (An Andalusian Dog) in The brass band section in the song Emotional Atyachar 1929, financed by Bunuel’s mom, which gave the filmmakfrom Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D (2009) is evidently hom-

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3 february 2014

express archive

surrealist Director Kamal Swaroop approached the NFDC with a completely linear synopsis of his script and secured funding; (right) a poster of the film

age to the Om Dar-B-Dar track Merijaan AAA, which is also the song Natha’s son hums when his father disappears in Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live (2010). My favourite number in the film is Bablu Babylon Se. This is the song that helps two lovers meet in the movie. Both of them had been repeatedly placing a request for the same track over the years on Vividh Bharati— the boy Jagdish, from Jhumri Talaiya, and the girl Gayatri, from a fictional Rajasthani town, where the film is set. The girl is the protagonist Om’s elder sister. On the face of it, the film, in chaste Sanskritised Hindi, is a hallucinatory journey from adolescence to late teenage of young Om, who is an astrologer’s son. If you sit down to follow that story, chances are you’ll lose your mind. Deliberately hammy actors add to the humour.

Swaroop says he took about three years to figure out a script, spending most of that time discarding any aspect in it that seemed like a film. He argues that if you merely remove sex and violence from a movie, it stops looking like one.

There is a toy gun in Om Dar-B-Dar for violence. And a brief direct reference to sex when Gayatri asks Jagdish to sleep with him—drawstrings of the boy’s boxer shorts refuse to come off, her hyperventilating father spins back and forth in his cycle before collapsing outside the house.

Swaroop says he took that naara (drawstrings) scene directly from Manohar Shyam Joshi’s novel Kasap. Rajat Kapoor referenced it in his film Mixed Doubles (2006). The last time I heard Rose Mary Marlowe, a pulp author’s name in Om DarB-Dar, was in a recent farty sex-com Grand Masti (2013).

Swaroop says he drew heavily from free-spirited MaithiliHindi-Bengali writer Rajkamal Chaudhary from Mahisi in north Bihar. Chaudhary’s writings effortlessly merged ‘American pop literature with Indian literary traditions, delving strongly in self-exorcism and black magic’. Chaudhary is 3 february 2014

often credited with one of the earliest references to lesbianism in a Hindi novel, Machhli Mari Hui, which is one of the books that Swaroop claims primarily inspired Om Dar-B-Dar. Chaudhary died of syphilis at the age of 38 in 1967.

Swaroop, 61, hasn’t made a feature since Om Dar-BDar. I first began to hear about the film in the late 2000s.

A screening at Mumbai’srelatively underground festival Experimenta in 2005 had apparently led to a belated buzz around it. The psychotropic substance, from print to VHS, had begun to proliferate itself like frogs in a pool—key characters of Om Dar-B-Dar—as the film went digital on Torrent.

Internauts began to blog about their first Indian surreal film experience. These were usually young cinephiles whose eyes were still open to viewing movies beyond a straight and simple storytelling medium. Much like the absurdities of life, the film makes no obvious sense. It is not meant to. Some prominent critics pestered the NFDC to digitally restore the film. They could recover some of the cost with a theatrical release, even if from a single show in a private screen, PVR, across major Indian cities. But that’s immaterial.

The internet makes it hard to predict what will survive public memory anymore. The web, chiefly YouTube, had already liberated Om Dar-D-Bar’s scenes, satires, codes, songs and non sequitur dialogue from the film, turning them into individual vignettes to be multiply interpreted or enjoyed for their own worth: ‘Aatankari tadpoles’, ‘Rana Tigrina’, ‘Om fights with bicycle’, ‘Out of course’, ‘Letter to Nehru’, ‘Aa kood’, ‘isme khazana chhipa hai’…

Viewing the whole thing without any warning, I wouldn’t be surprised if you turn around, super frustrated, to ask, “Is this even a film?” Yes, it is. Or maybe, not. n Mayank Shekhar runs the pop-culture website TheW14.com open www.openthemagazine.com 59

science

extreme el niños occur when sea surface temperatures above 28°C develop in the normally cold and dry eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, unlike standard El Niños that appear in the western Pacific

Comic Twist Comedians have traits that are strikingly similar to those suffering schizophrenia or bipolar disorder

Extreme El Niño Events to Double

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s it turns out, the funniest

people have traits that are highly similar to those suffering from psychotic disorders. A new study has found that comedians are able to make people laugh because they often display characteristics that are found in people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, appearing to support the widely-held belief of a link between madness and creativity.

For the study, published in The British Journal of Psychiatry, a total of 523 comedians in the US, UK and Australia were tested. They were given a questionnaire designed by researchers from Oxford University to gauge four traits known to be associated with schizophrenic and psychotic tendencies—unusual experiences (belief in paranormal events); cognitive disorganisation (difficulty in focusing thoughts); ‘introverted anhedonia’ (a reduced ability to feel social and physical pleasure, for instance a tendency to avoid intimacy); and impulsive non-conformity (a tendency towards impulsive, antisocial behaviour and lack of mood-related self-control). Their results were then compared with that of a group

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of actors and another group of people in non-creative industries. The actors scored higher than the general group on three of the four measures, except introverted anhedonia.

The comedians came out significantly higher on all four types of psychotic personality traits compared to the other groups.

According to the researchers, various psychologists and psychiatrists have pointed out the links between creativity and madness, yet comedy and humour have been neglected. They believe that the high ratings of comedians on all four counts, especially manic thinking, a feature of bipolar disorder, help explain comedian mindsets and how they can entertain audiences. One of the researchers, Gordon Claridge told The Guardian, “Although schizophrenic psychosis itself can be detrimental to humour, in its lesser form it can increase people’s ability to associate odd or unusual things or to think ‘outside the box’.

Equally, ‘manic thinking’, which is common in people with bipolar disorder, may help people combine ideas to form new, original and humorous connections.” n

According to a study published in Nature Climate Change Extreme, extreme weather events fuelled by unusually strong El Niños, such as the 1983 heat wave that led to the Ash Wednesday bushfires in Australia, are likely to double in number as our planet warms.

To achieve their results, an international team of scientists examined 20 climate models that consistently simulate major rainfall reorganisation during extreme El Niño events. They found a substantial increase in events from the present-day through the next 100 years as the eastern Pacific Ocean warms in response to global warming. The impacts of extreme El Niño events extend to every continent across the globe. n

Brain Cells that Spur Fighting

A new study in Cell says male fruit flies fight more than their female counterparts because they have special cells in their brains that promote fighting. These sexspecific cells exert their effects on fighting by releasing a type of hormone that has also been implicated in aggression in mammals. Some recent studies have also found increased levels of this hormone in people with personality disorders that lead to higher levels of aggression. At a genetic level, many of the genes seen in these flies are also present—and play similar roles—in humans. “Our study validates using fruit flies as a model to discover new genes that may also control aggression in humans,” says biologist David Anderson. n 3 february 2014

AirPlay This wireless technology (receiver mode) is integrated into speaker docks, AV receivers, and stereo systems from various companies. Song titles, artistes, album names, elapsed and remaining time data, and album artwork can appear on AirPlayenabled speakers with graphical displays

tech&style

Bose SoundTouch 20 Stream songs anywhere around your home via a home Wi-Fi network gagandeep Singh Sapra

Manero w PowerReserve

Price on request

Rs 32,512

The power reserve indication is a classic design element of the Manero PowerReserve. Originally used in marine chronometers, this indicates the remaining time the watch will continue to run. At the heart of this mechanical watch

by Swiss brand Carl F Bucherer is the manufacturer’s own automatic CFB A1011 caliber. A shock absorber known as ‘Dynamic Shock Absorption’ assures efficiency and reliability. n

Xolo Q3000

I

n October last year in an ex-

clusive preview, I got to see the latest systems from Bose, called the SoundTouch, and they are finally here in India. Released in three models, Sound Touch 10, 20 and 30, they offer music lovers great sound with the latest in technology.

The Sound Touch systems connect to your home Wi-Fi or wired network, and play songs from an iTunes library in your Mac or Windows PC. The speakers are designed for effortless operation with six control buttons on top of the speaker. The free Bose SoundTouch App can be used with your computer, smartphone or tablet to explore internet radio or any other music service.

If you have more than one speaker system, you can choose which speaker in the house plays which music; you can choose to stream the same song in all units or have each unit play a different song in each room.

3 february 2014

The SoundTouch 10 is more portable and thus handy, and the SoundTouch 30 features the Bose proprietary Waveguide that gives you a richer bass and cleaner sound. The SoundTouch 20 offers room filling sound, whether in the bedroom or kitchen; its intuitive 6 buttons that are akin to a car radio’s make choosing music simpler; and the speaker is also AirPlay compliant, so if you have an iPhone or iPad, streaming from this device even without the app becomes easier.

To connect the SoundTouch to your home Wi-Fi, you need to access a PC, which I did not like since more homes now have tablets. But once the setting up is done, you don’t really need the computer except for your iTunes library.

What I appreciate is that you can start with one and add more speakers as and when you feel the need—and have the money. n

Rs 20,999

This smartphone comes with a 5.7-inch crisp IPS 1920x1080 386 PPI full high definition screen, a huge battery, 2 gigabytes of RAM, and a 1.5 Ghz quad core processor that powers its Jelly Bean Android OS 4.2. The RAM makes sure you don’t run out of power when multitasking and there is also 16GB of internal storage that can be increased by using a micro SD card.

There is a 13 megapixel rear camera with a back-illuminated sensor, a 5 megapixel front camera that also has back-illuminated sensor. Xolo claims that the talk time on this phone is 33 hours in case you are on a 2G network, and falls to about 21 hours on a 3G network. The Q3000 is available in black and white colours and comes with a free slipcover. 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 lovely star in a zombie flick The lead actress in Miss Lovely, Niharika Singh, has acted in a sequel to the popular zombie film, The Dead, produced and directed by British filmmakers Jonathan and Howard Ford. The Dead (2010) is known to be the first zombie film shot in north Africa, and earned decent reviews and a 72 per cent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The sequel was shot in India

Miss Lovely A masterly noirish recreation of C-grade smut that takes a hard look at exploitation in cinema ajit duara

current

o n scr een

Om Dar-Ba-Dar Directors Kamal Swaroop cast Gopi Desai, Manish Gupta, Anita

Kanwar, Aditya Lakhia Score ★★★★★

Singh, Nawazudd Cast Niharika orge Siddiqui, Anil Ge Ahluwalia him Director As

‘I

in

nterpolation’ is a term gener-

ally used in mathematics, but in a few movie theatres in Bombay in the 1980s, it was applied to another kind of exercise. It was known, for instance, that at select screens like the Ganga Jamuna Theatre in Tardeo, a ‘Ramsay Brothers’ horror movie would be scheduled, you would watch it for about half an hour, and then, voila, a reel of pornographic clips would be inserted in between.

Miss Lovely opens with a scene like this—a raucous audience waiting for the clips, the projectionist unloading the horror film and Sonu Duggal (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) standing there dutifully with a fresh film can in his hand. It is a masterful period re-creation, shot in ‘noir’ style,set in dilapidated buildings and populated with paunchy middle-aged men and sad looking starlets. It is a merciless look at exploitation in cinema, and is one of the most depressing films you will see.

Brutally honest, it looks at the movie

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business not as art, but as transaction.

Though the subject of Miss Lovely is ‘B’ or ‘C’ grade cinema, there is no mistaking the director’s intent of implying that the same equations apply across the board in Bollywood, even in the socalled A-list films. Towards the end of the film, as the simple-minded Sonu is recovering from his trauma in this industry, the hazy and grainy ‘noir’ look of the lighting lifts, and we see bright sunlight for the first time.

Sonu’s brother, Vicky Duggal (Anil George), is the producer of these films.

He is a realist, but has not the slightest idea that his brother is a romantic.

This is the hopeless twist in the story—a man with passion and feeling in a world of smut.

He falls in love with an actress called Pinky (Niharika Singh) and it is the saddest, most hopeless love story in the world. The ability of Nawazuddin Siddiqui to inhabit and possess a character so completely is a rare gift. Let us savour this talent. n

It is important to understand the intellectual and artistic antecedents of this spectacularly-restored film. The Indian New Wave of the 1970s and 80s included two directors, Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani, who made somewhat abstract films in the non linear tradition. Both Kaul and Sahani were held in high esteem at the FTII, when Kamal Swaroop, director of Om Dar-BaDar, was a student, but Swaroop ended up making a movie in 1988 that is more original and lasting than anything made by his mentors.

Set in Ajmer and Pushkar, Om DarBa-Dar is about small town India seen through the visual and aural experience of a boy called Om, as he transits his adolescence. He has a sister (Gopi Desai), he has a father (Lakshminarayan Shastri), he has school, he is interested in science, he dissects frogs. Through a tapestry of colour and sound—with a voice-over on the radio that fixes a sense of time and place— we experience Om’s life purely through the auditory and visual side of our brains.

The experience of this film is akin to looking at modern Indian art—particularly the work of the ‘narrative painters’ of the Baroda School: Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Bhupen Khakhar and others. Om Dar-Ba-Dar enters your memory and subconscious in exactly the same way. n ad

3 february 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Sniping About a Sublime Actor

The backlash has begun! Trust Bollywood, and the film media, to put someone up on a pedestal first, only to knock him off it before he’s even had a chance to get comfortable there.

It hasn’t been two full years since Nawazuddin Siddiqui became a household name through films like Kahaani and Gangs of Wasseypur, fast emerging the most promising actor in an industry that breeds more stars than real performers.

Already, Bollywood filmwalas have begun dissing the actor, insisting that he doesn’t deserve the Rs 1 crore-plus salary that he’s demanding per film. “Nobody goes in to see a film because his name is on the poster,” says a producer, requesting anonymity. “Sure he’s a good actor, but he can’t open a film. If you can’t bring an audience in, it doesn’t matter how good you are, you just cannot expect that kind of money.” As it turns out, this producer is only one of many in the film biz with the same opinion.

Studios are reportedly complaining that Nawaz may have outpriced himself from the very kind of small-budget meaty projects that made him the art-house star that he is.

Last week, I saw a different side to the actor from the one industry bigwigs seem to be complaining about. Dressed simply in a pair of jeans and a collar T-shirt, sporting days-old face-fuzz, Nawaz boarded a flight from Mumbai to New York en route Salt Lake City in Utah, where two of his films are being screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Travelling with the team of Liar’s Dice, the only Indian film in competition at the festival, Nawaz sportingly flew Economy on the fifteen-and-a-half hour flight, and didn’t seem to mind being repeatedly woken up by over-eager passengers seeking to start off a conversation.

Way too patient and accommodating for the too-big-for-his-boots upstart they’re calling him!

Smart Friendship Policy

He’s one of Bollywood’s biggest superstars, if not the biggest.

He’s invited to inaugurate renovated hospitals, flag off rallies, endorse political parties, and shine some luck on new film entrants. But the one place that’s in no hurry to invite him back is his own alma mater.

Reportedly, the very mention of this A-lister in the staff room of his Bandra school draws an uncomfortable silence among senior faculty, particularly the management. The story goes that years ago when he was invited to address students and staff at a school event, the actor delivered an impromptu speech that didn’t feel right for the occasion. He spoke at length about his mischievous ways, how he played pranks on his professors, copied in his exams, and just about managed to graduate from school without flunking a year. That speech wasn’t the problem… some even thought it was heartfelt and honest. It was what he did after.

The Catholic school prides itself for instilling discipline in its students, which is why its management and faculty was nothing short of horrified when in his closing remarks, the by-now-emotionallycharged movie star ‘crossed the line’. Possibly carried away by the enthusiastic response from students to his unfiltered memories of school days, the actor ended his speech by saying he was very happy to be invited back to school: “So happy, in fact, that I declare tomorrow a holiday for everyone!”

Expectedly, the students were overjoyed, and before the principal could grab the mike out of the star’s hand to make light of—and nullify—the holiday declaration, the noise from all the cheering drowned out any chance he had to rectify the situation. And that’s why they won’t have the actor back… even if he is in fact the school’s most famous old boy. n di

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3 february 2014

The Superstar Who Crossed a Red Line

In

Katrina Kaif—who chose the Hrithik Roshan starrer Bang Bang over her Mere Brother Ki Dulhan director Abbas Ali Zafar’s Gunday last year—showed up for Zafar’s birthday party last week, ending all speculation that their friendship had gone kaput since she ditched his movie.

At the time, Zafar reportedly felt betrayed by Katrina’s decision to choose the Hrithik vehicle over his movie, especially since she had verbally committed to doing it. Zafar had to go back to producer Aditya Chopra

to help him land a new leading lady, and fortunately for him, Priyanka Chopra said ‘yes’.

Judging by the camaraderie they shared at the party, it does appear that Katrina and Zafar have mended their friendship, which apparently dates back to the time he was chief assistant to Kabir Khan on New York.

Perhaps, it helped that PC wasn’t at the party.

Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

The Little Ecologist

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

At the age of five, Hatsanda is on her way to becoming a serial planter. As part of her ‘youth go green global drive’, her very own initiative, she has already planted more than 30 trees in the past three years in Afghanistan, the United Stated of America, and now India. She now plans to make a green contribution to each and every country on the globe. “We can make walls and divide the states, cities, countries and the world, but we cannot split air and nature. I feel proud to say that I am on my way to becoming a global super eco-heroine,” announces the Afghan-born five-year-old in Pashtun, who now lives in the United States. Her parents are nursing another dream—that their girl will grow up to become President of the United States and be a role-model for Afghans

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3 february 2014