Blink issue 69 23 05 2015

CAN’T WAIT TO BE KING The recent lion census proves that the numbers are growing, but what does the future hold for the big cat p2 saturday, may 23, 2015

illustration: dipankar

A quest for RK Narayan’s fictional town leads to serendipities through villages and railway stations, kaapi shops and post offices p9

Looking for Malgudi

PIKU’S HERO Scriptwriter Juhi Chaturvedi proves that bodily functions can make for a great storyline p15

WHISPERS AFOOT Political espionage in the days of Raj involved both art and science p22

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Lion king The 2015 census shows that the lion count is at 523 now, up by 27 per cent since 2010 vijay soneji

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Hakuna matata All is well in the jungle. Lion numbers are up and conservation is a success. But what happens next as the big cat moves out of Gir?

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he largest five-yearly lion census, cise went off smoothly. Many volunteers took held between May 2 and 5 in Guja- a break from their professional engagements rat, saw the numbers of the big cat to take part in the census. increase by a whopping 27 per cent For four days, enumerators trekked the dry (also the highest growth in all previous cen- deciduous forests of Gir tracking the Asiatic Lisuses) from 411 lions counted in the 2010 cen- on, placing themselves at the forest’s watersus. Asiatic lions once roamed from Palestine holes. Most river beds had dried up, except for to Palamau, but by the 20th century, their River Hiran, where water still flows. The methnumbers were restricted to the Gir region in od used for counting was Total Block Counting northern Gujarat. Even within the region, the method, which is based on direct sightings of lion courted extinction till a few decades ago, the animal. with numbers dropping to a paltry 50. Now, Armed with GPS, GIS instruments and according to the latest census, Gujarat is night-vision cameras, teams of enumerators home to 523 lions. sat on watch for the animals to In 1880, British officer Colonel come by. They wrote down speJames Watson is said to have uncific characteristics of the anidertaken the first lion census in mal on a sheet of paper printed Gir, reporting the presence of only with the sketch of a lion’s face Preparations for the 12 lions in the region. Over the next and body. After each sighting, census began nine few decades, the then state of Junaenumerators noted down months ago gadh undertook intermittent lion unique identification marks on censuses. It was only after the forthe lions — colour of hair and mation of the Gir sanctuary in 1965 eyes, belly folds, scars, or tufted that the first official lion census ends of tails. For instance, lion was held.

‘Kaan-kata’ was identified by the The 2015 lion census was the 14th exercise cut on its ear, lion ‘Langdo’ had a distinctive on the trot. But it was unique on many counts. limp and lion ‘Baando’ didn’t have a proper For the first time, the census covered nearly long tail.

22,000 sq km, more than twice the area covThe teams then marked the presence of the ered in 2010. Camera traps were also used for lion on physical maps and tagged the location the first time. The exercise saw the participa- on electronic maps. In several instances, tracktion of 250 volunteers, including representa- ers took help from the Maldhari tribe (local tives from NGOs, teachers and doctors. A cattle-herders). “We were paid a daily wage to 2,500-strong brigade of forest and security of- accompany them and help locate the lions. We ficials and enumerators ensured that the exer- have lived here for decades, we know the beast

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and its movements better than the forest guards,” says a Maldhari.

Preparations for the exercise began nine months prior and foresters started tracking movements of the lions a week before the actual census. For the enumerators, the census was a round-the-clock job. “They had to be at the spots throughout the process. They came with tiffins and water bottles. You never know when the animal will come to a waterhole,” says forester DP Dave at Sasan-Gir. The kingdom expands In India, historical records reveal that till a few hundred years ago, the lion roamed in areas north of the Narmada — what are now the states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Gradually, the populations migrated towards Gujarat and concentrated around Gir. The species is now restricted to 1,882.6 sq km of the Gir forest area in Saurashtra. Nearly 75 per cent of the area, 1,421 sq km has been declared as Protected Area, which comprises 258.7 sq km of the national park and 1153.4 sq km of the sanctuary area. An additional 470.5 sq km of buffer zone serves as reserve forest.

This means that lion presence has increased by more than 10 times the Protected Area.

As per the forest department’s estimate, a pride (five to eight lions) requires roughly around 40-50 sq km of territory. The increase in big cat population has resulted in a shrinking of the habitat, which explains why the lions have begun to move out of the forest

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areas. The census reveals that the big cats have expanded their territory to the coastal areas of Savar-Kundla, Amreli, Palitana, Mitiana, Pania and Babra Vidi. The lion footprint has spread to eight of the 11 districts of Saurashtra.

“Lions are moving out of the forest area in search of prey. Even if the lion has visited a place once, it has to be included as a lion-sighting area,” says Dr Ansuman Sharma, deputy conservator of forests, Gir (East). In the 2010 census, the exercise covered 41 villages, while this time the number has gone up to 76. GA Patel, former member of the National Wildlife Board and ex-chief wildlife warden, adds that “the increase in population has led to infighting among the males. The weaker ones are leaving the jungle.” Out of 523 lions, Gir is home to only 302 of them.

Call of duty For surveying 22,000 sq km of lion territory, 250 volunteers and 2,500 forest guards and trackers sat on a roundthe-clock watch reuters/anindito mukherjee; the big cats were tracked by their unique identification marks like scars or tufted ends of tails vijay soneji

Project Lion In India, the lion’s share of conservation of wildlife species is dedicated to protecting the tiger. While the central government has made efforts by providing additional financial support over the years, the fact remains that ‘Project Tiger’ is top priority. “Under ‘Project Tiger’, the government has spent ₹488.58 crore. For elephants, they have spent ₹48.71 crore. The centre has also released a total of ₹206.09 crore under the Integrated Development of Wildlife Habitats in the last three years,” says Rajya Sabha member Parimal Nathwani, who

introduced the pitch for lion as the national animal. “It is high time that the centre shifts its attention to the conservation of the Asiatic lion.” The status of the national animal has also seen its share of politics. Until 1972, the lion was a national symbol when the Indira Gandhi government launched ‘Project Tiger’ and the tiger unseated the lion. Since last year, however, the Modi government has been pushing for the lion’s return.

As the lion habitat spreads, the challenges that lie ahead for conservationists are the impending human-lion conflict in non-forest areas and the maintenance of a diverse gene pool. “The forest department has no infrastructure to protect the animal. There are no studies yet on lion behaviour outside the forest area,” says Patel, adding that an open savannah-type protected plains is an option for the lions’ expanded territory.

Members of the 8,400-strong Maldhari tribe say that the state government is not doing enough to protect lion cubs. “Male cubs are getting killed by bigger males. Some die on railway tracks. A strict vigil is needed to safeguard them,” says a young Maldhari. Last month, three cubs were run over by a goods train on the railway line between Pipavav port and Liliya taluka, which has a lion settlement.

With the latest census figures, plans are afoot to source more data on lion territories, their vulnerability to poaching and areas of conflict with the locals. “We are planning to have an Asiatic Lion Landscape Scheme aimed at habitat improvement and conflict management. Also, we are planning to form a task force to tackle issues related to lions and spread awareness for lion conservation,” says PK Taneja, additional chief secretary, forest and environment department.

While the state government has laid out ambitious plans to protect the lion, it has to increase its engagement with the Maldhari tribe. “It is their co-existence with lions that has benefited in conserving the endangered species. We must congratulate them for taking care of the lion,” Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel said while announcing the census estimates. rutam vora

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STATES OF MATTER

How fair is free speech?

France’s deep-rooted racism and intolerance mocks its defence of the right to expression

sukumar muralidharan

Dark tones The sorry state of minority assimilation in France has come under spotlight after the Charlie Hebdo killings in January 2015 afp

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ew minds were changed in the furious debate that followed the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris in January, with protagonists sticking to well-rehearsed scripts on free speech and its legitimate boundaries.

The heat of that debate had barely subsided when a fresh round of contention broke out over a decision by the American unit of the global literary association PEN, to honour Charlie with a free speech award. Much recrimination followed as a substantial group of literary eminences chose to walk out of the awards ceremony and others stepped up to replace them.

The arena was soon invaded by outright bigotry. A far right organisation in the US, appropriately described as a ‘hate group’ by anti-racism campaigners, assembled an event in a small town in Texas with the object of caricaturing the prophet of Islam. Two armed men, reportedly locals with known criminal records, attempted to storm the event but were shot dead. Another round of acrimony ensued, with free speech zealots attacking the suggestion that the hate fest organisers should have exercised restraint.

In some embarrassment, Charlie’s defenders distanced themselves from the Texas event. Of the 523 covers that Charlie published in the 10 years since 2005, only seven chose to ridicule Islam, claimed the defence. It was satire’s fate to often be construed as hate speech.

But as PEN America president Andrew Solomon and executive director Suzanne Nossel put it, Charlie’s valour lay in ‘their dauntless fortitude patrolling the outer precincts of free

speech’. For another writer, all comparison be- asserted the singularity of French culture and tween Charlie and the Texas event was mis- the unique opportunities it afforded to all, irplaced since it fudged the ‘distinction respective of identity. Yet it provided no civil between hate and critique.’ Even if Charlie’s remedies and virtually disallowed ‘civil parmethods were not ‘always admirable or ap- ties’ from bringing litigation on behalf of agpropriate’, its approach was avowedly secular. grieved individuals, reflecting an old French Secularism was not ‘state atheism, but rather, superstition that any form of intermediary an impartial, detached policy that permits the loyalty between the citizen and the state coexistence of multiple faith groups and cul- would be corrosive of the republican values. tures under an egalitarian structure.’

Minority assimilation remained patchy. In As official policy, secularism or laïcité, dates 2007, a reporter with Time spoke of a ‘bigoted from a 1905 French law on the separation of chorus’ and ‘growing racist chatter in the church and state, which disestablished the Ca- French mainstream.’ In 2012, an official advitholic faith, turning over church sory body reported a 23 per cent properties to the state. In its imrise in racist acts, with the vauntplementation, the 1905 law was ed 1972 law being by and large, inalways negotiated with the Vatieffective. The official response can and tempered by judicial inwas another astounding retreat To ridicule those at terpretation. Over time, its rigour into the delusional cocoon. In the bottom of the abated considerably. The January 2013, the French government outmemorial for the Charlie victims social heap ‘is almost lawed the use of the term ‘race’ in never funny — it is at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris all relevant articles of the penal just mean’ was perhaps best evidence of the code, or alternately, its replacenew compact between church ment by the term ‘ethnic’. and state.

French census enumerations Laïcité prohibits official fundceased gathering information ing of any religious order, but the about race and religion ever French state supports an estimatsince colour-blindness became ed 39,000 churches. In contrast, of about official policy. But in 2004 it was reported that 2,500 places of Muslim worship, constructed the preceding decade had witnessed a dramostly after the mass arrival of immigrants matic change in the composition of the counsince the 1960s, not one enjoys any form of try’s prison population. Though only about 10 state support. per cent of the population, Muslims were Evidently, observant Catholics acclimatise close to 70 per cent of prison inmates in better in the French environment of secular- France. The prison system, presumably beism. And discrimination is an unseen reality, cause of the unique seductions of the French often denied. A 1972 anti-discrimination law secular pretence, was yet to adapt to this shift.

There was for instance, an obdurate refusal to employ Muslim clerics to counsel prison inmates, because ‘inadequate screening could unleash potential militants into the system.’

Though uneasily aware of the troubling background, PEN America chose to honour Charlie, since as Solomon and Nossel put it: ‘The distressing absence of broad respect toward Muslims in France does not undercut Charlie Hebdo’s bravery in defending the right to be disrespectful’.

Early-April, just ahead of the PEN decision, Garry Trudeau, the legendary creator of the Doonesbury satire, chose a ceremony honouring his lifetime work, to sum up the moral dilemmas involved. “Traditionally,” he said, “satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable.”

By its very nature ‘satire punches up, against authority of all kinds.’ To ridicule those at the bottom of the social heap ‘is almost never funny — it is just mean’. In punching down and ‘attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech.

And despite all claims made on its behalf, it was an unavoidable conclusion that the ‘French tradition of free speech is too full of contradictions to fully embrace’.

Clearly, the free speech zealots have to worry that the cause is not hijacked by culture warriors creating new fissures.

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sukumar muralidharan is a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla

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UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Republic of shame The 1962 war changed the lives of around 3,000 Chinese living in India — their only crime was that they belonged to a country that most of them had never seen

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Omair Ahmad is an author. His last book was on Bhutan

ashington DC can be quite a beautiful city, and its Mall area — not to be confused with shopping malls — is both restful and a way to learn from the museums and monuments. At the intersection of Louisiana and New Jersey Avenues and D Street, there is a quiet corner which is easy to miss. It does not tower like the Washington Monument, nor is it like the great Smithsonian Museums, and it takes a while to realise that it is a tribute to the Japanese Americans who lost their lives in defence of the US in World War II. It is actually a little more than that, because it also pays tribute to 2,500 Japanese who were held in an incarceration camp in Texas during the war, simply for being Japanese. Actually it is even more complicated; many of these people had American citizenship, so they were not being punished for their citizenship but their origins. And lastly, the camp in Texas was only one of many. Overall the US incarcerated more than a 1,00,000 people of Japanese origin. It has never really come to terms with that, but the small quiet memorial is at least an acknowledgement of something. Countries do terrible things during the paranoia of war, often enough to their own citizens.

In India there is no such memorial, but we acted scarcely better in the one occasion that presented itself. After the 1962 war with China — we call it war, the Chinese call it a skirmish, and the world did not really care because it happened when the nuclear stand off between the US and USSR over nuclear missiles in Cuba was at its peak — India imprisoned around 3,000 people of Chinese origin in an internment camp in Deoli, Rajasthan. This large ethnic Chinese community was living in India’s northeastern states and West Bengal, among those closest to the frontline of the war. The very odd thing is that despite the high tensions before the conflict, these people had never been seen as suspects earlier. In fact, during the war, between October 10 and November 19, 1962 (the Chinese declared a unilateral ceasefire on November 21, 1962; the Cuban missile crisis ended in October, and the US was getting involved, vacating all areas captured by them), no action was taken against them. At the behest of BN Mullick, the head of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then home minister, signed an order allowing the IB and the state CID teams to detain all people of Chinese ethnicity under the Defence of India Act, 1962. The order was given on November, 17, 1962, and carried out with alacrity within two days, by which time the fighting had ended.

None of these people had actually been accused of doing anything wrong. Certainly no case was filed, and none heard by a court.

Instead Mullick alleged in his book, The Chinese Betrayal, that these people, many of them workers in the tea estates of Kalimpong and Darjeeling, or labourers in West

Not us, just them People of Chinese origin with Indian voter cards at an election in Kolkata, which has India’s only Chinatown arunangsu roy chowdhury

Bengal, “had worked in collusion with the Journalist Kai Friese told me about his meetChinese Consulate in Calcutta till it was ing with two men of Chinese origin locked closed and it was noticed that there was up in Ranchi’s mental asylum for years afmuch jubilation amongst these terward, only because the state people over the Chinese victory did not know what to do with at Nyamkachu and Kibithoo in them. the month of October.” No eviIn my hometown Gorakhpur, dence of this assertion has ever my sister’s hairdresser was ChiThe order was given been provided. Dragged out of nese. I think her family was from on November 17, their homes, dumped into Canton, now Guangzhou. I do 1962, and carried out trains, whole families were shiftnot know why they came to Inwith alacrity within ed to the Deoli internment camp dia. It happened long before my two days, by which used by the British to hold prisbirth during a time when China time the fighting oners during World War II. After was torn by civil war, and when had ended weary months, the Chinese govthe horrors of the Maoist revoluernment sent a ship to India, tion had devoured more than 70 and about 2,500 of these internmillion lives. But I wonder ees went ‘back’ to a country sometimes, considering how we most had never seen. The few have treated these people who hundred left mouldered in the camp until it came to our land for refuge, what they think was finally shut in 1968, and then they were of us, and what memorial could be large sent back to houses that had been ranenough to capture the scale of our shame. sacked, or left to rot in their absence. They tOmairTAhmad didn’t know what to expect on their return.

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Made in India An Australian designer is raising awareness about eco-friendly artisanal heritage crafts through her ‘Ayurvedic’ lingerie label

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rowing up on a farm in Hunter Valley amidst corn and watermelons in New South Wales, Julie Lantry would watch her mother, grandmother and aunt sew, knit and crochet. She would sit beside them and sew her doll’s clothes and paint bedspreads. Her love for textiles and design was instilled at an early age.

She was introduced to Ayurveda by her beautician and naturopath who used Ayurvedic creams and herbs. Lantry graduated in fashion design from the Sydney Institute of Technology, which boasts leading fashion designers such as Akira Isogawa, Nicole Zimmermann and Lisa Ho as its alumni. She worked with small and medium designers, and learnt to evolve a product from the drawing board to the retail shelves.

She launched Bulb — a range of sleep, loungewear and lingerie in 2001. “It was a day-toplay-to-bed range in sheer fabrics and silk adorned with handcrafted embellishments,” says Lantry. A passionate advocate of local craftsmanship, she had intended to produce her collections entirely in Australia, but it proved difficult as she worked in a shrinking local manufacturing industry.

A chance meeting with British designer Niki Groom saw her make a trip to India, where she was introduced to the artisans and ethical cooperatives, some of whom she continues to Body matters Lantry's Soulmate Intimates is made with natural tulsi, neem and aloe vera plant dyes work with. In September 2014, she launched Soulmate Intimates, an Australian-designed, For blue and pink pastel shades, we use neem, keen on embroidery and that’s the reason I Indian-made ‘Ayurvedic’ lingerie label. tulsi and soup nut with Indian Madder and in- joined Lantry’s Textile Tour to Vrindavan, “Underwear was the obvious thing to do. I digo. The cloth is then softened with aloe vera where we collaborated with artisans at Ashok wanted to create a commercial product that and dried in the sun. Fine latex free elastic is Ladiwal’s studio. The second tour was to The raises awareness and income for traditional used to create a smooth silhouette, whilst sub- Stitching Project in Pushkar, where we learnt artisans and also offered customers the oppor- tle panelling and extended side seams provide traditional block printing. Both experiences tunity to care for their body and environment. gentle layers of support,” explains Lantry. helped me realise my design aesthetic.” After In standard chemical dyes there are toxins Many designers use organic cotton, but she graduating, Kalsi would like to spend an exwhich many people with sensitive skin were claims to be amongst the very few making ‘Ay- tended period in India, learning different art finding uncomfortable and irritable to wear. urvedic’ lingerie. “It is a niche product,” says and textiles techniques and collaborating So I decided to use natural tulsi, neem and aloe Lantry. She has evolved comfortable yet chic with more artisans. vera plant dyes for their antioxidant, antibac- designs by incorporating responses from her Lantry is conducting an embroidery tour to terial and antiseptic properties. It took four customers over 25 years in the industry. Her Delhi next month and a weaving tour to Kullu years of research to launch the products sell mostly through in Himachal Pradesh in November. In 2016, product I have today,” says Lantry the gift and health markets and she is hoping to take students to work with who called it Soulmate Intimates the business currently has a Studio Calantha and Tharangini Studios. Stuas it is a natural partnership beturnover of under AUS dio Calantha’s co-director, Sudhir Swain says, tween traditional crafts and $500,000 (₹2.5 crore approxi- “We have traditional artisans from Bengal modern technology. mately). But Soulmate Intimates who embellish the block print on Lantry’s It took four years of “Our organic cotton, certified has come with its own set of range with delicate threadwork, beadwork research to launch by the Global Organic Textile challenges. “The initial pro- and sequins, adding flair to the garments.” the product I Standard, is bought from a farmgramme started in Tirupur with The custom block designs are hand-carved have today er in Tirupur in Tamil Nadu and traditional dye artisans working by Tharangini’s team of skilled traditional loomed into fabric and dyed with with Ayurvastra (now AyurTex). woodblock makers.

Ayurvedic herbs and plants at AyThey worked very hard to deliv“We were happy to work with Lantry as her urTex, Tirupur. The fabric is then er international quality stan- brand stands for similar values. We make custested for colour fastness and dard and meet realistic tom eco-colours to complement her range of shrinkage before it is sent to Bangalore for deadlines, however, circumstances made it garments. The printing and finishing involves manufacturing. Our factory partner, certified difficult for them. Through group discussions a team effort between our studio and women

by Worldwide Responsible Accredited Produc- with our manufacturing partners in Banga- from the many non-profit organisations we tion, uses the latest Swiss technology in un- lore we got there in the end,” says Lantry who support, including MITU (Multiple Initiatives derwear and employs mostly women to make is doing a master’s degree (Research) at Uni- Towards Upliftment), a self-help group for unour garments. The lingerie is then hand block versity of Technology, Sydney (UTS). derprivileged women”, says Padmini Govind printed at Tharangini Studios and embelShe has been organising textile tours to In- of Tharangini studio. lished at Studio Calantha by traditional arti- dia since 2010 to help Australian fashion stuAt present, Soulmate Intimates only has linsans in Bangalore. It is then packaged in dents collaborate with Indian artisans and gerie and women’s sleepwear, but Lantry recycled material in Delhi and sold online build long-term artisan networks. Since 2012, wants to extend the range to include chilfrom Australia,” says Lantry. she has conducted five tours for UTS and two dren’s and men’s wear; along with an online About half a dozen different dyeing process- for Technical and Further Education (TAFE), Ul- sales partner with an Indian retailer for the Ines are used. “For ecru whites, natural minerals timo in Sydney. dia market. and salts are used. The fabric is then dried in Mandish Kalsi, a UTS student who has been the sun for three weeks to naturally bleach. on two tours with Lantry, says, “I am really neena bhandari is a Sydney-based journalist

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Building a ‘smart’ world Purushottam Kaushik, Cisco’s managing director, on what to expect in a smart city

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he Narendra Modi government has ambitious plans to create 100 smart cities across the country. But the government white paper on the subject does not clearly state what a smart city is and how they will be developed. BLink spoke to technology major Cisco, which has prepared the information and communication technology (ICT) roadmap for four smart cities. Purushottam Kaushik, managing director, sales, growth verticals, Cisco India & SAARC, explains what a smart city will look like. Edited excerpts from an interview:

There is no standard definition of a smart city. What, according to you, is a smart city?

Over the past few years, the definition of smart cities has evolved to mean many things to many people. Yet, one aspect remains constant: part of being ‘smart’ is utilising ICT and the internet to address urban challenges. Digital urbanism is rapidly becoming a central pillar for urban planners, architects, developers, and transportation providers, as well as in public service provision. The foundation for a digital India will be intelligent networks which will transform the delivery of citizen services

A virtual centre Digital urbanism is becoming the central pillar for urban planners, architects, developers, and transportation providers, says Purushottam Kaushik

from transportation, utilities and security to entertainment, education, and healthcare.

Cisco has prepared the roadmap for four smart cities in India. What does that roadmap entail?

Cisco has prepared the ICT master plan for four smart cities which was proposed under the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor project.

As part of the project, Cisco is preparing plans for Shendra Industrial Park in Maharashtra, Dholera Special Investment Region in Gujarat, Manesar Bawal Investment Region in Haryana and Khushkhera Bhiwadi Neemrana Investment Region in Rajasthan. The objective is to dovetail physical planning with digital planning so as to ensure integrated control and governance. Cisco Smart City in Bangalore is a showcase of how the government can offer governance and essential services to citizens digitally, build broadband highways, enable digital inclusion and deliver information for all.

which an incident taken place. The system utilises video and audio; touch screen, virtual keyboard and Cisco collaboration technology, allowing citizens to launch a live video session with a designated police officer. Post filing of the FIR, the citizen instantly receives a printed copy as an acknowledgement. In response to the success of the pilot and positive citizen feedback, the City Police have announced their intent to set-up 100 more such kiosks.

How easy or difficult will be the implementation of technology on such a large scale ?

Building a smart city from scratch is relatively easy compared with the task of introducing intelligence into an existing urban environment ie retro-fitting a smart city. For most cities, the challenge does not relate to creating a smart city from scratch but rather, on adding intelligence to existing infrastructure. Further complications arise as a result of distributed infrastructure, and multiple What is the role of technology government departments in a smart city? which become hurdles in archiPart of being ‘smart’ With regard to utilisation of tectural design and implemenis utilising ICT and technology , the end result is totation. What is needed is a the internet to leverage the internet and telestep-by-step process starting address urban communications with simple solutions to imchallenges technology to enable the city prove basic city intelligence like and citizen multiple services, sensors, cameras, connected thereby enhancing their quality transport, smart lighting etc. to of life. Cities are growing at the larger interventions such as a rate of 10,000 people every hour consolidated Common Informaeven as we continue to accelerate tion Model. towards a world of connected devices. For every two people connected around the globe, Since technology is at the core of smart there are five more ready to be connected, and cities, how will it accommodate those who for every device connected to the internet, 10 are technologically illiterate? more are set to join in the near future. Technology has been absorbed ubiquitously Through the Internet of Everything, across India through smart phones and the we can help countries, cities and mobility revolution has extended through evcommunities embrace sustainable ery layer of society. Technology is an enabler urban development and enable eco- of progress, and applications therefore need nomic, social and environmental to be aligned to ensure that people of all edustability. Cisco has already demon- cational backgrounds are able to leverage thetechnology for social and strated this with the Navi Mumbai benefits of Municipal Corporation where we economic progress. have deployed a video surveillance system. The solution utilises live With a high rate of technological camera feeds and alerts from IP- obsolescence, the costs of upgradation (of based outdoor cameras. The so- various devices/processes for city lution detects and records at- administrators and inhabitants) would be tacks, theft, vehicular high. Has Cisco analysed that aspect of movement, human move- future costs? ment, etc and alerts officials At Cisco, we leverage our Cisco Capital arm in a centralised control room which helps mitigate the risk of technology which will enable faster inci- obsolescence. Today, there are multiple financing options that offer the flexibility needed to dent response.

Cisco has also undertaken a upgrade to new technology to cater to current pilot project for the Banga- and future business requirements. lore City Police, where citizens can avail of an What kind of back-ups can one expect in ATM-like kiosk to file smart cities if technology/networks fail?

FIRs remotely, irre- Redundancy has to be built into the foundaspective of the juris- tion of the architecture that goes into any diction in smart city solution. Given that essential and core services run on these solutions, ringbased networks, redundant data centres, and back-up of end devices give operators the assurance of high availability in any scenario.

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A foxy kinda love

Girish Arjun Punjabi, a wildlife biologist, on how we have been good at conservation but are susceptible to silly development ideas

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ildlife biologist Girish Arjun Punjabi recently received the Carl Zeiss Award for Wildlife Conservation in New Delhi.

The award was in recognition of his efforts to conserve wildlife in the northern Sahyadris, through on-ground research and outreach.

Here he talks about his love for foxes and how technology can play a role in conservation. Excerpts from the interview: How did you turn to wildlife studies?

I think it happened when I was in Balas in Sawai Mansingh wildlife sanctuary in Rajasthan, which is now part of the Ranthambore Tiger reserve. I was a novice then, but living for 10 days in a forest guard’s shoes taught me something that I was yearning to learn. I was sitting on a cliff-face with a few others and watching the sun go down after a heavy downpour. I decided to take the plunge then. I took up wildlife studies for my masters at National Centre for Biological Sciences in 2008. That course, no doubt, was a turning point in my life.

Why did you choose foxes for your masters dissertation?

I’ve always loved foxes! They’re the smallest wild Canids, so I was always keen to learn more about them. I remember doing a mad bike trip with a colleague in the heat of May across Rajasthan looking for them. We traversed 1,200 km of the state trying to locate the desert fox, a species found in north-west India.

When the time came for my dissertation, it wasn’t very hard to choose what I wanted to study. I studied den-site selection of Indian foxes in a human-dominated landscape near the Great Indian Bustard Sanctuary in Solapur.

We found that on a large scale foxes primarily chose grasslands when denning in the agricultural matrix. At a small scale, even manmade structures can play an important role.

Grasslands are highly threatened habitats in India today, and we found that they were important habitats for this species, but at the same time foxes appear to have opportunistically used human-made structures as well.

Your projects and interests have taken you to wildlife areas all over the country, what have been your observations?

The diversity of wildlife and habitats is immense and spectacular, and as a country we’ve done a great job in conserving this diversity up till now. But suddenly I feel things have started turning turtle, and we seem to be losing this regard for our wild heritage. Most places I go now, there’s this talk of ‘development’, habitats are being fragmented, biodiversity being lost, and yet little do we know how this loss in biodiversity will affect us in the future.

Tillari is an amazing region at the tri-junction of Maharashtra, Goa, and Karnataka. I saw the area for the first time during the large carnivore occupancy survey in 2010. Ever since I’ve been captivated by Tillari. Now, we’re meticulously documenting what wildlife exists in the region through camera-traps. We’ve found evidence of tigers, elephants, and there seems a reasonably high density of sambar and gaur.

This area has great potential for wildlife conservation, if only we can prevent it from falling prey to silly development ideas.

You support science-based conservation, how do you think recent technological You worked on a project which developments can help examined large carnivore conservation? occupancy in the northern Technology can help conservation Technology can Western Ghats. Please tell us in many ways, especially by helping help managers and about it. managers and researchers monitor researchers Yes, I was on this project under Dr areas. Take the case of camera-traps monitor areas Advait Edgaonkar to understand as an example — I’ve been using what proportion of area (aka octhem to document wildlife that was cupancy) tigers, leopards, dholes, until now never or rarely reported and sloth bears occupy in the from these parts. Especially in hunorth Western Ghats, a region selman-dominated landscapes, where dom studied for mammals. We also tried to wildlife is usually very shy. In one case, we also understand how forest area, large prey availa- managed to catch poachers who had killed a bility, and human presence affected large car- sambar deer, as we got clear shots of their nivore distribution at a landscape scale. faces. Nowadays, camera-traps even come with email/MMS facilities so monitoring can What is Sahyadri Corridor project about? become real-time, helping us act in time.

This project’s my brainchild, but I’m thankful a lot of organisations and people have sup- How do you look at human-carnivore ported my endeavour. It focuses on retaining interactions? and improving connectivity for large carni- Yes, these interactions are an important asvores in the north Western Ghats. This is not pect in carnivore conservation. Whether attipossible without stakeholder involvement, so tudes are positive or negative towards a we’ve also focused on creating partnerships species does determine if they occur in huwith people working in different parts of the man-dominated areas or not. It’s amazing to region. Importantly, the project works closely see that in some areas where I work, tigers and with the Maharashtra forest department and leopards are treated as gods and people want we’re collecting some incredible information to have them around their village. But how through camera-traps placed outside of pro- these dynamics change in a market-driven tected areas in the corridor region. world is something we should keep an eye for.

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You have also done important work in Tillari region of Maharashtra, please tell us about it.

parikshit suryavanshi is a researcher, translator and writer

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A house for Swami Doddamane in Agumbe, a village in Karnataka the hindu archives

The road to

Malgudi A quest for RK Narayan’s fictional town — replete with oldworld charm and character — leads to many interesting twists and turns, stories and discoveries

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odern-day Bengaluru has an endless Outer Ring Road. Cars, lorries, buses whizz past, and the noise is deafening as I — the only soul on foot — dodge exhaust and dust tails and share ‘pedestrian space’ with the occasional lethal vehicle taking a shortcut through the wrong lane.

The area is Doddanekundi, once probably a village by a pond of the same name, 20km outside the town centre. I’m looking for Malgudi, that gentlest of places characterised by a completely different pace of life — old bungalows

and lively bazaars populated by sweetmeat vendors, astrologers, printing presses, painters of signs, fake gurus and talkative men.

Although it’s a fiction created by novelist RK Narayan (1906-2001) some 80 years ago, a Google-search throws up several candidates in present-day India: one Malgudi is a gated villa community south of Chennai, another is a pharmacy near Mysore University, and a third is a restaurant on Bengaluru’s outskirts. This last is said to offer delicacies of the four southern states plus a special ‘Malgudi menu’.

After some two kilometres of a survival ex-

ercise on the Ring Road, the restaurant appears like a hallucination — built to resemble a traditional home with wooden pillars, it has a swing on the porch, a tray of help-yourself bananas by the door, and walls covered with reproductions of drawings by Narayan’s illustrious brother RK Laxman.

What would Narayan have ordered I wonder as I peruse the menu card. The Malgudi section is a mishmash of southern starters, such as chicken-65, chicken-95 and Malgudi spl chicken. But Narayan was a vegetarian. So I flip to the Tamil menu. After all, Narayan was born that side and towards the end he returned to Chennai where I was fortunate enough to meet him in the late 1990s. Unwilling to answer the same old questions about Malgudi and his books, he preferred to discuss Tamil food habits.

I had asked him if he ever thought about what it would feel like to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“No, I don’t need a Nobel Prize. I’m too old.

What would I do with it?” he said and quickly changed the topic, “So exactly which south Indian dishes have you eaten?”

I named the various foods that had found favour with me, and he appeared pleased that I had enjoyed both dosa and idli, because dishes like that couldn’t be had in Europe, he explained: the temperature wouldn’t allow a proper fermentation.

The less we talked about his books, the more communicative he became. Every now and then he inspected his potted plants with a critical eye but seemed to be unsentimental when declaring that some of them did not seem to be quite alive. “I think that all things, humans included, go through a phase of decay towards the end. So this is entirely natural, all this,” he said alluding to his own aged body, and the fact that he had stopped giving interviews about his books and meeting journalists, only then to ask as one writer might, with comradely pleasure, of another, “Would you like to see my study?”

He made his way slowly through the apartment he shared with his nephew, with the support of a crutch, over to a small room where he kept a cot and a writing desk. He sat down and rested his hand on a pile of papers.

“Are you writing something at the moment?” I asked.

“No, this is my correspondence. Every now and then I have a typist write out letters for me, but mostly I let the mail lie here and go through a phase of decay. It’s like a natural process.” He then asked me to write to him sometime, he enjoyed receiving letters. “If you don’t get a reply, you’ll know why,” he added.

I did write him, but I never heard from Narayan again. Though the conversation about food stuck in my mind, and so Tamil grub it is.

The Munakai soup is a light sambar-like preparation with tender drumsticks and I can imagine it being eaten in Malgudi, but vathal kozhambu turns out to be garlic pods cooked in pickled salt, and is a total assault on the gastric system. Narayan may have stuck to the standard meals.

By the time I empty my plantain leaf, I’m determined to find the real deal — the actual Malgudi. There are clues. Wikipedia and other internet sources useful for various degrees of disinformation place Malgudi a few hours’ journey from Chennai, some 500km away, so Coimbatore is frequently fielded as a possibility. In Tamil Nadu, there are in fact several candidates, such as Lalgudi.

But what if it’s in Karnataka instead? I’ve found evidence in the popular Doordarshan series Malgudi Days by playing the video in slow-motion. You might recall the episode about the mailman who doesn’t deliver an inauspicious letter on a wedding day — the foot-

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Malgudi brews A coffee shop at Green Hotel, Mysore. The hotel appears in one of ithe episodes in Malgudi Days ma sriram

age of the Malgudi post office flashes the zip code 577 411 in passing. It belongs to a small Malnad town called Agumbe (population of 180 joint-families).

Malgudi also makes an appearance in the Dev Anand-starrer The Guide but I trust the small screen version simply because Narayan himself preferred it to the movie. For one, the Bollywood version was shot in Rajasthan and Gujarat, which didn’t fit Narayan’s own image of Malgudi at all, but he rather felt that Shankar Nag’s acclaimed TV series, largely shot in Agumbe, did justice to his fiction.

Bengaluru Bengaluru isn’t entirely irrelevant in the search for Malgudi, for it was here that Narayan came up with the name. It happened on Vijaya Dashmi in September 1930, an auspicious time to set pen to paper according to his dear grandmother and so that’s when he began his first novel Swami and Friends.

In his autobiography he describes wandering about the streets, dreaming, planning, and then buying an exercise book in which he wrote the first line of a novel. “As I sat in a room nibbling at my pen and wondering what to write, Malgudi with its little railway station swam into view, all ready-made, with a character called Swaminathan running down the platform.” The station had a banyan tree, a station master, and only two trains a day, one coming, one going.

Although I haven’t managed to pinpoint the exact room, or desk, where Narayan started writing, it may have been in Malleshwaram. He made sure to give his town a fictitious name, so as to be free to meddle with its geography and details, but the city-based historian Ramachandra Guha assures me: “The folklore, which may or may not be correct, is that Malgudi is taken from MAL-leshwaram and Basa-

van-GUDI” — two prominent old neighbourhoods in Bengaluru. And considering that of the two, Malleshwaram, founded as a model suburb in the 1890s, has a significant Tamil population, it does seem the likeliest candidate. Furthermore, Malleshwaram has a small railway station which was utterly charming back then, according to those who remember the original building, and would have inspired the initial scene Narayan wrote on that September day.

Ah, finally I’m in Malgudi! Everything looks like the TV series but less crowded. There are barely any people. No cars.

Agumbe is essentially a T-junction, called ‘circle’, with a post office, a bus stand, some shops and messes such as Hotel Kubera, as well as a bank and a school with a faded board outside — ‘S.V.S. High School’. Could this have been Albert Mission College in the TV series?

A winding side lane called Car Street takes me to a village square with the Sri Venugopalakrishnaswamy temple that feels familiar Agumbe and a primary school where kids looking like I’m booked on an overnight train that passes Swami and friends crowd the classrooms, and Malleshwaram without stopping. Getting off a ruined pilgrims’ choultry built in 1906 — innext morning in the temple cidentally the year of Narayan’s town Udupi, the nearest railhead birth. Many of the bungalows to Agumbe, I plan to hire a taxi are distinctly old-fashioned. and with some luck I’ll find a cabEverybody I speak to, from the bie named Gaffur, just like the postman to the shopkeeper redriver in Narayan’s stories. members Malgudi Days which Although I haven’t was filmed here in 1985-86.

First thing I do is have a meal managed to pinpoint When asked whereabouts the by the temple, pure veg, which the exact room, or feels already very Malgudi. Once I desk, where Narayan shooting happened, they say: “Everywhere.” Most villagers got get a taxi, the driver’s name turns started writing, it walk-on parts, doing cameos in out to be Krishna Prasad, which may have been in the series that transformed this roughly translates as ‘food conMalleshwaram into a bustling small town if onsecrated to Lord Krishna’ and ly for the duration of the shoot. this isn’t bad at all considering The key location where the that the Udupi Krishna temple is crew spent months on end is the main tourist attraction in Doddamane (‘the big house’) in these parts. Krishna Prasad is exceptionally punctual, too, and drives up the the main street. This private home built in narrow Ghat road so fast it feels like bungee- 1900 has a grand front verandah adorned with pillars and a central courtyard. Kasturiakka is jumping uphill.

We run into a thick cloud after the third the matron of the house and sits on a cot in hair-pin bend and by the time we drive into the inner verandah, surrounded by two other Agumbe, following another dozen increasing- matrons. Before I quite know how it haply scary bends in the mountain road, the mist pened, I find a steaming tumbler of kashayam, is so thick that it’s like entering a fading pho- a milky, lightly spiced local health beverage, in tograph of a town… or hamlet, as this turns my hand.

She tells of how the Malgudi Days shooting out to be.

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Going easy A still from the episode Dodu

turned the house upside down. The first episode that took place in the house was Maha Kanjoos, the memorable story of a miserly grandfather and his mischievous grandson.

When I step out again, I get a funny feeling that the slow pace here does set one’s inner biorhythms to Malgudi time. But however close to an ideal village Agumbe might seem, with its kindly, unhurried, educated inhabitants, there are things missing. Where, for example, is the railway? Talguppa station, a 126-km drive north, was used as a location in the TV series. There’s also no Lawley Extension — Agumbe is so frozen in time that suburbs for upwardly mobile, modern people haven’t come up yet.

Track record Malleshwaram station in Bengaluru may have inspired Narayan to create the one in Malgudi s mohan prasad

Mysore A chowkidar and his black goat keep watch at 15 Vivekananda Road. The toothless watchman confirms that the forlorn house indeed belongs to “Narayanappa” and then proceeds to joke that anybody who approaches with bad

intent will get headbutted. I’ve journeyed to possible heritage structure and may one day Mysore, where Narayan lived most of his life, open for tourists and book-lovers as an RK Naand I find that much in that town fits my men- rayan Museum.)

I find a conclusive clue in tal image of Malgudi. Indeed, Narayan’s essay Misguided the map of Malgudi drawn by ‘Guide’, where he talks extenClarice Borio and reproduced sively about the aforemenon Narayan’s request in one of tioned Bollywood movie The his books, if tilted to the right, But however close to an Guide. The film team (that inand then a bit to the left, bears a ideal village Agumbe cluded the Nobel Prize-winstriking resemblance to a map might seem, with its ning scriptwriter Pearl S of Mysore. kindly, unhurried, Buck) came all the way to MyIt’s one of the few towns educated inhabitants, sore to see the setting for the where one can hitch a ride with there are things missing. book — and Narayan writes, “I a horse-pulled jutka in this day and age of imported cars. And Where, for example, is the showed them the river steps railway? and a little shrine overshadLawley Extension could well be owed by a banyan on the a portrait of Yadavgiri, the banks of Kaveri, which was ‘new’ extension behind the railthe actual spot around which way station where Narayan I wrote The Guide. As I had himself purchased a 180x120 thought, nothing more needfoot plot in the winter of 194748 to build a graceful two-storey home. (Note: ed to be done than put the actors there and The house has recently been marked out as a start the camera.” He took them to various other locations in and around town, including Mysore’s smaller twin town Nanjangud, which he felt could be used to depict the climax of the plot. They even went to the top of Gopalaswamy Betta, the highest peak in the Bandipur National Park. It is easy to imagine his disappointment then, when The Guide was shot in Jaipur, Udaipur, Chittorgarh and Limdi, instead.

Quite obviously, Malgudi is indebted to the Mysore area. The most logical thing would be to presume that Malgudi, and again I refer to Ramachandra Guha, “was a composite, in physical and social detail, of Mysore and its next-door neighbour Nanjangud.” Indeed, it is a well-known fact that Narayan liked to walk about his hometown and socialise with the various characters he encountered in its streets for inspiration.

Incidentally, the more urban locations of the TV series Malgudi Days are recognisable as places in Mysore. In one episode I spot what is now the palatial Green Hotel on Hunsur Road, which used to be part of the famous Premier Studios until 1989 (a studio which itself may have inspired the fictional Malgudi Film Studio of the novels).

The heritage hotel has recently opened a coffee shop called Malgudi, staffed by young Dalit women, and there I find myself drinking the nicest café au lait in town. I suspect that Narayan who was famously fussy about coffee and proud owner of eight different percolators (and was constantly chasing the perfect blend) may have enjoyed a sip of it too, if he were here today.

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zac o’yeah is a Bengaluru-based author, travel writer and literary critic

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Life goes on A wedding tent pitched in the middle of the Rohingya settlement

Room for the Rohingyas Thousands of refugees from Myanmar are stranded in wooden boats on the Andaman Sea as several Southeast Asian countries refuse them entry. A Rohingya settlement on the outskirts of Jammu also makes for a gloomy picture

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round 1,700 Rohingya families — stateless Muslim refugees from northwest Myanmar — settled in Jammu in 2008. In Narwal’s Qasim Nagar, on the outskirts of the city, a plot of land, dotted with makeshift huts, is what they call home. Most huts at Qasim Nagar have just one room but that’s more than what these Rohingyas, a homeless people, could ask for. The men are labourers at construction sites. “Sometimes we get paid, sometimes we don’t,” says one of them. “But we can’t file a complaint. When you have no nationality, there’s nothing you can do.” The women stay home and look after their large families. Girls are married off young and most mothers give birth in

Mother courage A young Rohingya (left) with her day-old child

the huts without medical attention. A few Rohingya women try sewing for a livelihood but both money and market are limited.

The Rohingyas continue to live in India without the official refugee status. The matter has been pending before the UNHCR despite repeated attempts by representatives. The official tag will give Rohingyas protection under the law, thus allowing them to seek employment. A refugee card will also give them cover from deportation. As of now they only have a few NGOs to turn to for advice and aid. photos by rudra rakshit; text by lora tomas

Looking ahead Fathe

Welcome drink A father makes tea to welcome his daughter’s groom and family

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Full course Gifts for newlyweds — clothes, blankets, pots and pans, water containers, pedestal fans in full splendour

er and sister of the bride catch a breath before the big day

One for all A Rohingya family inside a hut. Each family pays ₹500 or more as rent for these huts

Hanging by a thread A girl works on a sewing machine donated by a local NGO

Parting shot A bride leaves for her new home

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FILM FATALE

Consistently inconsistent The Censor Board’s ratings for mainstream Bollywood films reveal a gender bias and star obsession, over and above the extreme conservatism of which it is often accused

anna mm vetticad

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y the time you read this, chances are that the heated discussions about Anurag Kashyap’s Bombay Velvet would have died down, to be replaced by chatter about Aanand L Rai’s Tanu Weds Manu Returns. Chances are too that in the midst of the din about the quality of Kashyap’s film, a crucial point would have been lost: that its gruesome violence was rated U/A by India’s Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC).

The U/A certificate indicates that it is deemed fit for unrestricted viewing, though parental discretion is advised for children below 12. Producers prefer U/A to an A (adult) rating which affects collections by limiting a film’s potential audience.

Let me make it clear: this column is not against violence on screen. Unless a film glorifies, romanticises or advocates violence (Bombay Velvet has not done any of this) no one should curb a director’s freedom of expression. The issue here though is that the CBFC is consistently inconsistent.

Back when Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2 were released with A ratings in 2012, there was cause for celebration, because the films’ narrative steeped in expletives, crime and bloodshed was expected to incur the Board’s wrath. These assumptions were based on the Board’s track record, which included a refusal to clear Kashyap’s remarkable debut feature Paanch in 2001 on charges that it glorified crime, indulged in double entendre and bore no positive social message. The absurdity of the accusations lay Luck by chance? Despite many violent scenes, Bombay Velvet was rated U/A — deemed fit for unrestricted in the fact that Paanch, quite to the contrary, viewing, with parental guidance advised for children below 12 was about the pointlessness of violence.

Over a decade later, GoW was handled by a seen as ‘serious’. Take for instance the A-rated As already mentioned, women are not the different Board headed by classical dancer Rani Mukerji-starrer Mardaani (2014). When only victims of this hypocrisy. Three years afLeela Samson whose tenure (April 2011-Janu- actor-producer-director Aamir Khan was in- ter Ghajini and Aamir Khan got lucky, the John ary 2015) marked the dawn of a new progres- formed about Mukerji’s reported intention to Abraham-starrer Force — with its unrelenting siveness in the CBFC. Samson’s Board was not challenge the A, he was quoted as saying he scenes of blood-spurting, bone-crunching powithout flaws, mostly though because of the agrees with the rating because young children lice brutality — got away with a U/A. In 2015, dated rules under which even libshould not be exposed to the kind while Bombay Velvet headlined by Ranbir Kaerals are compelled to operate of language and violence depicted poor has been awarded a U/A, Badlapur was and because the overall system in the film, adding: “Most absurd certified A. Can it be happenstance that Badladesperately needs an overhaul. and strange things are shown in pur starred the popular but still emerging Despite these constraints, films some films which are U or U/A. I youngster Varun Dhawan and gave equal siglike GoW were released.

It would seem that cannot believe how it is shown in nificance to the darling of indie projects, NaHowever, then too, as it is with the film. I think we should be care- wazuddin Siddiqui?

Kay Kay Menon’s the abysmally regressive present ful about what we are exposing Can it be just chance that Badlapur’s direchighly believable, Board headed by Pahlaj Nihalani, our children to.” (Source: tor Sriram Raghavan remains best-known for wild, amoral and in fact long before Samson enibnlive.com) his non-massy films Ek Hasina Thi (albeit a Saif character in tered the picture, the ratings for That’s a curious statement, con- Ali Khan-starrer) and Johnny Gaddaar? Can it Paanch is mainstream Bollywood films residering that Khan appeared to possibly be a fluke that the only two U/A ratobjectionable; but veal two aspects of India’s Censor not the violence of have no qualms about the U/A cer- ings in Kashyap’s filmography of 14 years as a system: a gender bias and a star tification for his blood-spattered feature director have gone to No Smoking Ranbir Kapoor’s obsession. First, over the years, 2008 film Ghajini in which he (2007) with John Abraham and Bombay Velvet Johnny Balraj films by directors who are perplayed a ferocious, murderous he- starring the hottest hero of this generation?

If India’s film rating norms are to be beceived as ‘artistic’ and ‘serious’ — ro. Ghajini featured far more gory Kashyap being an example — have aggression depicted far more lieved, it would seem that Kay Kay Menon’s been far more likely to get scisgraphically than anything in Mar- highly believable, wild, amoral character in sored or rated A or both, than daani. Yet it was deemed fit for Paanch is objectionable; but not the violence films by directors widely considered more children whose parents thought it suitable for of Ranbir Kapoor’s Johnny Balraj, including a close-up of him wrapping his arm around a mass-oriented and/or mainstream. their young wards.

Second, films revolving around big-league The pattern of the Censor response to wom- man’s neck to crush and twist it. It would commercial male stars tend to get gentler en-led films cannot be a coincidence. In a year seem that a policewoman bashing up a crimitreatment than those with younger, less estab- when Bombay Velvet has received kid-glove nal in Mardaani could ruin our children; but a lished actors or those primarily associated treatment, the Anushka Sharma-starrer NH10 policeman committing many more grievous with off-mainstream cinema. Third, female- was certified A. Yes, NH10 is bloody. No doubt acts of violence in Force cannot. Just saying. centric films seem to be viewed through an too that NH10 and the comparatively mild Marentirely different lens from male-centric pro- daani merited As. The question is: why the anna mm vetticad is the author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic t@annavetticad jects, possibly because they are automatically double standards?

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Emotion in motion Juhi Chaturvedi, like her protagonist Deepika Padukone in Piku (below), lives with her father who admits he enjoyed the movie shashi ashiwal

Role of the writer Scriptwriter Juhi Chaturvedi has proved that constipation and sperm donation can make for hit movies even in Bollywood

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t’s been a couple of weeks since the release of Shoojit Sircar’s sleeper-hit Piku.

While it boasts of splendid performances by its heavyweight cast, it is writer Juhi Chaturvedi who has emerged as the brightest star of the film. This is rare for the faceless film writers of Bollywood who normally vanish after they’re done with the script. Even if the film does turn out to be a success, it is rarely credited to them. “A friend says he doesn’t care because he moves on to the next script.

He has convinced himself that if this is how he’s going to be treated, then he might as well make money. For the stars, the director is the most important person, and for the director, his stars. A lot of the time the writer is just hanging around,” says Chaturvedi.

This is her third collaboration with Sircar, the first being the delightful Vicky Donor (2012), which dealt with sperm donation in a typical middle-class Delhi milieu. Their partnership, however, goes way back to their advertising days. Yet, when Chaturvedi pitched the idea of making an entire film on sperm do-

nation, she feared her naiveté had cost her a dependent on their children because they live relationship. “Shoojit laughed and said I’ll call in nuclear families and you don’t have chachayou back. I wasn’t sure if I had just ruined the chachis to take care of your emotional needs. friendship,” she recalls. Today, none of her There are so many women handling the ideas shock Sircar. He even ensures house, parents, and work. So that she’s involved at every stage of much so that their own life is on making the film. It’s no wonder hold,” she adds. then that Chaturvedi hasn’t looked Chaturvedi admits she has a elsewhere for work. special corner for her women After a night of celebrating the characters and gives them the reI generally think success of Piku, Chauturvedi has a spect they deserve. Her Piku is dethat women are string of interviews lined up at her way ahead and are scribed as ‘sexually independent Worli apartment the next morning. and financially independent’. And way stronger Much like Piku, the protagonist of in a refreshing change, her father her film played by Deepika Paduis in no rush to get her married off. kone, she too lives with her father.

It is a “low IQ decision,” he hollers.

He’s already seen the film once, and “If I had a chance I would like to do has approved. But today he is getsome progressive writing. I don’t ting dressed to go watch it once again, this believe that all a woman has to do is please a time with an old friend. “He’s taking his friend boy. There’s more to life than that. I think that who is an 85-year-old man who can barely women are way ahead and are way stronger.” walk,” she says, with a smile. “It is encouraging A stand-out feature in all of Chaturvedi’s to see people walk into the cinema hall after work is her nuanced understanding of com30 years. Somebody else told me their family munities. While Bhaskor’s temperament is watched a film together after 15 years and like many 70-plus men with ailments, she says want to see it again. Another person said he it made sense to make him a Bengali. “It just hadn’t spoken to his daughter in many years, added the quirk,” she says. It’s also a world but gave her a call after seeing this,” she adds. she’s familiar with. “Champakunja (the name You might say these are emotional reac- of Banerjee’s ancestral home in the film) was tions to a film that essentially revolves around the name of our house in Lucknow. In the first poo. Bhaskor Banerjee, played by Amitabh floor we had Bengali tenankts and I was alBachchan, is a difficult, old Bengali man who most raised there. Things like cutting the fish, goes into graphic details while analysing his learning all the Rabindrasangeet songs and daily motions. He doesn’t think twice before dancing to them — a lot of it has remained as a calling his daughter who’s out on a date to in- visual memory in my mind.” Similarly, Vicky form her that his poop resembled mango and sperm-clinic owner Dr Chaddha just had pulp. And Piku doesn’t mind discussing it ei- to be Punjabi. They were created from her mether, even as her date gags at the opposite end mories of living in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar a few of the table. “If you’re an old person or have a years back. small kid at home I think the morning begins Chaturvedi already has new ideas for Sircar. with certain things. There is no scope of being She says 18 years of creating 40-second comgrossed out. You’re always talking about aaj mercials for agencies like Ogilvy and Mather, kitni hui, kaise hui, kitni baar hui aur kya colour Bates and McCann has exhausted her. “I did adthi,” says Chaturvedi. vertising for the audience and client. But now “Constipation and hypochondria came it is my turn. I want to write for myself. This is more as a character build-up. That was second- like a meditation phase for me,” she says. ary. The film was clearly about a father-daughter relationship. Parents are getting more mohini chaudhuri

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Divided we fall Author Toni Morrison started the conversation on race with The Bluest Eye and carries it forward with her latest novel ap/alfred a knopf, file

Matters of colour Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child, does not share the magic of Beloved, but shows that race continues to run deep in America

T God Help the Child Toni Morrison Chatto and Windus Fiction ₹599

eacher, editor, writer, winner of in- then into just Bride, an extremely successful numerable awards and honours, in- career woman, working for a cosmetic compacluding the Nobel Prize and the ny. With the help of a “total personal designPresidential Medal of Freedom, Toni er”, she also makes herself over into a very Morrison is very clear about her identity as an beautiful woman. It helps that times have African American writer. However, she adds, changed since Bride’s childhood; black is now “Writers write out of where they come from. It trendily beautiful. just happens that the space for me is African But colour, for Morrison, is only the peg on American.” Perhaps this is why she insists that which to hang the issue of cruelty to children. she does not want to be judged, as African Ironically, it is Bride’s unloving mother, who American writers often are, by looking only at insists her daughter call her ‘Sweetness’ to the political and ignoring the aesthetic in her avoid being identified as the mother of such a work. She believes in fidelity to dark child, who says: What you her own sensibility which, accorddo to a child matters. In this noving to her, is “highly political and el, this issue is more important, passionately aesthetic”. This sensiactually, than colour. God Help bility has informed all her work the Child is replete with child vicBut colour, for and given her novels both power tims, not only Bride, but worse Morrison, is only the victims like her lover Booker’s and intensity.

The Nobel Prize citation spoke peg on which to hang brother, Adam, abused and murthe issue of cruelty of her as giving “life to an essendered by a child abuser; Rain, the to children tially American reality”. In God child, whom Bride comes across Help the Child, her eleventh, most in the course of her search for recent and first contemporary her lover Booker; and the school novel, it is once again this reality, children abused by teachers, one the African American experience, of whom, Sofia Huxley, was conwhich she deals with, going directly to the victed on Bride’s identification. This becomes central issue of that experience, the matter of a problem for the reader — there are so many colour. In the very first lines, a mother says victims that the edge of the knife used to exthat her newborn, “was so black she scared pose the cruelty becomes blunted. And Bride’s me”. (There are many words used for the col- regression into childhood (her bodily hair, her our of the skin through the novel: midnight periods and then her breasts disappear) when black, Sudanese black, blue black, licorice Booker leaves her, seems neither magic nor skin, obsidian midnight skin.) Her blackness fantasy, just a hiccup, both to Bride herself, as makes her light-coloured mother regard Lula well as to the reader.

Mae Bridewell with such repulsion that she God Help the Child is written in small chapcan’t bear to touch her, something the child ters, each chapter devoted to a character. Yet becomes aware of. Rejection drives Lula Mae no character, not even Bride, comes wholly into transforming herself, first into Ann Bride, alive. We have no clue to the flight path of one

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who fought rejection to become a success, to the courage and strength that helped her to do this. Bride is all surface and glitter, she seems less a winner than a whiner, in spite of her Louis Vuitton bag, her Jaguar, her expensive clothes. In fact Booker and his family are more real, Booker’s adoration of, and his grief over his dead older brother, Adam, more poignant. The words that describe his last sight of Adam are beautifully evocative and have all the lyricism Morrison’s writing is known for.

Morrison has once said that “the writer must practice thrift, there must be a sense of holding back”. Unfortunately, there seems to be no holding back in this novel. Everything is explained, all is explicit. And ironically, for that very reason, the characters seem sketchy, without any depths. The magic of novels like Beloved and Sula is missing.

However, what really matters about this novel is that, even in a world which has seen Obama as President, and women like Condoleeza Rice and Oprah Winfrey in powerful positions, Morrison shows that colour still matters. The killings of unarmed black men and boys by policemen in the US and the resulting anger spilling over into rioting, have highlighted this. In fact, Morrison, in a recent interview, said, “Is it over? I will say it is over when a cop shoots an unarmed white teenager, when a white man is convicted of raping a black woman.” We need to have a conversation about race, she says in the same interview.

In God Help the Child, Morrison is continuing the conversation she began when she started writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye. shashi deshpande is an author and critic, based in Bengaluru

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saturday, may 23, 2015

A capital account Saba Naqvi draws upon her earlier analytical pieces, and uses a reporter’s insights to give a comprehensive picture of the AAP wave

Turning the table This book intelligently and insightfully tells of a win that has redefined Indian elections shanker chakravarty

T Capital Conquest How the AAP’s Incredible Victory Has Redefined Indian Elections Saba Naqvi Politics and Current Affairs Hachette ₹499

he reviewer and the author of this riwal magic. No stodgy ‘election study’ can book were both at the same dinner possibly bring out the spirit of a campaign as the night before Delhi voted. There this book does. were about two-dozen odd guests, What sets the AAP apart from other tradialmost all of them well-informed journalists tional political formations, as Naqvi brilliantwho took considerable professional pride in ly underlines, is the ‘volunteer spirit’. Here discerning which way the wind was blowing. was a leader and a party that could project a There was near-unanimity that Arvind Kejri- different vision and a new approach that enwal’s Aam Adami Party had a slight edge over thused and motivated thousands of ordinary Narendra Modi’s BJP. Only a razor-thin edge. citizens to take time off from their jobs, busiNo one had any idea that the next day the AAP nesses and homes to undertake chores and rewould be notching up an unprecedented elec- sponsibilities during the campaign. The toral triumph. traditional parties have a transactional relaThis perceptive book tells intelligently and tionship with their so-called ‘cadres,’ in which insightfully the incredible story of a win that a party promises patronage and protection to Naqvi rightly suggests “has redethose who choose to identify fined Indian elections.” The auwith it, for whatever reason. thor has the reputation of being a More often than not the reason diligent reporter with an eye for may not be all that elevating. the telling detail. The book only The AAP, in a refreshing conNo stodgy ‘election enhances her reputation; the trast, traded in hope and idealstudy’ can possibly reader gains. ism. The AAP victory simply The major strength of the book bring out the spirit of renewed the Republic. a campaign as this is that it adds to an emerging When a citizen votes the decibook does genre of election studies in India. sion is arrived as much by a feelIn this new genre, the reporter’s ing of approval for a candidate voice gets precedence and inteland his party as also by a sense lectual respectability for the simof disapproval of the rivals. In ple reason of being authentic, its immediate context the AAP’s genuine, even if raw and rough. total sweep was the first sign For too long Indian election studies have been that the country was beginning to see monopolised by self-important psephologists through the Narendra Modi hype. As Naqvi whose flawed data is then drawn upon by dis- notes insightfully: “The prime minister had tant academics to tell us how India votes. In lost the chaiwala ground. He was no longer this slim volume Naqvi rightly draws upon the outsider who had broken into the system; her earlier analytical pieces, full of reporter’s he had become the emperor who ruled the nainsights, to give the reader a flavour of the Kej- tion.” And, the new emperor wore a super-ex-

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pensive suit as he courted President Obama.

The AAP voter was sending a message to the new emperor.

Equally perceptively Naqvi draws attention to how the AAP dealt with the BJP’s inherent communal tactics. In bringing out the essential nature of the BJP campaign, she notes: “But the BJP was not done with using sadhvis and yogis even in the national capital where the party swore by modernity when it came to injecting a dose of fire-brand communal rhetoric into the proceedings.” Unlike the Congress in the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign, the AAP leaders deftly denied the BJP its most potent currency — and laughed their way to a mindboggling sweep.

Early in her book Naqvi suggests that the AAP 2015 victory constitutes perhaps “the first experiment in alternative politics.” This is a tantalising suggestion. But by the time the book appeared at the bookstores the AAP top leadership was seen as engaged in an unseemly power wrangle. Every organisation demands a hierarchy, norms and discipline; once in power, the AAP leaders are also discovering the limits of openness, transparency, accountability. The author believes that Kejriwal and his crew have “the imagination and the will” to change a system that operates on “corruption, indifference and a great deal of ignorance.” Too early to take the call; but, this is a capital account of a potential turning point in our contemporary history. harish khare is a senior journalist and author of the recently published, How Modi Won it: Notes from the 2014 Election

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READER’S DIE JEST

I hate you, forever Dhurv and Aranya believe that slanging matches are the sure way to romance

leremy/shutterstock

arunava sinha

A World’s Worst Boyfriend Durjoy Datta Penguin Metro Reads Fiction ₹175

: Dhruv, I have vitiligo.

D: Yeah, even my head spins sometimes, Aranya.

A: Vitiligo, you moron, not vertigo. I looked it up on my brother’s computer, a second-hand AMD 1.2 GB Thunderbird Athlon, with 320 MB SDRAM, Soundblaster Live sound card, a CD drive with a 12GB hard disk.

D: What does all that even mean? I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours. Tomorrow in school.

A: You’ll show me your computer?

D: What are you, a sexless nerd?

A: At least I didn’t tell my dad my mum’s sleeping with the principal. Is the divorce done?

D: You can’t tell your dad ANYthing. He beats you every day. That’s when he’s not calling you a b******d.

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: Dhruv, I hate you I hate you I hate you. So I had to tell everyone you forced me to kiss you, but did you have to tell them you saw me naked to find out if I have white patches all over? You’re such a bad boy Dhruv I’m going to fall in love with you when we meet in college but not before I make you feel like a piece of shit.

D: But first, Aranya, I’m going to sleep with all these girls and then tell their parents their daughters are s***s. Oh I’m such a bad boy. And I promise you I’ll never bathe and my dorm room will be filthy.

A: But you’ll work out all the time and have only protein shakes and some sexy chick named Ritika will fall for you and you’ll f**k

her brainless… oh wait, she never had any in the first place if she falls for you. : So, forest essentials, is Prof Raghuvir in your pants yet?

A: I love him, get it? A physics genius at 29 who sleeps with all his research assistants, what’s not to love? But then the only thing you ever loved is attached to you, isn’t it… but is it even big enough to see?

D: You’re so funny, you tub of lard who thinks you can beat me on grades, not to mention Temple Run.

talk to me again but you will drive me completely insane. Here I am, a role model to today’s youth, capable of seducing any woman with my hot bod even though my room is filthy and I have never read a book or watched a good film in my life and I don’t think I have any friends either, everyone’s either someone I want to sleep with or someone I don’t , or my parents or my teachers. I want to be that role model forever because obviously people love boys like me. If you mess with my mind I might turn into a decent guy and HOW WILL DURJOY’S BOOK SELL THEN???

A

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: Give up now, Dhruv. I hate you but I love you but I’ll sleep with anyone who’ll sleep with me but what’s love got to do with sex because it’s you I love and that girlfriend of yours is a s*****h moron or a moronic s**t and you’re destined to love me.

D: Last I looked, I was with Ritika in bed and you were on the terrace watching porn on your laptop. AND I DON’T WANT TO KNOW THE CONFIGURATION. Who’s the loser here?

A: Dhruv, Rags is leaving Delhi and going to Bangalore! Take me to meet him at three in the morning on your motorbike and when your skinny girlfriend comes to know ditch her because you love me although I love Rags and am doing this to you to punish you because you are a very bad boy whom I want to forget but can’t and I know my dad will beat you up and I hope you beat him up too but you won’t because you’re actually a good boy and oh my god.

D: Aranya, go marry Raghuvir and never

: I did it. Or rather, Raghuvir did it. He got me a job in his company in Bangalore and got me a flat and now we’re sleeping together.

I’m his post-doc project, he wants to make me love him. But the truth is that I want you. So I’m going to call you while we make love and make you hear everything and become insanely jealous.

“D: Stop playing with words, you witch.

A: F**k you.

D: F**k you.

A: We are so f****d up.

A: That we are. And that’s why we were meant to be.”

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nd is that why this novel was meant to be top of the charts? We are so f****d up.

(This monthly column helps you talk about a book without having to read it.)

arunava sinha translates classic and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into Englisht @arunava

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saturday, may 23, 2015

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WINDOW OR AISLE

Stuck in the middle In airline business, centre-seat passengers are the ‘have-nots’ in more ways than one rishi piparaiya

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nyone who knows me and my rants out making any attempt to move. Maybe he’s on air travel would be well familiar waiting for the plane to take off, I thought, and with my disdain for passengers who waited until the plane reached cruising altiend up on the centre seat on flights. tude and the seat belt signs went off with a In an age where airlines have offered every ‘ting’. I turned towards him but he was fast possible means for passengers to snag an aisle asleep, his head lolling against the empty aisle or window — web check-in, tele check-in, kiosk seatback. I decided against pinching him check-in, early check-in and so on — why awake and impatiently turned away. A while would one still end up on the middle seat? As I later, the meal service started and the food note in Aisle Be Damned, ‘centre seats are only trolley hunkered by with loud clanging occupied by monks, children and duffers who noises. Dumbbell woke up, smacked his lips, checked in late. Centre-seat pockets are the glanced yet again at the empty aisle seat next waste buckets for window and aisle passen- to him but made no attempt to move. gers, who shove in chewing I was losing it by now. The gum, chocolate wrappers, used flight attendants who kept diapers, snorted tissues and inpassing by were giving us ensect parts when no one is lookquiring looks — as one might to ing. Centre-seat occupants two people, who are not a coudeserve sympathy, a pat on the ple, sitting next to each other Maybe it’s just a back and any loose change in rather than adjacent to, at a restemporary lapse of your wallet.’ taurant table. I tapped him on intellect and they are My hypothesis is that centrethe shoulder, “Excuse me, full-fledged Einsteins seat passengers have a signifiwould you like to move to the on the ground cantly lower IQ than those on adjacent seat so we both have the window or aisle. Maybe it’s some more space?” And I pointjust a temporary lapse of inteled to the obviously empty seat lect and they are full-fledged next to him.

Einsteins on the ground but I Dingbat turned towards me am yet to encounter any centre-seat passenger and stared with guppy eyes, his tongue dartwho has impressed me with his brainpower. I ing in and out of his lips like a serpent. There recently encountered one prime example of was a long pause as his little used brain this species of intellectually challenged flyers cranked itself up. “No, I’m comfortable,” he on a Mumbai-Bengaluru flight. said. I stared at him speechless. He stared I was seated on the window, this dimwit in back. And then with a start he leaned over and the centre, and an aged gentleman on the ais- pointed to the seat recline button. “Here, you le. The old gentleman was part of a larger be comfortable too,” he said, pushing an imaggroup and soon after boarding was complet- inary button in the air with his thumb. If looks ed, he moved to a seat next to his friends. So could kill, he would have disintegrated into that left me on the window, ignoramus in the ashes right there and then. Which I would centre, and the aisle seat vacant. have gladly smeared on the empty aisle seat Phew, we shall have some elbow space after next to him. all, I thought and turned to the fused bulb with a knowing smile. He looked at the empty rishi piparaiya is the author of Aisle Be Damned aisle seat next to him and smiled back, with- 쾷 rishi@aislebedamned.com

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saturday, may 23, 2015

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Binsar calling Among the early conservation efforts in India, its densely wooded trails are quietly gaining popularity with the curious traveller

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f you don’t like walks, you won’t like Bin- me the other side of conservation. It’s easy to sar. Nothing defines it better than its talk about protecting the wild from the safety long winding paths. As the solitary tar- of an air-conditioned office in a city, but when mac road spirals up, pine gives way to a a herd of wild boar digs out the potatoes you dense mix of oak, rhododendron and deodar. grew so lovingly, it breaks your heart. It’s Like the rest of Kumaon, Binsar has been a rel- tough not to curse monkeys that destroy floatively lesser-known destination. At 8,500ft, werbeds in play, or begrudge leopards that the petite 49.5-sq-km wildlife sanctuary near prey on your beloved dog. But then you have Almora was among the early conservation ef- swathes of beautiful forest that make Binsar forts in India. the heaven it is and the picture is incomplete Looking to the trees while walking the for- without the wildlife. est comes easy in Binsar, a birding hotspot. It Although most guides take tourists to Zero is home to over 200 resident and migratory Point, my favourite walk remains the one that species that play peek-a-boo all day, and noc- goes north towards Hunting Rock, a fairly easy turnal ones, that go chuk-chuk-chuk all night. and level 4-km stretch. The melodious voice of My life came a full circle when I moved back the rufous sibia, a small and colourful mounto Binsar, after spending a decade tain bird, will keep you company. away from the mountains I grew Hooting owls and the gentle purr up in. This time, I met Binsar of of turtle doves are the other musiyore, through the eyes of a huscal accompaniments. band who spent his summers If you’re on this trail at dawn or Nothing defines it here as a child. dusk, there’s a good chance of better than its long Binsar owes much of its history spotting ghoral, a kind of mounwinding paths. As to Henry Ramsay, commissioner tain goat-antelope, families of the solitary tarmac of Kumaon from 1856. He is said wild boar, pairs of yellow-throatto have searched for a summer road spirals up, pine ed martens, or, if you’re very residence in Kumaon for a dec- gives way to a dense lucky, a graceful leopard. If you mix of oak, ade before he chanced upon Binhear a sharp dog-like bark echorhododendron sar. The house he built in the ing through the forest at regular and deodar 1860’s is now a heritage hotel. Afintervals, it’s the barking deer.

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Snow queen Binsar, sitting at 8,500 ft in Kumaon Himalayas, is a good choice for anyone who wants to enjoy a Christmas card-like winter shikha tripathi

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ter he demarcated his estate, Ramsay invited four junior officers to choose theirs, and declared the place a forest reserve to prevent mindless construction.

Ramsay’s conservation philosophy stills runs strong in the people who live in Binsar.

Lucky to call it home, my life here has shown

From Hunting Rock, you get a magnificent view of the Himalayas: the Trishul, the Nanda Devi, the Panchachuli, and the ridges in-between, all lined up proudly like winners at a beauty pageant. You can turn around and walk up to Jhandidhar, also called Zero Point. The sunrise over the peaks is a deli-

Travel log Get there Pantnagar is the closest airport, with flights that go thrice a week from Delhi. From Delhi, you can also take the overnight Ranikhet Express or the early morning Shatabdi to Kathgodam, the closest railhead. Hire a taxi to Binsar from Pantnagar or Kathgodam (four hours and four-and-a-half hours respectively).

Stay Grand Oak Manor (Binsar Estate, PO Ayarpani; grandoakbinsar.com; double room with breakfast and dinner from ₹8,500). A budget option is the Tourist Rest House (Kumaon Mandal Vikas Nigam; kmvn.gov.in; package varies).

Tip While early mornings are great for birding, it is dusk that Binsar leopards love. A short drive down the main road at that time could reward you with wild encounters.

cious view from here, as one can see nearly every hill of Kumaon on a clear day. This is why the Union Jack used to be planted here to announce the arrival of a British officer, lending it the name of ‘Flagstaff’ or ‘Jhandidhar’.

Another walk I love is in the direction of the central ground, by which stands an 11th-century Shiva temple built by the Katyuris, the ancient rulers of Kumaon. Worth stopping at is a little naula across the field, which, again, most tour guides won’t tell you about. First built in Kumaon by the Katyuris, naulas were structures built over a natural spring to indicate the level of the underground water.

Up the hill across is the little cottage where I live. The flight of steps adjacent to my house leads up to an old unused bungalow on the estate that was gifted by Queen Victoria to her personal physician, Dr Govan and his wife. If you are a history buff, take the trail leading from the south gate of the Grand Oak Manor.

Right at the end of this trail are the ruins of a prison that Ramsay operated when he moved his office to Binsar from Almora for the summer months.

Make sure you don’t leave Binsar without savouring the beautiful image of Katdhara, one of the four villages within the sanctuary, which continues to survive without electricity.

I visit it for an annual organic ‘shopping spree’, when we buy fresh produce of buckwheat, hemp seeds (hard to believe, but it’s an important ingredient in Kumaoni food) and malta, a local variant of the citrus family, from the friendly local farmers. shikha tripathi is a writer and photographer based in Binsar

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saturday, may 23, 2015

Chilli ice-cream Inspired by the kachhi kairi wala and also the new wave of nostalgia-cuisine, I’m planning to experiment with a few desserts. Sliced semi-raw mango topped with chilli ice-scream. Or even chilli ice-cream and salted bor.

1 cup fresh cream 1/2 cup sugar 2 whole red chillies 1 cup vanilla ice-cream

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1 Remove stems, deseed and crush red chillies.

2 Whip cream with sugar. When thick, add vanilla ice-cream and whip till blended.

3 Mix in red chilli flakes. Pour in an airtight box and freeze.

STREET, EAT, REPEAT

Raw passion Childhood lost some its charm with the demise of the ‘unhygienic’ vendor outside the school gate, armed with a bouquet of berries and raw mangoes shabnam minwalla

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othing provides a greater zing than a dash of chilli and salt. Except perhaps a sprinkling of adventure. This is a lesson that every schoolchild once learnt. Not from a teacher with chalk and duster, but from an almost equally important character on the school scene. The kachhi kairi wala.

This was the fellow who stood outside the school gate with red, green and brown wares arranged on his spindly stall. Usually an aluminium thali — at most the diameter of a bicycle tyre — sat precariously on a crude cane stand. From within this battered circumference, emerged the most addictive delicacies.

The fruity pulp hidden in the tough brown pod of tamarind. A fragrant parcel of quartered guava. Glossy purple berries, unforgivingly acerbic and rumoured to be poisonous.

All these forbidden fruits were dusted with a matchless pink powder — a punchy combination of chilli and salt and some mysterious ingredient. A powder that, no matter how hard I tried to replicate at home, I failed.

Most schools around the city had vendors with identical inventories. Their wares sat in frayed plastic bags with rolled down sides. All year round, there were two types of bor. The yellow-red berries were crisp and fleshy, and held little attraction. They tasted too much like the healthy, legitimate fruits that we were served at home. I definitely preferred the overripe ones with their dark red, wrinkly skins and naughty tang. One that became positively wicked when mixed with the chilli-salt mixture from an old, unwashed plastic box.

Even more tart and mouth-puckering were the pale green amlas. They were as small and translucent as marbles, and as fresh as spring.

But they packed a punch that could reduce a normal, intelligent girl into a spluttering, eyewatering, nose-leaking mess.

The deceptively innocent amla apart, our vendor sold sliced star fruit, and varieties of tamarind. But despite his decision to diversify,

he was invariably called the ‘kachhi kairi wala’ eat mountains of amla and bor and kairi withbecause raw mango was his bestseller. The out peering over my shoulder and counting stall stocked two types of raw mangoes. Both my coins. Except that when I finally grew up, I were thunk-thunk-thunked into paper-thin became more interested in organic sushi bars slices. The yellow, on-the-road-to-ripeness and artisanal bakeries. mangoes were a wimpy mixture of sweet and Meanwhile, the city changed too. Schools sour. But the firm, raw ones caused mouths to became more conscious about hygiene and sepucker, ears to buzz and brains to freeze. curity. And children began to believe that all It was for these killer kairis that we galloped good things come in packages — even if they to the gate as soon as we heard the lunch bell, are topped with synthetic masalas and flaand tried to squeeze through the crowd with voured with evil, throat-stripping chemicals. our coin. “Ek rupya kachhi kairi, mirchi zyada,” So bor and amla and mystery masala mixes we would wheedle and bellow. And after much faded out of our lives. jostling and pleading, would emerge from the Till I bumped into a beloved old friend, fray with our soggy treasure wrapped in a most unexpectedly, last week. We had lunch at square of newspaper.

Bombay Canteen, a buzzing new Of course, the adults in our restaurant in Mumbai. I ordered a lives furiously disapproved of guava tan ta tan with chilli iceour break-time transactions. Mrs cream and beamed when I saw a Saldanha threatened punibeautiful tart topped with the palAll these forbidden shment. Mrs Uppal shrieked. The est pink ice cream. Then I took a fruits were dusted school principal ordered surtentative spoonful, and gasped. with a matchless prise desk checks during which The flavours of schoolgirl-hood pink powder orchards of berries and mangoes came flooding back. The tang of were confiscated. My mother drippy guava and chilli. The heavy warned of cholera, dysentery and schoolbag. The sense of freedom. bronchitis. Then she tried to A quick check proved that I’m work out a compromise. We not the only one feeling nostalgic brought raw mangoes home and sliced them, about the elusive kachhi kairi wala and his sour but the experiment flopped. The slices were delights. A local chef has worked out a chilli too fat and crude. The chilli-salt mixture was and raw mango risotto. A bar in Fort offers too brash. And the tang of adventure absent. cocktails that could have come straight from a So we continued to sneak out of school and hawker’s thela — kachhi kairi, sweet amla and part with coins and crumpled two-rupee imli ka nasha. Another whips up a chilli guava notes on that most crowded and clamorous margarita, in which the glass is rimmed with patch of pavement. And just like other school- red mirchi powder. There’s even a raw mango children outside other schools, we ensured chilli and amla chocolate out there. But who that the kachhi kairi wala was the busiest ven- wants these variations when you can get the dor around. More than the man who cycled by real thing? I’m determinedly trawling the city with his pink puffs and white whorls of sugary for an old-fashioned kachhi kairi wala. And if ‘buddhi ke baal’. More than the fellow who sold he looks hepatitis-free and hygienic enough, I chikki. More even than the pulled candy seller may even let my daughters take a bite. who shaped his soft, colourful confection into shabnam minwalla is a journalist and author of little birds and butterflies.

How I longed to be an adult so that I could The Six Spellmakers of Dorabji Street

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THE COMPASS CHRONICLES

A game of whispers Political espionage in India before and during the British Raj intersected with the sciences of astronomy, chemistry and physics rohit gupta

Last frontier A group of intrepid Hindu pundits were trained by a British colonel to penetrate the mystical ranges surrounding Lhasa, seen here in a painting by Nicholas Roerich wikiart

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n the heyday of its expansion across the Indian subcontinent, the East India Company soon discovered that classical intelligence networks in Asia were a gossamer, puzzling web. The spies could be fakirs, servants, wealthy merchants, darbari news writers, postmasters, soothsayer saints, princes or even wandering monks — just about anybody. Illiterate tribals were useful as couriers, for example — since they couldn’t read the messages.

In his pioneering study of information networks in India before and during the Raj, the (recently deceased) historian Sir Christopher Bayly added that, “The news writers, and in particular the burains — old ladies — employed by them as peeping-toms in the women’s headquarters, kept all India amused for years with a flow of dirty stories until a more severe morality intervened in the 1830s.” The news writers (akhbarnavis) in every court were not ambassadors or foreign correspondents, but a mutually tolerated system of espionage. Their presence signified trust among the rulers, an interest in each others’ policies, and an expulsion was tantamount to a declaration of war.

In order to control India, the British had to understand it. The plethora of Indic dialects and scripts posed a great difficulty — and this naturally turned their attention towards its languages and history, marking the birth of Orientalist studies. In 1786, the philologist William Jones declaimed, “The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident…”, suggesting a common origin of Indo-European languages. Soon after this in the 1830s, the scholar James Prinsep deciphered the mysterious stone inscriptions strewn across the sub-

continent — declaring them to be the edicts of been involved in these battles of subterfuge.

Emperor Asoka, written in the Brahmi script.

Our evidence is scant, but we can make some Meanwhile, ‘neutral’ and largely unex- educated guesses. plored regions in the north such as Tibet and Two main encoding schemes for written Afghanistan were being squeezed into a pow- language have been observed in Indian manuer struggle across Central Asia between the scripts since ancient times. The first is the KaRussians, British and Chinese powers (even tapayadi system used largely in Kerala, in Germans). This long tussle for supremacy was which syllables stand in place for numerals. coined The Great Game by a British officer in The second is the Bhuta Samkhya cipher in Uzbekistan, Captain Arthur Conolly — before which certain words or phrases denote numhe was beheaded by the Emir in 1842 for spy- bers. For example, in the latter — eyes would ing as one ‘Khan Ali’. denote the number two, and teeth would One of the better known passages hap- equal 32. An arrow would mean five, because pened when the East India Comthe Hindu deity of love — Kamapany attempted to survey the deva, is depicted carrying five forbidden kingdom of Tibet. Enflowery arrows. These words try was banned to foreigners, becould be strung together in ing punishable by death. A group verse using the ‘place value sysTo this dangerous of intrepid Hindu pundits were tem’ to depict larger numbers end, the pundits were trained by a British colonel — Thoby both astronomers or spies. trained to walk 33 mas Montgomerie, to penetrate Sanskrit poetry is known to inches a pace, making the mystical ranges surrounding contain highly mathematical 2,000 paces in Lhasa. Not only did these ‘monks’ structures such as palindromes each mile — Nain Singh Rawat and his brothand error-correcting codes, as ers — have to travel without blowseen in the epic poem Shishupaing their cover, they had to map la Vadha by the 7-8th century pothe areas accurately using instruet Magha. ments of surveying, triangulaMoreover, whispering gallertion, and astronomy. ies are found in many fortifications and palTo this dangerous end, the pundits were aces — Gol Gumbaz (Bijapur), Victoria trained to walk 33 inches a pace, making 2,000 Memorial (Calcutta) and the Bankipore granapaces in each mile. Instead of the usual 108, a ry to name a few. They embody the geometrispecial rosary of 100 beads would keep the cal properties of an ellipse (or oval), which is count. Secret compartments concealed a com- also the shape of planetary orbits. As a circle pass and sextant to observe the position of has one centre, an ellipse has two focii. Anystars, begging bowls had a hidden mercury thing spoken at one focus will reflect from its level to find the horizon, thermometers to periphery and can only be heard at the other measure the altitude from the boiling point of focus. Elliptical arcs across hilltops and courwater, and a Tibetan prayer wheel concealed tyards can thus be used to communicate in setheir scribbles. Perhaps at times they would crecy with friends, if one prefers to keep one’s have memorised their observations as man- enemies closer. tras, for fear of being seen with paper and pencil. Other secret techniques (talismanic locks, rohit gupta explores the history of science as poisonous seals, invisible inks!) may have Compasswallah t @fadesingh

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saturday, may 23, 2015

Green toppings Plants find home on a taxi roof

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hat makes Dhananjoy Chakraborty’s taxi — the familiar yellow Ambassador — stand out on Kolkata roads? It’s a carpet of grass on the roof. Eight potted plants find place on a tray behind the rear seat and the car interiors are also in shades of green. Chakraborty (40) — nicknamed gechho (one who loves trees) — doesn’t mind spending more than what he earns on his sobuj rath (green chariot). He even distributes leaflets with his poems and sketches on the importance of protecting the environment among passengers who show some leafy interest.

A sleepy dad’s gift

Inhale, exhale Get fit and fine at yoga gyms to be set up in Haryana

When SleepHero comes to the rescue

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sleep-deprived dad can be a game changer. Or at least Rob Tong is. An app-developer, Tong, after many sleepless nights with his young son, decided to put his work skills to some personal use. He created SleepHero, an app that comforts babies with familiar sounds and helps them get back to sleep. One can choose from the sedate hum of ‘Aircraft Cabin’ or pleasant ‘Birdsong’ or boisterous ‘Cafe Chatter’. If your sleepy, tuneless rendering of gibberish is all that puts your baby to bed, the app lets you do that too by recording your voice and playing when the baby stirs, while you snore away happily in your room.

n an idle day, you might sit back and wonder ‘What does Haryana need?’ Perhaps, more schools, more hospitals, and a few more women. Yoga guru Ramdev, however, believes that what the state needs most urgently are yoga gymnasia. And not just a dozen or two , but 10,000 of them. These gyms he asserts will bolster positive thinking in the youth and increase their immunity. Well, Om one, Om two, Om three to that.

Birds and bees Flora and fauna to be saved by the POTUS

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he White House is buzzing these days. No, not about Baltimore, Bin Laden or FLOTUS’s workout video. The word on the street is that President Obama is talking birds, bees and butterflies. You see, there was a task force — as there always is — appointed last June that is finally going to swing into action. The Pollinator Health Task Force is coming to protect and restore the US’s dwindling honeybee and monarch butterfly populations.

Numbers of bees and monarch butterfly have been in decline for a decade now, with beekeepers losing 40 per cent of their bees and the butterfly numbers dropping by 90 per cent. The White House is apparently serious about reviving seven million acres of land and populating it with wildflowers, because pollen-deprived birds and bees don’t make for good dancers.

Veerappan’s stash Cosmetic giant finds an unlikely ambassador in the bandit

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e was a slippery smuggler and frequent poacher. He was a crafty brigand with distinctive whiskers. Now, he is the suave, sophisticated face of Lush Cosmetic’s round jar of moustache wax. Veerappan never had it so good in his lifetime, which was spent hiding out in the jungles of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Sure, he made millions, smuggling ivory and sandalwood.

But to be the face of a cosmetic giant? To have a moustache so good that enthusiastic girlfriends and manly men swear by it? To endorse a moustache wax that is vegan, animal friendly, and has a sandalwood-y aroma? Veerappan’s ghost, you are totally worth it.

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saturday, may 23, 2015

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in-faq by joy bhattacharjya Unreal locations

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his week’s quiz takes you to some of the better known fictional locations.

here,there & elsewhere

Which mythical place gets its name from a tribal chief of the Muisca people who dived into lake Guatavita as part of an elaborate initiation rite?

Kookie kitty e are at our wits’ end. Living with a young raccoon is like sheltering a tiny illegal immigrant who bites, poops in our shoes, swings from the ceiling fan and will never qualify for work.

We decide to leave him in a wilderness area. It’s a terrible idea but all the alternatives are worse. We bundle Kookie into Bins’ backpack and stand in line for a bus to the nearest National Park. Even before the bus arrives everyone else in line is staring suspiciously at the squeaks and chirps emanating from the bag being cuddled by the tall, scrawny foreigner with the yellow pigtail and tears streaming down his cheeks. Bins is openly sobbing, being not only French but Tamil too. He actually howls more easily than he laughs.

I’m too afraid to cry. I know that we’re breaking so many regulations just by keeping Kookie in the house that we’ll be deported straight to Mars if anyone discovers us trying to dump him in a National Park.

When one of the guys in the line asks, “Sir, what kind of pet d’you have in there?” I bray with fake laughter and say, “That’s not a pet, it’s my partner wheezing from asthma!” Bins says, between sobs, “It’s a cat!” The man, a bit confused now, says, “A cat named Azma?”

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Another man, wearing a bright yellow tee-shirt pipes up with, “Sounds awful strange for a cat.”

Then a woman with a face like a frowning emoji says, “Awww! It’s not right to name your kitty Azma! How would you like to be called, you know, Diarrhoea?” The kid beside her starts hopping up and down, squealing, “Kitty!

I wanna see the KITTY!” Yellow Tee-shirt says, “Sounds more like a parakeet than a ...uhh...paraKAT!” He begins to cackle at his own idiotic joke, just as the backpack starts to drip with pee. “Looks

like your Azma sprung a leak!” says the first man and soon we’re all snuffling and honking at our various jokes and sorrows.

By the time the bus arrives, Bins, Kookie and I are so exhausted from a combination of tension and dehydration that we give up on the National Park and go home. Kookie settles down to a snack of Oreos with a side order of Windsor & Newtons while Bins washes out his backpack. It stinks like a portable zoo so he slides down the window-sash on his side of the room and hangs the bag out to dry.

Opening the top half of the window lets bugs into the house. But I am too drained to argue with him over this. By morning? You guessed it. Kookie has vanished. A trail of dainty blue paw-prints on the frames tells the story. Bins is heartbroken.

He leaves cookies out for our little furry friend at night. In the morning he claims he saw a family of adult raccoons plus one junior stop outside his window to collect the loot. “Kookie is not alone. He is with his own people,” he says philosophically. “My sad, his glad.” manjula padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, in this weekly column

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This fictional town will always be remembered for what happened precisely at 10.04pm on Saturday, November 12, 1955. Just identify this place, seen across 60 years and three films. Easier still, identify the film franchise?

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If, according to legend, Rome was founded by two brothers raised by a wolf, which fictional city was founded by two brothers raised by a hippopotamus. More hints, the river running through this town is so polluted and full of silt that ‘even an agnostic could walk across it’.

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This town’s location is a recurring joke in the series in which it appears. Going by the hints in the series, the state in which this town appears borders Ohio, Nevada, Maine and Kentucky, which is clearly impossible. The director of a film based on this series says it is in ‘North Takoma’. Name the town and the series.

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Originally the writer wanted to name it ‘Civic City’. Then ‘Capital City,’ then ‘Coast City.’ Then he flipped through the New York phone book and spotted the name ‘_______ Jewelers,’ and settled on the name. Fill in the blank.

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Which fictional state is described a ‘fourth world’ country. Its two most common animals are the mud weasel and the mud adder?

In which fictional place would you come across the Picaninny tribe led by their chief Great Little Big Panther. Optionally, name the most famous tourist attraction in Los Olivos, California to get the same answer.

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In which delightful work would you come across the fictional country of Alifbay, and the Dull Lake in the Valley of K? Most of the action in which huge hit film occurs in the fictional town of Laalgunj in Uttar Pradesh, though the film was actually shot mostly at location in the town of Wai in Maharshatra?

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Which specific fictional location is being heavily promoted by Iceland tourism, as the shooting used locations like Lake Myvatn, the Gullfoss waterfall and the Geysir hot spring?

Answers

1. El Dorado, originally El Hombre Dorado — the golden man. He covered himself with gold dust before diving, which somehow led to the Spanish conquisdators believing in a city where the streets were lined with gold. These Europeans!

2. Hill Valley, in the Back To The Future films. This was the moment where lightning struck the clock tower and allowed Marty McFly to power his car back to 1985 3. Ankh-Morpork, in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

4. Springfield, in the Simpsons 5. Gotham City, the location of the Batman comics 6. Elbonia, from the Dilbert series. The entire country is covered in waist deep mud 7. Neverland. The first is the original land described

by James Barrie in Peter Pan and the second is the eponymous ranch formerly owned by Michael Jackson 8. Haroun & The Sea Of Stories, by Salman Rushdie 9. Dabangg, the Salman Khan starrer which also had a sequel 10. The Wall, in the Game of Throne series. The term for this type of tourism is ‘set jetting’

joy bhattacharjya is a quizmaster and Project Director, FIFA U-17 World Cup. t@joybhattacharj

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