OPEN Magazine 6 October 2014

ZIAUDDIN SARDAR THE TRAGEDY OF MECCA

TUNKU VARADARAJAN THE GOOD SCOTTISH NO THE RETURN OF AMIT CHAUDHURI

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

american BLITZ Can Modi redeem an alliance gone astray?

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Volume 6 Issue 39 For the week 30 Sep—6 Oct 2014 Total No. of pages 64 + Covers

Cover design Anirban Ghosh

6 october 2014

Srinivas Udumudi

This article is a sad reflection of the state of affairs in Indian media (‘Those to Whom Evil Is Done’, 22 September 2014). It’s shallow in its commentary of what is happening in Telangana. By focusing on press freedom, it continues to ignore a far bigger problem that this recent incident is just a part of. During the agitation for Telangana, K Chandrasekhar Rao consistently badmouthed Andhras, calling them “dogs that need to be driven away”. The national media and so-called By consistently intelligentsia consistfocusing on ‘Andhra ently ignored this and capitalists’ oppression’, instead made Telangana the media conveniently out to be a victim and ignores the constant underdog to be supportthreats to poor and ed. Now that statehood middle-class Andhra is granted, the Telangana ‘settlers’ in Telangana Rashtra Samithi is only keeping its promise. The media focuses on the Telangana CM’s open murder threats to journalists, but ignores the context he provides in the same speech. He compares “driving out Andhras” with “driving bad spirits that possessed us” and that the treatment he allots to certain TV channels as “beating with neem leaves”. He says, “These Andhra people need this beating.” By consistently focusing on ‘Andhra capitalists’ oppression’, the media conveniently ignores the constant threats to poor and middleclass Andhra ‘settlers’ in the new state. By using phrases like ‘persecution complex’, the media only justifies this patently fascist behaviour of KCR and his party.  letter of the week Ganga, Benares SOS

this refers to the brilliant article ‘Re-imagining Benares’ (22 September 2014).

Successive governments have made promises galore to clean the Ganga but in vain. In fact, Swami Nigamananda, who had tried for a decade-and-ahalf to save the Ganga and even gone on a 115-day fast, was allegedly poisoned to death by a mafia gang. During his untiring campaign, he charged the administration with being in collusion with the illegal mining mafia. True, believable

electoral campaign that he was called to Benares by ‘Mother Ganga’ and said, “We have to begin the cleansing of India from Benares.” In brief, Benares as it exists now represents both the best of India in terms of its spiritual legacy and the worst of India in its physical decay and decline.

With millions of her pious people ignoring the fact that the Ganga is dying from the toxic waste dumped into it by them, it is ironical that they want to die only in Benares so as to gain direct access to Kailash.  SM Kompella

Too Much ‘Love’

and shocking! Benares, once the self-luminous star in the firmament of India, is now the very picture of defaced ghats, untreated sewage, half-burnt corpses floating in the filthy waters, garbage, dirty bylanes and crowded streets, smacking of sheer commercialisation, apart from displaying a strange amalgam of cultures, classes and religions. The city is destined to die unless someone rescues it from further decay.

Many Indians pin hope on the new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who declared during his

after the BJP’s stupendous Lok Sabha poll results in the northern states, which includes UP and Rajasthan, the reversals in the by-polls in UP show that the party’s strategy of nominating Yogi Adityanath to lead the polls in the state misfired badly (‘It’s not About Modi’, 29 September 2014). The BJP must understand that harping on ‘Love Jihad’ can polarise voters to some extent, but getting votes will be difficult if there is not much effort put in the direction of bringing down inflation and unemployment—the main poll agenda.

All said and done, the by-election results send a strong message to the BJP leadership that it cannot take voters for granted and win elections by communalising and polarising voters when what the people need is growth and ‘Roti, Kapda aur Makaan’ for their survival..  KR Srinivasan

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small world

Moments before Maqsood was killed

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright...

But not that Tuesday at Delhi zoo when it wanted to play with Maqsood t e r r o r This isn’t the first time people have jumped into tiger enclosures at the National Zoological Park in Delhi.

Around ten years ago, in two separate incidents, two men who were allegedly intoxicated jumped into a lion enclosure. And later, when they had been rescued, they said they wanted to know how it felt to be standing in front of a lion.

Tuesday’s bizarre incident of a 20-year-old man called Maqsood being attacked by a white tiger, and being killed by the animal that zoo authorities suspect got confused by the stone-pelting from other visitors, has yielded many 6 october 2014

versions of the event. Some say the zoo officials arrived late, and couldn’t arrange for a tranquiliser shot. But Riaz Khan, spokesperson for the zoo, says the tiger didn’t give them enough time to follow the protocol, which includes drills and other emergency procedures for such incidents.

“It happened in a matter of minutes. The tiger was trying to play with the man, and was affectionate, but when the stone pelting and shouting happened, it attacked the man,” he says.

A video that has gone viral on social network sites shows the victim pleading in front of

the white tiger named Vijay.

The animal dragged his body around until it got bored, and left Maqsood in the enclosure where he had fallen after crossing the fence and the moat on Tuesday. Many have blamed the culture of red tapism in the zoo for the incident According to some reports, the guard had been warning the victim, and the caretaker had been trying to calm the white tiger down. The guard had pulled him back the first time Maqsood tried to cross the fence, but Khan says such horrors happen at zoos.

“Basically, a lion is a lazy

animal so it doesn’t get up too soon. A tiger is quick, and it was a pet one. It was born here in 2007, and so was its father,” he adds. Besides, preparing a tranquiliser takes time, and depends on the calculation of dosage in accordance with the weight of the animal.

“Within 15 minutes, the tiger had been caged in, and we had dispersed the crowd.

The guns were ready but the doctors pronounced the man dead,” says Khan. The man is believed to be a little unstable, mentally.“See, those who want to jump, they will.

No protocols can help then,” Khan says. n Chinki sinha

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contents

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8

jackfruit

Jack Ma and Alibaba

Rediscovery of the underrated fruit

open essay

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business

Scotch wisdom

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locomotif

The pathology of antiAmericanism

Maharashtra poll

End of a romance

cover story

American blitz

organisation of the week isro

Superheroes of Space ISRO is that rare government agency which is ambitious and continues to deliver Madhavankutty Pillai

T

he Defence Research

Development Organisation (DRDO) is a favourite subject of the media when it is looking at an example of government inefficiency. For decades, DRDO has had incomplete tanks, aircraft, guns, etcetera, in the works and that still does not stop it from making such announcements as plans to make robot soldiers. Whenever the failure of DRDO is mentioned, there is however an immediate antithesis cited—the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

To get an idea of the beginnings of ISRO, remember that iconic photo by Henri Cartier Bresson in which the cone of a rocket is being taken on the back of a bicycle in Kerala’s Thumba village in 1966, three years before it had launched its first rocket from there, and that was brought in a bullock cart. Since then, ISRO has launched over 70 satellites, is responsible for India’s ballistic missiles

and had a lunar mission that placed an Indian flag on the moon. On Wednesday morning, when the Mars Orbiter Mission or Mangalyaan entered the orbit of Mars, no one was surprised that it succeeded.

Going to Mars is not easy. Mangalyaan was launched on 5 November 2013. On 1 December, it said goodbye to the earth’s influence and then, circling the sun, took a parabolic path to Mars. The vessel travelled through space for over ten months, and the distance it has covered is 666 million km. All of it has been done on a shoestring budget. On Sunday, three days before Mangalyaan entered the Mars orbit, the US agency NASA’s space vessel Maven reached there. It spent just over Rs 4,000 crore on the project. How much did it cost ISRO? About Rs 450 crore.

And it is not as if India reached there after all the developed countries had paid a visit. India is only the fourth to achieve this feat. And the only one to get

Aijaz Rahi/AP

ISRO scientists and officials celebrate the success of Mangalyaan

it right the first time it tried.

Mangalyaan will now do studies using its payload. This includes a colour camera that will look at Phobos and Deimos, the two satellites of Mars, measuring the presence of chemical elements in Martian atmosphere and using advanced spectrometers to study minerals on the planet’s surface.

One of the reasons that ISRO became such a success was that the agency has had some extraordinary people helming it right from the beginning with Dr Vikram Sarabhai. Then there was APJ Abdul Kalam, who went on to become the President of India. They were not just committed scientists but knew how to negotiate the corridors of power. But ISRO has also had its share of controversies. There was the Nambi Narayanan espionage case, in which the scientist was framed and later acquitted. Narayanan was responsible for some of ISRO’s technological achievements like the introduction of liquid fuelled rockets.

On the website of ISRO, a quote by Dr Vikram Sarabhai says, ‘We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight. But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally and in the comity of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society.’ He was wrong about the exploration bit (only manned space flight remains now), but he wouldn’t have had a problem with that. n 6 october 2014

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mecca

p NOT PEOPLE LIKE US

cinema

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Ziauddin Sardar’s tome on the holy city

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Homi Adajania: His passions and projects

Hrithik’s fitness dare

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arts

food

Amrita Sher-Gil and Lionel Wendt

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ajit sin

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f o r refusing to vacate a

sprawling goverment bungalow Not wanting to give up government accommodation might be a norm for bureaucrats and politicians in the country, but Ajit Singh, son of former Prime Minister Charan Singh and chief of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), has made a very creative case.

Riyaaz Amlani’s youth focus

Singh has been holding on to a government-allotted bungalow despite the termination of electricity and water supplies last week. He has ignored eviction notices and instead demanded that the property be converted into a memorial for his father.

The Government has refused his demands saying that the conversion of government bungalows into memorials was banned by the Union Cabinet in 2000. The law is not something that Singh is concerned about and he instead called for a so-called ‘Jat Mahapanchayat’ at the 12 Tughlaq Road bungalow to discuss memorial options.

Despite the Delhi Police deeming the meeting ‘illegal’, the agitators managed to disrupt the lives of regular citizens by causing traffic jams throughout the city. The demand for the memorial is plain blackmail by another name and it would be downright foolish on the part of the Government to surrender to such petulance. n

The Election Commission of Pakistan, after pointing out rigging in the 2013 elections, claims that its report was a summary of suggestions DENIAL

‘The historic success of the 2013 general elections... were not without significant challenges...the election authorities faced lack of support from political parties and contesting candidates’

‘Perfection is not possible in this imperfect world...it is not a report but a summary of the recommendations received from various stakeholders’

—ECP report, released on 22 September 2014

—A press statement issued by the ECP on 23 September2014

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A Timely Warning to Crony Capitalists N e w D e l h i The mass cancellation of coal blocks by India’s Supreme Court has vindicated the findings of the CAG and sent out a warning to a political class that perpetrates crony capitalism. But the decision of the court to quash allocation of 214 of the 218 blocks allotted to various companies since 1993 could adversely affect the health of banks as their exposure to the sector is estimated to be over Rs 1 lakh crore.

Bestacolla Colliery in Jharkhand Sanjit Das/Bloomberg/Getty Images

6 october 2014

Industry bodies have described the court order as ‘too harsh’. This assessment is not off the mark as the country’s largest lender, State Bank of India, alone has lent around Rs 4,000 crore to power plants that were put up based on coal from the cancelled coal blocks. The development once again emphasises the need for the ethical conduct of governance. The Government should work out transparent guidelines for the allocation of natural resources so that the economy is spared such shocks in the future. n open www.openthemagazine.com 5

angle

A Hurried Man’s Guide

On the Contrary

to the whopping Infosys pay hike While Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy has been revered for austerity, the infotech major recently brought about a phenomenal uplift to the industry’s salary benchmark, making its top executives virtually poachproof by even international rival companies.

The salaries of vice presidents in the company have undergone a three- to five-fold hike, now putting them in the bracket of Rs 6 crore.

The move comes immediately after the company board appointed Vishal Sikka as its CEO and MD. Sikka was previously working with the multinational software giant SAP and was brought in to revive the company’s dipping Nearly 300 fortunes in the infotech executives in the industry. The hikes are $8.2 billion infotech being seen as indicaservices company tors of Sikka’s efforts are expected to see to stem exits from the substantial salary company and bring in increases talent from SAP as well.

Following the hike, at least five top-level executives and some former SAP appointments have been pushed into the Rs 6 crore category.

Vivek Prakash/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Sikka, incidentally, already happens to be the highest paid CEO of an Indian company, with his annual salary of about Rs 30 crore. His pay packet includes a base salary of $900,000 and

Now with many more in the Rs 6 crore bracket

variable pay of $4.18 million. As per estimates made within the industry, nearly 300 executives in the $8.2 billion infotech services company are expected to see a substantial increase in their salaries.

Infosys is poised to retain its position among the world’s top infotech companies after witnessing some unfortunate years—attributed to the policy of having its founders lead the company. It required Murthy to emerge from retirement and make drastic course corrections. But now the company has shown that it is willing to pay to keep talent that it feels is essential to its growth. n

A Murder by Any Other Name The Supreme Court spells out a policy on encounters to prevent cold blooded killings M a d h a v a n k u t t y P i l l a i

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nderworld stories can

come from all quarters in Mumbai. Recently when I ran across a neighbour, a senior citizen, he told me of a friend of his who had put in his life savings to buy a canteen in the suburb of Jogeshwari.

It was frequented by henchmen of the gangster Sharad Shetty.

One day, they casually told the man that they were taking over the canteen. He couldn’t refuse. Friends came to his help to negotiate and they agreed to give him a fraction of the market price. The man went into a shell after that. Most of the gangsters were later shot dead in encounters.

This happened, unsurprisingly, in the 90s, when the Mumbai police decided to go on a killing spree. It was not crime that worried them as much as loss of control. In the 90s, every streetside thug realised how easy it was to make money out of extortion and crime, an orderly affair with the dons being accountable managers of sorts, began to slip into chaos.

What was striking was how these extrajudicial killings were welcomed for some time. Encounter specialists, an elite group given the responsibility to enforce this policy, became heroes. It was only after order was restored and organised crime became organised once more, that ethical considerations came in.

The Supreme Court this week spelt out a policy for encounters so that murders don’t get passed off as heroic deeds. In its order, it has created rigid systems of accountability around every encounter which includes a compulsory FIR and investigation for every such killing with checks and double checks at the executive and judicial levels. No promotions or awards can be given out of turn to those policemen who are part of encounters until their legitimacy is established. And relatives of the

dead person can complain directly to a court.

They are well thought out measures, but it also shows how long it has taken for India as a country to arrive at them. The reason is that not just the police establishment but even the common man thought the outright killing of criminals was the only way to address crime. The judicial system was easy to manipulate and it was hard to find a witness against a gangster. Imprisonment itself was not a punishment, because he ran his operations just as efficiently from behind bars.

The problem, however, is not the encounters but also the men who order and do them. Soon Not just after the the police encounter policy in establishment Mumbai, it but even the suddenly common man became thought that apparent that the outright most of the gangsters killing of being shot criminals was were the only way to down rivals of address crime Dawood Ibrahim.

Like good businessmen, he had managed to twist the system to serve his needs. And when Arun Gawli started a political party, he saw his men being killed with a vengeance, showing how politicians had begun to use encounters for their personal agendas.

The encounter specialists themselves started milking the system by becoming arbitrators in disputes in sectors which operate on the fringes of the law, like the construction industry. They became rich, flashy and powerful. Now they keep going in and out of jail and nobody thinks they don’t deserve it. n 6 october 2014

business

Jack Ma and Alibaba’s Beanstalk

A

bout two decades ago, the only one talking about ‘Jack’ and the internet was HCL, the Indian infotech company. Inspired by Forrest Gump’s ‘fruit company’ Apple, it had this idea of a home computer called Beanstalk that would grow and grow and grow, taking Jack the Consumer on an endless adventure in cyberspace. The internet was just an odd curiosity then, HCL’s leafy dream didn’t get far, and it’s Jack the Billionaire and Alibaba’s forty leaves that have made off with the online bounty.

Alibaba’s Initial Public Offer of shares at the New York Stock Exchange has got Jack Ma’s Chinese e-com company a stupendous $25 billion from investors, making it the world’s largest such equity sale ever. And the stock’s value in early trading has shot up so sharply that Jack Ma’s own stake has placed him in the glare of global attention as China’s richest man.

Founded in 1999, Alibaba.com, the come-yecome-all e-trade website that started it all, was just about a year old when I bumped into Jack Ma at the turn of the millennium at a Pragati Maidan fair in Delhi, and he smiled impishly as I marvelled at the genius of his brand choice. That he had worked out what the internet’s big market effect would be—disintermediation—was obvious. For a market to be efficient, information needs to be clear and transaction costs low, and in a country of cobwebbed commerce, he knew what wonders could be worked by putting data on open record and buyers directly in touch with sellers.

That he’d have a quarter of a trillion dollars worth of deals done on his web platform in less than 15 years, however, did not seem even remotely possible at the time. Well, whaddyaknow, it’s happened.

The boom lately has been on his Taobao.com website, which has millions of consumers logging on every day to buy stuff with the aid of Alipay, his e-payment system.

has seen ten times, the last time just before leaving for New York for Alibaba’s debut. “I watched the movie again telling me that ‘No matter whatever changes, you are you’,” he says in a CNBC news clip of the day, “I am still the guy 15 years ago, you know. I only earn like $20 a month.”

Jack Ma has had several other interesting things to say. A couple of years ago, he spoke of a need for people in China to “learn what democracy means” in the context of his company’s Imaginechina/Corbis decisions on philanthropy being taken by a panel elected by employees.

Of late, what Alibaba itself has had to learn, though, is what competition means.

While the company has well over two-thirds of China’s e-com market to itself, it faces a challenge in the shape of Tencent, which has surfed its way into play on waves made by its social media network, Weixin (literally ‘micro message’).

Since its 2011 launch, this service has been a craze among China’s youth, gone global as WeChat with Rolling Stonish iconography, and become the day’s wake-up app—a crucial gateway to the internet, mind you—for users by the million enough to play deal stealer. Most of its users are of a generation that values intimacy and immediacy online. And that is exactly what Weixin is essentially about. It is not, as some sneer, a WhatsApp copy that is shielded from the real thing of America by the Great Firewall of China. Its youth appeal lies in hot lay features such as Look watch American TV shows, and prefers to Around, which identifies contacts closeby; Drift Bottle, which floats out a message spend his free time on stuff like Tai Chi, a martial art he appears to take seriously for for random retrieval; and Shake, which lets phone shakers vibe discreetly with reasons other than his light frame. He is one another. also said to play poker, which, given my Marketers are already adopting Weixin memory of his general geniality, seems as a promotional platform. And now, as somewhat hard to believe.

Tencent CEO Pony Ma leverages a social But then again, perhaps he revels in app for e-com, Jack Ma may have to mix inscrutability. It certainly lends him a metaphors and fairytales in new ways to charisma few can resist. His favourite movie is Forrest Gump, reportedly, which he keep Alibaba ahead. n are sh shirali And to think he hit upon the internet almost by accident in 1995 on a trip to America as an interpreter! Back in his hometown of Huangzhou, he had been a teacher of English, a language he picked up mainly off radio broadcasts. Getting into college had been a struggle (he failed two attempts), and he was ungeeky in almost every other way as well. By all accounts, he remains infotech-aloof. He hardly ever surfs the web, is said to use his iPad only to

And to think he hit upon the internet almost by accident on a trip to America as an interpreter!

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6 october 2014

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lo co m ot i f

S PRASANNARAJAN

E

The Pathology of Anti-Americanism

very ism is born out of an argument that

brooks no rejoinder. An argument that excludes the other voice is adamant, exclusivist, and one-dimensional. The story of anti-Americanism, with its provenance in the last century when the moral activism of one nation became a global rage against the transgressions of freedom, is no different, and its enduring appeal, stretching from the ghettos of Arabia to the ruling echelons of Asia, is a testament of how the argument remains unresolved, no matter that America itself is far from being the moral imperium that it was in another era.

In the beginning, anti-Americanism was played out against the great passion plays of history; it was then an ism sustained by the brotherhood of victims. And being victim was a state of mind of the spectator who could not comprehend one nation’s ability to blend domestic interest with global idealism. When decolonisation was a national struggle, and when almost every decolonised nation was tempted by the Soviet style of socialism, America had a different take on freedom. The newly liberated nation builders, invariably, looked towards Moscow for inspiration. Most of them, in the end, became Stalin clones. Hate Americana was a necessary alternative for the liberatorturned-tyrant.

Most of that variety found a place in the Non Aligned Movement, which, as the last word of the name suggests, was, and still is, more than a grouping of neutral nations.

It was a movement—and among its founders perhaps Nehru was the only true democrat—marked by an inherent sense of anti-Americanism. It was hardly nonaligned when it found Soviet communism more useful a model than the ‘imperial’ democracy of America. The romantic notion of Third Worldism—the fable of national wretchedness— wanted a bogeyman, and Washington was there waiting.

Anti-Americanism became street theatre of protest when Vietnam for Washington was a freedom project, a necessary intervention. In the twenty-first century, it would be repeated elsewhere. 9/11 changed the world, but it changed America more. A Manichean moral starkness came to define the worldview of George W Bush, whose image of a gun-slinging , Bibledriven cowboy president was a made-to-order villain in the updated narrative of anti-Americanism.

That character in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist who smiled as he watched the twin towers burning on his television was not a stranger. For those fed on the mythology of America as a source of all our sorrows, 10 open

it was a sight of secret pleasure—the shared perversion of anti-Americanism.

The necessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aggravated the ism, and Pox Americana was a common pun. The unloved America became the hated America, and for certain antiAmericanists in Delhi and elsewhere, Tora Bora, where the last troglodyte of jihad escaped the American missiles for a while, was the incantation of a freedom struggle. From the mean streets of the Middle East to the bylanes of Malabar, imperial America united the orphaned Saddamists and Osama’s fan clubs, and in a strange alliance of theology and ideology, it brought together Islamists, communists and other sundry debunkers of the so-called American moral duplicity.

In India, the ism is still alive, and most incongruously, it is kept alive by a section of our ruling and intellectual elite.

For the Establishment, it is the Nehruvian legacy of creating the Indian version of the socialist New Man, which itself was a failed project in history. As any other non-aligned nation, India too was pro-Soviet, and successive regimes nurtured the inherent anti-Americanism of the Establishment for which the Soviet Union was a natural ally. And for the intellectual in search of a context to play out his text of dissent, there was nothing more beguiling than the violations of American imperialism. It was Atal Bihari Vajpayee who finally put an end to the practice of anti-Americanism as a state religion, and still, even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it took India a decade to catch up with a world emerging from the wreckage of ideology.

Which does not mean that antiAmericanism is dead. Not here, though the Marxists, who were once its most virulent apostles in politics, are too steeped in their own irrelevance to keep it as a campaign.

That said, civil society has made anti-Americanism redundant in a world where Americanism is what we experience most, knowingly or not, in our political, economic and cultural life.

No other country has invaded the world with ideas of freedom as America did: the exceptionalism of America is what we call globalisation, like it or not. Anti-Americanism is kept alive by those who think the impulses and instincts of democracy, the autonomy of markets, movies and music, fast food and hi-tech, and moral vigilantism are bad for the world.

We are all American today, Le Monde said after 9/11. We still are—in our most casual ways of freedom.

Narendra Modi’s American journey should be the beginning of a historical correction. After all, the one who could be India’s Reagan should remain untouched by another ism abandoned by history. n 6 october 2014

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INNOCEAN-001/12

Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaches America at a time when the relationship between Washington and Delhi is at a low ebb. Beyond the spectacle starring a man who loves performance lies a harder challenge: Can the enchanter redeem an alliance gone astray?

By PR RAMESH

MERICA LITZ

modi in america

illustration by anirban ghosh

modi in america

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arendra Modi wants to be no less than

a rock star in the United States—and that too, a rock star of the likes of Elvis Presley, the King, and Michael Jackson, all of whom had performed at Madison Square Garden. Modi, used to larger crowds back home that easily outnumber those at any pop concert, would find the venue small enough to address his admirers in the US. But then that was the biggest spot available over this coming weekend which will see the Indian Prime Minister attend 50 meetings in the 100 hours he spends in the US. He is certainly a rock star politician, on a foreign stage, as his visit to Japan and other countries indicate. And for the first time in several decades, the visit by an Indian Prime Minister is the talk of the town in America, too. After all, Modi, with high popularity ratings back home and not saddled with a ghettoised Third Worldism, has taken to defining his country’s foreign policy in clear terms. Now, on his first visit to the country that had for long denied him a visa over protests staged by far-right Christian groups, Modi expects to reboot US-India relations that experts such as Ashley J Tellis, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have described as ‘in a rut’.

Modi, who will address the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Saturday before speaking before a huge gathering at Madison Square Garden, is expected to attend a private White House dinner on Monday but may not eat anything since he is observing a daily fast for the nine-day period of Navratri.

Since Modi’s election in May, the US has taken many steps to redress perceived slights of the past and to demonstrate the importance of India to the US, notes Washington DC-based lawyer and India expert Robert Metzger. The recent visits to India by US Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and

The US has work to do to earn India’s trust. Apart from the appointment of a new ambassador, the US needs to take measures to demonstrate to India that it is a reliable partner in defence Robert Metzger , Washington DC-based lawyer and India expert 14 open

Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker all signal that India will receive enhanced attention from Washington DC, he adds, saying that by most reports, both sides saw these visits as successful.

Metzger, of course, has a word of caution for the US if it wants to ensure that both the world’s largest and biggest democracies become natural allies. “The US has work to do to earn and keep India’s trust. Apart from the appointment of a new ambassador—long overdue—the Obama administration needs to take positive measures to demonstrate to India that the US is a reliable partner in defence and other forms of trade. Most important, the US needs to articulate a vision for the India-US relationship that is more than ‘transactional’ or opportunistic.

Dedicated efforts by US and Indian officials are needed to build a mutually beneficial relationship that strengthens India while respecting its autonomy,” Metzger says.

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t was India’s first BJP Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who described India and the USA as “natural allies” in early 2004, taking the premise of the thus far moribund relationship between the two great democracies to the next level. The Bush administration reciprocated by describing the US and India as “strategic allies”. That year, the two countries had announced the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership or NSSP, a defining period in Indo-US relations. It was a thaw six years after the nuclear tests at Pokhran conducted by the Vajpayee Government which apparently plunged Indo-US relations to a new nadir, that led to this agreement on sharing dual-use technologies in everything from defence to civil spheres to space.

Adding momentum to the increasing warmth between the two countries was the ‘special’ equation between President Bush and Prime Minister Vajpayee, as also India’s increasingly positive self image, a healthy economy and a heightening focus on trade and investment.

Anti-American sentiment was at its lowest ever in India, leading to observers guiltlessly batting in the mainstream—after close on 50 years—for India to find its own space in the post Cold War Pax Americana. Writing in Foreign Affairs at the time, Pratap Bhanu Mehta of the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi, pointed to a ‘profound change’ in India’s perception of national interest that the country had undergone in the closing decades of the 20th century: this involved prioritising economic interests, including trade and investment.

As a natural corollary, this transformation widened India’s engagement in multiple sectors with the world.

It also extricated India from the narrow lens of Pakistan relations, through which India had for long viewed the US. The US, too, stopped viewing India merely as a nuclear proliferation problem.

Despite the few vestigial problems that persisted, warm 6 october 2014

BHR/AP

1961

President Kennedy and Prime Minister Nehru walk on the White House lawns during their third round of talks on problems caused by the Cold War

personal vibes between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Bush added momentum to the Indo-US relationship that later resulted in the former’s push for the Indo-US Nuclear Deal, despite opposition within his own party. By the time the UPA won re-election in 2009, not long after Manmohan Singh risked losing a confidence vote in the Lok Sabha for the sake of that deal, Indo-US relations were on an even keel. India’s economy was doing well, and, while there were some hiccups over dour diplomats who mistreated their 6 october 2014

domestic helps and some sour Alphonso mangoes, nothing appeared amiss. That the nuclear agreement was complicated by India’s Nuclear Liability Bill that came later, of course, is another story.

By and large, the two countries were rubbing along well. The fact that India’s economy was in relatively good shape in spite of a global downturn that turned into what was described as the ‘Great Recession’ had more than little to do with this. Despite all the gloom cast by pundits after Barack Obama’s arrival at the White House, based open www.openthemagazine.com 15

AP

1971

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and President Richard Nixon in Washington DC in November that year. Gandhi and Nixon shared a troubled relationship, not least because of India’s conflict with Pakistan

mostly on the premise that Republican establishments in Washington had consistently proven to be ‘better’ for Indian interests, relations stayed on course. In November 2010, US President Obama told the Indian Parliament, “India is not simply an economy that is emerging, it is one that has already emerged.” Nothing, it appeared, could go wrong with the country’s growth story, the principal driver of bonhomie between the two democracies. But it did.

Just two years after its 2010 drafting, the Indo-US 16 open

strategic framework got stymied by global events and lack of stamina on Washington’s part to stay engaged.

The policy paralysis in India also resulted in the loss of support of one important component that ensured healthy relations—American business. For US corporations, doing business in India was turning rapidly into an exercise in frustration. By then, India’s economy was clearly in trouble. The fiscal deficit ballooned, inflation soared, food prices in particular skyrocketed and the boom met an abrupt end, resulting in a noticeable 6 october 2014

slack in Indo-US relations.

Through all of this, however, there persisted an unmistakable drone of caution in the background from select quarters urging India to push for a sustained, long-term and strategic convergence of worldviews, rather just a selective, short-term and tactical partnership of economic interests.

While the US was engaged in trying to extricate its own economy from a severe slowdown, however, it appeared to have little time for India anymore. Also, the Obama administration’s increasing engagement in West Asia and Africa began to push India to the margins of Washington’s concerns, even as corruption scandals rocked the Manmohan Singh Government, which had acquired a reputation for misgovernance and inertia. No short-term fix for the economy seemed plausible.

India’s stalled economy and the UPA II’s refusal to clean up its policy mess put off those who were championing India’s rise—so much so that the US Congress asked the US International Trade Commission (USITC) to investigate India’s trade practices, focusing on Intellectual Property Rights. The US pharma industry alleged that though the US had an open door to the India’s pharma industry, India was closing doors to them. Around 45 per cent of all US Food & Drug Administration (USFDA) approvals for generic drugs had been awarded to Indian companies. On the other hand, the US industry complained that India had put 45 drugs under compulsory licences, thereby denying IPR protection to US companies that had developed these drugs. The USITC team had wanted to visit India just before the Lok Sabha polls, but the UPA regime managed to thwart it.

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rime Minister Modi will have to address the US’s

unnatural fear of outsourcing, as a strong antiimmigration mood in America has held this relationship back in many ways. Sending Indian programmers and engineers to the US for short-term assignments helps both countries, but American restrictions on H-1B visas come in the way of increasing trade volumes.

Short-term Indian workers, by far the largest group of such workers in the US, have to make social security contributions, though they would never be eligible for its benefits since they actually reside in India. Over the years, the figures have been quite significant, and these sums are in effect net transfers from India to the US. This has to be stopped and reversed.

Michael Kugelman, a senior program associate for South and Southeast Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, US, is of the view that with a moderniser like Modi at India’s helm, both sides need to facilitate the ability of people and products to access each other’s markets. “There needs to be work done on the US side to make it easier for Indians to get work visas to come to the US. And there must be work done on the Indian side to provide a more conducive environment

6 october 2014

for US investors and American exports. If you don’t allow for the smoother flow of people and products, your trade won't truly take off,” he points out.

He hopes that the two sides will likely shy away from the irritants, in order not to slow the momentum that is allowing the relationship to regain traction. “But they would do well to tackle a variety of tensions—and especially the protectionist policies that both often impose on the other. The health of the US-India relationship will always hinge on the economic partnership, and if the trade-related tensions are not addressed, bilateral ties will always face constraints,” he says.

There have been a few irritants of late, among them India’s blocking of a World Trade Organisation (WTO) deal that took 12 years to negotiate. This July-end, New Delhi rejected a trade facilitation agreement (TFA) signed last December at Bali. Envisaged to cut red tape and relax customs rules, it would have been the largest multilateral trade agreement since the GATT Uruguay Round accord of 1994. The US was shocked at India’s stance, and globalisation buffs and the Western media vilified Modi for his alleged obstinacy. Some of them even described the move as India’s ‘WTO antics’ driven by domestic politics. Lisa Curtis and William T Wilson of The Heritage Foundation questioned Modi’s businessfriendly image, asking why he, a leader ‘who was elected

The US is consumed by managing disorder in Eurasia, the Middle East and East Asia.

India is marginal to resolving these crises, though it could be more significant if it chose to ashley j tellis, Senior associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

in an electoral landslide on a platform promising economic reform’ had to pull the plug.

From a national perspective, Modi was not wrong in insisting that the WTO alter its rules to allow countries such as India to expand food subsidies for the poor. If India had signed the TFA, it would have violated WTO obligations that say the value of subsidies India gives its farmers on agricultural products must be limited to 10 per cent of the total value of a product’s output at its market price. Columbia University Professor Arvind Panagariya argues that Modi’s problem with such an accord was that the WTO-mandated method of making those calculations is so flawed that India’s subsidy bill open www.openthemagazine.com 17

modi in america

2000

President Clinton and first lady Hillary WITH Prime Minister Vajpayee during a State Dinner at the White House during which the President toasted a renewed Indo-US friendship before a gathering of almost 700 guests

would end up violating the trade body’s guidelines.

Besides, agriculture is India’s mainstay and employs more than half of the country’s workforce.

On the political front, India is on the periphery of America’s focal zone. According to Tellis, ‘The US is consumed by managing disorder in Eurasia, the Middle East, and East Asia. India is marginal to resolving these crises, even though it could be far more significant if it chose to. On issues closer to home—Pakistan and Afghanistan—India is rightly fearful about US policies, 18 open

and on critical initiatives farther afield—the US rebalance to Asia—India is understandably ambivalent.

Further complicating matters, bilateral relations have deteriorated in recent years because of poor policy choices in India on nuclear liability, taxation, and trade.’ India’s economic downturn and America’s pursuit of narrow ‘sectoral interests’ under Obama, instead of a broader strategic alliance, have only worsened the state of affairs.

President Obama himself is not politically strong 6 october 2014

It was India’s first BJP Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who described India and the US as “natural allies” in early 2004, taking the premise of the relationship between the two great democracies forward

William J. Clinton Presdential Library/AP

enough at this juncture to ink a long-term deal of strategic engagement with India. Not only is his popularity at its lowest ebb, but a presidential election is just two years away. Obama is grappling with a Congress dominated by Republicans and had to face stiff criticism even over funds for fighting the Islamic State (IS).

For his part, Prime Minister Modi’s strategy is focused on surmounting the negatives and leveraging the positives of Indo-US relations, senior government officials say. “He takes lessons from the past; so the 6 october 2014

engagement will be multi-pronged—on the economic side with global corporate CEOs, mainly for investment, and on the strategic side with the US Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense,” says a BJP minister. “For mass communication of the Modi regime’s vision for India, [he will address] the Indian diaspora. Even if there is intense business interest in investment here, it is held back by an apolitical lack of interest in India. That was aggravated during the terminal inertia that affected policy implementation in the latter part of the Manmohan Singh regime. Without a decisive political leadership that signals its determination to come up with conducive policies and implement them smoothly, political interest in the US for India had waned. That story is likely to change now, given the decisive mandate handed to PM Modi. When he meets policymakers in the US, the Prime Minister’s priority will be to give them a clear idea of what plans he has for India in the next five years, and where it is headed.”

That ‘clear idea’ of Modi’s roadmap for economic rejuvenation and creation of an investment-friendly climate would also be spelt out by him to a select group of top American business honchos, including CEOs of top Fortune 500 companies such as Google, Boeing, MasterCard, Pepsi, IBM, the Cargill Group, Citigroup, Merck, Warburg Pincus, the Carlyle Group and Hospira, according to the Ministry of External Affairs. Six of the 17 heads of large global corporations are scheduled to meet Modi one-on-one.

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o how big, really, is Modi’s visit to the US? It is very high on optics, at any rate. “The bigger picture has to guide us and the endgame has to guide us,” Kerry said of Indo-US relations at the Center for American Progress.

Kerry’s recent visit to India was hailed as the beginning of a ‘new and ambitious course’ in Washington’s view of what it regards as an ‘emerging powerhouse open www.openthemagazine.com 19

modi in america Ken Cedeno/Corbis

2005

President George W Bush greets Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the White House’s North Portico.

The meeting saw a dramatic policy shift, with the US promising India full cooperation in developing its civilian nuclear programme

regionally’. Kerry and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker later maintained—somewhat rhetorically—in an article that the Indo-US relationship is on the ‘cusp of a historic transformation’. But years after the NSSP was announced, critics say that Kerry’s idea of what it took to be a full partner looked more like a shopping list for the US. And Modi, says the BJP minister, will not compromise India’s interest and concerns.

A warm relationship between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Bush saw the former push for the Indo-US Nuclear Deal 20 open

The rock star event is the public address in Hindi at the historic Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, organised at the initiative of Americans of Indian origin. Over the decades, this 20,000-seat venue has hosted sold-out concerts by several cultural icons, including Aretha Franklin and Janis Joplin, Elton John, India’s own Freddie ‘Balsara’ Mercury of Queen, Jim Morrison, Billy Joel and more recently, Justin Bieber and Linkin Park. It was here that Marilyn Monroe sang a Happy Birthday number for President John F Kennedy.

In other words, the Indian rock star has a tradition to live up to. For the 3.2 million strong Indian diaspora, that will be a proud moment of nationalism played out by one of the country’s most popular politicians ever.

The money collected from the gala dinner’s tickets will go to a chartity. To keep up the glam quotient, the show will have former Miss America Nina Davuluri as its compere. The billboards and massive cutouts will keep those familiar Modi masks company. All said, the Prime Minister is certain to be at home in a country that celebrates alpha performers. n 6 october 2014

a letter to the Prime Minister modi in america

MAKE A JOKE, AND DON’T FORGET TO CHUCKLE From: Bennett Voyles Subj: Yo, PriMo! that in light of your upcoming visit to the US, we should try to reacquaint you with American manners, which as you may remember from your last visit generally range from the informal to the disrespectful. You’ll find even quite senior people are frequently addressed by first names or nicknames. Just ask Hillary.

On the bright side, this lack of concern for propriety does have its benefits. For instance, the same officials who wouldn’t give you a visa for nearly a decade because they considered you a genocidal monster concluded after your election this spring that you’re actually a statesman of great ability and a man of immense charm.

You will undoubtedly note this flexibility during your meeting with the former Secretary of State. Whatever her qualms while in office, she told NDTV earlier this year that, “it’s in the past”, implying that it’s not her department in any case, and suggested he raise any “lingering” concerns about the matter with President Obama.

back home. We think your stump speech will do nicely.

The second important engagement is your sold-out speech to 18,000 fans at Madison Square Garden—an intimate setting by Indian standards but one that promises to be a major media event in the US. The Garden, like so many things in America, is not quite what it seems: It is nowhere near Madison Square.

Nor is it a garden. Nor is it square. In fact, it’s a big round building where they play basketball games and hockey, and occasionally box, perhaps best known for being what the singer Billy Joel has called “the iconic, holy temple of Rock and Roll for most touring acts”.

Elvis Presley played the Garden. So did Michael Jackson. ueslei marcelino/reuters

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lease excuse the familiarity, sir – we thought

Four days, three parties

With 50 events in 100 hours, most of this trip is likely to be a blur, but three events are actually likely to leave an impression.

The first is your appearance at the United Nations.

Don’t worry too much about this one. It’s the podium that matters. It’s not true that the delegates are CGI projections, like the people in video games, but as you’ll be speaking in Hindi, we can hand out a text for the reporters and you can say anything you like for the folks 6 october 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 21

modi in america

Muhammad Ali fought there. But filling 18,000 seats when you can’t sing, moonwalk, or throw a strong right jab is an accomplishment. No American politician could do it right now unless the promoter gave away rotten vegetables at the door.

The warm-up acts that precede you will include Nina Davuluri, Miss America of 2014, and the first Miss America of Indian descent, singers Anjali Ranadive and Kavita Subramaniam, violinist L Subramaniam, a laser light show, a collection of holograms of historic Indian luminaries, and folk dancing.

The other stars of the evening will undoubtedly be the crowd. Indian Americans have done fantastically well, by and large. Whatever caste their families belonged to back home, chances are good they’re at the top of the heap in the USA: household NRI income is $65,000 a year, over 30 per cent more than the $49,000 the average American family takes home, according to a 2012 report by the Pew Research Center. And that may be a low-ball figure: some researchers estimate that Mr and Mrs Desi actually bring home $100,000.

One measure of their growing influence is that although Indian culture is not as integrated into the American scene as it is in the British, it’s getting there. Ms Davuluri’s Bollywood-style dance routine probably couldn’t earn her a place on a Mumbai soundstage, but its novelty made it a hit in the pageant; Indian faces are now

brooks kraft/corbis

A strange aspect of the Obama case is that unlike most pop stars who have fallen off the charts, he doesn’t seem to be anxiously plotting a comeback

common on TV and in the board room; and Indian food is rapidly becoming as American as pizza, tacos, and sushi.

But rest assured that the focus, chief, will be on you. The reporters here are already describing you as a rock star, and noting that the last politician who could pack in crowds like this—in a foreign country and without soldiers at their back—was Barack Obama on his first European tour.

Six years ago, President Obama could pack stadiums all over the world, adored by crowds who admired his exceptional skill in oratory and at not being George W Bush. His books were bestsellers, and as for not being George W Bush, you’ll recall that he even won a Nobel Peace Prize for that accomplishment.

That was then. US politics are unusually dysfunctional right now: the 2011-2012 Congress passed only 110 substantive bills—the lowest number in a century.

Between the lack of Congressional popularity and lack of Obama’s personal popularity, the government seems to be going nowhere fast.

Our only advice for your party is: enjoy it. This kind of honeymoon tends not to last. Expectations were pitched as high for President Obama at his first inauguration six years ago as yours are now, and that kind of support tends to burn quickly, like the first stage of a rocket— immensely powerful, but good for just the first few minutes, and you had better have reached orbit before it sputters out.

The Obama you’ll meet on 29 and 30 September is a much sadder character than the promising young senator of six years ago. His approval rates are middling, in the upper 30s and lower 40s, but Congress is so resistant to them that most of his proposals go nowhere these days.

Nor does he inspire the crowds the way he used to: at a nuclear security summit in The Hague last March, only one person in the audience clapped when he left the podium. He used to say that he was a blank screen on which people projected their hopes. These days, however, they mostly see a blank screen.

One strange aspect of the Obama case is that unlike most pop stars who have fallen off the charts, he doesn’t seem to be anxiously plotting a comeback. Instead, he looks more like a prisoner who has two years to serve. In the Hague video, he looks positively ashen, and mumbles his way through remarks to which neither he nor his audience seemed to be listening.

As you will see when you visit him, a powerful office takes its toll, especially if you’re the nominal leader of a rowdy country that is not especially interested in being led.

Besides living with constant disappointment and rejection, you’re also more or less living under lock and key, and that does things to you. Norman Mailer argued that Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was more or less caused by the pressure of living in a place where people check up on you every 15 minutes. “And if you feel you’re in prison, you try to do something about it. Most 6 october 2014

walter carone/paris match/getty images

Marilyn Monroe performs at Madison Square Garden in 1955

people naturally, viscerally, react to being in prison. And the form it takes almost always is to break the rules,” Mailer speculated.

Clinton had Monica. Kennedy had a harem. Nixon had his paranoia and his drinking problem. For Obama, a disciplined, natural introvert, the rebellion may have taken a different form. Where some might throw themselves further into the permanent campaign, as Clinton did when he wasn’t womanising, or hide away in the country, as George W liked to do—he spent more than 400 days of his presidency on his ranch in Texas—Obama has drifted off.

In his profile of Obama in Vanity Fair, the writer Michael Lewis asked him what he would do if he had a day where he could do whatever he wanted, and he gave a long answer describing a drive to a beach in Hawaii and a long swim, all by himself, that sounds a little like Hemingway in the tropics: ‘And you spend an hour out there. And if you’ve had a good day you’ve caught six or seven good waves and six or seven not so good waves. And you go back to your car.

With a soda or a can of juice. And you sit. And you can watch the sun go down…’

During your private dinner with the President, we suggest you mention this, and ask him if he would like a chance to have a few days like that, to give himself time to loaf or think deep thoughts about the future of the country. Then you offer the following talking points: India already runs the back office of many American corporations. They’re doing a fantastic job, making companies much more efficient and allowing them to focus on their core competencies. l A number of Indian-Americans have already demonstrated great administrative ability as heads of corporations, hospitals, and universities. l

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Filling 18,000 seats when you can’t sing, moonwalk, or throw a strong right jab is an accomplishment. No American politician could do it right now You (PM) love politics, and you’re good at it. You’re highly experienced too: you brought growth to Gujarat, which has roughly the population of France. l So why not let Modi Consulting Services handle all this messy political business you don’t like? We have the capacity: the US is only 50 per cent larger than Uttar Pradesh; it’s practically just one more province for MCS. l Ask for a test assignment. Make a joke about knowing how to handle Congress. (Don’t forget to chuckle, the way we’ve been practising.)

Of course, this will be coming at the end of a long day and might not actually register with Mr Obama, who may be looking out the window toward the Washington Monument, thinking about those big blue waves.

If that happens, just call us on your mobile on your way back to the hotel and give us your pitch. Someone will be sure to take it all down, and this time, the proposal is likely to reach a decision-maker. n l

Bennett Voyles is a Paris-based observer of global trends.He was formerly with The Economist Intelligence Unit open www.openthemagazine.com 23

brand analysis

anirban ghosh

modi in america

Our Man Goes to America

Americans love the language of the visual and the Prime Minister has a chance to mount another charm offensive, writes suhel seth

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o Narendra Modi is all set to visit the United States

which, for a decade, refused him a visa. This was a bit rich coming from a country that revels in being the ‘land of the free’ where justice is fair. Was Modi ever convicted? No. Was he ever indicted by any court in India?

No. And yet the United States refused him a visa: so much for the principles of democracy and justice.

The United States is a recent civilisation. Recent enough to get excited about minor time milestones like a hundred years and so on. It is also a country that has been built by migrants who show exemplary zeal in embracing Americanism the moment they get citizenship. Neither an Indian nor an Englishman will be as loud of his nationalism as the average American is. But that is because we don’t need our nationality to define us. Our civilisation does the job. With America it is different. It needs the trappings of nationalism to keep the flock together. It needs every global pulpit to express its outrage over the violation of human rights and yet it was only recently that Martin Luther King exhorted a nation to sit at the table of brotherhood. America is also about hope, and nations 24 open

that come together on this platform often confuse hope with greed. America has always been proud of its capitalism and free market sprit, and yet even to this day several industries are unfairly skewed to favour American industry—agriculture being one such. I was amused to see the spat between Apple and Samsung over intellectual property rights, and yet for years the average American has been lied to about the origins of Basmati rice, which ostensibly comes from California and Texas: a far stretch from the Indo-Gangetic plains. Then there is the issue of human rights itself and the simmering discontent that so often rears its ugly head as it did not so long ago in St Louis.

Hypocrisy has been an enduring birthmark of the United States of America. It has never been ‘what’s good for the world maybe also good for the United States’ but instead ‘what’s good for America must be good for the world’. Hypocrisy is a virtue easy to adopt when commerce drives the agenda, as it sadly does in today’s times. So one can’t blame the US for taking this hegemony to rare heights; but while the United States is a great preacher, it is a poor listener. It displays an aversion to the confession 6 october 2014

box. Equally, the dysfunctionality of basic society in America cannot be discounted. A melting pot of so many cultures is bound to have its own friction and we see it in the manner in which politics is run in the US. Then there is the overhang of religion and perhaps excessive intolerance. The contempt which innocent Sikhs suffered post 9/11 also points to another facet of America: there is no sense of either global history or empathy for cultures other than their own, which is not something any superpower should be proud of. The great moralist that the United States wishes to be often pales in front of other frustrated global leaders such as Vladimir Putin who flex their muscles.

Might is often hated by those who don’t possess it. They invent authority where none exists and want the mighty to take a stand that may be unpalatable for that nation but is seen as the right thing to do. America had no proof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and yet no official of any American administration will ever be tried for several thousand Iraqis who lost their lives for no fault of theirs. Contrast that to the proceedings against war criminals at The Hague and you will spot an enduring paradox.

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here are several things wrong with America, as I am sure there are with India and other nations too.

But then there are several things about the US which deserve applause. America is no longer a society that denies people an opportunity because of their colour and race.

In India, sending high-profile people to prison has been a recent phenomenon, but what I love about America is that by and large the justice system is fair and will punish you for a crime no matter who you are.

You can never imagine an Indian Prime Minister being interrogated by a Special Prosecutor as Bill Clinton was

by Ken Starr. If Rajat Gupta had been in India, I doubt if he’d have gone to jail for insider trading.

In a perverse way, greed has helped shape and define America’s global success as an economic powerhouse.

The rich in America are feted, but then they also give back in great measure. Unlike our country. I have, over the years, been a passionate believer in what America has done for liberalism, through free speech and an outstanding higher education system which has the ability to draw the best and brightest from across the world. And then by creating an environment where they bloom. There are more migrant Americans who have won the Nobel rather than homegrown Americans. If there is one thing that the United States of today can guarantee every man, woman and child, it is equal opportunity. You can be miserably poor, but you will never go without an education. Even though successive American Presidents have fumbled with universal healthcare, no one who is ill or has met with an accident will have hospital doors close on him. The basis of a just society is making it convenient for people to do well and not act as a welfare state that encourages patronage.

I must have visited the United States over three hundred

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times in my 51 years on this planet, and what never ceases to amaze me is the way the average American thinks. There is a can-do attitude which is steeped in innovation and daring. There is hardly any room for conservative thinking or too much caution. I once asked Arun Sarin, the very successful Indian-born CEO of Vodafone what he thought of the United States, and he told me it was a land that allowed the mind to be unfettered and where success for migrants largely depended on where they landed in the US because it was inextricably linked to the kind of education you could then avail of.

There must be a reason why the United States is home to a Google or an Apple or even a Microsoft. Land and climate are superficial factors: what is critical is the kind of place you really want to be. Where you encourage outof-the-box thinking and allow people to do crazy things: a society that permits insanity of the intellectual kind will always score higher than the rest. What is equally impressive about the United States is their marketing prowess. From painting a former ally like Bin Laden as the world’s most evil prospect, to merchandising the American elections and creating a global market for films made in English, Americans inject marketing into everything because marketing is essentially about inventing desire. Which is why few people know that Häagen-Dazs is not a European brand but an American one, or, for that matter, that yoga was not begun in America but in India.

In many ways, the Modi visit will be of significance to both Modi and America. For the first time, Americans will meet a Prime Minister of India who fought the General Election in a highly presidential style. They will also meet a man who is not in awe of the US but knows it makes for a fine partnership. On his part, Modi will be like a child in a candy-store when he sees the manner in which nationalism is marketed within the United States. Where there are many who will fight over every trivial issue, but when it comes to the American Cause, there is no partisanship.

Perhaps Modi will be at home in a country that has often made the medium more inventive than the message, and in that lies future hope.

My advice to Modi will be: this is a new United States that you are seeing. It may still be the dominant global economy, but is not the great moral authority it was under Franklin Roosevelt. It also has a president who like Modi was and remains a great orator, but when speeches are over, real work is demanded of leaders by those who they govern.

Finally, Modi must stay on a charm offensive. Americans are always good on the optics. They read through visuals.

For them, imagery is what fuels their passion and their insights. Modi would do well to speak Mahatma Gandhi’s idiom but to see America through Google Glasses. n Suhel Seth is Managing Partner of Counselage India and can be reached at Suhel@counselage.com open www.openthemagazine.com 25

open essay

BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN

jeff j mitchell/getty images

scotch wisdom Why the Scottish vote against independence is good for British Indians

I

ndia, by and large, brooks no

discussion of ‘self-determination’ for Kashmiris, Mizos, Nagas, and others who aren’t entirely happy with their lot.

Frozen non-negotiably in their status as citizens of the Republic of India, these malcontents have been put firmly in their place by New Delhi, which hasn’t always been gentle in its handling of Tunku their political demands.

Varadarajan So it came as no surprise that Indians is the Virginia would regard the Scottish referendum Hobbs Carpenter in the United Kingdom with bewilderment. How could a country submit itself Fellow in voluntarily to potential dismemberJournalism at the ment? India watched, and shuddered, Hoover Institution even as its more sophisticated citizens at Stanford pleaded guilty to a quiet envy of Britain’s University. He is peaceful exercise in national redefiniworking on a book tion. And as Scotland declined the offer on the political of independence, India breathed a sigh of legacy of the Shah relief. It is an axiom of Indian politics Bano case , The that separatists are Bad Guys.

Divorce That Mighty relieved, too, I imagine, were Rocked India the Indians who have made Britain their home, immigrants and their children (and grandchildren) who now number 1.4 million people, the largest non-indigenous ethnic group on the British Isles.

For them, a vote for Scottish independence would have been a grievous blow.

Why do I say that? My thesis is that after the nearly seven decades since they first began to flock to Britain, British Indians are now substantially integrated, both in the perception of the host community as well as in their own minds. They regard themselves—and are regarded—as British. Britishness is an idea embedded in their way of life. They may fail the Tebbit Test, formulated by Norman Tebbit, a member of Maggie Thatcher’s cabinet, which demanded that an immigrant cheer for England at cricket and not for his country of origin. But failing that test is, in fact, an ironic mark of Britishness. Tebbit became a figure of ridicule for it, among English and immigrant Britons alike.

British Indians have worked mightily to cement their Britishness. They have integrated extraordinarily well into mainstream British life. In this respect, they have mirrored the integration in the early and mid twentieth century of Jews, who have become all but invisible except sometimes by name, or by stereotypical association with a particular walk of life. While retaining a sense of cultural difference seems to be important to young people of Indian origin, this does not turn into apartness. Indians are active participants in all shades of political and cultural discourse, and intermarriage with Whites and others—what anthropologists would call exogamy—is common.

Any unravelling of the United Kingdom in a referendum could have put these British Indians in a position where they would have

had to renegotiate the terms of their Britishness. They would have had to do so in a country where that idea had a diminished potency, a country suddenly—and nakedly—more English than British. The advantage of a British identity is that it is conceptual at root, not ethnic. It is much harder for the descendant of grandparents from Gujarat to argue that she is English. Being able to assert Britishness, on the other hand, is a function of assimilation.

People of Indian origin in the UK are not English, Scottish, or Welsh. Their primary civic identity is British. The UK, like the US, is a state that doesn’t rest on bloodlines. It requires no more than loyalty to a set of values: in the UK, these would be the rule of law, fair play, and the English language. However hard it may be for immigrants to integrate and overcome prejudice, the ‘idea’ of Britain remains a strong one (and can offer great solace, however badly English, Welsh and Scottish individuals may behave). So any threat to Britishness—as was posed by the Scottish referendum—would make life difficult for the Indo-British.

Note, here, that I focus on British Indians, not British ‘Asians’ in general. British Indians are much better integrated, more in harmony with the idea of Britain, than British Pakistanis or Bangladeshis. This is so for several reasons.

First, a general observation: Britain is, quite simply, a lot less racist than it used to be, especially among younger generations who have been brought up in a flamboyantly multi-ethnic country. This has made it easier for Indians (as well as everyone else) to feel at home in the UK. But there are particular observations, too: British Indians are demonstrably keener to integrate than are British Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, who feel much less comfortable adopting a Western way of life. Perhaps this is because Indian immigrants were better educated and less rural in the first place. More likely, however, it is because the predominant religions among British Indians—Hinduism and Sikhism—do not hinder assimilation.

The main problems with integration among immigrants from the Indian Subcontinent have been with Muslims, especially post-9/11. Indigenous Britons feel more ill at ease with Muslims (especially the visible markers of separation, such as their dress, or with the cultural vigilantes in some Muslim neighbourhoods). And Muslims are unusual among immigrants, in that their second or third generations are often as hostile to their host country—sometimes even more so— than their parents. As a result, there is much less talk of ‘British Asians’ than there used to be: It makes no sense to lump together integrated Hindu or Sikh Indians with alienated Muslim Pakistanis or Bangladeshis. Economically, too, the groups are poles apart, with British Indians among the wealthiest in Britain in terms of household income. Pakistanis and, in particular, Bangladeshis, are startlingly poorer.

British Indians have cause, for the moment, to celebrate the UK’s survival, and with it the survival of their socio-political status, dearly won. These immigrants have invigorated Britishness, and have come to have a powerful stake in it—even as many nationalist Scots, incurably recalcitrant, seek to fritter it away . n

Any unravelling of the UK in a referendum could have forced British Indians to renegotiate the terms of their Britishness

6 october 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 27

sachin kadvekar/fotocorp

maharashtra

Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray

end of a bad ma I

t seemed scripted like a Bollywood story, except the end.

After all the emotion and drama of the tiff, there was no making up. Instead, India watched what is perhaps the biggest break-up of the coalition era. The Shiv Sena and BJP, a 25-year-old partnership, parted ways on 25 September, less than a month before Maharashtra goes to the polls.

28 open

The first hint of it came in the morning when BJP President Amit Shah cancelled his Mumbai trip for the day. Negotiators of the two parties were unable to reach a compromise even after several rounds of talks. As Plan B, both had already drawn up full lists of candidates for all 288 Assembly seats in the state. Meanwhile, in the opposing camp, the Congress alliance with the Nationalist Congress

Party (NCP) also looks shaky after 15 years of togetherness. The collapse of the saffron alliance and a possible CongressNCP break-up could set the stage for a four-cornered election in the state.

The BJP’s decision appears to be prompted by its assessment that the post Bal Thackeray Shiv Sena does not have the requisite political appeal to consolidate and draw Hindu votes. Also, the 6 october 2014

satish bate/hindustan times/getty images

BJP president Amit Shah with Maharashtra state unit president Devendra Fadnavis (2 L), Eknath Khadse (L), Vinod Tawde (2 R) and Rajiv Pratap Rudy (R) at a meeting with the party’s Maharashtra State Core Committee members on 4 September in Mumbai

rriage ‘Modi factor’ that played a critical role in the combine’s Lok Sabha landslide in the state, according to the party, will keep the party in good stead this October. With Modi going strong with a majority government at the Centre, the party believes it is time to go solo in the states as well.

The only trouble for the BJP at the Centre could be in the Rajya Sabha, where the NDA Government is too weak to push 6 october 2014

The uneasy alliance of BJP and Shiv Sena comes to an inglorious finale. There is nothing much to cheer about in the Congress-NCP camp either

By Kumar Anshuman and haima deshpande

key pieces of legislation. The NDA has only 59 MPs in the 245-seat Upper House, and without the Sena, which has three seats, it will be left with only 56. However, given its right-wing orientation, the Sena could find it hard to side with the UPA. For the Sena, it is a big gamble. After the party’s founder Bal Thackeray passed away in November 2012, his successor and son Uddhav Thackeray’s political

acumen and charisma has been questioned by many—and his cousin Raj Thackeray even broke away with a party faction to set up the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, splitting the Sena’s ‘Marathi manoos’ (sons of the soil) constituency. The breakup of the alliance could hurt the Sena far more than the BJP, which has Modi’s appeal to bank on.

There was always a basic difference open www.openthemagazine.com 29

between the BJP’s alliance with the Sena and the Congress’ with the NCP. The BJP believed that if it won the Assembly polls due in October with its partner, it would have been on account of its own—and mainly Modi’s—popularity. In contrast, the Congress fears that if it loses alongwith the NCP, it would be the fault of its partner’s unpopularity.

The BJP-Sena split, according to some observers of Maharashtra politics, has the markings of a clash of sub-cultural identities as well. It is no secret that the Uddhav Thackeray-led Sena, which banks on Marathi sentiment, has been wary of a Gujarati dominated BJP, with Modi and Shah now at the helm of party affairs. It was the emphatic win in the General Election this summer that gave the BJP the confidence to insist that old

the BJP lost only nine of its previous 65 seats. Since then, the alliance had been unable to regain power in the state. And now that the BJP was on a high, it saw no reason to let the Sena lead the effort.

In the two Assembly elections held after 1999, the Sena had shown little ability to enhance its performance. In 2004, for example, the Sena was reduced to 62 from 69 seats, while the BJP fell from 56 to 54. In 2009, the BJP clearly outperformed the Sena. This, despite contesting fewer seats as part of the pact. The national saffron party won 46 seats of the 119 seats it contested, while the Sena won only 44 seats of 169. Effectively, the BJP has had a stronger voice in the Assembly for the past five years. “The Maharashtra BJP’s strike rate was 60 per cent in 2009 while the Sena’s strike rate was 40 per cent,” says senior satish bate/hindustan times/getty images

Shiv Sena spokesman Sanjay Raut and BJP leader Vinod Tawde address the press on 23 September

equations needed revision. Accordingly, it had been flexing its muscle all through the seat-sharing talks, dropping broad hints that it now saw itself as the senior party in the alliance, and thus a claimant to chief ministership.

While Bal Thackeray was alive, the Sena had always played the lead role in Maharashtra; in fact, some in the BJP even saw his Hindutva rhetoric, which he blended with Marathi identity politics, as an inspiration. In the mid-1990s, the Sena-BJP won the state Assembly. But the alliance lost in the state polls of 1999. The Sena’s tally fell from 150 to 60 seats, while 30 open

BJP state leader Eknath Khadse.

The recent Lok Sabha election also underlined the BJP’s rising clout in the state.

Of the 24 seats it contested as part of the alliance, it won 23, losing only one. The Sena won 18 seats, but some of its MPs admit off the record that it was more on account of Modi’s charisma than their own party chief’s.

It had been clear for many months that the BJP was keen on playing the Big Brother role that it did at the Centre.

Several state leaders had been telling party president Amit Shah that the BJP would do well going it alone. “[It] is no se-

cret that we were ready with our list of candidates,” says Devendra Fadnavis, state BJP president. That’s why when Thackeray first made an offer of 119 seats to the BJP, it was rejected outright by party leaders. This happened despite a meeting between Shah and Thackeray on 4 September in Mumbai. The BJP president was in Mumbai for party work and the Sena chief invited him over for dinner.

Both the leaders later said that their differences would be sorted out.

But on 16 September, after the bypoll results of 33 Assembly constituencies in various states across India saw the BJP suffer some reverses, Sena leaders began to question the ‘Modi magic’. The BJP and its allies won only 13 of those seats. On 19 September, the leaders of both parties met again, but the deadlock continued.

BJP General Secretary Om Mathur, Rajiv Pratap Rudy and senior state leader Khadse met Sena leaders Anil Desai, Subhash Desai and Aditya Thackeray.

The Sena’s claim to a major share of seats was that 18 of them from its quota would be earmarked for other alliance members such as the Shetkari Sanghatana, Rashtriya Samaj Paksha and Republican Party of India. But the BJP was adamant on contesting at least 130 seats, which in any case was 20 seats less than the figure first put out. If the Sena declined the offer, the BJP made it clear, it was ready to quit the alliance.

In the meantime, the BJP also opened channels of communication with other party leaders such as Raju Shetti of the Shetkari Sanghatana and Ramdas Athawale of the RPI. Rudy was trying to bring these leaders on board in case ties snapped with the Sena. The party also got messages from some Sena leaders looking to switch over in the event of a break up.

Overall, it spelt confidence for the BJP. And once the Sena upped the ante in an attempt to woo the same parties, the BJP decided to call the alliance off .

A

cross in the other camp, a spat over the number of seats to be contested remains unresolved at this juncture between the Congress and NCP. The formula was the same. In the current Lok Sabha, there are four NCP MPs as against only two of the Congress from Maharashtra. Just after the Lok Sabha 6 october 2014

arko datta/reuters

Sonia Gandhi has a word with Sharad Pawar during an election rally at Sakoli village, Maharashtra, in 2009

results, Congress President Sonia Gandhi had met Sharad Pawar and requested him to take charge of the state. Sources confirm that the offer was declined by Pawar, pleading poor health. But that incident gave NCP leaders something to talk about. They argued that despite having a higher number of seats in the Assembly in 2004, they let the CM’s post be taken by the Congress. The NCP had 71 MLAs while the Congress had 69.

The gap not only widened, but the equation between the two flipped in the 2009 polls. The Congress won 82 seats while NCP got 62.

The prospects of re-election, both have realised, are rather poor this year.

The last five years of Congress-NCP rule in the state has seen such a multitude of controversies and scams that even some senior leaders have little hope of a comeback. “If we lose the elections, we will be paying the price for all the misdeeds of NCP ministers and leaders,” says a former Congress MP from the state. “They have completely ruined our chances.”

The Congress and NCP have found it difficult to defend their coalition government in a state which seems to stay in the 6 october 2014

The NCP’s demand of 144 seats and chief ministership for half the term is something the Congress has found difficult to accept news for all the wrong reasons. The relationship between Sharad Pawar and the Congress leadership has always been fraught with tension. After Sonia Gandhi returned from her annual check-up in the US, there was speculation that Pawar would be called upon for a meeting. They were supposed to meet on 20 September, but the meeting didn’t take place. Pawar was in Nagpur on that day.

The seat-sharing talks between the two parties have been a headache for both sides, given the poor state of relations.

The NCP’s demand of 144 seats and chief ministership for half the term is something the Congress has found difficult to accept. As a result, even though discussions are still underway, on 24 September the Congress released a list of 118 candidates—a move that has put the NCP off.

Apart from that, internally, the Central Election Committee of the Congress had already finalised candidates for all 288 Assembly seats in Maharashtra. “With just one day left for filing nominations, there is no time left to make an alliance with NCP,” says Congress state president Manikrao Thakre. “It is for them to decide.” Another leader confirms to Open that there is little left for the alliance to work. With the saffron alliance over, the fear of fighting a joint opposition force is that much less as well.

With a state as politically significant as Maharashtra, perhaps such pre-poll drama was inevitable. For the BJP, power in Mumbai looks eminently achievable.

For the Congress, it is mostly about salvaging what it can of its political stature after its Lok Sabha battering. For Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar, it may be back to the Marathi manoos. n open www.openthemagazine.com 31

Moment open/Getty Images

SUPER FOOD

Humble Jack Goes Cool The underutilised and unappreciated jackfruit is on its way to become a global star BY GUNJEET SRA

E Jackfruit is an extremely versatile and nutritious fruit that is undervalued here but has a potentially big market in Europe and America that is just starting to shape up” Dr KN Gowda

Former vice-Chancellor, University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore

arlier this year, the World

Bank and United Nations warned that rising temperatures and erratic rainfall had reduced yields of wheat and corn and could lead to food wars within the decade. Around the world, since, eyes have been turning to the jackfruit to save the day. High on nutrition, cheaper than wheat and corn, and relatively easy to grow in arid climates, it has been held up by researchers as an alternative food of the future. “I think it could play a much more important role in diets than it currently does, and [become] a staple,” declared Dr Nyree Zerega, a plant researcher at the Chicago Botanic Garden who has studied the fruit in her home country Bangladesh. According to her, the fruit not only boasts of high nutritional value, it is also very versatile—apart from the fruit itself, both raw and mature, its seeds are also edible. So too is the timber of the jackfruit tree.

You have probably seen the jackfruit— giant coarse bulbs with a thick musky smell hanging unapologetically from tree trunks across India. Native to the Subcontinent, it is the world’s largest fruit and is grown commercially chiefly in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, but can be found throughout the country.

Despite being described as a super food, 75 per cent of India’s produce is wasted, according to estimates. For a fruit that has

higher amounts of Vitamin C and B-complex than common fruits such as the apple, banana and orange, that is unfortunate. At just 95 calories in half a cup, it is good for dieters as well. A 2006 study published in The African Journal of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicines says eating jackfruit leaves one’s blood sugar levels lower and that the fruit’s latex has antimicrobial properties. Studies published in the European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences and several other reports suggest the fruit’s wine is rich in antioxidants.

Jackfruit has none of the problems that other substitute foods have, and can thus be used as a healthy addition to one’s diet. Says Shikha Vohra, a Delhi-based dietician, “For example, when you are eating soy instead of meat or even nutri nuggets, you know that you’re replacing your preferred choice with a healthier option. The fruit itself is so delicious that you will not mind eating it in any form. I personally recommend it to anybody looking to lose weight.”

Dr KN Gowda, former vice-chancellor of the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, is of the view that if used properly, the fruit can solve the hunger problem in the country. “It is an extremely versatile and nutritious fruit that is undervalued here but has a potentially big market in Europe and America that is just starting to shape up.” open www.openthemagazine.com 35

He is not the only one who is vouching for it. In his book, Indian Food: A Historical Companion, KT Acharya explains that the jackfruit’s ancient name, ‘panasa’, can be traced to a pre-Sanskrit language, Munda.

Buddhist texts bear references to the fruit as early as the fourth century BCE, and some Buddhist priests still use extracts of the fruit to colour their robes. The fruit is also used for various traditional remedies.

The leaves and roots of its tree are routinely used in the treatment of skin disorders and it is a well known natural laxative.

Shyamala Reddy, a biotechnology researcher at the University of Agriculture, calls it a ‘miracle fruit’, saying that if one eats 10 or 12 bulbs of it, one need not consume anything for another half a day.

To top it all, it is enormous in size—a single fruit can weigh up to 45 kg. It now

I have made marmalade and savoury items. Other chefs have used Mughlai recipes in which they have replaced the meat with jackfruit without anyone being the wiser” Chef Siddiq

Taj Club House, Chennai

36 open

grows in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and is also a popular fruit in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, apart from many African countries, where it is grown for commercial purposes.

Despite its global appeal, the fruit remains a hard sell in most of India, with only two or three commercial plantations in operation. This, however, might start changing with its rising popularity among yuppies and health freaks, thanks to how ‘cool’ it has become lately in trendy parts of the US after Hollywood’s influential media house E Network declared it a super food early this year. Jackfruit tacos, enchiladas, salads and desserts have popped up on menus in California, and this trend is on its way to India.

Even though the fruit’s exotic appeal is yet to make a mark on mainstream India, trend-spotters are now surfacing as selfprofessed jackfruit evangelists. Take, for example, James Joseph. In late 2012, this 43-year-old former Microsoft director took a year off to write a memoir, but found himself drawn to something completely different—the jackfruit. His curiosity of the fruit stemmed from his memories of growing up in the small town of Aluva, Kerala: his maternal uncle would often speak highly of it, saying that if one had a jackfruit tree in the backyard, one would live at least 10 years longer than everyone else. “For the first time in my life, I had enough time on my hands to research the fact, so I decided to dig deeper,” says Joseph, who soon stumbled upon research findings. He discovered that the fruit, which is rich in fibre, had a number of beneficial properties, the most important being its ability to ward off cancer.

“The fibre in the fruit acts as a bottle brush for one’s intestines,” he says.

While working in the US, Joseph would often eat steak accompanied with mashed potatoes and gravy, and wonder if he could replace it with mashed jackfruit curry. Not only would it be high in fibre, it could also reduce starch consumption. “As a young working professional,” he says, “I was obsessed with my health, yet couldn’t make the right choices because of the lack of options available. I knew I wanted to do something, but didn’t know what.” Then one evening at a dinner at The Taj Mahal Hotel, Mumbai, he asked chef Hemant Oberoi why chefs didn’t use jackfruit in

their kitchens as a vegetarian replacement for meat, as traditionally done. “He told me that if he asked his sous chef to clean a jackfruit for him, he would throw it at him and refuse to do it, as not only is it extremely sticky and a pain to clean, it is also smelly and seasonal.” Not convinced and still sold on to its health benefits, Joseph decided to do some jackfruit research of his own.

Joseph then started going to chefs and requested them to make some jackfruit dishes on his behalf. “My first experiment was the jackfruit burger. Though it tasted excellent, I discovered the cold storage chain in the country would be the weakest link in the supply chain.” So he dropped the idea and still kept working on various alternative recipes using the fruit. Help came in the most unexpected form. Almost a decade ago, Joseph had met Dr Koshy, ex-president of Thai Carbon Black who had explained to him the dehydration process of green pepper for the spice export business. He contacted Koshy’s son, who explained how the fruit could be freeze-dried.

And that set the tone for his passion from then on.

F

reeze drying means the removal of

all moisture from a material by first freezing it. More dried food can be carried than wet food of the same weight, and it also has the benefit of a longer shelf life 6 october 2014

since it does not spoil as easily. For the jackfruit, this meant a new lease of life, especially in these modern times where the fruit was often thought to be too cumbersome to cook in small kitchen spaces.

Also, the process would not only eliminate the smell and stickiness, but also turn it into a hip, easily procurable product that was both malleable to taste and of high nutritional value. Says Joseph, “I come from a village and I have worked in a city. I know the pressures of corporate life. When I was living in the city, I was constantly aware of my health choices. I wanted to be healthy, but didn’t have the time for it. So to imagine working people trying to work with jackfruit… it’s like giving them a live chicken.

It is just too problematic.”

Freeze drying reduces the weight of the fruit by 82 per cent. You can store the pack in room temperature for 365 days and chefs can configure-to-order any dish at the time of consumption since it takes just 20 minutes to rehydrate the fruit.

“When I started experimenting with freeze dried jackfruit, the once supplychain expert of i2 and Warwick University within me quickly recognised [how the] cost of freeze drying offsets the cost of transportation, storage and inventory by a big margin.”

That is when Joseph launched Jackfruit365.com, a website that supplies the fruit 365 days a year to health enthusiasts across kitchens in the country. The 6 october 2014

I wanted to be healthy, but didn’t have the time for it. To imagine working people trying to use jackfruit… it’s like giving them a live chicken. It is just too problematic” James Joseph

Former director, Microsoft

website came at a time when the rest of the world was just waking up to the wonders of this unremarkable looking fruit that has long been ignored in India. “I now have regular orders from women working in metros looking at healthier food options,” says Joseph.

T

he fruit is eaten in three main

forms at varying stages of ripeness.

The first is what is popularly known as kathal in Northern India, which is tender jackfruit; it usually weighs an average of 3 kg. The second is the sweet fully ripe fruit, which usually weighs 10 kg. And the

third is the mid-stage, by when the seed is fully formed and the fruit’s flesh is like a potato’s—bland, absorbent of a wide variety of spices and therefore useful in the preparation of a variety of dishes.

Chef Siddiq, executive chef, Taj Club House, Chennai, has also experimented with freeze dried jackfruit. He says that the fruit is not a favourite ingredient with chefs across the country because it is not easily available in the market, and even when it is, cutting and cleaning it is too laborious. “But now that we have an easy way to access it, I’ve seen a lot of chefs use it,” he adds, “I have made marmalade and some savoury items. Other chefs have used Mughlai recipes in which they have replaced the meat with jack and it has worked just fine without anyone being the wiser. The best stage for me is the midstage, in which the fruit acts like a bland potato. It’s great from a chef’s angle because one can flavour it any which way you like. The scope for it is endless because not only is it nutritious, but also very tasty. It could get very popular.”

Dr Gowda, who is also an evangelist of the fruit, has been lobbying for a plant to make processed products of jackfruit for over a decade now. On a visit to Delhi earlier this month, he offered Ashmita Kaur Badal a jackfruit drink. She confessed to having it for the first time, but was sold on it the moment she took a sip.

Jackfruit promotion has other things going for it as well. There is an annual jackfruit conference, for example, to spread awareness of the nutritional benefits of the fruit and the products it can be used to make. From jackfruit flour to wine, it is all exhibited there. There is now also an international symposium on the fruit that started in Bangladesh in 2012 and was held in India this May. The meet’s discussions covered such subjects as the fruit’s genetic diversity, cultivation, value addition and marketing strategies.

About 100 scientists, 300 jackfruit cultivators and 50 entrepreneurs participated in the event. It was accompanied by an exhibition of elite jackfruit varieties and genotypes, value-added products and processing machinery.

So, even if Indians keep ignoring this fruit, the world has started to take notice of it, and it may not be long before it becomes one of the country’s hottest items of export. n open www.openthemagazine.com 37

saudi press agency/ap

religion

The REConfigured Utopia Mecca today is a microcosm of its own history replayed as tragedy

by ZIAUDDIN SARDAR

I

heard Mecca calling one morning in September 2010.

I was performing my usual rituals of drinking coffee and reading The Guardian. As I turned the pages of the newspaper, I came across a full-page advertisement. ‘Live a few steps away from the holy heart of the universe,’ it said, underneath a large photograph of the Sacred Mosque. ‘When you look for residence in Makkah, the first thing you seek is how close you’ll be to the holy mosque,’ the advertisement said, inviting the reader to buy a property at the ‘Emaar Residences at the Fairmont Makkah’.

These residences are located within the Royal Makkah Clock Tower, which at 1,972 feet is the world’s second-tallest building after Dubai’s Burj Khalifa. It is part of a mammoth development of skyscrapers and includes shopping malls devoted to luxury goods and seven-star hotels catering exclusively to the obscenely rich. The Clock Tower, as the photograph accompanying the advertisement made clear, dwarfs the Kaaba and soars above the Sacred Mosque. The skyline above the =Sacred Mosque is no longer dominated by the rugged outline of encircling mountains. It is surrounded by the brutalism of hideously ugly rectangular steel and concrete buildings, built with the proceeds of enormous oil wealth that showcase the Saudi vision for Mecca. They look like downtown office blocks in any mid-American city. The advertisement invites you not to live ‘a few steps’ from the Sacred Mosque but to live over and above it.

What the advertisement does not tell you is that this grotesque metropolis is built on the graves of houses and cultural sites of immense beauty and long history. An estimated 95 per cent of the city’s millennium-old buildings, consisting of over 400 sites of cultural and historical significance, were demolished to build this eruption of architectural bling.

Bulldozers arrived in the middle of the night to demolish Ottoman-era town houses. The complex stands on top of the

6 october 2014

bulldozed al-Ayad fort, built in 1781 and no longer able to perform its function of protecting Mecca from invaders. At the opposite end of the Grand Mosque Complex, as it is now called, the house of Khadijah, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, has been turned into a block of toilets.

The Royal Makkah Clock Tower is not the only building to hover above the Sacred Mosque. There is the Raffles Makkah Palace, a luxury hotel, with round-the-clock butler service. Add to that the Makkah Hilton, built over the house of Abu Bakr, the closest companion of the Prophet and the first caliph. Along with the Intercontinental Mecca they all vie for prominence on the skyline. There are numerous other five-star hotels and highrise apartment blocks. Within the next decade there will be a ring of 130 skyscrapers looking down upon the Sacred Mosque.

There are spectacular plans to further redevelop the Sacred Mosque so that it can accommodate up to 5 million worshippers. With a seemingly casual disregard for history, the Saudis are rebuilding the Ottoman-era section of the Haram, the oldest surviving section of the Sacred Mosque. The interior, of exquisite beauty, with intricately carved marble columns, built by a succession of Ottoman sultans—Sultan Suleiman, Sultan Salim I, Sultan Murad III, and Sultan Murad IV—from 1553 to 1629, will give way to series of multi-storey prayer halls, eighty metres high. The columns, which are adorned with calligraphy of the names of the Prophet’s companions, will be demolished.

Indeed, the whole of the old Sacred Mosque will be bulldozed.

History stretching back to Umar, the second caliph of Islam, ibn Zubair, who sacrificed his life to rebuild the Kaaba, and to the Abbasid caliphs, will be replaced by an ultramodern doughnutshaped building. The new Jamarat Bridge will ultimately be twelve storeys high, so pilgrims will be able to ‘Stone the Devils’ on even more multiple levels.

It seems only a matter of time before the house where Prophet open www.openthemagazine.com 39

Muhammad was born, located opposite the imposing Royal Palace, is razed to the ground, and turned, probably, into a car park. During most of the Saudi era it was used as a cattle market; the Hijazi citizens fought to turn it into a library. However, even to enter the library is apparently to commit an unpardonable sin—hence no one is allowed in. But even this is too much for the radical clerics who have repeatedly called for its demolition.

Also in their sights is Jabal al-Nur, the mountain that contains the cave of Hira, where the Prophet used to retire for meditation and reflection and where he received his first revelations.

What I find particularly troubling is how few are willing to stand up and openly criticize the official policy of the Saudi government. Turkey, and the arch-enemy of the Kingdom, Iran, have raised dissenting voices about the erasure of history, but most Muslim countries are too fearful of the Saudis. There is real fear that their pilgrim quota will be cut—just as the Saudis refused to give visas to the Iranian pilgrims during the late 1980s. Popular vituperative complaint between consenting adults in private, though it is the norm in Muslim circles, is, as it always has been, inconsequential and irrelevant. Far from cautioning the Saudis, architects, including some who are Muslim, are actively colluding with the destruction of Mecca.

Peace activists and archaeologists have raised concerns in newspapers and in the pages of learned journals, but the mass of believers are silent. Archaeologists fear that access to the few remaining sites open to them will be blocked. Would-be pilgrims understandably worry that they may be barred from performing a compulsory sacred ritual. Everything else for believers comes secondary to Mecca’s place as the destination for one of five ‘pillars’ of the practice of faith.

Mecca today is a microcosm of its own history replayed as tragedy. The city that has serially been remade in the image of the wealth and imperial splendour of whatever power was dominant is the plaything of its latest masters—who happen on this occasion to be lacking any aesthetic sensitivity, so that the underlying theme of naked power and wealth-driven consumer excess is brazenly exposed for all to see, devoid of saving graces.

Modern Mecca is a city of contradictions. And the contradictions start with the name itself. Mecca, the name of the Holy City, is the original transliteration of the Arabic name. But in English, Mecca is used more widely as a generic term, meaning ultimate destination; a magnet that attracts people in large numbers; or an activity centre for people with a common interest—we refer to Los Angeles, for example, as the Mecca of show business, to Paris as the Mecca of chic fashion. Saudi officials have complained at such ‘derogatory’ usage. They see the name of the Holy City in such labels as ‘Mecca Bingo’, ‘Mecca

Motors’, and worse, Mecca as the name for loosely clad American girls, as sacrilegious. So, in the 1980s, the Saudi government officially changed the spelling from ‘Mecca’ to ‘Makkah’, the old spelling, to emphasize the uniqueness of its holy and traditional character. Makkah, or more fully Makkah al-Mukarramah (Mecca the Blessed), is now used by Saudi government institutions as well as international organizations such as the United Nations, the US Department of State and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

‘Makkah’ may be blessed, but the more spiritually oriented Meccans, the descendants of the old and established families of the city, find nothing particularly ‘holy’ in the recycled designation of ‘Makkah’. What is evident to them is a city of proliferating bling, a haven of consumerism and opulent tourism that have usurped spirituality as the city’s raison d’être.

They call it ‘Saudi Las Vegas’.

Like the American city famed for its gambling casinos and gaudy architecture, Mecca has become a playground for the rich. For most of the year, it plays host to religious tourists who arrive partly to pray in the Sacred Mosque but also to shop in its countless opulent malls. Many have bought property around the Sacred Mosque not just as a financial investment but in the hope that it will translate into real estate in paradise. For rich Muslims the world over—most notably the Gulf, Malaysia, India, Turkey, and among the diaspora in Europe and the US—a quick visit to Mecca for Umra (the lesser pilgrimage) or ziyarat (the religious term for visit) has become routine. Indeed, for many it’s a badge of prestige: the more visits you make to Mecca the more pious and dedicated you appear. The poor arrive only during the Hajj seasons, and are packaged and processed speedily, without much dignity, from entry to exit in the space of less than two weeks. Yet even the relatively poor are incited to shop at every available moment. Wherever you look in the city, someone close is selling something. Beyond the expensive shopping malls, there are numerous markets, such as Souk Gaza or Souk al-Lail, where only one manner of existence is possible: the shopping mode. The markets are full of stalls, hawkers and street vendors selling everything from fake watches to plastic bottles of ‘holy Zamzam water’, from perfume to cheap prayer rugs and plastic trinkets. The ethos is clear: no one should leave Mecca without some memento. *****

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part from the Kaaba and the Sacred Mosque, there is nothing that remains in Mecca that is unique to the city— it is a focal place with no sense of its own history or its place in

Most of the city’s millennium-old buildings, over 400 sites of cultural and historical significance, were demolished. Bulldozers arrived in the middle of the night to demolish Ottoman-era town houses

The city is the plaything of its latest masters—who happen to be lacking any aesthetic sensitivity, so that the underlying theme of naked power and wealth-driven consumer excess is brazenly exposed the world. Nor is it any longer attuned to its own geography and ecology: it is air-conditioned and air-polluted in spite of its location in the Arabian Desert. There are no monuments, no relics, no culture, no art, and no architecture worthy of the name.

In contemporary accounts of Hajj, such as Michael Muhammad Knight’s Journey to the End of Islam, there is no sense of the city of Mecca, largely because there is nothing special about the city itself. Knight, an American Muslim with a punk background who has evolved an eclectic Islamic liberation theology, found the Holy City ‘homeless’. Beyond the ‘immaculate’ Haram, the city was utterly mundane. The Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi, who performed the Hajj in 1999, found Mecca ‘to be hesitating between the sublime and a film set’. *****

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he Prophet Muhammad himself knew that many of his fellow Meccans loved money above all else, as illustrated by a telling event in his life. It happened in the year 630 at the Battle of Hunayn, where the Muslims acquired considerable booty. The Prophet distributed the booty amongst his followers, who included many new converts, Meccans, who had joined the army of the Prophet after the fall of the city a month earlier. The Prophet assigned the lion’s share of the spoils, some several hundred camels among them, to the Meccans. His followers from Medina received virtually nothing. This upset the Ansar, the Helpers, as the people of Medina were known. These were the loyal supporters who had followed him unconditionally ever since he was driven out of Mecca and had to migrate to Medina to save his life. Rumours began to circulate amongst the people of Medina. Muhammad was from Mecca, and now he was back with his people; this was why he was showing clear bias towards them. ‘By God, the apostle has met his own people,’ they said. Eventually, one of them went to the Prophet to report what was being said. ‘And where do you stand on this matter?’ the Prophet asked him. ‘I stand with my people: he replied. ‘Then gather your people,’ Muhammad asked him.

When all the people from Medina had been ushered in front of him, the Prophet asked the crowd: did you not believe in me when I came to you discredited? Did you not help me when I was deserted? Did you not take me in when I was a fugitive? Did you not comfort me when I was poor? They all shook their heads in agreement. Are you upset now, the Prophet continued, because of the good things in life that I give to Meccans? ‘Are you not satisfied that [Meccan] men should take away flocks of herds while you return with the Prophet of God? By Him in whose hand is the soul of Muhammad, but for the migration I 6 october 2014

would not be one of the Ansar myself. If all men went one way, and the Ansar another, I would be with the Ansar: The gathering fell to its knees, and the ‘people wept until the tears ran down their beards’.

Whether Hijazis or Najdis, in history many of the people of Mecca have only had one true love: material wealth, the pilgrims their ‘flocks of herds’. With a few notable exceptions, the citizens of the Holy City have been greedy and money-grabbing.

In the midst of garish skyscrapers, and the manic consumption that envelops Mecca, stands the Kaaba, which is intended as a symbol of equality. But equality is conspicuously absent in the Holy City. Mecca has always been a closed city, enclosed by its own sense of historic importance—the importance of lineage and blood. It has guarded the prerogatives of this unearned inheritance down the centuries with tenacity. The aura of religiosity cannot be inherited. However, this is not an impediment to the ethos of lineage and blood, rather it is its stock in trade. In consequence, Mecca is a place riddled with racism, bigotry and xenophobia. The Najdis regard the Hijazis as inferior for their lack of ethnic purity and keep them at respectable distance. The Hijazis have compromised their cosmopolitanism and cultural openness for the sake of a stake, and status, in the power structure. The Saudis, the Najdis and Hijazis together, are a society apart from the rest of Mecca’s inhabitants—a kind of ‘no-go area’ for ordinary mortals. In Mecca, as in the rest of Saudi Arabia, the Saudis are superior to everybody; but this superiority has its own gradations.

The most ‘superior’ Saudis belong to the royal family, the rulers of a quasi-totalitarian dynastic state based on the absolute supremacy of a single clan, the Al Saud. Next in the pecking order after the royal family, and often quite indistinguishable from them, are the wealthy families such as the Bin Ladens, who are responsible for most of the construction in Mecca and elsewhere in Saudi Arabia; the al-Shaikhs, descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eighteenth-century founder of Wahhabism, who dominate the religious institutions of the Kingdom; the al-Turkis, who own several investment and development companies; and the Rajhis, owners of several banks. Most wealthy families, as well as a string of billionaires, are related to the royal family through marriage or connected to it in some convoluted way involving business deals, loyalty oaths and other tribal rituals. Today, as through much of its history, status in Mecca is demonstrated by the size and location of one’s property around the Sacred Mosque. With a palace towering over the Kaaba, the king is obviously preeminent. The bottom layers of social strata comprise the poor Bedouins, who are travellers and refuse to settle and are denied open www.openthemagazine.com 41

The Wahhabi clerics justify the demolition of historical sites and shrines because, they argue, they promote shirk— the sin of polytheism. Yet Mecca is knee deep in shirk citizenship by Saudi Arabia, and the even poorer Yemenis, who want to be Saudis.

After the Saudis, the scale of superiority moves, still in careful gradation, from Arabs to non-Arabs, taking race and wealth into full consideration. At the top, a few notches beneath the privileged Saudi families, stand European and American converts to Islam. The Saudis see them as demonstrating the innate superiority of Islam as a living and expanding faith. The next rung is Arabic-speaking Muslims.

Since they speak the ‘language of the Qur’an’, the Saudis see them as superior to all other Muslims who do not have Arabic as their mother tongue. Then come the Pakistanis, Indians, Malays and Turks. If they are wealthy, they will be treated with some respect. And finally, right at the bottom of this unsubtle Meccan hierarchy, are the Africans—Sudanese, Ethiopians, Somalis—who came initially for pilgrimage and stayed, often illegally. As anyone who has been to Mecca for me Hajj can testify, black skin tone is not appreciated in the Holy City.

One can see Black African men and women being treated abominably by the local citizens in front of the Sacred Mosque.

The expatriate Muslims, who work and live in the city and have actually built the gigantic structures surrounding the Haram, are treated with equal contempt. Slavery may have been abolished, but in Mecca it is alive and well, although now it goes under the rubric of ‘labour laws’. These define ‘foreigners’ as intrinsically untrustworthy people who cannot be allowed to travel freely in the Kingdom, and have to be watched at all times. Thus the racial and ethnic divisions in the Holy City have remained intact since it was first visited by Naser-e-Khosraw and ibn Jubayr in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. *****

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n a city that owes its existence and survival to two women— Hagar, wife of Abraham, whose search for and eventual discovery of water first established the city in the ‘Barren Valley’; and Zubaidah, wife of the Abbasid Caliph Harun alRashid, who first provided the city with the supply of usable water that sustained it for centuries—women are treated as chattels. They have to be shrouded and hidden, if they go out they must be accompanied by a male guardian, and under no circumstances can they drive any of the motor vehicles to which the city and its environs have been given over. Foreign maids, from Southeast Asia, Indonesia or African countries, employed by many Meccan households are considered fair game for everything from incarceration to beatings to sex.

Mecca is about religion. One would expect a city devoted to 42 open

monotheism to be free of superstition and idolatry. The Wahhabi clerics justify the demolition of historical sites and shrines because, they argue, they promote shirk—the sin of polytheism.

Yet Mecca is knee-deep in shirk. It is manifest not just in the worship of money, wealth and consumerism. It can be discovered in the Sacred Mosque itself. During the late 1990s, I was in the Haram when there was a call to prayer. The evening prayer had already concluded, so I was rather surprised. Nevertheless, I joined the congregation. The imam started reading the second, and longest, chapter in the Qur’an; I soon realized that this was going to be a very long prayer. I noticed that some members of the congregation were looking towards the sky. I followed their gaze and realized there was a partial eclipse of the moon. The congregation was performing Salat-Ul-Kasuf, special prayers to diffuse the ‘darkness’ of the lunar eclipse. I was aghast—what could be closer to shirk than this? I left the prayer—which went on for over three hours—but was stopped by members of the Mutawwa, the religious police force that enforces the moral code and strict observances of rituals. I pointed out to the Mutawwa, like my predecessors Mahmoud Mobarek Churchward and Eldon Rutter, who visited the Holy City at the dawn of the twentieth century, that eclipses and other stellar events are a natural phenomenon, as it is clearly stated in the Qur’an: ‘The sun, too, runs its determined course laid down for it by the Almighty, all Knowing. We have determined phases for the moon until finally it becomes like an old date-stalk. The sun cannot overtake the moon, nor can the night outrun the day: each floats in its own orbit’ (36. 38–40). I also told them the story of the death of the Prophet Muhammad’s infant son, Ibrahim. It coincided with an eclipse of the sun. Muslims at that time took it as a miracle, a sign from God. A rumour spread throughout Medina that even the heavens were crying for the deep sorrow and loss of the Prophet. But Muhammad was not consoled; he was angry at this gossip. ‘The sun and the moon are signs of God,’ he announced. ‘They are eclipsed neither for the death nor the birth of any man.’ The Mutawwa answered by saying that the prayer was a requirement of the Shariah, Islamic law, and forced me back towards the congregation.

The Prophet, of course, removed all the idols from the Sacred Sanctuary. Today the walls of the city are full of advertisements featuring people missing an eye or a female hand or with a foot painted over. These have been disfigured by the Mutawwa to avoid adulation of the graven images. Yet Meccans venerate the wonders of technology as sacrosanct, revere opulence, and worship insatiable desire. Contemporary Mecca has reverted to its old self and become the pagan heart of Arabia.

Mecca is a city where rituals reign supreme but there are no 6 october 2014

ethics. One of the most common sights in the city is to see a Saudi man emerging from the Sacred Mosque after prayer, worry beads in hand. He is approached by takruni (black African) women, covered head to toe in a black abaya in scorching heat, who beg outside the Haram. Far from giving them charity, the Saudi tread them with utter contempt, cursing as he goes along. It is not unusual for pilgrim guides to take the money of the poor pilgrims and leave them lost and confused, without provision, to manage on their own. The Mutawwa, Mukhabarat (intelligence forces) and the Bedouins of the National Guard are often aggressive and hostile towards female worshippers, as I have observed on many occasions. And if a visitor or a foreign worker is arrested for some reason, he can easily end up being tortured—innocent or guilty. One of the noted spectacles of the city is the Friday executions, often carried out in a shroud of secrecy, where mostly poor foreign workers—marginalized labourers from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Africa—are beheaded.

On the surface, Mecca is changing rapidly. But it is also frozen in a time when cultural diversity, religious pluralism, political dissent, art and music, intellectual accomplishments, academic freedom, political dissent and bridges across gender and nationalities do not exist. Visually the city looks like an amalgam of two film sets, one part ‘Arabian Nights’, the other a science-fiction saga. Minarets jostle with skyscrapers; motorways and towers align to face the Kaaba. Monorails take pilgrims from Mecca to Mina (initially only the Saudis and Gulf Arabs).

But look beneath the ground and all the ultramodernity dissolves into sewage. The city has no new sewage system; dig anywhere around the Sacred Mosque, and you will hit sewage after three metres. The Saudis could demolish the Ottoman buildings and town houses, but they could not build a sewage system, which has remained much as it was described by Churchward and Rutter. And, of course, the city’s effluence— much like its affluence —is way past the carrying capacity of the old network. The famous cemetery of Al-Muala, where many members of the household of the Prophet Muhammad are buried, is drowning in sewage. On the outskirts of the town, sewage oozes from the houses. *****

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ll Muslims know that the Hajj is one of the five pillars, the central tenets, of Islam, an obligation to be undertaken once in a lifetime, if one is able. History argues that most Muslims who have ever lived have not been able. Pilgrim numbers have fluctuated wildly, reflecting the political and economic conditions of the Muslim world as sensitively as a finely tuned barometer. Even at the best of times the opportunity to complete the Hajj has been the privilege of only a small proportion, usually the most affluent and educated, of any population. The idea of Mecca, the history of its elevation and idealization in Muslim consciousness, is a function of the rarity of the experience. It was something to long for and dream about. Every other element of the five pillars could be accomplished in the comfort of one’s own home. Going to Mecca was something quite different.

Not surprisingly it is the journey, the enormous effort of getting there, that predominates in all the books written down 6 october 2014

the centuries by pilgrim travellers. When so few Muslims could ever realistically conceive of performing the Hajj it is little wonder Mecca became the concern of the dominant powers, the imperial courts, those who wished to publish and broadcast their credentials as guardians of Muslim existence. In an age of increasing case of global travel, do we not need to unpick this historic connection? When the bulk of the world’s Muslims can realistically plan for and look forward to going to Mecca not once in a lifetime but whenever they want, should the focal point of religious consciousness, the lodestone of Muslim identity, not acknowledge and be answerable to all those whose lives it informs and enriches? How would it be possible to make the transformation from beacon to the world to the place that belongs to the whole world? Could Mecca ever become truly an international city, the heart that belongs to the whole body of believers, rather than the Arabian backwater compliant with the grand imaginings of its chance rulers? I have heard people assert as much. The question is what would such a transformation consist of, and what kind of difference would it make in Mecca and throughout the Muslim world?

The factionalism and dissension, the intolerance of differences, so prevalent in history, have by no means disappeared from Muslim existence. Yet to internationalize Mecca would be a grand idea. All the grander for requiring urgent and informed thought about what it means to be Muslim now and wherever one happens to live in this all too real world.

In all my travels, actual and literary, the city of my heart remains secure. Nothing could change my relationship to the Mecca I first encountered as a child. I have dreamt of Mecca, loved Mecca, longed for Mecca and found Mecca. This Mecca has always been more than a geographical location: it is a state of consciousness, the focus of prayer, the signifier of aspiration for the Divine. It is the place where I experienced the most profound moments of my life. This is not to say that my ideas have not been changed by travelling to Mecca and through the annals of its history. I have found a great deal more than I dreamed of, much of it a nightmare. I have concluded that dreams are not enough. Our dreams, like everything else, must be subject to critical scrutiny and objective judgement if they are to be worthwhile ideals to help negotiate the realities of this world. Mecca exists to shape us, not to be shaped by an unchallenged parade of human follies and foibles.

Nevertheless, my last best hope for myself and everyone is to know the timeless peace of Mecca I met in the eyes of one old man, the Pakistani peasant who had come to the Holy City to die. For believers like him, Mecca is a place of eternal harmony, something worth living for and striving to attain. It has always been. And it will always be. n © Ziauddin Sardar

Excerpted from Mecca: The Sacred City, Bloomsbury India; 408 pages; Rs 599.

The author is a Pakistan-born broadcaster and cultural critic open www.openthemagazine.com 43

a rt

mindspace

Homi Adajania on his passions and projects 52

Fleeing writers with Tash Aw

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o p en s pa ce

Salman Khan Hrithik Roshan

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n p lu

Khoobsurat A walk among the tombstones

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cinem a r e v ie w

BlackBerry Porsche P9983 Roger Dubuis Excalibur 42 Automatic Sandisk 512GB Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I

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t ec h & s t y l e

Blood Test for Depression Dark Side of Sibling Bullying Pupil Size and Decision Making

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s cience

Restaurateur Riyaaz Amlani and his Social revolution

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food

The bare-chested brigade

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Roug h cu t

Homi Adajania on his evolution as a filmmaker

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CINEMA

The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin with Indrajit Hazra Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri

books

Amrita Sher-Gil and Lionel Wendt

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ART The Pose and the Portrait The juxtaposition of two modernists, a painter and a photographer, from the subcontinent celebrates the confluence of cultural histories beyond nationhood Deepika Sorabjee

Amrita Sher-Gil’s Self Portrait with Long Hair (2), 1934, on display at the Jhaveri Contemporary gallery

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urator Shanay Jhaveri,

in a new show at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, has two artists of the Subcontinent on view.

Not contemporary artists, but two Modern artists, well-known in their respective countries, are up for reexamination. In similarities and differences, the show unfolds in many ways—artistically, historically and where the curator marries thought with expression in the display.

These two artists are Amrita Sher-Gil, Indian, and Lionel Wendt, Sinhalese.

Both embody a particular time with the mere mention of their names. It’s with interest, therefore, to see them juxtaposed thus, recalling two nations poised on the tip of modernity, and artists in both nations grappling with the meaning of it all, in the surroundings they found themselves in.

In his curatorial note, Jhaveri intersperses his essay with readings by others and his own personal presentation. He starts with two images, each of which sets the tone for the exhibition: in the style that is contrasted and assimilated throughout —the medium juxtaposed and the returning artist turning his gaze to a country newly seen. Both, Wendt, a Dutch Burgher, and Sher-Gil, born of a Punjabi father and Hungarian mother, return to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and India respectively, around the same time, between the two Great Wars and during their country’s struggle for independence. New ideas and new identities were being sought, and both cast Western-trained eyes on the contemporary happenings around them in markedly different ways. Both sought to explore form and technique not in the spectacular of the Subcontinent but in the ordinary, leaving us decades later with images of the often marginalised then to ponder over now.

The two images at the entrance are Wendt’s Boy in a Sarong and Sher-Gil’s Two Women. Roughly the same size, Sher-Gil’s canvas seems an exploration of an idea. The photograph size of the canvas is a clever choice of the curator to show alongside Wendt’s boy, a well thought out image both in form and technique. It allows a quick register of

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style and thought that leads up to the rest of the show.

Sher-Gil’s work is well-known and well represented at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi. The works in this show sourced from private collections may not be iconic images that we recall in posters and postcards, yet the familiarity of her style is unmistakable and the canvases have that ‘seen somewhere’ look even if one hasn’t viewed them before. There are self portraits and paintings of women in ordinary settings. It’s Wendt’s photographs of the solitary that arrest one’s gaze; it’s not often that one sees his work, and even less often in India.

Lionel Wendt (1900–1944) hasn’t had quite the exhibitory trajectory that Sher-Gil’s works have enjoyed.

An exhibition in 1994, ‘Lionel Wendt: Photographs’, held at the Lionel Wendt Gallery in Colombo, Sri Lanka, is believed to be the moment that interest in his work was revived. Jhaveri quotes researcher Manel Fonseka describing the moment as “pervaded by the ‘shock of discovery’”. Following this show, Wendt was noticed abroad, and, in 2003, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum

George Bernard Shaw, TS Eliot, James Joyce, WH Auden, among others, held him. Unlike Sher-Gil—trained in Paris at the Grande Chaumière and then at the Écoles des Beaux Arts—who drew her practice more from the 19th century painterly influences, Wendt’s outlook was derived more from the 20th century, choosing the camera instead of the brush, ‘committing fully to the camera in 1932–33, a Rolleiflex at first, moving on to a miniature Leica,’ writes Jhaveri.

Wendt’s earliest known photograph is of his friend, the painter George Keyt, dating from 1918. From 1928 to 1932, Wendt was ‘a major critical and organising force of the Modern Movement in Sri Lankan art’, writes Manel Fonseka in Modern Artists III—The Gaze of Modernity: Photographs by Lionel Wendt.

Jhaveri, in pitting photographs versus painting, draws attention to the then “newness” of both the artists’ practices. Wendt played with this modern media and all the techniques and subjects in vogue, with montage and solarisation, studio portraits and nudes, with maids and boys not for an anthropologist’s ethnographical documentation, but for experimentation and imitation:

Sher-Gil’s paintings in this show may not be iconic images that we recall in posters and postcards, yet the familiarity of her style is unmistakable held a retrospective of his work, ‘The Gaze of Modernity: Photographs by Lionel Wendt’. Subsequently, this identification of the period and style of his works saw his “images appear alongside those of international photographers such as Man Ray, whose work exerted a direct influence on Wendt”, says Jhaveri. In placing Wendt alongside a Modernist working in India at the same time, Jhaveri seems keen to explore this aspect of the artist.

Certainly, Modernism was what drove Wendt’s practice. Wendt’s training in England as a lawyer and a pianist made him familiar with modern movements then taking place in painting and literature; Marcel Proust,

not so much Henri Cartier-Bresson in India, more Man Ray in a Ceylon studio/landscape, or adopting the poses of European Classical sculptures.

Though Surrealism was a strong influence, there is a hesitance to leap into the truly bizarre—Wendt instead pushes the envelope more personally— in close-ups of the anatomy and sensuousness of the male form. The languor of the subjects reveals, in George Keyt’s words, that Wendt ‘was always in a state of conflict, and homosexuality, though a driving urge, did not satisfy him’. With his nudes of women, the slim sensuousness of the male nudes gives way to round plumpness in the models; there is more experimentation open www.openthemagazine.com 47

An untitled photograph by Lionel Wendt; a gelatin silver print from the Man, Rock and Vetti series, 1934–38

in the technique and composition; mirrors are used to bounce light and enhance contrast, props to explore scale and perspective.

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n the second room, two images stand

out—Sher-Gil’s Woman on Terrace and Wendt’s untitled portrait of an old lady. Both women are maids.

Sher-Gil’s maid is animated with a raised hand, a conscious gesture by the artist who captures in the background a quotidian surround—children being watched over. Wendt’s studied portrait makes the maid a genteel memsaab, hand raised to support the face elegantly: in subject subversion, this is no ethnographical colonial recording but a Modernist in practice.

What is interesting in Jhaveri’s dialogue is how he posits Sher-Gil. This is the second time he has used Sher-Gil as a starting point in a refreshing way, away from previous historians’ starchy placing of the artist constantly within the Indian context, revealing instead her true complexities—her peers abroad; her, unknown to her contemporaries, facing the same dichotomies of birth and education and location. In 2013, for an exhibition ‘Companionable Silences’, he “conscripted” her into “intriguing conversations” situating her alongside Tarsila do Amaral, Saloua

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It’s Wendt’s photographs of the solitary that arrest one’s gaze; it’s not often that one sees his work, and even less often in India Raouda Choucair, Zarina Hashmi, Etel Adnan—who were artists who had lived or trained in Paris. Asked what made him re-examine Sher-Gil in this context, with others, Jhaveri expands, “Both ‘Companionable Silences’ and ‘In Dialogue’ are invested in mapping how distinct currents of Modernism, witnessed through the individual journeys and practices of certain artists, can be seen in relation to one another.

At the Palais de Tokyo, it was done at a more global scale, and with the show at Jhaveri Contemporary, the remit is more regional. Sher-Gil in both was the starting point… The shows attempt to reveal the experience of the simultaneous sensations of imminence and distance. ” He adds, “Sher-Gil has received a fair amount of attention, being considered in relation to Frida Kahlo, and within a national narrative, discussed in the same breath as Jamini Roy, Tagore and Raja Ravi Varma. I wanted to initiate a dialogue with someone from the region, and, by placing them in relation to one another, start to appreci-

ate the kind of cultural modernity that was playing out in and around South Asia at the time.” Further, in choosing Wendt, rather than a painter, Jhaveri highlights the more historical aspects of photography as an art form being introduced in Sri Lanka, as most experiments in Modernism at the time were being played out in painting.

Jhaveri Contemporary is a small gallery. Yet the thoughtful display in this small space shows a generosity of spirit and an inclusiveness that goes beyond nationhood—before globalisation became a catchword. It provokes one to think of trajectories that ‘newness’ takes and with a retrospective gaze dismantles the new otherness of the time—in that, within the artist’s expression and the viewer’s gaze, the curator makes one re-imagine practices, images and histories embedded in questions and the leftover languor of the pose and portrait. n The exhibition ‘In Dialogue: Amrita Sher-Gil and Lionel Wendt’ is on at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai, till 25 October 6 october 2014

books

Body of Work This is bibliotherapy at its literary—and wicked—best in a new Indian edition DIVYA GUHA The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies

Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin with Indrajit Hazra roli books | 480 pages | Rs 595

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ore than a hundred years ago, Austrian doctors

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer discovered the nature of psychosomatic illness. Breuer’s famous patient ‘Anna O’, who he started to treat in 1880, grew up well-adjusted but is said to have gone a bit cuckoo later in life; she developed inexplicable, chronic and crippling pain in multiple parts of her body. The medical professionals knew Anna’s distress, though not physical, was real, and watched helplessly as it took its toll. But in the course of treatment, the patient started to heal her bodily symptoms by finding words to express their emotional dimensions; as she gave words to her distress, her symptoms disappeared.

They termed this paradigm-shifting treatment the ‘talking cure’, by which Anna could eliminate her bodily symptoms by finding words to describe the distress she felt. Through the years, medical professionals have come to realise that the only language our body knows when something is wrong is pain; far from being the enemy, it is the only possible route to restoration.

Exploiting this curious connection between words, suffering and deliverance is The Novel Cure, a popular A-Z compilation of the everyday ‘illnesses’ and the novels that might cure them—though, unlike the talking cure, The Novel Cure does not discriminate between physical and emotional pain. Bibliophiles and Cambridge alumni Ella Bethoud and Susan Elderkin ‘trawled two thousand years’ of literature for cures—from Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass, to Adiga, who wrote The White Tiger—in this eccentric hit which Canongate published last year in the UK. Indrajit Hazra, novelist and journalist, has now added to Berthoud and Elderkin’s collection in a new volume aimed at the Indian market, with entries such as ‘Kolkata, dealing with’; the cure, of course, is Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address.

Lucid summaries classify literary plots and themes by genus; works of the most ‘brilliant minds’ who through the ages have provided philosophically ‘restorative reads’.

Take, for example, the entry under ‘V’,

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‘violence, fear of’: the books prescribed for this unpleasant emotion are RL Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Musashi

by Eiji Yoshikawa. ‘The message is clear’, states the entry; ‘allow your inner violence an inch and it will take a mile’. If it is the violence of others you fear, the bibliotherapists suggest you acquire the strength of the samurai by osmosis; Yoshikawa’s 900-page epic takes you to punishing training grounds and the battlefields of sixteenth-century Japan, and ultimately, the discovery of love, humility and wisdom.

Someone has done the leg work to help us discover what to read when we break a leg: Cleave, by Australian novelist Nikki Gemmel, a meditation on the life of a girl called Snip, who has made sure the men in her life have always had the feeling she’ll be out the door any minute (the title, as autoantonym, the book explores fully).

You may be losing friends (read: So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell), you might even be at the verge of losing your job (curl up with: Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener or Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim). You may have fallen out of love with love, gone off the rails, be suffering man flu. Ever heard of itchy teeth? Read Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow. Developed inexplicable homesickness or a fear of dogs? Do you feel like your life, even your body, has betrayed you? This book has the literary cure for it all. It celebrates what the world of fiction—novels, in particular— has to offer for problems as varied as a hangover, physical exhaustion or the failure to seize the day.

The Indian variations are just as entertaining and edifying.

Ever hated the very Indian fixation of urinating in public against walls? Find Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, suggests Hazra. To overcome your horror of coprolalia (being potty-mouthed), read Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil, with its generous use of India’s very own four-letter word, ‘chut’; try Manu Joseph’s The Illicit Happiness of Other People to demystify suicide; if IST (Indian Stretchable Time) is bothering you, lie back with Forster’s A Passage to India.

If you are convinced that there is a connection between words and the body, this collection is for you. Books will nudge you off the island of ineptitude, help you access emotions through others’ words and make suffering less frightening. For a few hours, if you’re lucky, you may curl up with a book, pretend to die, escape and return from a place of isolation—to awareness.

Be cured or be cursed; read and be restored. n open www.openthemagazine.com 49

books Poet of the Mundane Amit Chaudhuri matches the glorious nothingness of Afternoon Raag at last with his beautiful new novel about a bookish young Bengali Everyman and his uncle in London SHAHNAZ HABIB

Odysseus Abroad

Amit Chaudhuri Penguin Books India | 256 pages | Rs 499

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his is the story of Ananda, a 22-year old Indian man and an aspiring poet in exile, full of the usual contradictions. He is a student of English literature in London but at odds with the city. He reads poetry even in the bathroom, but despises novels. He has not bothered to read The Odyssey and though he has waded through Ulysses, he did not enjoy it, except briefly when a customs man at JFK discovered it in his luggage. Yet, with characteristic playfulness, Amit Chaudhuri layers over the persona of his protagonist that most inter-textual of archetypes, Odysseus.

Eighty something years after Leopold Bloom set out on his walk through Dublin, Ananda wakes up, meets his tutor, pays his rent, eats a sandwich, and takes the tube to meet up with his talkative, moody uncle Rangamama. The two of them eat dinner, and around the time an Ian McEwan novel would be climaxing with the revelation of a secret that changes everything, they buy laddoos and return to Ithaca.

To read Amit Chaudhuri, the acclaimed author of 12 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, is to set aside any expectation of something happening, of course. What is happening is nothing. Chaudhuri is a writer who pays special attention to ordinariness, not seeking to excavate the extraordinary

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within the ordinary as some writers might, not seeking spiritual epiphanies; but simply because the details of the ordinary exist and need to be recorded. Why does Ananda notice the florist by the Belsize Park tube station, ‘where someone behind the glass was harvesting bouquets for customers, choosing, bending, and embracing the flowers’?

Because it’s there. Chaudhuri chooses and bends and embraces such details that bear no portentous meaning and the reader slows down with him, to choose and bend and embrace.

And it is this witnessing rather than any narrative causeand-effect momentum that defines the pleasure of reading Chaudhuri’s work. Of Afternoon Raag, his acclaimed 1993 novel about an Oxford student, the critic Jonathan Coe wrote: ‘Chaudhuri has already proved that he can write better than just about anyone of his generation, and in that respect his first two novels are unlikely to be improved upon.

The problem is the lack of a shaping narrative and... whether he will be able to carry on transferring to a new location every few years.’ Finally, with Odysseus Abroad, he triumphs.

Chaudhuri is a marvellous observer of place. Describing his characters’ geography is his forte; again and again, he will describe a place Ananda is passing through. The novel moves from Ananda’s bedroom, with its porous walls and unfriendly neighbours, to the streets of Bloomsbury to the deserted alleys of the English department. Shahnawaz Bhutto has died in mysterious circumstances and the Iranian Revolution is still a recent memory. Indians and Pakistanis in Britain have migrated from the ‘black’ category to the ‘Asian’ category.

Margaret Thatcher. The smell of fenugreek in an Indian 6 october 2014

restaurant. The Jamaican music shop that, ‘without explanation or warning, would sometimes vibrate with music of simple, uncomplicated joy.’ The spaciousness of tube travel in the afternoon. The bed-sit where his uncle lives, the same one Ananda’s parents lived in when they were first married, in ‘the crowded bhadralok village’ of Belsize Park; the tall ungainly woman at King’s Cross station who solicits Ananda’s uncle and leaves Ananda feeling affronted that she hadn’t addressed him; the smell of his mother’s cooking in the kitchen, long after she has left for India, when he returns home.

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t’s not easy to like Ananda immediately. One suspects

him of prissiness. He spends a lot of time worrying about noisy flatmates. He has, after all, moved out of the hostel because ‘its drunkards and merrymakers—international students—were keeping Ananda from practising music’. When his uncle offers him a Coke, he declines the offer because it seems too scandalous a drink for afternoon. But what protagonist could possibly be charming and likable under the probing scrutiny of an author like Chaudhuri? This is a character on a tight leash. Every thought of Ananda’s is laid out for the reader. Every aside, every tangent is dissected. This is especially evident in how Chaudhuri writes dialogue. If we hear Ananda talking to someone, we also hear him thinking simultaneously; half-thoughts and counter-thoughts punctuate the dialogue, as, for instance, when he discusses his poetry with his tutor: ‘“It’s a difficult art,” said Mr Davidson—now he was softly addressing himself rather than admonishing Ananda, the prose writer recalling (perhaps from experience) the mysterious pitfalls of poetry-writing.

“But what you do have is a grasp of rhythm,” he said—not grudging, but fair. “It was never something I could master!”

So he had had the experience then!—he’d given verse a go.

How little Ananda knew of him—yet had reached out to him as at a straw… Ananda decided to slip in a compliment—to prove he was superior to the little well-meaning jibes...’

There is a beat of silence after Nestor Davidson says to Ananda, “I must say you’re virry prolific!” and before he follows it up with “I did like these.” But in that beat, we see Ananda wondering about the ulterior motives of “very”, envying Philip Larkin for his lack of prolificness, and, halfregretfully, half-proudly, observing his own instinct ‘to recoil, to hide himself away, with a soul in spate, leaking, spilling over, overflowing eagerly in poems he wrote every week with such facility’. Thus, firmly lodged inside his mind, we begin liking him after all.

Ananda’s story becomes the story also of his parents and uncle and the series of migrations and counter-migrations that have brought him to London. And this is where the reference to Odysseus becomes less a post-modern irony and more of a rich and tantalising metaphor. Perhaps there is more than one Odysseus in this story. What better way to transform an epic warrior into an anti-hero than to indicate that he is not unique, his story not the only one?

We learn that his parents married in London after a protracted engagement. We hear two different versions of

6 october 2014

how the marriage came about—his uncle’s version and his mother’s. Before London entered the picture, his family moved from Sylhet to Shillong, and then to Calcutta and eventually to Bombay; over the course of a day in the life of Ananda, we get a multi-generational tangle of stories and allegiances. Yet, what is at stake here is nothing as crass as, excuse me, a plot. When Ananda and his uncle go out for dinner at the Gurkha Tandoori, a basement restaurant, a waiter greets them with “Table for Two?” in a Sylheti accent: ‘Careless with the ‘b’, pushing table close to te-vul. Ananda felt he was near home. Not home in Bombay: his parents didn’t speak Sylheti in that large-hearted peasant way; their accent was slightly gentrified. Not Warren Street of course.

Not Sylhet, either—he’d never been there and didn’t particularly regret it. Maybe some notion of Sylhet imparted to him inadvertently by his parents and relations—as an emblem of the perennially recognisable... And the perennially comic.’

Chaudhuri is not exploring a narrative arc but a consciousness, one encompassing the long trail of a clan from Sylhet in undivided British India to London, the dwindling capital of a postcolonial empire. A consciousness that includes many divided literary loyalties, from his uncle’s love for Tagore and Bibhutibhushan to the intellectual allegiances of his tutors to Chaucer and Kristeva and Spencer. In the introduction to his 2008 book of critical essays Clearing a Space, Chaudhuri writes that it sought to explore the temperament of an Indian writer who ‘…doesn’t trace, as he probably should, his creative lineage to Salman Rushdie and the mandatory ‘hybrid’ post-colonial usages of English, but to a variety of, often conflicting, sources and forebears, including European and vernacular Indian… ’ Perhaps this is why Ananda walking through London in the mid-1980s seems to belong differently there than other Subcontinental emigrés. Midnight’s Children has won the Booker a few years ago and My Beautiful Laundrette has just released. But in exploring Ananda,Chaudhuri is interested less in identity and more in temperament. The postcolonial experience is definitely part of this temperament but so too is the fact that Ananda ‘would cross the street to avoid meeting the Victorians.’ And so we are treated to a passage on Ananda’s delight in modern literature: ‘Twentieth-century literature!

With its narrow subject, modern man—strange creature!

With his retinue of habits, like getting on to buses,secreting the bus ticket in his pocket, or going to the dentist... ’ Two hundred pages later, we are back in Ananda’s flat, laddoos in hand, uncle in tow. Two modern men, deeply self-conscious outsiders, flâneurs.In this last chapter, titled ‘Ithaca’, they discuss whether there will be a Shudrayuga, the age of the common man. The novel ends as they make another plan for another day like this one. And here, it is another poet who comes to mind, another exile of many migrations.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

n

Shahnaz Habib writes for The New Yorker’s Briefly Noted open www.openthemagazine.com 51

cinema

Being Homi Adajania The director of Finding Fanny breaks out of the indie straitjacket. The auteur on his passions and projects DIVYA UNNY

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ine years ago , Homi Adajania went into various art deco theatres around the world lugging six film reels of his debut film Being Cyrus. He patiently responded to many tangential questions about the film’s philosophy. “Everyone from critics to film school pass-outs raved about Being Cyrus, but it did not make me a penny,” says Adajania.

With his second film Cocktail, the conversation changed, and he found he had to defend himself. He was accused of selling his soul to money magnets who fund Bollywood’s big-budget song-and-dance dramas. “Well, if it were up to me, Cocktail would be about sex, drugs and girl-on-girl action. But they called me a misogynist because my protagonist Veronica starts wearing dupattas to please the man she loves.”

Now with his third and latest, Finding Fanny, Homi finally hopes to have struck a balance between telling the stories he really wants to and keeping his producers safe. “Our parties cost the most. Every five days, we’d go wild in Goa. But I think my producer Dinesh Vijan may not have to sell his flat after all,” he says with a smile.

Dressed in a plain T-shirt and shorts, sipping his morning cup of sugarless coffee, Adajania seems more at ease this time than during the release of his last film. A bit sleepy from the night before, he makes a little fuss over being photographed with baggy eyes, but soon accedes. “Look at this view… would you feel like working with a view like this?” he says, watching the sun from his sea-facing Breach Candy apartment in South Mumbai. “You did not like the film?” he suddenly asks, to which the only confession I can make is that I’d accidentally seen a Hindi version of it.

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“Go watch the English one. The syntax of the film isn’t in Hindi!” he says, almost sounding a bit offended.

“I feel like I’ve come back home with Fanny,” he says of the 102-minute long English/Hindi satire about five eccentric Goans in search of a woman named Stephanie that’s most unlike Bollywood in terms of treatment and storytelling.

Even then, the film has worked well with the multiplex audience, which is unusual for a quirky film like this.

Few filmmakers have had the courage to explore the indie, as Adajania did with his very first film. Being Cyrus was a non-Hindi psychological thriller, perhaps one of the best to come out of India in many years. After succumbing to some stereotypes in his second film Cocktail, it seems he is back to telling a story exactly the way he wants. “When I made Cyrus, I did not know how to make a film. With Cocktail, I wanted to see if I could deal with the naach-gaana narrative format. But with Fanny, we were fearless. There were really no boundaries.” He deals with farce this time, but leaves many loose ends.

Incomplete conversations and undecided motives are elements splashed all over his canvas. Nor are the characters the

I take away a lot of the emotion of the character into my home. It weighs and accumulates in me, which is why I don’t churn out film after film Homi AdAjania

kind you’d relate with or look up to. It’s the absurdity that seems to have stayed with filmgoers. “Aren’t we all a little eccentric? I just think human beings are very bizarre, complexed, screwed up. I wanted the eccentricity to be the predominant feature in them, but then you slowly see why they are the way they are. Won’t it be too boring if we all agree on everything?”

For the kind of life he has led, Homi Adajania may as well be a happier mash-up of characters in Finding Fanny.

The only difference is that his road trips were way longer and he wasn’t looking for anything in particular. The first and only filmmaker in the Adajania family, he discovered his penchant for quirky stories early in life. Though an avid-reader, academics was never his calling.

“During graduation I got thrown out of English Literature in St Xavier’s due to lack of attendance, though I somehow managed to finish it.” For over a decade, he let himself loose as a wanderer, travelling across the globe, letting stories happen to him—all this on a shoestring and a smile. “People thought it wasn’t possible to travel the way I did, but it really was. After my father passed away, for one year I sat at the petrol pump in a red light area and made sure my mum got her monthly income. Then I said I can’t do it. It was too non-creative for me.

Instead I let wanderlust get the better of me.” From getting drugged by Albanian refugees to getting deported from Nepal to taking a fake fair to Venice, every trip gave him fresh stories to tell.

Much like his father, whom he calls the most passionate storyteller he’s ever known. “My father used to travel six months a year as part of the jury for the World Boxing Federation. When he’d return, my sister and I would wait to 6 october 2014

your lines you’ll fit right in!’

He takes his work more seriously than he appears to. “My actors trust my instincts, and that’s all it takes. Pankaj [Kapur] asked me what his character was like when he was six. And I’m the guy who has an answer to that. I’m anal about detailing. I take away a lot of the emotion of the character into my home.

It weighs and accumulates in me, which is why I don’t churn out film after film.”

Deepika Padukone in a still from Finding Fanny

hear the stories he came back with.”

Evenings spent with his father narrating one fascinating travel tale after another are too many to choose from.

“He once spoke about a time when he was at a stadium in Cuba and Fidel Castro was there too. A guy came into the stadium and blew himself up right there. A referee sitting next to my dad lost his right leg. When he was in South Korea, he saw people pull out a snake’s beating heart with chopsticks and eat it.

He was in the army for a while and he’d tell us war stories. Now these were bizarre stories for a child to hear. We were just awestruck.” His father taught him to cherish and add colour to memories that would eventually fade and fluctuate. “It was because of him that I grew up to tell stories.”

It wasn’t long after his dad passed away that Adajania started to get restless. “When the travel bug bites you, it bites you hard. You want unfamiliarity, the unknown, the unpredictability of what’s round the corner.” He wandered aimlessly with as less as $25 in his pocket. He met fellow travellers who became friends as instantly as they disappeared from his life. “I once spent three days with this French bar girl who couldn’t speak an iota of English. You can guess what we did the whole time!”

He recalls how his then girlfriend and now wife Anaita Shroff Adajania once reprimanded him for disappearing on her for five months straight. “I always had her to come back to. She was the one constant in my life. That’s I why never really fell in love during these trips.” It’s these experiences he’d never trade for anything. “Today I can’t travel the way I 54 open

T I’m shooting another video where women are just freewheeling, doing their thing. And Deepika will be just another girl in the video did. I wouldn’t be able to sleep on the sidewalks of Athens at 43.”

By his own admission, he made Cocktail to fund his next trip as a professional diver. “Dinoo [Vijan] once told me, ‘Why be stuck on one island all your life, when you can make a movie and go diving all over the world?’” Just before he started shooting Fanny, he went on a diving escapade to Ecuador where he almost lost his life. “Our boat crashed in to the rocks and sank on the last night of our trip. I remember I was so happy to be alive. I was diving with marine iguanas, penguins, seals, and I was happy that I lived to share it.”

Back in Bollywood, Homi Adajania is the guy who writes letters to himself to be read 10 years from now. He’s the writer who talks easily about an unpublished book. He’s the director who pens personalised welcome notes to his cast members before they start shooting. For Deepika he wrote: ‘Welcome to Goa, home to spectacular beaches, bootlegged booze and certain beatific bafoons.

While you’re here we cannot promise you the beaches and the booze, but the buffoonery, why, the minute you spout

he next ONE year of his life has

been mapped out. He will be directing the Hindi adaptation of John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars, but he’s also helming his good friend and producer Dinesh Vijan’s next project and gearing up to shoot a women’s empowerment video with Deepika Padukone. “I’m shooting a video where women from all walks of life are just freewheeling, doing their thing. The message the video will highlight is [that] the only choice a woman wants is [one] of equality. And Deepika will be just another girl in the video.”

Adajania is also awaiting the release of a fresh cut of Finding Fanny in the overseas market, one that hasn’t been butchered by the censors. “Yes, this one thankfully does have that beautiful shot of Deepika’s bare back! It’s minus all the gags. Dimple’s dress doesn’t tear. Pankaj doesn’t go ballistic over her bosom.

Basically all the loud stuff has been removed. I think it’s like a documentary, but it worked with the focus groups.”

With time, he hopes Indian filmmakers won’t have to fight the censors at the word go. “When people like a film like Finding Fanny, it gives a huge group of potential filmmakers that hope. We don’t have to start thwarting our sensibilities to adjust to a specific mindset. I think there will come a time when it’ll be okay to say ‘virgin’ without a thousand eyebrows rising.”

His two-year-old son Zane runs into his father’s arms, looking wide-eyed at the camera that’s capturing his pictures.

“Life is a passion, it’s a full time job. My first film had both Xerxes the evil conqueror and Cyrus the benevolent king. Whatever you do, however you find your path, just be happy.” n 6 october 2014

rough cut

The Bare-Chested Brigade How Bollywood has reversed the evolution of the Indian male Mayank Shekhar

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ne of the things Amitabh Bachchan thanks God for,

tan cities in 2002, growing its fitness franchise at a phenomehe once told me in an interview, is that his audience nal rate across B and C towns in the country. Talwalkar’s and never expected him to take his shirt off on-screen! other body shops began to dot Mumbai’s skyline at around This is while he was the young action superstar in the 70s. the same time. Young Indian men’s T-shirts started to tighten Heroes like him, four decades later, I suspect, enjoyed no around the biceps and chest. Bland ghaas-phoos (vegetables) such luck. They were forced to obsessively work out, besides replaced dal makhani and butter chicken on the dinner/lunch work hard for their lead roles. menu. Conversations centred on BMI, GM, carbs and other During the summer of 1998, Salman Khan was shooting a esoteric acronyms. song Oh, oh Jaane Jaana for the film Pyar Kiya Toh Darna Kya Beyond the natural human quest for immortality, I in Madh Island, a far-off suburb even for Mumbai that mostsuppose this phenomenon had something to do with the ly lives in the ‘burbs. The stage was set. The crew was ready. marriage age of the average metropolitan Indian going up.

Right before they were going to roll, Salman realised that the They had to compete in the gene pool for much longer. Even clothes he was meant to wear for the shoot didn’t fit him anythe arranged marriage mart offered them less security to more. Over the month since he had first tried on the stay comfortably podgy. Women, far more independent, had costumes for the song, he had bulked up in the gym and put greater say in the choice of their male partner, even if they on four-and-a-half kilos of muscle. Getting a were introduced to potential suitors through replacement jacket and shirt from Bandra (a the parents. If you casually scan through couple of hours’ drive away) could have cost Facebook profiles of males of roughly the If you scan them the day’s shoot. The film was Salman’s same age, you’ll realise the fitter ones are mostthrough family production. He decided to shoot the enly single or interested, rather than married Facebook tire track dancing half nude before the camera. with kids and other worldly concerns, who are profiles of males, more likely to be pot-bellied and balding. Of That number, by the one-hit wonder Kamaal Khan, became the ‘ear-worm’ of the year. course there are enough exceptions to debunk you’ll realise The music video, for its time, went viral. I’m this theory. the fitter ones not sure if sales of under-shirts dropped Still, we mainly derive our concept of are single rather drastically, like it did in America when Clark the ‘body-beautiful’ from actors on screen, than married Gable showed up bare-chested in It Happened whether in films or advertising. Shah Rukh with kids One Night (1934). But being bare-chested Khan kicked off the marketing campaign for became Salman’s signature style. Following his his movie Happy New Year posing half-nude success, his contemporaries and newbies who with eight-pack abs. He’d done the same with entered mainstream films thereafter began to pump heavy Om Shanti Om (2007). I don’t know how many women went iron, shave their chest, pop steroids and glug down weak in the knees ogling at that front-page image in Bombay protein shakes to be able to similarly show off their muscles Times. Every man I know secretly gawked at that picture of on screen. Audiences began to expect this. a 49-year-old hero—whether Photoshopped or not—with To be fair, Dara Singh was first associated with kilts and genuine envy and admiration. briefs in ‘sandal and sword’ pictures of the 60s; Dharmendra I doubt The Times of India’s website would have zoomed in had apparently made the male torso mainstream with Phool with an arrow pointed at SRK’s chest, biceps or torso (as it did Aur Patthar (1966); Sunil Shetty was the original Balwaan with ‘OMG, Deepika Padukone’s cleavage show!’). It would (1992). But none of those movies were considered hardly serve as the same kind of ‘click-bait’ for women massive mainstream successes. Many of them were decidedsurfing the internet. That way, they are a step ahead of men ly B-grade. John Abraham through Jism (2003) gave hope to a in the evolutionary curve. For them, individual body parts lot of body-builder non-actor types travelling to Andheri for are rarely objects of fixation. How else could you explain work. Turning into Terminator or Rambo (Schwarzenegger or Salman Rushdie with Padma Lakshmi or Lyle Lovett and Stallone) may be a throwback to 80s Hollywood. But besides Julia Roberts? Sometimes I thank God for that! n films, its impact on India’s streets, was equally real.

Mayank Shekhar runs the pop culture website TheW14.com Los Angeles’ Gold’s Gym started operations in metropoli-

6 october 2014

open www.openthemagazine.com 55

food

Amlani and His Food Factory The restaurateur who is nourished by the spirit of the youth. And it’s good business RACHANA NAKRA

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ver coffee at Colaba Social ,

the Mumbai outpost of Riyaaz Amlani’s newest chain of concept cafés, the restaurateur tells me about the “serendipities” and “hookups” taking place there. “Writers are hooking up with graphic designers, who are meeting photographers here,” he says. While he is playing the part of a matchmaker of sorts, the stories aren’t of the romantic variety. “We are putting freelance professionals in

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the same matrix; we are creating an ecosystem where you can work independently but also collaborate. But more importantly, we are putting them on the same table, so they end up talking,” says Amlani about the concept of Social, which he also recently launched in New Delhi and Bangalore.

According to Amlani, youngsters today do not want to meet at a café without some creative purpose. “In my day, kids wanted to just hang out and

waste time. Today, the young want to work, build projects, be out there doing stuff but as long as they are doing it together,” he observes. Therefore, Social. It offers wifi, coffee, community tables and a real chance of meeting the web developer of your dreams.

And once again the serial restaurateur, owner of Impresario Hospitality and Entertainment Pvt Ltd, gets it right with the young who he says are the inspiration and the audience for every6 october 2014

Riyaaz Amlani; One of the more popular cocktails served at Social: Coke and Cane (inset)

“That I cannot be at every restaurant is a constant problem. So I build restaurants that have character and they hopefully develop their own personality” ritesh uttamchandani

thing he creates. “I am very nourished by the spirit of the youth, what they want to do. Although now I am a little paranoid about that, because I am over the hill,” laughs the 39-year-old.

So then how does he still manage to stay relevant and connected with the youth? He shadows his 26-yearold brother and his friends, he confesses. Although, it has a lot to do with his own personality—quick to laugh, affable and interested in the stories of others (when we finish our interview, he wants to know more about me and my work). He looks like someone who would be quite easy guffawing at cat memes with a group of 24-year-olds and buying them a round.

6 october 2014

Riyaaz Amlani Amlani may seem like the grandfather of the restaurant business (and the only other Indian restaurateur besides Olive’s AD Singh, who has successfully managed to create multi-city chains of cafés and fine-dining establishments), but he started out only a little over ten years ago. He opened the iconic Mocha café in Mumbai at a time when Udipi restaurants or five-star hotels were the only places to ‘hang out’.

He always had an entrepreneurial streak (his first venture was a footwear store in Mumbai), but worked in the entertainment business for a while before quitting it for hospitality. An innate feeling of “civic pride” and a desire to create “experiences” for people in his

city brought about the idea of a Turkish style café. You could order coffee, sheesha or cake, and lose all track of time at his Mocha outlet near Churchgate. It soon went on to become a chain.

“I am not in the food business, I am in the leisure business,” he clarifies.

Not just Social, most of his cafés have a community angle—from music gigs and movie screenings to organising backpack trips. Today, his company operates 35 restaurants across 11 cities under various brands. The number was only six until 2008, when the company received an infusion of Rs 25 crore from Beacon India Private Equity Fund, and then a second round of funding of Rs 35 crore from Beacon and Mirah Hospitality in 2011.

The reasons he started out in this business were relevant then, but what motivates him now? It is a question he asks himself everyday, he says, going into self-reflective mode. “I enjoy what I do. In a sense it’s one big candy shop. I get to indulge all my passions and call it research, have a lot of fun, meet interesting people and be involved in a small way in making a city what it is,” he says, after some thought.

Gresham Fernandes, executive chef for fine dining at Impresario, who has been with Amlani for a decade, says, “From the designers to the chefs, he gives everyone creative freedom.” This is Amlani’s generosity of spirit, he adds, and it gives him and his projects a positive energy. “That guy really isn’t making much money for himself—the bottom line or profit is never as important to Riyaaz as giving value to the customer. He really just wants people to have a good time. I cannot think of any other person in Mumbai I would like to work with more,” says Fernandes.

But since most of the money was put into Impresario, do words like ‘scaling’ and ‘chain’ dent the ambitions of creating ‘handmade’ restaurants, the company philosophy? “I don’t want to ever get so big that I stop personalising,” he says, “Yes, the fact that I cannot be at every restaurant, knowing every customer’s name, is a constant problem for me. So what I do is, build restaurants that have character and they hopefully develop their own personality.” open www.openthemagazine.com 57

And that’s where ambience plays a big role—from the mismatched furniture of Mocha to the graffiti on the walls of his Smoke House Deli chain that is localised to incorporate the vibe of the neighbourhood. Each café in the Social chain is named after the area it is housed in. Every restaurant seems like an extension of his personality—casual and accessible. Amlani’s favourite part of the business is idea generation. Once a year, he and Fernandes travel together for inspiration. “We don’t just eat at fancy places, we want to see the local restaurants where people spend time.

And he really gets deeply involved in everything, I have seen him cry at a qawwali,” says Fernandes, who is more of a friend than an employee.

Music is often an idea trigger. “I think I could be a DJ,” laughs Amlani, adding that his favourite free-time activity is making playlists for his restaurants. “I am a bit obsessed about that. A lot of my restaurants have been inspired by music. When you put on some jazz and you think about the kind of environment in which you would be listening to that, the cocktail you would drink,

recommend it,” he smiles.

Even though business keeps him travelling to Bangalore, New Delhi and Pune, he now makes sure to keep time out for his son. While in Mumbai, his day usually starts at 8 am, “when a trainer comes home”, he says, adding a rueful, “to no avail”. The rest of the day is spent discussing ideas and plans with his team at the company’s Mumbai office. “I prefer calling myself a ‘chief experiential officer’ rather than a chief executive officer. My role is customer facing—what they experience,” he says.

And food is the biggest part of that.

Recently, he spent five consecutive days doing food trials from 11 am to 6 pm. “It’s honestly the most exhausting thing you can do,” he says, “your entire energy goes in digesting the food.” But as someone who ends up playing the role of a “bridge between the chef and the customer”, the final vote of what is going to be on your plate is Amlani’s. “Chefs tend to be purists, but customers are used to certain things and you have to give that to them.” Being

flair and fine dining with cutting edge cooking techniques, proved far less of a draw. “It was my finest work but also my biggest failure,” he says. The concept of a 12-course ‘degustation menu’ that was meant to be a sensory experience was probably ahead of its time three years ago. “We put a lot of capital behind it and we did it in Delhi, which we thought was leading the food revolution in India. It worked on modern principles, and on some level people couldn’t understand the concept.”

This was also the one time he admits that he let his and his star chef Fernandes’ ego get the better of them.

“My biggest learning was, ‘Don’t take Screw Social Driver, yet another popular drink served at Social

“A restaurant must have a tonality match—the menu, table, chair, music, all have to be of the same chord.

Otherwise it jars”, Riyaaz Amlani the furniture, lighting, food and suddenly you have a restaurant idea!” While briefing the architect, he plays the chosen music in the background to help get across the mood he has in mind. “It is important to build a restaurant where there is a tonality match—the menu, table, chair, music all have to be of the same chord. Otherwise it jars,” he says.

A

s we discuss Amlani’s pursuits

away from his business of leisure, he tells us about his wife and his newborn child. The long-time bachelor tied the knot in 2012 with Kiran Chaudhry, who was a UK-based lawyer when they met in 2011. About two months ago, they became parents to a boy. “It is the best feeling. Have one… or ten, I highly 58 open

consumer oriented has been important to him ever since he began: “I never approached things from a restaurateur’s perspective. That was the edge I had, I didn’t know what it was to be a restaurateur. There was a certain amount of naiveté and it worked in my favour.”

He preserves his newcomer’s spirit and pure love of food with side efforts such as Gypsy Kitchen. A pop-up restaurant format that he describes as a “food and heritage conservation project”, it grants chefs and housewives a platform to showcase their talent and lets lovers of food submit to the experience.

But then, not all experiments work in this unpredictable market. While Amlani may have a Midas touch in the casual-dining format, his ambitious Smoke House Room, which was all

yourself too seriously’ and ‘Don’t try to change the world.’ This business is a slow tango.”

More than a decade dancing this ‘slow tango’, he harbours a dream of someday just “vegetating and being a stay-at-home dad”. “I am getting to a stage where my involvement will become less and less necessary and the next generation in the company will be able to take over.” He wants to be able to grow fresh vegetables and work on a farm-to-table project, so that the new generation doesn’t grow up thinking carrots come out of a packet. But will it be easy to give up the business? “I don’t know. Maybe I will want to come back or I’ll be extremely happy and wonder why didn’t I do it sooner!” n 6 october 2014

science

childhood bullying The negative social, physical and mental health effects of childhood bullying are still evident nearly 40 years later, according to a King’s College, London, study

Blood Test for Depression A study shows how this ailment can finally be diagnosed in an objective way

Dark Side of Sibling Bullying

I

f you weren’t feeling so good about life and went to a psychiatrist, he pretty much had to take your word for it. And you had to trust him if he diagnosed you with depression. There was really no objective way to measure the ailment. That has changed now with the development of the first ever blood test for major depression.

According to a report on the website Sciencedaily.com, scientists from Northwestern University have come up with a set of criteria for a test that eliminates the questionnaire. The report says, ‘The test identifies depression by measuring the levels of nine RNA blood markers. RNA molecules are the messengers that interpret the DNA genetic code and carry out its instructions.’

But that is not all that the test does.

Depending on what it shows, it also indicates whether a patient should go in for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which relies on changing the way you think in order to address mental ailments like depression. The researchers found that markers showed improvement within 18 weeks of

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CBT and the depression was brought under control.

Eva Redei, who developed the test, was quoted as saying, “This clearly indicates that you can have a bloodbased laboratory test for depression, providing a scientific diagnosis in the same way someone is diagnosed with high blood pressure or high cholesterol. This test brings mental health diagnosis into the 21st century and offers the first personalized medicine approach to people suffering from depression.”

For the study, Redei’s team took 32 depressed patients and an equal number of non-depressed people.

In those with depression, they had already identified nine RNA markers. ‘After 18 weeks of therapy, the changed levels of certain markers could differentiate patients who had responded positively and were no longer depressed (based on a clinical interview and patients’ self-reported symptoms) from patients who remained depressed.

This is the first biological indicator of the success of cognitive behavioral therapy, the study authors said,’ noted the Sciencedaily report. n

A new study, published in the journal Pediatrics, has found that children who revealed they had been bullied by their brothers or sisters several times a week or more during early adolescence were twice as likely to report being clinically depressed as young adults. They were also twice as likely to say they had harmed themselves within the previous year compared with those who had not been bullied. The findings are the results of the first longitudinal study to investigate possible links between sibling bullying and clinical depression and self-harm in young adults.

The link between being bullied by siblings as a child and later mental health disorders was found to be similar for boys and girls. n

Pupil Size and Decision Making

The precision with which people make decisions can be predicted by their pupil size before they are presented with any information about the decision, according to a new study published in PLOS Computational Biology. The study, conducted by researchers at Leiden University, showed that spontaneous, moment-tomoment fluctuations in pupil size predicted how a selection of participants varied in the success of their decision making. A larger pupil size indicated poorer upcoming task performance, due to more variability in the decisions made once the relevant information was presented. Some individuals who had the largest pupils also tended to be the least consistent in their decisions. n

6 october 2014

sdxc card Released in 2010, this is the latest type of memory card that meets the demands of full HD recording in terms of capacity and speed. SDXC cards begin at 64GB with speeds upto 104MBps and have a roadmap to 2TB with speed up to 300MBps. This card is only compatible with SDXC devices

tech&style

Roger Dubuis w Excalibur 42 Automatic for men

BlackBerry Porsche P9983 A premium smartphone with the company’s latest operating system gagandeep Singh Sapra

Price on request

Price awaited

Roger Dubuis’ Excalibur 42 Automatic for men is powered by the automatic mechanical movement RD640 comprising 198 components. The pleasingly crafted case in pink gold is enhanced by rhodium-coated pink gold appliques and its elegance extends perfectly to its pink gold bracelet.

The watch is water resistant up to 30 metres. n

Y

our style quotient shows

the world how differently you stand out; to complete your look, BlackBerry, in collaboration with Porsche Design, a luxury brand, is set to launch the new Porsche Design P9983 smartphone. This is the third phone in their collaboration series.

P9983 is made of premium materials with a beautiful finish, including a sapphire glass crystal lens on the camera, forged stainless steel chassis, a special keyboard made of a glasslike material, and special 3D effect silver font characters.

This smartphone sports a battery that will give you a talk-time of up to 14 hours. There is an 8 megapixel back camera with a five-element f/2.2 lens, and a 2 megapixel front camera for video calls over BBM. The P9883 comes preloaded with the latest BlackBerry 10.3 OS, giving you access to apps not only from the BlackBerry App store, but also the Amazon App store, thus allowing Android Apps to run on it.

6 october 2014

The package includes Porsche designed headphones, and a world travel adapter kit, so you have the right adapter irrespective of where in the world you are. If you are using BBM to connect with friends and family, the P9883 comes with a specialised PIN ID group that lets them all know you are using a Porsche designed phone.

Like all other BlackBerry phones, the P9883 is designed to make your work life easy, with its BlackBerry Hub that lets you look at all your messages at one go, predictive and adaptive typing tools that learn how you answer emails, and a secure operating system that keeps your files and data secure.

You also have on offer exclusive aftermarket accessories, including handcrafted leather backdoors made of fine Italian leather that are available in yellow, blue green, dark brown, pomegranate, paloma grey, salsa, blue and orange colour options. n

Sandisk 512GB Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I

Rs 51,990

Modern day DSLRs can shoot 4K videos, but chances are that your card will fill up fast and you will be shooting videos at low resolutions. Sandisk has a solution, the world’s largest capacity SDXC card—512 gigabytes of storage with a writing speed of 90 megabytes per second, and a top reading speed of 95 megabytes per second—which can hold 120odd minutes of 4K video. The cards are made of very tough materials, and they can withstand shock, water and even X-rays, making sure you don’t lose your pictures. 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 show-stopper from pakistan Khoobsurat’s leading man, whose cool brooding looks have got people talking, is a well-known television actor in Pakistan. This Lahore-born model-actor is also a singer. He released his first album in 2013, and also owns a clothing brand called Silk with his wife

Khoobsurat This film combines a delightful re-creation of old-world charm with emphatic performances ajit duara

current

o n scr een

A Walk among the Tombstones Director Scott Frank cast Liam Neeson, Dan Stevens,

David Harbour Score ★★★★★

khan or, fawad afzal Cast sonam kapo osh Gh ka an Director Shash

K

hoobsurat is set in the palac-

es of Rajasthan. It is very clear that the middle-class audience of the 1980 Hrishikesh Mukherjee prototype, also called Khoobsurat, has now gone dramatically upmarket and has transformed itself into a target audience for high-end brands.

The costumes, the art direction and the properties are exquisite, and since the intention of the film is to entertain the romantically inclined, it is well cast, with the bimbo side of Sonam Kapoor—as the actress once eloquently described one half of her persona— on full display. She is well matched by Fawad Afzal Khan, who plays the reserved, somewhat uptight heir to a royal Rajput bloodline.

The middle-aged Raja, Shekhar Singh Rathore (Aamir Raza Husain), is in a wheel-chair and dozens of physiotherapists have come and gone, unable to get him to do any exercise. The man has lapsed into depression after he lost his older son in an accident, and he does not

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want to walk. What he really needs is counselling. The latest physio, Dr Milli Chakravarty (Sonam Kapoor), figures this out—after a disastrous start during which she bumps into priceless antiques, rubs the Rani (Ratna Pathak) up the wrong way, jams with the servants and makes the handsome young prince, Vikram Singh Rathore (Fawad), further arch his arched eyebrow and further starch his superbly tailored achkan.

The whole thing is in the tradition of the paperback romantic novel, and it works in that genus. This is because the director pays attention to the smallest of roles, guards and butlers, and makes them all fit in to the general ambience of old-world elegance. Also, apart from Milli’s mother (Kirron Kher) and her non-stop blather—designed as comic relief—the performances are low key but effective.

Only one sequence, a ridiculous kidnapping episode, is out of sync with the even tenor of the film. Khoobsurat is a pleasant watch. n

Like fictional detectives Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, the former NYPD cop and private investigator Matthew Scudder also has distinctive personality traits and a curious past. He is a recovered alcoholic who attends ‘Alcoholic’s Anonymous’ meetings and introduces himself with touching humility, stating exactly how long he has been on the wagon. In the tradition of AA’s anonymity, it will never be known if Scudder’s creator, crime writer Lawrence Block, on whose book of the same name A Walk Among the Tombstones is based, suffered from a similar affliction.

When faced with the most horrific of serial murders in this movie, Scudder (Liam Neeson), retains his equanimity with an attitude that says ‘This is the worst, it can’t get any worse than this’, characteristic of a recovered alcoholic. This enables him to think rationally in tight situations, and also gives him empathy for lonely people without a support system. He offers friendship to a homeless African-American kid with sicklecell anemia. This film evokes a New York city thriller set of the 1990s, but it slips in leaving both the victims and killers unfinished—that is, improperly sketched as characters. This prevents a complete immersion in the narrative. n AD 6 october 2014

Not People Like Us

R aj e e v M asa n d

Wounded Words of a Spurned Lover

Salman Khan, who’s apparently still smarting from the fact that Katrina Kaif broke up with him to take up with Ranbir Kapoor, is not one to pass up a cheap shot. He said in an interview recently that Isabelle Kaif (Katrina’s younger sister), who stars in Dr Cabbie, a Canadian film he’s produced, is a better actress than her star sibling.

It’s a good thing Katrina has a sense of humour. When asked to respond to his comment, she said she’d seen Isabelle’s audition tapes, and given that her sister had received formal acting training—which she hadn’t before making her own debut—Salman was probably right in saying Isabelle is a better actress. Katrina, who has been slowly opening up about her relationship with Ranbir in the press lately, is expected to move in with her Raajneeti co-star shortly, and the couple is making no secret of it.

Hrithik’s Ingenious Fitness Dare

Hrithik Roshan would have you forget the Ice Bucket Challenge and stay focused on the ‘Bang Bang Dare’ as he likes to call it. Leading up to the release of his new action film next week, the actor has been issuing mostly physical challenges to his filmi friends and co-stars, starting with his childhood buddy Uday Chopra, whom Hrithik dared (on Twitter) to do ‘100 weight pull ups in five sets’.

No one likes to be called out as a chicken. Uday accepted the challenge, and, admittedly with a little help of special effects, carried out the dare and quickly posted a video on Twitter and Instagram.

Next in line for the ‘Bang Bang Dare’ were Dino Morea, photographer Dabboo Ratnani, and the very sporting Priyanka Chopra, who accepted Hrithik’s challenge to do ‘a handstand with a pushup’. She did a handstand with three pushups, and did it in heels. “Next time ask me to do something a little more difficult,” she shot back in the video, making it clear she hadn’t so much as broken a sweat.

By the time you read this, Ranveer Singh, Shah Rukh Khan and Katrina Kaif are likely to have accepted and performed the challenges he’s thrown at them. The one who got away easily was Sonam Kapoor, who 6 october 2014

Hrithik dared to display ‘a collection of your happiest, craziest smiles on d super success of Khoobsurat’. She responded not long after with a collage of her widest grins.

Whoever said Aamir Khan and Shah Rukh Khan were Bollywood’s ultimate marketing masterminds might want to add Hrithik Roshan to that list for this shrewd campaign to create buzz around Bang Bang! Movie stars posting fitness videos of themselves… pretty clever, you’d have to agree.

Old Habits Die Hard

She’s a popular leading lady, currently in semi-retirement, notorious for her mood swings, and the bête noir of assistant directors everywhere. The married actress has cut down on her film work considerably, but has shot a bunch of advertising campaigns recently for everything from baby diapers and chocolate milk to vitamin supplements.

An agency representative on the set of a diapers commercial she was filming not so long ago revealed that the actress was “surprisingly well behaved” during the shoot and “incredibly patient” while the unit waited around for the star attraction—the infant who was to appear in the commercial—to wake up and behave for the cameras. Fearing that the actress might throw a hissy fit for being made to wait endlessly, the unit was apparently on tenterhooks, treading on eggshells around her, making sure she was comfortable. But there wasn’t a murmur of a complaint from her.

Could she have changed, after all? Well, not quite. Just weeks later, while filming a chocolate powder commercial, the actress seemed to be back in her usual mood, snapping at assistants and production people, throwing her weight around while everyone on the set cowered in fear. When the director asked if she would do another take of a particular shot, this time approaching the scene another way, she reportedly glared at him angrily as if he had no business telling her how to do her job. During lunch break, the unit heard her vent her anger while she swore away like a sailor in her make-up room, unaware that the microphone she was wearing hadn’t been switched off. n Rajeev Masand is entertainment editor and film critic at CNN-IBN open www.openthemagazine.com 63

open space

Fleeing Writers With Tash Aw

by S i d d h a rt h D h a n va n t S h a n g h v i

I first met Tash Aw at a literary festival in north India. I was desperate to leave after my talk; the company of writers, I’d discovered and confirmed that day, was full of envy and rage, discount intelligence, royal pettiness and frightful egoism—qualities I prided in myself, no doubt.

The festival bus drew up.

But a bus full of writers would have felt like a marriage, with its rank whiff of confined sex and domestic rancour. I stayed back. Then Tash appeared, elegant, flustered, and although we did not know each other, we decided to get a rickshaw to the hotel. The rickshaw driver drove at speeds I’d seen before only in films where the protagonist is on crack, or fleeing metaphysical demons. I think he might have run over someone and when I asked him, he said, “It is their karma, sir,” or something to the effect. Later, over the years as I got to know Tash, I always remembered the rickshaw ride, trying to flee bad company, how we had accidentally fallen into a friendship. Perhaps that was our karma.

A past contributor to The New York Times and Time, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi is the author of The Last Song of Dusk. His tributes in pictures and words to fellow writers and friends will appear regularly in this space