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Saturday, December 27, 2008

Vol. 2 No. 50

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

IN OUR OWN WORDS >Page 17

MEET THE NEW EXPERIENCE JUNKIES

Terror attacks. Raj Thackeray. A smoking ban.

Financial turmoil. Gay rights. The moon mission.

New films, books, movies. And so much more

The year when holidays became hands­on and ‘peaceful’ was nudged out by ‘participatory’ >Page 16

THIRD PARTY INTERVENTION Our panel of style experts tell you how to add that extra edge >Page 18

DON’T MISS

For today’s business news > Question of Answers— the quiz with a difference > Markets Watch

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First published in February 2007 to serve as an unbiased and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian Dream.

FIRST CUT

2008 IN ESSAYS

PRIYA RAMANI

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

THE SIGNS OF A ROLLER­COASTER YEAR SHIRISH SHETE/PTI

MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

RAJU NARISETTI (EDITOR)

R. SUKUMAR (MANAGING EDITOR)

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W

hat a year. And if you think you displayed impeccable restraint because you didn’t throw up on the mother of all roller-coaster rides that was 2008, imagine what it must have been like for Ratan Tata.

Yet, there he was looking calm and determined on television, as the year drew to a close. “We can be hurt but not knocked down,” he said as he reopened one wing of the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower in Mumbai less than a month after terrorists attacked the hotel.

And Tata was hurt bad in 2008. This year, in addition to recovering from an audacious attack and rebuilding south Mumbai’s most luxurious hangout, he has had to figure out how he is going to find the millions of dollars required to bail out the lemon that is Jaguar (it now looks like the British government might finally help) and drive the Nano nearly 1,600km from West Bengal to Gujarat after a furious—and very public—land-rights battle.

Aside from thanking our stars that we lesser mortals are not in Tata’s shoes (and that our weekend homes are not located on the banks of the river Kosi and that we celebrate Christmas in Goa not Kandhamal), we should be kicking ourselves for our complacency.

We should have seen it coming. Or, to use M. Night Shyamalan’s logic: We should have seen the Signs. In his 2002 film, the director outHOLD ON lined two kinds of people who inhabit his universe: Those who believe everything happens for a reason and those who believe that life is pure chance. Of course, it wasn’t a good year for Shyamalan either. This was the year the world finally agreed that he was no Hitchcock.

Yet, we should have seen it coming because the year got off to a killer start. On the first day of the new year, terrorists armed with AK-47s and grenades attacked the recruitment centre of the paramilitary force in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh. In February, the police of that state arrested six Lashkar-e-Taiba militants who were associated with the Rampur attack and were said to be planning an attack on Mumbai. Urban terror was one of the year’s most disturbing themes.

Actually, many of the issues and people in the news in January continued to dominate the headlines through the year.

Sachin Tendulkar scored the first two of his four centuries of 2008 in January. Later in the year, he crossed 12,000 runs and became the world’s leading scorer in Test cricket, beating Brian Lara’s record.

January was also the month Tata was first in the spotlight, when he finally unveiled his dream fouryear project at the Ninth Auto Expo. Raj Thackeray was already in the news in January and managed to stay put through the year.

The year began with bird flu in West Bengal and ended with bird flu in Assam. The beginning of the year saw petrol price hikes, the end of the year, price cuts.

Like most years, India got more than its share of everything in 2008. A horrific flood. Farmer suicides. Riots. Gruesome murders of young women (Arushi Talwar, Scarlet Keeling, Soumya Viswanathan). Commu-

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u The year a

bullet changed the way we think

By Rohit Brijnath Page 4

u The year we

learnt to hit pause before reacting

By Vir Sanghvi Page 5

nal clashes. An Indian Mujahideen. Naxal attacks. Tiger deaths. A moon mission. A nuclear face-off. New money-spinners (the Indian Premier League was born in 2008) and new billionaries. Sporting humiliation (our hockey team didn’t qualify for the Beijing Olympics for the first time in 80 years) and sporting victory (shooter Abhinav Bindra won this country its first ever individual gold in the Olympics).

It was the year Baba Amte died, Bilkis Bano got justice, Sister Alphonsa was anointed our first female saint and Sonia Gandhi became the longest serving Congress president. In 2008, inflation touched a new high and our investments plummeted to new lows. In short, it was another year of living in India.

As Joyce Carol Oates put it in her famous essay On Boxing: “Life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.” This year proved once again that India loves to fight itself.

PS: I wonder what January holds.

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Saturday, December 20, 2008

Vol. 2 No. 49

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

A DANGEROUS

DIVIDE

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH VARDA SHINE >Page 6

Ramachandra Guha outlines the path forward for India and its Muslim minority

THE LITTLE BIG GAME THAT COULD Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet sets its phasers to ‘Charm’ and succeeds brilliantly >Page 7

FORGET NOT

DINESH

FRONTLINE LEADERS Sure, 26/11 has stirred feelings of social responsibility (‘How you can propel change, make a difference’, 20 December), but the question is, how far are we ready to go? Just like after watching ‘Rang De Basanti’ people felt that they had to do something for the country, after 26/11, many citizens felt the same. For the next week or two, images of the horrifying attacks were forwarded, we were angry with the politicians, but now all that is lost.

We are taught from a tender age that we are the common man, but never made to understand the power that a commoner can wield. Today, India has many young people who can make a difference. Perhaps it is time for some of them, such as Vir Sanghvi, Shashi Tharoor, Navin Jindal and Ramesh Ramanathan to come forward and lead a generation which has ideas but no concrete direction.

SAYANTAN ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATIONS : JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

SHIVER MY TIMBERS Ten nuggets of pirate history essential for every landlubber >Page 12

Zubeida Ahmed, a resident of Sonia Gandhi Nagar in Malegaon, Maharashtra

THE GOOD LIFE

PURSUITS

SHOBA NARAYAN

YOUR MAMA DON’T ROCK ’N’ ROLL

T

he other day I had a sobering déjà vu moment. I realized that I had just become my father. No, I didn’t have a sex-change operation. Nothing as exciting as that. I just found myself telling my kids, “I don’t know why you kids listen to trash like that.” It was when my 12-year-old gave me the eye-roll that I realized that I sounded just like my father.

I don’t know if this happens in your household but in my home there is a clear schism between the generations. >Page 4

RAAGTIME

VIR SANGHVI

SAMANTH S

HOW YOU CAN ’TIS THE SEASON TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE BE NIT­PICKY

I

s there something that we can do with the anger that all of us feel in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks? Can we find some constructive way of channelling it apart from appearing on TV shows and demanding that so-called Pakistani flags be removed from slums near our favourite five-star hotels? It saddens me that so many morons from Mumbai’s chattering classes went on TV to declare that on the whole terrorism was a bad thing but gosh, when it appeared this close to their doorstep... >Page 5

B

y the time this column appears in print, the December music season in Chennai will have warmed up to a pleasant bright orange, reaching a white-hot intensity roughly by Christmas.

It’s a great time to think of all the joy in the world—and all the added joy that would accrue if these pet peeves would somehow vanish overnight: The sing­along seniors: It often happens that, as a musician starts the first word of a song, a happy murmur of recognition spreads through the audience... >Page 17

THE MUST­HAVES IN YOUR COLLECTION From a Dutch banker in New York grappling with self, sport and life, to Barack Obama’s compelling story in his own words—and so much more in between >Page 14

DON’T MISS

For today’s business news > Question of Answers— the quiz with a difference > Markets Watch

TAKE CHARGE The three pillars make a lot of sense and provide a comprehensive structure for dealing with many social issues, not just terrorism. (‘Are you a good citizen?’ by Swati Ramanathan, 13 December). We always look for heroes to save us because that is how our beliefs are shaped. By and large Indians are soft and peace­loving, but this is now giving way to a “I don’t care” attitude. We never make the effort to fulfil our responsibilities as citizens. Indians must shake off this stupor.

ANDY

MUSIC DIVIDE I read Shoba Narayan’s column ‘Your mama don’t rock ’n’ roll,’ 20 December, and I agree with her that there is a music divide between generations. I was going through a nostalgia phase a while back and Frank Sinatra was high on the list. My grandmother visited us during this time, and I told my brother to put ‘Something Stupid’ (a great song of Sinatra’s) for her. We were very amused when she said in a hurt tone: “Yes, yes go ahead, put anything silly for me. In English songs, I won’t know the difference between good and bad anyway!”

ANJALI MEHTA

By Salil Tripathi Page 10­11

u The year liberalization celebrated its silver anniversary

By Anil Padmanabhan Page 10­11

u The year the little ones were brought to book

u The year of inside out and upside down

u The year of sons, soil and concrete

u The year we really came out

u The year AR Rahman scored big for emperors and slumdogs

By Soumya Bhattacharya Page 6

21 December: Ratan Tata at the reopening of the Taj.

u The year a city learnt to fight its fears

smoking became the new bad word

u The year

>>Page Page 10 10

We need clarity of thought and good communication to channelize our anger at this point. Vir Sanghvi’s column ‘How you can propel change, make a difference’, 20 December, provides that clarity. As citizens we also want that our government be made accountable. My question is, how do we ensure that the government knows we are awaiting each day to find out what their next step is?

Unfortunately, time is a great healer and it is easy for people to forget what happened. Citizens tend to carry on and the people who assembled in large numbers outside the Taj hotel have disappeared. We need to ensure that we, the citizens, don’t forget 26/11. And keep the pressure on the government so that it knows that the people of this country have not forgotten the Mumbai terror attacks.

To commission an essay on every big event that happened during 2008 would have meant devoting several weeks of ‘Lounge’ to the year gone by. We picked issues that we thought were representative of the year. Don’t miss the stunning illustrations by Jayachandran

By Manas Chakravarty Page 7

By Parmesh Shahani Page 8

u The year we reclaimed our English

By Sanjukta Sharma Page 8

u The year of free markets versus financial markets

By Ramesh Ramanathan Page 9

By Vatsala Kaul Banerjee Page 10­11

By Naresh Fernandes Page 12

By Lalitha Suhasini Page 13

u The year of cheap and best

By Sidin Vadukut Page 14

u The year when small was big and big wasn’t big enough

By Rohan Sippy Page 15

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2008

Essays

LOUNGE

A bullet changed the way we think

BY ROHIT BRIJNATH JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

T

he pellet weighs 5.3 milligrams, it travels at 175 metres per second, it is manufactured by a company called Qiang Yuan. Each pellet (he fired 70 in Beijing) is a tiny, hourglass-shaped piece of lead, though when it emerges from his gun it turns into some minor masterpiece of feel and technique, patience and accuracy. The pellet flies, literally, across 10m, to a bullseye that’s 0.5mm across, somewhere between a pea and a pinhead. But this August, Abhinav Bindra’s pellets metaphorically flew much further, for they took India, finally, across that outrageous distance that separates potential from performance.

Gold is the colour of winning and as old Californians will tell you, getting it takes a madness.

It’s a hunger, it’s an ache, and the gymnast Svetlana Khorkina once explained it, saying: “I want to win a gold medal as much as I want to mother my own child.” India knows this ache. As this year began, 15 Olympics had passed since 1947, 61 years of individual fourth places, bronzes, silver, 61 years of that unseemly, if incorrect, question about one billion and no Olympic champion (how many of a billion have a place to play? But that’s another story), 61 years of a nation waiting for an Olympic hero to call its own.

He, the keeper of promises, he knows about this gulf, this separation between owning talent and using it. In a recent speech, which he takes months to craft, and is more thoughtful, more passionate than anything I’ve possibly heard from a 26-year-old sportsman, he says: ”When the rest of the world talks about Indian sport they use the word potential, potential, potential.” And maybe he was just tired of this word, tired of the insinuation that India, and thus he, can’t win, and so he fired India into the future. And immediately change was evident, for now India belonged. In the Beijing press room, a bunch of Dutch writers give a few Indian journalists, who had become new friends, a small ovation. This is a shot heard around the world.

But sometimes you wonder, once the media’s gone back to coddling Dhoni, and shooting ranks as a story below Ishant’s

barber’s favourite hair gel, does anything really change, does the medal still resonate, or is a piece of metal out of sight in Mama’s closet really out of mind? In late November, I email Bindra a question, “Do you find that fellow shooters are inspired by your gold, that they think, damn, if he’s done

it, so can I, as if you’ve broken some barrier?”

He replies: “I think so and I really hope so, not just with the shooters but all Olympic athletes in India. I’ll give you my example. When Colonel Rathore won silver, I said to myself that I will not settle for anything else but gold. It was inspiring! I see DESMOND BOYLAN/REUTERS

11 August: Bindra wins India’s first ever individual Olympic gold.

that change in the mindset of Indian athletes, nobody talks about silver or bronze now, everyone wants gold. That’s a huge breakthrough because everybody has set their standards higher than ever before. Every one is aiming higher than ever before!!”

Rathore’s medal (a first silver) was vital, Bindra’s gold is greater proof, and not just to shooters. In tubelit municipality gyms where boxers move to the music of rain drumming on tin roofs, in small-town badminton courts whose lines have faded into the cement, in suburbs where tin glasses of milk crusted with malai quiver next to sweaty akharas, in sleepy district ovals where grass grows through the bricks and evening dust softly explodes with every runner’s step, young athletes must know now that it can be done, that struggle has a finish line, that Bindra like them was just a boy with a dream. If even one of them thinks this, runs faster, rises earlier, it’s change.

It’s astonishing what a tiny pellet does, how it pierces scepticism, how it carries hope to distant places, how it can change (hopefully) how India looks at winning. Bindra’s telling us you can’t win through luck, prayer, handouts, amateurism, but through professionalism, by a trust in science, by having a plan, by a willingness to go half insane searching for excellence, by turning his mind inside out (mapping his brain), his life upside down, looking for every infinitesimal edge that would take him past not just the next guy but the best guy. Sure, he has affluent parents and an office of coaches, but you can’t buy desire.

His pellets... Well, they’re a story in themselves, of perfection pursued, of the microscopic detail he attended to while trying to find greatness, like drilling holes in his shooting jacket to reduce vibration in its trampoline-like material or adjusting the size of the soles of his shoes to fit different ranges.

Pellets matter, he educated me two months ago, the quality of ammunition helps you shoot more accurately and even different batches react differently to a gun. A pellet makes a hole of 4.5mm in a target. So he puts his gun in a vice, and shoots 10 German pellets at the target and finds that the grouping of shots is over 6.5mm. Then he takes Chinese pellets, which he always believed might be good simply because Chinese shooters always dominated, and tests them and finds they have a grouping of only 5.4mm. In a sport of, well millimetres, this matters. It’s hard to get the pellets out of China, but he won’t quit. He hunts down the manufacturer, he gets his pellets.

It’s a story of fastidiousness that might impress you, a story that might alter the way you look at nerds with air guns, might revise your opinion of shooting as a sport (dull it ain’t), might amend your view of how desperately far athletes go to win gold. And if that happens, even one part of it, Abhinav Bindra’s pellets have done their job. They have become an hourglass- shaped, 5.3-milligram agent of change.

Rohit Brijnath is a sports writer for The Straits Times.

ESSAYS L5

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We learnt to hit pause before reacting

BY VIR SANGHVI JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

4 December: Asif Ali Zardari meets Condoleezza Rice and promises her Pakistan will take “strong action” against anyone involved in the Mumbai attacks.

O

ne of the things that the Western media seem most surprised by is the relative calm with which India has handled the 26/11 attacks.

Many Western countries had worried that our immediate response to the terror strikes would be to bomb Pakistan. And certainly, much of the commentary in the foreign press in the days after the attacks concentrated on the imminent war in the region. The predictions of an attack on Pakistan came because of the way other states have reacted to terrorism—and the US’ responses in particular.

American presidents have regularly sent missiles and bombers to destroy sites in sovereign countries that they believe are being used for terrorist activities. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya. Bill Clinton bombed Afghanistan. And of course, George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 was the invasion of Afghanistan.

If we went by American precedents, India would have no difficulty in offering a moral justification for an invasion of Pakistan. Consider the post 9/11 response. America asked the Afghan government to hand over Osama bin Laden. When the Afghans refused, the US invaded and instituted “regime change”.

So, when Pakistan refused to hand over terror suspects, we could have used the same justification for launching our own invasion.

So, why didn’t we do that?

Why has the mood in India been so introspective rather than aggressive? We almost seem

angrier with ourselves—and with our politicians and intelligence services—than we do with the terrorists. Why don’t people who want us to carpet bomb Pakistan receive a more enthusiastic response?

I’m wary of making grand judgements but it seems to me that 2008 might go down in history as the year when Indians became coolly realistic about what it means to live next door to Pakistan.

The Indian response to Pakistan has always been complex. In the north, memories of the horrors of Partition have largely faded but a new generation of Punjabis remains fascinated by Pakistan and Pakistanis. It is fashionable to caricature the Punjabi attitude to Pakistan in terms of old buffers lighting candles at the Wagah border, dreaming of the by-lanes of Lahore and inviting professional peaceniks from across the border to seminars at the India International Centre.

But that generation is dying out. And though its descendants do not share in the nostalgia, they still respond to that old cliché: “We are the same people, really”. When I edited the Hindustan Times, I was forever being told by market research agencies that readers in Punjabi Delhi (even younger ones) wanted more news from Pakistan.

Outside of the north though, Pakistan is not seen as being worthy of special attention or affection. Go out on the streets of Chennai or Bangalore and ask people how they feel about Pakistan and though you may

get a variety of answers (they hate it; they don’t care; they worry about terrorism, etc.), the responses will be dispassionate and disinterested.

The problem is that much of the media and a large chunk of the political elite are Delhifocused. And so the Indian attitude to Pakistan has never really been as cold and clinical as it needs to be. Worse still, many politicians make the mistake of identifying Indian Muslims with Pakistan. At the last general election, L.K. Advani predicted that the BJP would get Muslim votes because it had improved relations with Pakistan. Indian Muslims protested vociferously: Was Advani suggesting that they put Pakistan’s interests before India’s?

And so, our responses to Pakistan are always driven by north Indian agendas and the demands of political expediency.

We have lurched from angry hysteria to mindless euphoria to passionate anger. After the hijacking of IC-814 and other terrorist incidents, the BJP government refused to talk to Pakistan. Then it invited General Pervez Musharraf to Agra and unleashed a mood of mindless optimism. After the Parliament attacks, it launched Operation Parakram, posting thousands of soldiers on the border and very nearly going to war.

There’s also the nonsensical advice offered by our columnists.

We are constantly fed the line that a democratic Pakistan is in India’s interests. Thus, we must avoid destabilizing Asif Ali Zardari. We were supposed to have longed for Benazir Bhutto’s comeback. We were expected to cheer Nawaz Sharif as he fought Musharraf.

The basis for all this was the claim that a democratic Pakistan has never worked against India or gone to war with us. This is utter nonsense. The infiltration of terrorists into Kashmir began in 1989 when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister. The Taliban was also created in her reign.

And the Kargil war took place when Sharif was PM. Given this complex background, I wondered how we would react in the aftermath of 26/11. But the cool-headedness of our response suggests that we are finally getting over our emotionally driven Pakistan

policy and are treating it as just another small, largely hostile neighbour.

By now experience seems to have taught us several things.

One, individual Pakistanis are not necessarily anti-Indian.

Many are warm and friendly. So individual relationships are not a problem. Two, Pakistan is run by the army which derives its importance from protecting Pakistan from the “Indian threat”. So it makes no sense for the army to say there is no “Indian threat”. And three, no matter who is in charge, civilian or military, the policy of the Pakistani state will be anti-Indian.

Now that we’ve learnt to live with these realities, we are

wasting much less time on hysteria or anger. Yes, we want to be friends with the Pakistani people. But we no longer make the mistake of confusing their goodwill with the policy of the Pakistani state.

So, we don’t act betrayed. We display no surprise at the latest attack. And we don’t rush into knee-jerk reactions. We worry instead about how prepared we are to face their hostility. And we react with coolness and calm.

That, to me, is a major achievement—and 2008 is the year it happened.

Vir Sanghvi is a Mint Lounge columnist and the advisory editorial director of Hindustan Times.

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Smoking became the new bad word

BY SOUMYA BHATTACHARYA JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

I

was thinking the other day of a time—not so very long ago, say, in 1994—when being on a long-haul flight for me used to go like this. Settle down, reassuringly pat the cigarette pack in my pocket, open the book, wait for the seat belt sign to go off, clink open the tiny ashtray embedded in the narrow armrest and—oh, such bliss—light up.

In no time, the drinks trolley, with its enticing array of miniatures, would come around. There I would be, in the sealed pod of the aircraft, reading, smoking, drinking, gaining in altitude. Could one, I used to ask myself, be any closer to heaven?

This joy now seems so distant as to sound apocryphal.

Now, at the fag end of a year in which a smoker has become nearly as repugnant as a paedophile, it’s enjoyable to think of the vanished pleasures of days past. (I might sound elegiac, but no, I am not joking.

And even if I am—in these politically correct times, can one ever tell?—yes, I am aware that the joke is on me.)

India, till very recently the last refuge of the unapologetic, unrepentant smoker, has become truly globalized this year. Like posh countries, it has banned smoking in public places.

I could see the way things were shaping up whenever I travelled abroad. First, smoking at bar counters in the UK went out, but all the pubs still had loads of smoking tables. So all you needed to do was to not smoke while you were waiting for the head of your dark ale to subside.

Then the smoking tables went, and we’d stand outside, freezing if it was winter, drawing the smoke into our lungs, feeling—to adapt the late British playwright Simon Gray’s line—the old friend and scoundrel swirling about in our lungs. We needed that sustenance, again and again, before returning to our cigarette-less drinks.

Till a few years ago, as one waited to board the plane at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, in front of the huge French windows so clean and

gleaming that they seemed not to be there at all and one felt as though one was looking directly on to the tarmac, one would find a smokers’ alcove.

I could stand at the bar there, with a café or a carafe of Beaujolais, and smoke and read as I watched the planes land in front of my nose. By this time, I couldn’t smoke on the plane any longer, sure, but this was close enough to heaven on earth.

Or that’s how it seemed to me. All that has gone now.

Even Europe, my favourite continent, stubborn celebrator of radical free will, has given in.

What a pity.

But in India? I’d never thought this would ever really happen.

I’d never have thought that I’d be denied the pleasure of arriving at a bar and making myself comfortable at a table as I waited for the orders to turn up. Oh, the ritualistic thrill of setting out on the table the accompaniments of the evening ahead: cigarette pack, lighter/matchbox, neat and aligned, alongside each other; or, if the mood took me, one on top of the other, the matchbox smaller and in

the dead centre of the larger pack of cigarettes. A lot of the pleasure of an experience is derived from the pleasure of its anticipation.

And then, there was the thing with sharing a cigarette.

The comradely thing, of course, when out with a man; and the thing that Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited described as the tiny bat of sexuality that squeaked when I shared it with a certain kind of person.

So what does a poor wretch like me do nowadays?

Here’s what.

I try and look for bars that have adjoining open-air areas in which smoking and drinking simultaneously are allowed.

There aren’t that many of them. Going out for a drink these days has become like being on a long-distance flight.

Drink all you like, but have that pleasure destroyed by not being able to smoke at the same time.

MANPREET ROMANA/AFP

2 October: Smoking in public spaces is banned in India. This picture was shot after the ban and moments before the man was approached by anti­smoking enforcement officials in New Delhi.

Solution? I go out much less.

Invited to people’s homes, I look around for an ashtray with the sort of furtiveness one might feel if one were sizing up the host’s wife. And when hosts look at me with withering scorn, titter condescendingly and tell me how bad all this is for my health (the scorn I can take, I am often scornful of myself; the infantilisation I can’t), I slink out, upbraided but unbowed, to reduce my life span by 8 minutes.

But it’s hard work, I tell you, all this social service. For what else is it, trying to save you from my secondary smoke?

Because however much you tax tobacco, we shall keep on smoking. The more we remain resolute, the richer you get.

And then on to health care, as we spend to keep ourselves alive so that we can smoke some more. We shall puff up your coffers. We are useful, you see. Not that you give us any credit for that.

I find that I need more and more succour in these dark times. That’s another way in which things have changed. So I keep handy a few books: Richard Klein’s Cigarettes are Sublime; an anthology, Smoke: A Global History; Simon Gray’s memoirs, The Smoking Diaries and The Year of the Jouncer.

It helps because I know things will get only worse. Next year will see cigarette packs with large pictures of rotting teeth, ruined lungs, perforated mouths: the results of a lifetime of stubborn recklessness.

I assume they will be—just in case we’ve been unable to grasp the import of the visual—accompanied by unambiguous written messages about what might happen if we smoke. Certain countries have been doing this sort of thing for years.

Me? I’ll switch to what I do when I am in those countries. I shall look for packs that say, “Smoking when pregnant can harm your baby”. Good. We can agree on that. It’s something that will never happen to me.

Soumya Bhattacharya is the resident editor of Hindustan Times, Mumbai.

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Of inside out and upside down

BY MANAS CHAKRAVARTY JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

A

s the year draws to a close, it’s time to consider what this annus horribilis has taught us.

What, as they say, are the key takeaways?

The most important lesson that many of us learnt the hard way in 2008 is that stock prices can go down. After several years of picking stocks by the simple method of closing our eyes and taking a random stab at the stock pages and seeing our picks zoom within days, we were amazed when stocks started going the other way. We were flabbergasted when IPOs were listed way below their offer price in spite of the promoter’s promise that he would use the money to set up huge projects at some future date. And we were astounded when, after strenuous efforts by the Reserve Bank of India to cool the economy by raising interest rates, the economy actually started to slow.

Another key takeaway from the year was the insight that bubbles eventually burst. At the back of our minds, many of us dimly remembered childhood traumas of burst balloons, but we were persuaded that Alan Greenspan, that serial bubble blower, had found a secret method of re-inflating the bubble just as it was about to burst. When Ben Bernanke succeeded him as chairman of the US Federal Reserve, we believed that he would carry on the good work. Alas, we have been sorely disappointed. Our faith in Fed chairmen has been lost.

Some of us held a quaint belief that free markets weed out the efficient from the inefficient, the profitable from the unprofitable and that competition drives lousy companies out of business.

That, we thought, was capitalism. We now know that competition will drive you out of business if you are a small

strength all through the crisis, telling the markets almost every morning that we have nothing to worry about.

But man does not live by economics alone. Perhaps the greatest lesson of 2008 is that hope springs eternal in the human breast. That is what the election of Barack Obama as President of the US tells us. It also tells us that Americans will believe anything. The same people who believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in cahoots with each other, or that Guantanamo was actually a rather humane place, now believe that Saint Obama will right their wrongs, bring justice to the oppressed, heal the sick and drive the money changers from the temple. That’s apart from walking on water.

It’s best to end this piece on a note of hope. One of the really important lessons of the year is our astonishing capacity for resilience. Consider how analysts and economists have swiftly changed from being guy with no contacts in Washington. If you are a large bank that has squandered billions of dollars of your depositors’ money, the free market will not only bail you out, but will also pay your bonuses. At worst, capitalism would ensure that you would be nationalized.

The moral of the story is that you should, without further delay, become a bank. I accordingly hereby announce that from today I shall be called the Bank of Manas Chakravarty and will shortly be applying for bailout funds from the US Federal Reserve Bank.

The days when they would accept only US government bonds as security for loans is long gone and they now take all kinds of dodgy assets, ranging from mortgage MARY ALTAFFER/AP

15 September: US investment bank Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy.

derivatives to commercial paper. I aim to take a pile of old clothes and newspapers to the Fed to try my luck.

Back home in India, we learnt and unlearnt many things in 2008 in rapid succession. At the beginning of the year, we knew that emerging markets had decoupled from the advanced economies and we would soon be blazing our own path to glory. We then learnt that our earlier belief was mistaken and that our stock markets would go down with stock markets everywhere else, but our economy would be fine. After a few months, we realized that although our economy would be affected a little, there would be no credit crisis in India. Next we found out that not only was there a severe credit crunch in India, but that our economy too has been hit rather badly, although, of course, our long-term story is still intact.

And somewhere in the middle, we believed that the world’s stock of oil is on the verge of running out and that inflation was never going to come down.

We now know that wasn’t true, oil prices have plunged and inflation is dead. So which of these learning experiences is the right one? The big lesson to be learnt from all this is that every story has an equal and opposite story. The other lesson is to never believe the pundits.

We have also learnt a lot about the ability to grin and bear it from our finance minister. He has been a pillar of

cheerleaders of the boom to their new roles as prophets of doom. After comparing the bull run of 2007 with the rise of the Nasdaq in 2000, most of us now merrily invoke comparisons with the burst Japanese bubble and that country’s lost decade.

Some of us have gone back in history and have gleefully started comparing current events with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Others go even further back and point to the South Sea Bubble or the tulip mania. In that spirit of resilience, I propose to soon issue a really smart research report comparing the downturn in the global economy with the Black Death—the outbreak of bubonic plague that ravaged Europe and brought the Middle Ages to an end. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of lessons we can learn from it. As the Duchess told Alice, “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

Manas Chakravarty is Mint’s financial markets guru. He also writes a humour column for Hindustan Times.

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he past two decades have seen tremendous progress within the queer rights movement in India. The battle has been fought on several overlapping activist fronts, through organizations such as Sangama (Bangalore), which follows a human rights-based approach, and the Humsafar Trust (Mumbai), which focuses on health-based intervention.

This has run in parallel with the continuing legal struggle for the modification of section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which effectively criminalizes same-sex relationships. Alongside the activism, there has also been a great deal of social change, especially in cities such as Mumbai, New Delhi and Bangalore. The Gay Bombay parties, Delhi’s Nigah Media Festival and Bangalore’s Gay Running and Breakfast (GRAB) club are just the tip of the iceberg—all big Indian cities today have vibrant, active and diverse queer scenes, the listings for which are easily available on the Web, or in some cases, in the local TimeOut. While developments such as these have taken place at a steady pace over the past two decades, 2008 could be considered the tipping point.

This was the year in which the sheer volume of conversation around queer India finally broke through to the mainstream, and sexuality became a topic that was literally on everyone’s lips.

This year witnessed queer pride marches held in four different cities. New Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata simultaneously held pride marches on 29 June, while Mumbai followed with its Queer Azaadi march, held symbolically on 16 August, one day after

We really came out

BY PARMESH SHAHANI 17 November: Gay Israeli couple Yonatan Gher and Omer fly to Tel Aviv from Mumbai with their baby born to an Indian surrogate mother.

Independence Day. The several hundred participants in each city also included a large number of straight supporters— parents, friends and colleagues of queer people who marched to show solidarity for the cause. For the people who marched, they were empowering experiences, the chance to be a part of and connect with a larger queer community. For the casual observers who witnessed the marches, it was an indication

that queerness exists in India, and not just on TV shows or the op-ed pages of newspapers.

It was also the year that the case filed to modify section 377 finally drew to a close in the Delhi high court, eight years after its original filing.

Developments were closely tracked by activists and the media throughout 2008, and this included the various arguments for the modification of the law made by the lawyers speaking

for the petitioners—Naz Foundation India and Voices against 377—as well as the opponents, including the government. The government’s contradictory stance on the issue was well documented.

The pre-release hype around one of this year’s biggest film releases, Dostana, and the conversations that the film sparked post-release served the queer cause immensely. In my book, I talk about how, while waiting for political or legal changes, we often fail to notice that real change is already happening all around us.

Dostana tapped into this current. Even though the film itself was comic, its release provided India a serious opportunity to talk about queerness at workplaces, colleges and homes. Priyanka Chopra’s matter-of-factness, Kirron Kher’s accepting mother

character, the dramatic kiss between lead actors Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham and the film’s ambiguous ending are landmark Bollywood moments. The film’s acceptance by the general public is an indication that queerness, like other differences, can be comfortably imagined within the Indian context.

There was, of course, a lot more, and it is heartening to see how the media took up the queer cause and ran with it, throughout this year. The nuanced nature of the coverage was impressive, whether it were well-researched stories that appeared on Tehelka covers, sensitive NDTV reports on the problems queer students face in school, or announcements for the Rajpipla prince Manvendra Singh Gohil’s plans to set up an old age home in India for gay men. To acknowledge and honour the media’s support, the year witnessed the first Queer Media Collective Awards.

The year also witnessed several progressive institutional on-the-ground changes. For example, in May, Tamil Nadu became the first state to grant recognition to the transgendered in its official

documents. Applications for admission to educational institutions, government hospitals and ration cards in the state now allow one’s gender to be designated as M, F, or T. All this is very feel-good, but I want to be guarded as we enter into 2009. The problems of harassment, blackmail and discrimination continued in 2008. In February, the Mumbai police, accompanied by television cameras, raided a gay party in Thane and made several arrests. In March, a homophobic mob in Kolkata attacked and critically injured three kotis who were peacefully walking in the locality. In November, the police in Bangalore arrested, victimized and mistreated several hijras and Sangama activists. These incidents and hundreds of other unreported acts of physical and emotional violence against queer people, remind us that despite all the hoopla, perhaps the queer struggle is only just beginning in our country.

Parmesh Shahani is the editorial director of Verve magazine and the author of Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India (Sage Publications, 2008).

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We reclaimed our English

BY SANJUKTA SHARMA

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here are two books selling on the streets of Mumbai now. Hamish McDonald’s The Polyester Prince, and a cheap paperback of this year’s Booker winner, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. The former, a sensationalized tell-all of the rise of Dhirubhai Ambani, is officially banned in India. You could call it a street classic—since 1999 when Australian publisher Allen & Unwin published the book, most copies have been sold at traffic signals. But The Polyester Prince doesn’t seem to excite the street sellers anymore.

About the second, the boys are aggressive. “Booker, Adiga”, they say, pressing its cover against car windows. They know that like Shobhaa De’s books, “Booker” is big, “Booker” will sell.

If you were to judge the success of The White Tiger and its author by this prize, it’s the biggest thing to have happened in the Indian publishing world this year. But the importance of this book lies elsewhere.

It’s the story of Balram, a voluble, murderous man from the dark hinterlands who makes it in the big, sinister city. His story is told through letters to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.

Adiga’s narrative is shocking—partly in a good way.

It is symptomatic of a final breaking-away from a long tradition of Indian English fiction. Finally, we are no longer

unapologetic about the way we visualize, think and therefore write about ourselves. Unlike the big names in the 1990s and even 2000s, we have stopped negotiating a language that has to be true to colonial traditions of syntax and imagery and yet capable of faithfully reproducing Indian realities. It is finally about our English and our metaphors.

The White Tiger exploded these clichés and stunned many people, certainly the judges of the Booker Prize: “With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then, an egg will crack open—a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out of an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road—and then the window goes up, and the egg is released.”

The merit of Adiga’s book can’t be stretched much beyond this shock value. So The White Tiger is certainly not the biggest or best thing to have happened to Indian publishing this year.

In fact, the new beginning that Adiga seemed to represent has been in the making for a few years now, with many young writers holding up new voices and making works of literary value, more sophisticated and universal than Adiga’s. Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight and Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head immediately come to

14 October: Aravind Adiga wins the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel The White Tiger. mind. It’s unfair that he emerged as the torch-bearer.

But let’s leave the quibbling aside for now.

A better picture of the year that was in Indian publishing emerges when we ask: What really made Adiga stand out?

The unequivocal answer is: HarperCollins’ aggressive marketing. For the first time in India, a television commercial promoted a book. Life-size cut-outs of the author stood at the entrance of bookstores.

It has been a global trend this year—publishers pushing the boundaries of promotional strategy. YouTube, Twitter and nightclubs were venues where books were launched. Fuelled by and piggybacking on the burgeoning Indian economy in the early part of 2008, publishers thought big—more print runs, bigger promotional budgets and wider distribution. You’re sure to remember Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan? Penguin India was bullish about promoting our first major book, You are Here, long before it actually released in August 2008. We got postcards of its cover with one-liners such as these: “The trouble with my life

is that it’s like a bra strap when you put your bra on wrong...” A couple of months before that, Penguin India CEO Mike Bryan told Lounge in an interview that it was one of the books he was most looking forward to in 2008.

Global publishers such as Hachette entered the Indian market. Said Thomas Abraham, managing director, Hachette Livre, “With more players and competition, there will be improvements in quality, wider targeting of readership which will thus expand the market, and a better end customer experience.” Popular genres—chick lit, literary fiction, non-fiction, campus flick, the India book—were well-defined.

Perhaps for the first time, the publisher considered reading to be akin to watching TV—would you rather watch Indian Idol or read about the drugs-and-masti

story of a management student?

The author who made the maximum number of appearances on TV and in tabloids was the father of the Indian campus caper himself, Chetan Bhagat. His third book sold over 25,000 copies in a month, his publisher proclaimed.

Such democratization has always existed in the US—the market for a Don DeLillo is as sacrosanct as that for Stephen Covey or Bill Bryson. But can we consider a similar approach to be of great consequence in India? Do many book launches and many new genres mean we are evolved readers and publishers?

We are a country of 22 regional languages, each with its own literary traditions and popular fiction. Most big publishers are yet to tap the riches of regional language

writing. Thanks to Blaft, an independent publisher, we got the eye-opening The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction.

The English language publishing industry—Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House and others—reaches out to about 35% of readers in India.

According to a study conducted by research consultancy firm Technopak Advisors in October (there is no systematic study on the Indian publishing market), this industry is estimated at Rs13,000 crore. India Perspectives, a monthly produced by the ministry of external affairs, focused an entire issue on the publishing industry in September. Its editor concluded: “Today, over 90,000 books in English and in Indian languages are published annually in India of which only around twenty per cent represent English language book publishing.”

One of the most encouraging trends of 2008 has been a boost in serious and engaging non-fiction. The book of the “new India” made way for the India versus China narrative (Bill Emmott’s Rivals, Parag Khanna’s Second World, Arvind Panagriya’s India: The Emerging Giant). Random House India’s AIDS Sutra, an anthology of writings on people living with the disease, is comparable to some of the best works of literary non-fiction in the world.

Thanks to a vibrant industry, we were happy bookworms.

What do we get next? We’ll find out soon enough whether books are recession-free. Most likely they are. But more importantly, nursing the wounds of a brutal attack from an unknown enemy, struggling through our loss, fears and questions, we’ll turn to books that have survived wars, disasters and recessions—books that always speak to us with urgency, and engages with the beauty and pain of the human condition.

Write to sanjukta.s@livemint.com

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Of free markets versus financial markets

BY RAMESH RAMANATHAN JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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eading into 2008, an increasing number (not a majority, but a sizeable enough minority) of Indians were beginning to feel that our 9% growth story was here to stay, like something that Moses brought down from the mountains.

There were troubling clouds in the skies, but there was enough clear blue visible all around the horizon. Companies across the board were bursting with confidence: Large Indian corporations were beginning to position for global scale, mid-tier ones began to transmit bigger ambitions within their ranks, and even small and medium enterprises were slowly overcoming their shackles.

Hiring boomed across the board—banking, consulting, manufacturing, textiles, service industry. The labour market was a sellers’ market like never before in our history, and parents’ eyes bulged watching the pay cheques that their 25-year-old daughters were picking up as they threw up their graduation hats at IIMs. New malls were opening up, not just in the mega cities, but across small-town India. Even niche segments such as high-end luxury were becoming large enough to see traction— exclusive magazines, new product launches and boutique hotels became daily affairs.

Middle-class India completely bought into the delicious idea of India becoming an emerging superpower. Even though Bric sounded like a thud, it felt like gold to be in exalted company—India was no more the perennial also-ran that we were for all our independent life, constantly being compared with Somalia and Ethiopia.

Somewhere in our collective hearts, we finally seemed to let go of a 60-year-old socialist idea of how our economy ought to

be run—in a unified national exhalation to release our pent-up tension regarding capitalism, the role of markets and the place of government in delivering prosperity to our people. We discovered our ingenuity, celebrated our entrepreneurs. It felt good to be Indian. As a barometer of the nation’s ebullient sentiment, the Sensex closed 2007 at 20,286.

What a difference a year can make.

December and January were bookends to the economic story. Even as 2007 ended exuberantly, 2008 literally began a new bleak chapter. Everything pretty much went downhill from the start. The Sensex peaked on 10 January. Oil prices shot up, the US mortgage meltdown started spreading and pretty soon, the skies seemed to be filling up with dark clouds.

There was no respite, as things got steadily worse with each successive month. One symbolic moment of the turbulent sentiment was when Jet Airways fired some of its employees: Their protest, and the immediate capitulation of management that followed, showed how tenuous this new-found relationship that Indians have with hire-and-fire free enterprise was. This of course isn’t anything evil, just the reality of economic sine curves. But not to Indians, having grown up on a steady diet of a maai-baap sarkar.

By the end of the year, with the relentless downward spiral, the real estate correction and the Mumbai attacks, all our spirit seems to have been sucked out. What a compressed time cycle for an education about the ways of market-based economics: That what goes up can come down dizzyingly fast; that jobs are not permanent; that housing prices can tumble and that bank recovery agents RAJESH NIRGUDE/AP

23 January: The benchmark Sensex rises about 1,000 points or around 7%—after falling for seven consecutive days.

are not nice when you don’t pay on time; that survival shocks can hit the middle class as much as the poor.

To the average Indian, this is a time of tremendous dissonance and confusion: A failed state was already visible everywhere, and the markets were meant to be the panacea.

But both seem to be deserting him. But underlying this turmoil is something fundamental, a complex clash of ideas about the architecture of the relationship between markets and governments.

Let me offer one example of the clarity we need to have: We need to distinguish the difference between free markets and financial markets. Free markets are about entrepreneurs, people who start off invariably as small business owners who hire from the ground up, maybe two, three or 10 people, and then grow from there. Most often, these entrepreneurs will never get to use the sophisticated tools of the financial markets, other than the typical loan from the neighbourhood bank. But that’s all they need, because they aren’t looking for more than

their own appetite for risk, creativity and hard work to help them move up in life, and for government to get out of the way, set fair and transparent rules of functioning, enforce them correctly, reduce red tape and provide the necessary social infrastructure. The true engines of an economy are these entrepreneurs—big and small, but mostly small.

Financial markets are about one aspect of facilitating this—and not the end-all of a free market system. They play a role, a critical role, but they are not the centre of the universe.

In fact, 2008 showed that an overemphasis on financial markets, an over-monetization of economic activity can have devastating consequences.

As we stumble into 2009, wallowing in our incoherence, doubts are beginning to emerge: Was it so bad to have a socialist mixed economy model, where the government was a benevolent dispenser of licences and all else? Is the market-based economy all that it’s made out to be? Could it really be possible that the communists—God forbid!—actually had it right,

that we need to keep markets on a tight leash; that slow and steady is a much better path than see-saw uncertainty; that the Hindu rate of growth isn’t a bad thing after all?

We face crucial national elections in a few months that can set the intellectual course on these issues for the next 5-10 years: What does the experience of the past year say about our positions on the role of enterprise and government in generating prosperity? It’s critical that millions of Indians engage in this debate. But first, we have to recognize that this is a new idiom for most of us—these are rapidly changing times and ideologically entrenched thinking won’t help, so we have to discover the vocabulary, much like children learn to talk—by speaking a whole lot of gibberish even as we practice, but learning along the way. The important thing for us as average Indians is to keep talking, thinking, correcting, and not let the intellectuals and politicians take over the debate.

Ramesh Ramanathan is the co-founder of Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy.

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A city learnt to fight its fears

Liberalization celebrated The little ones were brought to book its silver anniversary

BY SALIL TRIPATHI

BY ANIL PADMANABHAN JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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eliks Dzerzhinsky, the Polish communist who founded the Bolshevik secret police, once said: “The only object of terrorism is to terrorise.” The only recourse left for us, then, is not to feel terrified.

Terrorism aims to disrupt lives and destabilize order. It seeks to strike fear, to unnerve us. It wants us to suspect the other—the one who looks different, prays to a different god, speaks a different language, or who comes from a different place.

To beat terror, we are supposed to act normal and carry on as if nothing has happened. My former colleague Shekhar Gupta says he will go and stay at the Oberoi. My friend in New York, Suketu Mehta, looks forward to having a drink at Café Leopold.

As many more people in the city begin doing what they used to do before 26 November, we are supposed to have won, and they lose.

Some think that’s facile.

Many thousands have no choice but to lead their normal lives anyway. They must take that crowded bus, even if there may be a hijacker in it; they must cling from that train, even if it might have a bomb; they must return to work the next day, otherwise there is no food to feed the kids at night. Others see poetic resilience in this return to normalcy. But little acts of everyday bravery are often the only choices for those who have none left.

But Gupta and Mehta are not suggesting elitist hedonism: If bravery requires us to be normal again, that’s what they want us to do.

Look at its map: Mumbai is an extended arm, offering a clasp, a firm handshake, in the deep blue sea. It is a palm extended in friendship, to trade.

In his epic book, Maximum City, Mehta writes: “In the crowded suburban trains, you can run up to the packed compartments and find many hands stretching out to grab you on board, unfolding outwards from the train like petals... And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable, or whether you were born in this city or arrived only this morning. All they know is that you’re trying to get to the city of gold, and that’s enough. Come on board, they say. We’ll adjust.”

We will adjust. That is what Mumbai does very well, even in

the face of terror. Other cities go quiet immediately after terror—but it is the lull before the storm. An Ahmedabad or a Delhi goes berserk after an outrage, spilling more blood.

Mumbai, ever pragmatic, returns to normalcy, humming with activity.

Other cities have gates and fortifications; cavalries have attacked them. But Mumbai is a port city. It is surrounded by the sea, and it looks at the world beyond with a sense of wonder. Its symbol is not a tall tower, though skyscrapers it has many, but a gateway without doors that can be shut.

And its Taj Mahal is not a mausoleum, but a living hotel.

It will hum again.

For Mumbai is where people come from all over India to live out their dream, and that’s what terror sought to change. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie had warned: “Those who hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay.”

Mumbai lives on trust. It is used to welcoming outsiders and strangers. Tourists travel in its motor launches to the Elephanta islands, traders deal in shares, tycoons set up businesses, shoeshine boys work hard and strike it rich, dabbawalas perform their daily choreography—making sure the Jain banker gets his onion-less pulao and the Christian typist gets his Mangalore fish curry— and starry-eyed girls come from the hinterland to make it in its Tinseltown. The absence of majority is demonstrated in its plurality—the Zoroastrian philanthropist, the Punjabi film producer, the Malayali clerk, the Konkani bookseller, the Jewish bookkeeper, the Anglo-Indian model, the Gujarati stockbroker, the Marwari wholesaler, the Marathi bureaucrat, the Tamil lecturer, the Bengali MBA, and the cab driver from Uttar Pradesh. The city belongs to nobody, and to everyone. If Raj Thackeray’s thugs want to PUNIT PARANJPE/REUTERS

26 November: Terrorists attacked prominent south Mumbai landmarks.

BY VATSALA KAUL BANERJEE JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

destroy that from within, those 10 terrorists wanted to demolish it from without.

As Rushdie wrote further: “Bombay, a relatively new city in an immense ancient land, is not interested in yesterdays… In Bombay all Indias met and merged… Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories, we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once. What magic was stirred into that insaan-soup (the soup of humanity), what harmony emerged from that cacophony!”

And that’s what they wanted to tear apart—the two hotels, the majestic Indo-Saracenic railway station, are but symbols.

They wanted us to be afraid.

It is easy for me to say this from London. But I’ve lived through the blasts of 1993 in Mumbai; I recall the flames, the cloud of smoke choking the city. I was in London when its underground network was bombed in July 2005: it was as if London’s veins and arteries were ruptured. I visit New York often; in August 2001, I was on top of the World Trade Center with my family, surveying the city beneath. Three weeks later, those towers ceased to exist.

We will now have to queue longer, walk through more metal detectors, live through false alarms. But Mumbai’s genius lies in not panicking.

It is khadoos, like Sunil Gavaskar, blocking bowlers trying to get him out, then stepping out and driving them straight when they don’t notice; it is bindaas like Sachin Tendulkar, heaving bowlers elegantly.

And it is that normalcy Mumbai will restore— when schoolboys will be practising at the nets at Shivaji Park; when the bus conductor will tell his passengers “pudhe chala, pudhe chala (move ahead)”; when a future Saleem Sinai will see films at the Metro Cub Club; where the dancing fingers of Amina and Ahmed Sinai will float around teacups at the Irani restaurant, coming tantalisingly close, yearning to meet.

I will be back soon: for that pao bhaji at Sardar’s at Tardeo, for the bhelpuri at Chowpatty, the lassi at Jain Dairy, the kebab at Bade Miyan’s, the vada pau and kala khatta at Bori Bunder, the chana bhatura at Cream Centre, and the thali at Thacker’s.

And that cocktail at the Sea Lounge. For old times sake.

Salil Tripathi writes two columns for Mint.

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wo events that had far-reaching consequences occurred in 1983: On 25 June, against all odds, India won the cricket world cup; and on 14 December, a 796cc car, called Maruti, rolled out of its factory in Gurgaon. This year marks the 25th anniversary of both events.

Both were audacious efforts. One laid the foundation for India’s development as a key player in international cricket; the other stoked the middle-class consumer dream that would eventually power the country’s transformation into a trillion-dollar economy.

And, to think they almost didn’t happen.

Captain Kapil Dev rescued India after a tottering team had lost five batsmen for a mere 16 runs in a league encounter.

Later, lesser-known members of the team logged stunning performances to upset first England in the semi-final, and then, reigning world champions West Indies.

The Maruti story was equally, if not more, compelling. What started out in 1971 as a pet project of Sanjay Gandhi, the political heir apparent of then prime minister Indira Gandhi, went bankrupt and was moved for liquidation in 1977.

For three years it became a source of political conflict between the ruling Janata Party and a deposed Indira Gandhi.

After her return to power in 1980, she revived the project. The assets of the erstwhile company, including the land in Gurgaon, were acquired under the Maruti Limited (Acquisition and Transfer of Undertakings) Act, 1980.

In 1981, Maruti Udyog Ltd (MUL), a 100% government owned company, was set up. It was the era of industrial licensing—though the first signals of its dismantling were apparent—and any company needed government permission to manufacture (being a public sector start-up helped).

Over the next two years it came close, but didn’t quite manage to strike an alliance. Lost opportunities included partnerships with Renault, Volkswagen, Daihatsu and Suzuki.

In the case of the last, a second opportunity emerged almost by chance. In February 1982, a director of Suzuki Motor Corporation who was returning from a visit to a TVS plant in Chennai, chanced upon newspaper reports—ironically,

when the deal was falling apart—on a likely tie-up between its competitor Daihatsu and MUL. That’s how, several meetings later, MUL and Suzuki became partners.

Around the same time, MUL undertook a consumer survey. “It was the first of its kind for a public sector company. In those days, the customer did not matter. The survey told us that the customer needed a fuel-efficient and low-cost car,” recalls R.C. Bhargava, one of the founding members of MUL’s management team and its current chairman.

What unfolded was almost sacrilegious for existing economic policy. It was a time when foreign collaborations were frowned upon; Indira Gandhi had nationalized banks a little more than a decade earlier. Yet, she agreed to allow a

40% foreign direct investment, or FDI, in the venture.

“Mrs (Indira) Gandhi was very pragmatic,” recalls V. Krishnamurthy, the founding chairman of MUL and present chairman of the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council. This collaboration with a foreign name was a first—at a time when this was on the negative list of foreign direct investment.

The government did much more. It lowered excise duties (it claimed Maruti was energy efficient), and customs tariffs so that the company could maintain its inaugural price of Rs47,500.

“It was the first time that the government looked at an investment with such flexibility.

Our strategy on pricing was to peg it at 15 times the average (starting) ASHESH SHAH/MINT

14 December: Maruti’s silver anniversary. 7.44 million Maruti vehicles have been produced since 1983.

salary of an executive, which then was Rs3,000.

My slogan was that so long as the public saw value for money there would be no dearth of demand in this country,” says Krishnamurthy.

The former chairman says he wanted to develop a plant with a production capacity of 250,000 cars a year—more than five times the cars that were being sold in the country at that point of time! But not too many people were willing to bet on that number and eventually the company scaled down its capacity to 100,000—with the first phase restricted to 40,000 cars a year.

It was the first step of liberalization—a process that accelerated after Rajiv Gandhi took over as prime minister in 1984, and then dipped briefly before being dramatically revived in 1991 following an unprecedented economic crisis.

Along the way, MUL created an entire generation of entrepreneurs.

Vendors were the key to indigenizing a car that was initially 97% imported. “Maruti told us that we had to supply components and not the raw products. This culture started with them,” recalls 72-year old K.R. Singh, then director of Trinity India Ltd and now an adviser to the company.

The company, which was set up in 1974 as Trinity Die Forgers Ltd, used to supply raw forgings to several automobile manufacturers in the country, who would then machine them into components.

Life changed dramatically for the Pune-based firm in 1986 after it began supplying front wheel hubs—part of the front axle of the car—to MUL. They began modestly, supplying components to fit 2,000 cars a month. However, as MUL expanded, adding new models such as the Omni, Gypsy and Esteem to its oeuvre, Trinity’s order book grew rapidly: It now supplies for about 25,000 automobiles a month. The expertise the company gained opened up entirely new opportunities and today Trinity supplies more components to Ford—for 36,000 cars a month—worldwide than to MUL. No doubt a transformative story, compelling as none other in India’s modern economic history.

Anil Padmanabhan is chief of bureau, Delhi, Mint

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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wo days of Bookaroo, India’s first ever literary festival for children in Delhi, put paid to doomsayers’ declarations about how little the little ones are reading. As children made a beeline for interactive storytelling, comic-making, illustrating and verse-writing sessions, or simply crowded the lone bookstall, it was clear that you could not ask for better readers.

Perhaps it is because all children are not, like every other 20-something you know, writing books of their own yet; or because children respond to writers as if they are simultaneously gods and partners-at-play. No child was heard clamouring for weekend afternoon TV, and the only tantrums parents dealt with had to do with book-buying budgets.

Anyone could see that kids come to books with a natural keenness and a viewpoint—and it’s us grown-ups who skew or spoil that with adult agendas, aspirations and deathly dull books.

If your eyebrows are arching up and your mouth is an O, and there’s a little one by your side shooting little people into splats in a video game all day, it’s time for a quick, gratifying trip to the bookshop. This was the year when traditional myths and retellings were joined by a slew of self-help or life-skills books, such as the Berenstain Bears series for younger children and The 6 Most Important Decisions You’ll Ever Make and No Body’s Perfect for the teenagers.

It was also the year that the children’s and young adult book market threw up quite a few exciting titles—and trends. The battle between a slick city vampire and a fire-breathing dragon spilled over from international shelves to those in India as Brisingr (Random House), the long-awaited third instalment (after Eragon and Eldest) of Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle series, arrived on the heels of the bestseller Breaking Dawn

by Stephenie Meyer (Little, Brown Young Reader). With fascinating gothic books like Cirque Du Freak (HarperCollins) by Darren Shan and the Power of Five supernatural series by Anthony Horowitz, fantasy rose to the top of the charts, helped also by paperback releases of Percy Jackson and the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan (Puffin) and the seventh Harry Potter title. Teen spy thrillers and detective dramas sustained their star power with Robert Muchamore’s CHERUB series (Hodder Children’s), and the Artemis Fowl and Young Bond series (both Puffin).

If chick-lit is filling up adult shelves, chick-let books for girls

from Class III up are having a great outing, too. Take the glittery trail with the Rainbow Magic series by Daisy Meadows (Orchard Books) and Charmseekers series by Amy Tree (Orion); saunter over to palaces and hang out with princesses (Tiara Club series from Orchard and Meg Cabot’s Princess Diaries from Macmillan); give a high-five to pint-sized heroines (the Junie B. Jones and Judy Moody series); make friends with Cathy Cassidy’s many colourful protagonists; and, if you’re the guardian of a 13-plus, stop for a session with the Gossip Girls series (Cecily von Ziegesar) or Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s teen queens. And, holding up all by himself in the boys’ corner—and equally popular with junior girls—is Horrid Henry (Orion), on his way to mischievous stardom.

For local publishing, this was a year brimming with energy and variety. At one end of the spectrum, picture books for younger children seemed to find a place of their own. “I think Indian parents are finally appreciating picture books: It’s a change from

the old view, which questioned the value of a book that has one line of text per page!” says Sayoni Basu, director, publishing, Scholastic India—a statement supported by the success of Tulika Books’ Ismat’s Eid by Fawzia Gilani Williams and illustrated by Proiti Roy; What Shall I Make? by Nandini Nayar and illustrated by Proiti Roy; and the collaborative Crocodile Tears by Sandhya Rao and Jonathan Lindstrom, and illustrated by Taufik Riaz.

At the other end of the scale, Weed (Roli Books) by Paro Anand, the touching story of a Kashmiri boy’s struggle with loneliness, confusion and terrorism, found critical acclaim. The search for a good indigenous detective fiction series continues, and while the market was led by Scholastic’s The 39 Clues series by Rick Riordan, complete with an online game and trading cards, 2008 saw a start with Subhadra Sen Gupta’s Foxy Four mystery Double Click!

(Young Zubaan), followed by Aniruddha Sen Gupta’s Fundoo 4 in The Mystery of MindNet (Scholastic). The hunger for children’s plays has hopefully

22 and 23 November: Around 3,000 children attend children’s litera­ ture festival Bookaroo in New Delhi.

been appeased for the moment by Five Plays for Children by Vijay Tendulkar (Scholastic), the first ever English translation of the playwright’s works for children, and Rigmarole and Other Plays (Puffin) by Sai Paranjpye.

The year also saw “contemporary and urban” becoming the new area of experimentation in both fiction and non-fiction. Examples include the new Swapnalok Society series

by Suchitra Krishnamoorthi—set in an apartment building with a cast of young modern characters—and exciting city histories in Talk of the Town by Jerry Pinto and Rahul Srivastava.

“There has been a small but definite shift towards non-fiction,” says Swati Roy, partner, Eureka!, a specialist children’s bookstore in New Delhi. Scoring with the kids are books such as The Magic Treehouse series (Random House), The Roman Mysteries series (Orion) and the Dead Famous and Horrible Histories series (both brought out by Scholastic). Two top-rated books, both from Random House, have been A Really Short History of Nearly Everything, the children’s adaptation of Bill Bryson’s bestseller, and George’s Secret Key to the Universe, in which Stephen Hawking and daughter Lucy explain the universe to readers of all ages wonderfully.

If your child enjoys short stories, rejoice in the growing number of themed anthologies published this year, such as BeWitched, a collection of witch and wizard stories (Scholastic).

Two books on animals are notable: Ranjit Lal’s rollicking story of displaced monkeys, leadership crises and hostages in The Simians of South Block and the Yum Yum Piglets (Roli Books) and The Rumbling Island: True Stories from the Forest of India, edited by Zai Whitaker (Puffin).

And building upon the comic format, the Bones series (Scholastic) by Jeff Smith combined comedy and drama with remarkable illustrations.

The latest Rowling, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, is the cherry on the year’s book gateau for young readers. Industry consensus would put down annual growth at a healthy 10-15% in children’s list sales over the past decade, and hope floats for the coming year of books for kids and teens. The momentum is building up and it looks like, finally, children’s publishers are beginning to scratch where it itches.

Vatsala Kaul Banerjee is editorial director (children’s and reference books) at Hachette India, the newly set up arm of the UK publishing group.

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Of sons, soil and concrete

BY NARESH FERNANDES JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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ieutenant-Commander KRU Todd of the Royal Indian Navy first got wind that prehistoric man had lived in Mumbai when he examined the gravel of the Back Bay on the city’s southern tip nearly 80 years ago. An amateur archaeologist, Todd presented a paper to the Prehistoric Society, East Anglia, in 1932 laying out details of rough tools and flakes that seemed to be approximately 300,000 years old. To marshal his case, though, he had to conduct digs in Kandivali, more than 30km north of the neighbourhood in which he found his initial clues. That’s because much of the material for the top filling of Back Bay reclamation scheme of the 1920s, which created 439 acres of new land between Churchgate and Colaba, had been carted in from Padan Hill in Kandivali.

When Todd was scooping up ancient stone hand-axes, cleavers and scrapers in the city’s northern reaches in the first part of the last century, the creeks between seven malarial islands had already been filled in to form the Mumbai peninsula that’s now recognisable on contemporary maps. It’s a process that had started in the middle of the 16th century, when a Portuguese financier named Simao Botelho suggested that the authorities grant submerged land in perpetuity to anyone hard-working enough to drain and reclaim it.

Today, roughly 40% of Mumbai city and 20% of the suburbs consists of reclamations but soil and land remain the city’s central preoccupation—a fact that was starkly obvious all through 2008.

In the unlikely event that Raj Thackeray and his nativist associates in the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena should take the trouble to read Todd’s papers on prehistoric man, they would probably use his findings to bolster their contention that the sons of the soil have a claim to the city that’s even more ancient than they first imagined. It’s probably too much to hope that these bhumiputras see the irony implicit in the notion that, like the enterprising migrants who have settled here, Mumbai’s very soil has its origins elsewhere.

While the MNS’s corrosive assertions about roots—and their vicious attacks on north

Indians—have received wide play, another debate about a piece of Mumbai history has gone almost unnoticed by the national press, even though it has profound significance for the city’s future. In September 2007, Mumbai’s elected representatives in the municipal corporation took less than a minute to pass a so-called redevelopment proposal to lease the 139-year-old Crawford Market at Rs1,001 a year for 60 years to a firm named East West. The company was given the right to demolish portions of the historic complex to build three towers with a total area of

65,690 sq. m. of floor space. In exchange, the municipality will get 40% of that space.

Civic activists pointed out that the plan will destroy the architectural integrity of the market, which has been accorded the highest level of protection under Maharashtra’s heritage protection regulations.

But it’s mainly the integrity of Mumbai’s elected officials that’s been called into question.

According to the calculations of Right to Information activist Sailesh Gandhi, East West would make a profit of Rs1,155 crore on an investment of Rs105 crore. Under pressure, the RAJANISH KAKADE/AP

1 February: Raj Thackeray questions Amitabh Bachchan’s decision to start a school for girls in Uttar Pradesh.

corporation voted in March on a demand that the redevelopment proposal should be reconsidered. Civic activists lined up in the lobby to urge representatives to do the right thing. When the motion was tabled, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena voted against reconsidering the proposal and the Congress stayed neutral. The plan now has to be approved by the heritage committee, but its opinion is not binding on the municipal commissioner, who can pass the proposal if he presents valid reasons.

Since then, two other decisions on real estate have been welcomed by construction companies, but greeted with horror by people who care about Mumbai. In September, the Supreme Court set aside restrictions imposed by the Bombay high court in 2006 on the reconstruction of approximately 19,000 so-called cessed buildings in southern Mumbai. The residents of these buildings pay a cess to the state housing board to ensure that repairs are carried out, because their landlords have refused to look after their upkeep. Though the state government has offered construction firms liberal incentives to rehouse the residents of these structures, the majority of which were built

before September 1940, the Bombay high court had ruled that mandatory open spaces around the buildings had to be maintained. With the Supreme Court lifting these requirements, the residents of skyscrapers that will sprout through southern Mumbai will literally be able to shake the hands of people in neighbouring buildings.

As if this wasn’t alarming enough, the municipal corporation at the end of November decided to allow residents of the city’s 30 fishing settlements and 189 gaothans—villages that have improbably held out against the concrete tsunami of urbanisation—to demolish their homes and build taller homes.

It seems that the authorities haven’t bothered to study whether the infrastructure of these already-congested neighbourhoods can actually support the increased populations that will move into the new buildings.

The events of the past year follow the inexplicable decision in 2006 to allow piecemeal building projects on 600 acres of mill land in central Mumbai and the plan to redevelop the Dharavi slum area even though the government-appointed consultant to the project isn’t sure quite how many families live there and need to be rehoused.

In most other cities, this kind of chaos would probably have prompted irate residents to flood into the streets in protest. But in Mumbai, this seems like business as usual.

After all, real estate corruption has been around for centuries (though not perhaps from prehistoric times).

In fact, one notorious episode involved the area in south Mumbai where Lieutenant-Commander KRU Todd scratched around for clues about the city’s origins.

In 1926, the Backbay enquiry committee discovered evidence of financial irregularities in the reclamation scheme and noted that the government’s permission had been obtained through an incomplete presentation. That committee was headed by K.F. Nariman, after whom another stretch of land with the whiff of scandal to it would be named decades later.

Naresh Fernandes is the editor-in-chief of TimeOut.

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AR Rahman scored big for emperors and slumdogs

BY LALITHA SUHASINI JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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arlier this month, I found myself roaming the streets of Dimapur, a nondescript, dusty city in Nagaland whose youth is fanatical about all forms of metal—white, death, thrash, speed; the heavier the riffs, the better. Posters of an upcoming White Lion concert were plastered all over town but there was no sign of Bollywood. Hell, the place didn’t even have a movie hall. I bumped into a mobile download store at every corner—you could even download tones at the local paan store. So it was surreal when I saw a kid blast the Yuvvraaj number Tu Meri Dost Hai off his mobile.

Every year, there’s an anthem that endorses A.R. Rahman’s talent. This year there were several, including the one our young man in Dimapur downloaded. Sixteen years into his career as a composer, 2008 turned out to be a watershed with the largest number of Bollywood releases till date for Rahman. He also launched KM Music Conservatory (KMMC) to train students in Western and Indian classical music soon after he launched his label KM Musiq. The fee is hefty but the composer has made sure there are grants and subsidized packages for deserving students. Rahman even engaged KMMC faculty in film soundtracks this year. So, Kavita Baliga, who teaches vocals, did the operatic parts in Guzarish from Ghajini and V.R. Sekar with Elidh Martin, who teach the cello, are featured in the soundtrack of Yuvvraaj. I’m sure students will show up on soundtrack credits soon.

I remember Rahman sounding like an expectant dad as 2007 wound to a close—he was happy to announce that he had a slew of releases lined up for the new year. Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na had been held up over for a little more than a year due to production snags; Jodhaa Akbar, which was under production, had been pushed from 2007 to 2008; a Subhash Ghai project was yet to be titled (Yuvvraaj); and there was Ghajini. Dilli 6 made it to his list as well but it is still under production and is now slated to be a 2009 release. Ada: A Way of Life and Slumdog Millionaire were the two big surprises.

With Ada, Rahman, the geek that he is, opened himself up to a tech innovation: He allowed virtually anybody to remix two numbers (Gulfisha and Gumsum) off the film’s score via Nokia’s XpressMusic website. It was another first for Rahman, another leap into the future. Gulfisha, sung by Sonu

Nigam, made a lot of noise but soon made way for the bigger hits in Abbas Tyrewala’s directorial debut.

Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na was an album cut for mass hysteria.

Rashid Ali, who played the guitar in a jazz quartet at pubs in London, turned into a phenomenon with Kabhi Kabhi Aditi as did Benny Dayal, who sang the sassy Pappu Can’t Dance Saala. This year reconfirmed that Rahman is a terrific headhunter. His formula is simple: He needs to hear

magic when the singers go behind the mike. Exactly the way an actor transforms a scene dynamically when he steps into the frame. It doesn’t matter if the guy has lost a talent hunt (Naresh Iyer) or is a music teacher in Suriname with no claim to fame (Madhushree).

Rahman’s range as a vocalist expanded with each film too. If he surpassed himself with his tribute to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan in Guru’s Tere Bina in 2007, there was Khwaja Mere Khwaja from Jodhaa Akbar which made RAJ K RAJ/HINDUSTAN TIMES

12 March: Rahman launches his KM Music Conservatory.

the qawwali accessible again.

And he kept innovating. Who would have imagined that he would direct the Chennai String Orchestra to magnificently pull off Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony Prelude in Yuvvraaj? The script allowed for lusty Western classical departures; sometimes film-makers such as Ghai and Mani Ratnam (I can’t wait for Raavan where Rahman and Ratnam reunite—it’s as thrilling as Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson every single time) are known to tweak their films around Rahman’s music. O.P. Nayyar and Naushad commanded such respect in the 1950s and 1960s but few composers have thereafter.

Rahman has been accused several times of repackaging and re-recording his older tunes for a new audience. Even in doing so he’s managed to increase his fan base. Surely, few in the north would have picked up the soundtrack for Alaipayuthey but many must have enjoyed the soundtrack of Saathiya, the Hindi remake, as much or even more. Surprisingly, he hasn’t taken a single track off the hit Tamil OST for the Hindi version of Ghajini. Guzarish and Behka

from the Aamir Khan-starrer are catchy melodies with Rahman teaming up again with Rang De Basanti collaborator Prasoon Joshi to sweep the charts.

Slumdog Millionaire was a quick, quiet release. Rahman wrapped up the project in an astounding two months for Danny Boyle, collaborating with M.I.A.—the UK-based Sri Lankan wild child. Like Rahman, M.I.A. broke into the mainstream with her inimitable vocal style and razor rhythms. She spent her early years in Chennai and returned to record parts of her smash-hit second album, Kala, in Chennai, inevitably landing up at Rahman’s AM Studios to fine-tune it. She told me last year how she, like the rest of the world, had been blown away by Rahman and hated Gwen Stefani for grabbing her idea of redoing a Rahman hit. Stefani, she says, used the rhythm section of Ottagatte Kattiko, a Tamil hit from the 1990s flick Gentleman, in her debut Sweet Escape.

Slumdog was M.I.A.’s cash-in time. Not only did the soundtrack include Paper Planes, the knockout number from Kala, M.I.A. also recorded O Saya with her idol. The track is a megajam with dark tribal beats and Rahman’s chant-style vocals playing over M.I.A’s gritty rap.

And Rahman rewrote music history again when he completely redid Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai as Ringa Ringa. So it isn’t surprising that the soundtrack has snagged a Golden Globe nomination.

As the world fell apart around us, Rahman raised his voice against terror with Jiya Se Jiya, a robust number that draws from Rajasthani and Punjabi folk with percussionists from across the globe, including Sivamani, in his brand new solo album, Connections. The video that shows free huggers walking around various parts of the country is as emotionallycharged yet simple. Oh, and he also did the rousing theme song for the new Champions League T20 series with some power chords and Jamaican influences thrown in. Looking back at all that’s happened this year, it’s sometimes hard to believe that Rahman is one individual at work. But every single victory of his is somehow personal for all of us. The Slumdog OST has two tracks in the Oscar longlist for Best Original Song. Can ARR win? You know the answer.

Lalitha Suhasini is a willing listener if you’re playing something original or have an original excuse to do covers. She was formerly an assistant editor with Rolling Stone India.

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Of cheap and best

BY SIDIN VADUKUT JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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alk through the hot, dusty and energy sapping streets and by-lanes of the T. Nagar shopping district of Chennai and one often comes across a term used to describe the perfect bargain. Shopkeepers use it when, thwarted at every attempt to foist off a mixer-grinder or four-burner stove of dubious reliability, they finally relent and bring out the top-selling market favourite from under the counter. It may not be a shiny Maharaja Whiteline with seven jars or a Butterfly with copper gasheads but the product that is finally offered is a hard act to beat. “This sir,” he will say in resignation, “this item is cheap and best.”

And in most cases, it is. The product that inevitably changes hands is the perfect marriage of quality, reliability and price.

Cheap and best.

That moniker aptly describes the central philosophy in two projects that have made 2008 an uncommon year in Indian science and technology. It was a year that took our science from the realm of tantalizing but frustrating potential, and launched it into the mainstream. Both projects won considerable global praise. For a culture that continues to thrive on foreign appreciation before it reluctantly pats its own back, that was the ultimate stamp of approval. Indian science and engineering had arrived. More importantly, Everyman understood and appreciated.

The first project, when it was unveiled to the world this January at the 9th Annual Auto Show at Pragati Maidan in the Capital, weighed in at around 600kg. Reminiscent of a giant shiny egg on wheels, it was a shade over 3m tall and 5ft long.

And inside the egg sat one Mr Ratan Tata.

When Tata stepped out of the Tata Nano and called it “The People’s Car”, the world came to a screeching halt in astonishment. Here was a car—“a proper car” as Tata reminded everybody later in a Forbes magazine interview—with four wheels and a bona fide engine and safety features all for the measly price of just Rs1 lakh.

Or, to put it in perspective, around two-and-a-half times the price of the latest BlackBerry.

The Tata Nano was a dream come true not just for Ratan Tata, who announced it in 2003 to a lot of hope and plenty of cynicism, but also for thousands

of Indians. They could now see of Indian ingenuity meeting and went into free fall. It dreams of finally being able to shoestring budget—not only continued falling for around replace ageing scooters and went according to plan but it half an hour, all the while motorcycles with an incredibly has also reached its destination sending back data pertaining to affordable car. Experts believe safe and sound. a number of experiments. And that the Nano, when it is finally Six minutes past eight, on the just before impact, it was launched, holds the potential to night of 14 November, 100km slowed down with rockets and revolutionize urban and rural above the surface of the moon, allowed to crash into the mobility in this country. the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) moon’s surface. The 35kg MIP, Noteworthy perhaps was detached from the painted in the national colours, Tata’s statement at the Auto Chandrayaan-1 orbiting vessel landed on the moon near the Expo that none of the Shackleton Crater.

INDIAN SPACE RESEARCH ORGANIZATION/AP technology incorporated It was the first time in 32 into the car was years that a man-made revolutionary. The final object had landed on the product, he indicated, was moon. And thus, thanks to the outcome of Chandrayaan-1, India improvising existing became only the fourth technology within the nation to plant, albeit via tightest possible budgets. crashing, its flag on the That exercise alone moon. But wait, there’s makes the Nano more. The entire cost of quintessentially Indian—a the Chandrayaan-1 project product of our unmatched was just around Rs400 ability to jugaad or crore. Or, to put it in improvise and create perspective, something that would, in Chandrayaan-1 cost as a manner of speaking, fly much as the Delhi off the shelves at T. Daredevils team in the Nagar. The Tata Nano Indian Premier League. was undoubtedly cheap More than anything else, and best. it was this aspect of the If not for the Singur mission that captured the imbroglio, we could have imagination of scientists, seen the Rs1 lakh wonder space buffs and on our streets today.

22 October: Chandrayaan­1 is launched policymakers everywhere.

But our second from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in With just a fraction of the project—our second tale Sriharikota on a PSLV­C11 rocket. budget available to space

agencies in the US, Russia and Europe, the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) had managed to design, launch and land an object on the moon.

Isro chairman G. Madhavan Nair ascribed the success to some calculated risks and some good old-fashioned Indian ingenuity. They ran less tests and around one-third of the technology was reused from previous Isro missions. In short, they had depended on some old-fashioned jugaad science.

Of course, once the patriotic fervour surrounding the success died down, many people wondered why India needed to waste money on moon missions.

Isro has already announced plans for a sequel to Chandrayaan-1 which will land a motorized rover on the moon in 2012. A manned mission is being slotted after that.

While Isro maintains that it will stick to a shoestring budget, naysayers continue to believe that the government could use the money for more important things such as poverty alleviation and national security. The debate still rages but Nair promises that Isro missions will not only make monetary sense—Nair said in an interview that every rupee spent on Isro yields a rupee and half for the country—but also give the country immeasurable human resources and technology benefits. For once, scientists such as G. Madhavan Nair, and engineers such as Girish Wagh, who managed the Nano project, have become heroes.

On the face of it Indian achievements in science in 2008 boast of no Nobel Prizes or life-changing inventions. In fact both our crowning achievements have been more exercises in ingenuity and discipline than miracles in the laboratory.

Yet, over time, they captured the imagination of millions of people and gave them a reason to celebrate. Perhaps more schoolchildren will learn science so that they one day can be part of the first Indian manned mission to space. And then thankfully a Nano taxi will drop those children to the school that was too far away to walk to.

“Cheap and best” was never a glamourous philosophy. But like the Nano and Chandrayaan-1 tells us, it is one that can give you wheels on the ground and still help you reach for the moon.

Write to sidin.v@livemint.com

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When small was big and big wasn’t big enough

BY ROHAN SIPPY JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

NOTE: All “facts” are alleged.

They are primarily set forth by a conscious desire to confabulate and illustrate, and are not intended for the noble purposes of the actuary.

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wo classic cuts in films that stand out, probably cited to death in film schools all over the world: From a burning matchstick to the blazing desert sun in Lawrence of Arabia.

From an animal bone flipping through the prehistoric sky to a spaceship pirouetting through space in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Both cuts dramatically take us through a vast span of space and time in the blink of an eye. From the infinitesimal to the infinite.

From small to big.

I am wary of propounding any theory as a practising member of a business where, as William Goldman famously said, “nobody knows anything”. But there does seem to be an opportunity for films to be made with limited financial resources that appeal to a certain kind of audience. Bhojpuri films do this well, as do films driven by a genre or high concept (they are being watched in increasing numbers in our cities).

I was doing some mental calculations about our blockbuster films—since there is a complete lack of comprehensive data on the film industry despite the entry of large corporations (which makes me wonder what they base their investment decisions on!), this is more of an educated guess. The largest amount that a film distributor has made from a film in India (which is what he receives, net of theatre rentals, taxes, etc.) in recent times is said to be about Rs36 crore. Taking an average of Rs40 per ticket buyer (in multiplexes it would range from Rs40-80, single screens from Rs10-50), that comes to about nine million tickets sold. Even if I am off in my calculation by 100%, the number of tickets sold would still be less than 20 million, or just 0.16% of our population.

That’s about a third of the total number of people who use the Internet in India. Not a great indicator of success for a business that is supposed to be for the masses. The Dark Knight, which grossed more than $530 million (around Rs2,650 crore), has probably sold close to 45 million tickets in North America, or roughly 20 times more tickets

per capita. Or, to put things in perspective, closer home, the figures quoted for the biggest Tamil films are comparable to those of Hindi films.

So perhaps what we are looking at is not the fact that small is big now, but that big isn’t really big enough. It’s easy to forget that, on the day it was released, Munnabhai MBBS was a relatively low-profile film, with Sanjay Dutt coming on board after things didn’t work out with the original lead, Shah Rukh Khan. It didn’t open to full

houses, but had a sensational word of mouth. Going back further, it seems quaint now that Hum Aapke Hain Kaun opened with just 35 prints all over the country. These are great examples of films with legs, that keep going and going, so the box-office returns dwarf the cost, no matter how much.

Which is what runs this business. Ergo, small is big.

We are in an era where most “big” films sell themselves by virtue of the money that they have already made, i.e. a film

4 July: Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na releases. The small film becomes one of the year’s biggest hits.

must be good because so many have already been suckered into seeing it (an interesting strategy, because, as mentioned above, those numbers are impossible to verify!). The difference between the current “successes” and the examples mentioned above is that those films were genuinely loved, and audiences kept coming to see them, week after week. There is also more satisfaction in discovering a film through word of mouth, and sharing your excitement with those around you.

Put another way, the only way to explain huge film budgets that have been greenlit in recent times seems to be that the people with the money take a view of things diametrically opposite to Surma Bhopali’s “do rupaiya mein saara jungle khareedoge?”, i.e. throw vast sums of money at a film with little hope of multiple earnings, while retaining all the risk that is inherent to our valiant enterprise.

Given the fact that it is statistically impossible to sustain the business with those films, we turn back to the first principles—to wit, script is king, etc., etc., (set to a chorus of

moaning about the moral weakness of paying stars so much, etc., etc., as if we were forced to pay them; as if they approached us)—and other myths necessary for survival. So we follow the simple principle that an exciting new idea well told may perhaps have a decent chance of convincing enough patrons to part with their money to make the venture viable.

In January, within the span of a week, I have two films at opposite ends of the size spectrum releasing. The President is Coming, all fun and frolic with shining Indians and Dubya; our only regret is that a couple of shoes have outdone us as an appropriate goodbye gift to George Bush.

Then there’s Chandni Chowk to China, the biggest film that I have personally worked on, with a few bells and whistles of a Hollywood studio as add-ons.

I am equally attached to both, and both started with compelling concepts that really excited me. And, when I started work on this essay, it seemed clear to me which film was small and which was big. Until we posted the Chandni Chowk trailer on the Apple site... We’ve literally had several million hits.

And, as I opened the Web page and saw us nestled between behemoths like Terminator: Salvation and Star Trek, it struck me—to the vast majority of those who go to the site, we are the small film. Most of those commenting have no idea who the stars of the movie are, but are riveted by the idea of Bollywood Kung Fu! For them, this is the film that affords them the pleasure of discovery, that comes straight out of the blue!

I have no idea at all what the Fridays ahead hold, but a parting cut, this time from big to small: In Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, a sliver-like cloud drifts towards the moon.

Cut A woman, who comes out of nowhere, is seized by Buñuel, and her eye forced open.

Cut The cloud now divides the moon into two.

Cut A razor slices the woman’s eye open.

So whether small or big, the films we love make us see with a new eye.

Rohan Sippy is a producer and director of Hindi films.

L16

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2008

Travel

LOUNGE GAURANG JHAVERI

ON THE TRAIL

The experience junkie Action heroes: (clockwise from left) Gaurang Jhaveri and his friends hiking in Africa; Pratap Bose deep sea fishing in Thailand; Shreen and Ravi Malani at the Cannes film festival.

PRATAP BOSE

SHREEN MALANI

The year when holidays became hands­on and ‘peaceful’ was nudged out by ‘participatory’ B Y S UMANA M UKHERJEE ···························· hen history looks back on 2008, this will be regarded as the year when travel ditched the sun-nsand variety of tourism and evolved into an experience-rich genre of its own. Finally moving beyond sightseeing, the consummate Indian traveller sought to think out of his suitcase and make a difference—to himself, to his destination, and to the larger world.

W Adventure: Jhaveri overcame a troubled medical history to follow his wanderlust.

A cushion for the hard life At 52, Gaurang Jhaveri, automobile engineerturned-investments adviser, has a gory health history: osteoarthritis, two angioplasties and a bypass surgery. Individually, they would have felled a lesser man or at least shackled him to the sofa for the rest of his life. Jhaveri, though, looked at his health

THE FEEL­GOOD LIFE Want more out of your travels? Take your pick u Donor travel: Altruism is in. So

you can do your bit to save the developing world. “Last March, we organized a donor trip to Honduras. Eleven people visited the Pico Bonito National Park to see carbon offsetting and watershed projects, which are helping combat the destruction of the park’s precious resources, loss of biodiversity and degraded watersheds,” says Jessica Kenney, a marketing associate with Elevate Destinations (www.elevatedestinations.com).

Think of it as the ultimate guilt trip. u Customized holidays: Go where

no man has gone before. Or at least, where you can see no man.

Whether it’s floating around the Galapagos islands, South America, in a yacht or mountain biking in

Idaho, US, if there’s a remote spot in the world, there’s a travel company ready to tailor your trip there. “In New Zealand, you can travel in four­wheel drives, stay in luxe wilderness lodges, swim with the dolphins or spot the seals (but no humans),” says Leisure Ways’ managing director Ashish Chadha (011­25887204). u Invest in experience: The most

luxurious train ride in the world is in South Africa (www.rovos.co.za).

There is wilderness safari accommodation in North Island, Seychelles (www.north­island.com), and in central and South Africa (www.wilderness­safaris.com). You could also go polar bear shooting (only with your camera) in Canada or save the turtle in Costa Rica (www.whydontyou.com). If you have the will, they have the way.

issues as a challenge. A year after his bypass, he was standing atop Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest freestanding mountain.

“This was the only window I had following my ill health, especially the coronary bypass,” says Jhaveri. “Africa is the grand obsession of my life: I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been to Kenya since my first trip in 1969. On safaris in Kenya and Tanzania, I’d often marvelled at the majestic beauty of Mt Kilimanjaro, which was never far from our sight. Last year, I knew if I didn’t climb it now, I could probably never do it again.”

Jhaveri researched hard for a tour organizer who would not baulk at his health issues. He finally signed up with the African Walking Co., affiliated to the London-based African Travel Resource. “What bowled me over was their offer of insurance covering existing conditions. Their promises of an airlift in case of a medical emergency made a difference, too. I’ve done plenty of hardship treks in my youth but I can’t repeat that now,” he says.

His family also insisted that his elder daughter Shefali, 19, accompany him on the trek (Kilimanjaro is among the few peaks that do not require mountaineering skills). But before that, Jhaveri had to clear strict fitness tests. “I had to train for three months, since the scant oxygen on the mountain would make the heart beat 170 times a minute. Thankfully, I passed the medical tests with 180 beats/minute and I was allowed to go on the expedition.”

The trek itself is hard work— apart from the low oxygen levels, it’s also extremely cold. But the six-day walk offers opportunities to get up close with the African countryside in a way safaris don’t.

“You begin the climb in a tropical rainforest, pass through arid desert and end up in snow. For all the support you get—we had 21 porters who carried our supplies and provided us freshly cooked meals—finally, you have to put your physical discomforts aside, put one foot before the other and walk on to achieve a personal goal,” says Jhaveri.

Always a subscriber to outdoorsy holidays that combine dependable comfort with an element of unexpected adventure,

Turnberry in Scotland, said to be the finest golfing destination in the world, with championship courses—my husband and son are enthusiastic golfers—fabulous views of the Ayrshire coast and accommodation that’s a class apart,” says Malani. “The bonus, apart from a superb spa, though, was the range of outdoor activities: fishing, shooting, archery and falconry.”

This was how the British gentry lived for centuries and they now package it for travellers to offer them a glimpse of a gracious way of life.

Fishing for supper

Jhaveri has now set his heart on walking through the sand dunes of the Namib desert in Africa. “It’s a 10-day/100km trail through the world’s oldest desert,” he says enthusiastically. “The wildlife is incredible—here you see the only lion species that have adapted to living in the desert—and the trail ends at what’s called the Skeleton Coast, because there were so many shipwrecks on this part of the Atlantic.”

Sophisticate’s choice For Bangalore-based gallerist Shreen Malani, it is the experience of the sophisticated life that is the perpetual quest on her travels. “Whether it’s New York or London or any European capital, my travels are incomplete if I don’t catch at least two plays. I love theatre, especially musicals, and I think I’ve seen every play currently running on Broadway and West End. Shows and performances, from philharmonic recitals to Tom Jones, are another

draw—if there’s an artist I like playing anywhere at all when I’m in the city, I’ll make it a point to be there,” says Malani.

“The whole idea of old-style glamour excites me, so I make it a point to dress up for theatre, arrive in time for the performance and finish the evening with an excellent dinner that we usually book ahead. I enjoy that whole sense of anticipation, of fitting in—which is why I choose to dress elegantly, like the rest of the audience. If the theatre’s too close to hire a cab, I’ll even carry my dress shoes in a bag and quickly change into them as we enter.”

In their 50s, Malani and her businessman husband Ravi, who shares her tastes, make it a point to seek out the environment that most becomes them. They prefer not to stray too far outside city limits and, if they do, it is only for the pleasures of golf and health treatments.

“Earlier this year, we’d visited

Long before experiential travel became fashionable, Mudra COO Pratap Bose, 45, had spurned bythe-book for out-of-the-box. Most memorably in 2000, he visited Israel for a week, covering Jerusalem, Nazareth, the Golan Heights, the Dead Sea and spending a day with the Bedouins. “We did things and visited places that are no longer accessible now,” says Bose of the trip.

For this inveterate traveller, it’s this sense of achievement that makes his handsome budgets worth their weight in gold. “Take fishing. It’s a hobby I have pursued since I was a boy and deepsea fishing is something I do at any given opportunity. Malta, an archipelago of seven islands in the Mediterranean with a south of France feel, was an excellent experience. I went fishing twice off the Malta bay, a beautiful location made more impressive by the 4-5km long line-up of luxury cruisers and yachts.

“But my favourite when it comes to fishing is the waters off Thailand, largely because of the quality of catch,” says Bose. “I must have visited Thailand at least 10-12 times for fishing and I try a new location every time.”

Bose makes it a point to engage a deep-sea fishing boat with the best gear and a knowledgeable captain and crew. Fishing can be tiring as it involves sitting for hours in the hot sun and then reeling in fish that can vary in size from 6-7ft to 20ft. The catch of the day is either cooked on board the boat or turned over to the chef at the hotel for dinner.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2008

L17

Insider

=@F?86 TREND SHEET

In our own words

HARIKRISHNA KATRAGADDA/MINT

For these young designers searching for inspiration, there was no place like home

B Y M ELISSA A . B ELL melissa.b@livemint.com

···························· ost people don’t think matchboxes speak, or bookcases have voices.

But for a handful of graphic and product designers—“communication designers” as Divya Thakur, founder of Design Temple, puts it—products speak loud and clear. And, to them, designing everyday functional products has become an exploration in the language of “Indian-ness”. “(India has) been isolated for so many years,” says Thakur. “We had our own identity; we were fine with where we were. It’s only when you open yourself up to the world then you think about what defines India.”

In 2006, Thakur’s Mumbaibased company started experimenting with products that speak an urban Indian language: matchboxes detail the Kamasutra and a toilet paper roll tells the story of Draupadi’s cheerharan (the disrobing episode from the Mahabharat) with a few simple lines and one bold hand.

Designer Krsna Mehta, a Mumbai native, along with Sangita Jindal, first celebrated his city in the much-praised furniture line the “Bombay Project” at home decor chain Good Earth in 2006.

The two designers used old black-and-white photographs of the “Queen’s Necklace” (Marine Drive), men selling tiffins, and women in saris on the beach, and overlaid them on lamps, pillows and coat racks.

The result was a funky homage to the city.

“This country should be our first (source of) inspiration,” Mehta says. “In fact, Western designers interpret the East better, and I was getting fed up of that. It’s about time we get our act together and create more products that celebrate India. I love this country and I will never be tired of being inspired by it.”

Over the past year, a fleet of designers have followed suit. Now coffee mugs celebrate the autorickshaw. A well-known Italian furniture design house touts topend charpoys (cots). Clocks tell the time in Urdu. Coasters shout out famous Bollywood quotes.

And pillows boast the deeds of freedom fighters.

Call it home-grown kitsch or sentimental art, but a new sensibility which celebrates local icons has now taken root in product designing.

M

Mumbai speaks

Good Earth, with a presence in Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore, has been supporting these designs, be it Thakur’s first line of products or Mehta’s Bombay Project, for a couple of years now. Now, even in-house designers at such stores have begun to capitalize on kitsch.

Tara Lal, one of the designers at Good Earth, has set up a line dedicated to Bollywood classic stories and quotes, with images of actor

City beautiful: Paintings and pillows from Play Clan. to. The idea, he says, is usually to create playful concepts based on the humour in Indian clichés.

Branding India

Masti Christmas: (left) Hampers by Krsna Mehta at Bombay Store.

Madhuri Dixit on pillowcases and quotes from Sholay on coasters.

And the movement has just grown bigger. It is not just an attempt to celebrate but also honour the designers’ home turf.

A few days after last month’s terror attack on Mumbai, The Doers launched a T-shirt, “Speak Mumbai Speak”, to let people declare their feelings of rage, hurt, horror and courage. A previous tragedy, the serial blasts on Mumbai’s local trains in July 2006, convinced Neil Dantas that he needed to use his National Institute of Design education to do more than just create furniture. With a bunch of like-minded friends, he formed The Doers, a collective of creative people from varied professions.

“We like to talk about issues that surround us today via our creativity and naughtiness,” says Dantas.

The Taj Mahal, AIDS and alcoholism are other themes in their work. The group also created a clock with Urdu numbering, read anticlockwise just as the script is read right to left.

Meanwhile, in early November, Krsna Mehta launched a more affordable line of products, aimed at a younger audience, at The Bombay Store in Mumbai.

Among other products, agarbattis (incense sticks), bags, candles, coasters and cushions celebrate Mumbai while taking a gentle dig

at the city.

Mehta targeted a younger audience with his second line because “the idea is to make the youth of this city and our country interested in it. Many students have no love left for this city (Mumbai). I wanted to revive that in a fun way through product design.”

The first words

Thakur says the trend to use Indian imagery started with fash-

Stylish slumber: Doshi Levien’s range of charpoys for Italian design house Moroso.

ion designers, since they were the first to encounter a global audience that wanted to know what India was all about. “Is it royal India? Which is a cliché. Is it fakirs and sages? That’s another cliché.

So what defines us?” asks Thakur.

Perhaps the answer lies in what fashion designer Manish Arora does with his clothes—mixing contemporary styling with everyday Indian imagery. Arora started using kitsch-style images on his clothing about five years ago and has since become closely associated with the celebration of iconic Indian metaphors, from his Ambassador car to the religious figures on his clothes. He says in India “you just have to look around our cities and villages and you will come across something you can term kitsch”. From the plastic toys sold on the road, images of gods, beautifully decorated rickshaws,1980s posters of

actresses to kites—India has so much to offer.

Last year, in the side alley of one of New Delhi’s hottest new malls, Select Citywalk, Saket, a small clothing and home accessory store, Play Clan, opened with little fanfare. The directors of Citywalk were sceptical that the store belonged in the same mall as Tommy Hilfiger and Aldo.

Himanshu Dogra, director, The Ilum Design Project and Play Clan, says the mall’s managers finally decided to take a chance on something new, and the store immediately struck a chord with the urban youth.

The project sprang from the restlessness of its 25-member team, which grew tired of only working for other people. They wanted “their own playground” to create their own artwork: T-shirts mocking the cows holding up traffic; paintings celebrating the “Auto Risk Shahs” and the Ambassador taxis; pillows and lampshades displaying colourful maps of Connaught Place.

At Play Clan, the work is a mixture of hip-hop, manga comics, pop art and India. Dogra says the group’s work will help Indians appreciate the “cool” factor of their country. People who see the Jama Masjid every day forget to look at its beauty. But using it to decorate a pillowcase reminds people that it is something worthy of recognition.

“Illustrations and art have the power to change the way you’ve been seeing things,” Dogra says. Graphic designers, by and large, are comfortable with a reliance on history and on popular conceptions—or “street talk”, as Dogra calls it—while trying to create products the youth will respond

Rabia Gupta, founder of RGD Design, started a product line called “Taxi Taxi” based on the Mumbai taxi. She says that a taxi reflects the personal style of the owner, and designers are inspired, as it is a “cue to the assimilative nature of our culture and our people”. Gupta says she is constantly studying the world around her. Currently, her group is studying the graphics on local packaging from small kirana (grocery) shops and markets. “We pick up these images and then find it easier than others to transpose them effectively around us.”

Yousuf Saeed, a documentary film-maker and a collector of popular art, says that the interest in kitsch has definitely grown over the past few years. He thinks that designers using imagery from the street will preserve this form of art and push the intellectual elite into paying attention to it finally. He sees it as something that stems from the economic hierarchy in the country. “The division between the poor and the rich is extremely huge, so whatever the poor use, it’s considered an exotica for the rich.”

Saeed recently helped create a foundation, Tasveer Ghar, which is a digital archive that will work towards preserving popular art in India.

London-based graphic design company Doshi Levien had spent its career creating brand experiences for companies such as Intel, Nokia and Italian furniture design company Moroso. Last year, the Italian design house offered it a chance to create its own branded line of furniture. The husbandand-wife team behind Doshi Levien—Jonathan Levien and Nipa Doshi—came up with a high-end charpoy range. The fabrics, handmade in India, contrast beautifully with the polished black Italian metal of the legs. After the success of the charpoys, Doshi turned to Mughal miniatures for inspiration and a line of pillows and a seating collection called My Beautiful Backside was developed.

In an email response to the question why it has taken so long for designers in the country to find an Indian voice, Doshi writes: “This is a complicated, but essential question. To simply put this, I would say, that as we have moved out of the shadow of our colonial history, and have grown as a nation, now we have a great need to redefine our identity. In this pursuit, we are all finding our ‘Indian-ness’.”

L18

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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2008

Style

LOUNGE

TREND TRACKER

Third party intervention Metallics, slim cuts and dresses are the hottest party trends. Sounds familiar? Our panel tells you how to add that edge

B Y P ARIZAAD K HAN R ACHANA N AKRA ····························

WOMEN What to wear: Short dresses How to wear it: Glamour is back, says Raakesh Agarvwal. “Kind of red carpet meets short party dresses.” He recommends short dresses, which are either backless or cut low in front. Many designers are now creating dresses inspired by corsetry. “When you have a really low back or neck, you need some construction on the inside,” Agarvwal says. “To stay warm, add an embellished jacket and opaque tights,” says Namrata Joshipura.

MEN What to wear: Skinny all over How to wear it: Silhouettes are still slim, says Arjun Khanna.

“Skinny” is a prefix for trousers, jeans, ties, and jackets. Hemant Sagar also endorses the slim line. “A slim, black, two-button blazer with cigarette pants is perfect for a black-tie do.”

“Strangely, for jeans, the opposite is also true—try wide-cut, almost flared jeans. Levi’s has a strong collection,” Khanna says.

What to wear: The bandhgala How to wear it: They are not boxy or rugby-shouldered, but slim. Khanna says: “The cut is westernized and they are not made from ethnic fabrics. Black is great for formal dos, but try cream, or pastel blue for the day. Wear it with cream jodhpurs, skinny pants, or dark denims.”

BOSS HUGO BOSS

What to wear: Colour, of course How to wear it: Mohan Neelakantan suggests mixing

ALDO

What to wear: Jumpsuits How to wear it: Jumpsuits were seen on the runways at many fashion week shows. The adventurous can opt for jumpsuits as partywear. Wear them short or full-length and in bright hues such as citrus green or in satin, Joshipura says.

FASHION

DESIGNER

Party pick: A black Emporio Armani belt with an elongated black nickel buckle. The best part is, it has no flashy logo.

Knot up: You can’t go wrong with slim satin ties.

What to wear: Shimmer and shine How to wear it: Satin is the fabric of the season, according to Joshipura and Gaurav Gupta.

Wear short and fitted, or fulllength dresses in the shiny fabric.

Metallics are still in, but in a subtle way, says Gupta. “It’s nice to have hints of shimmer in the fabric itself, like in lurex.”

ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA

Chavan says people are making an effort to wear accessories in a unique way. She’s working on a unisex line of badges made from a medley of photographs, toys, brocade and lace. To make your own—attach a few of your favourite, quirky bits and bobs together—and wear it on the lapel of a jacket or even with a formal garment. u Instead of dresses with colourblocking—using two or more solid colours to create sections or blocks—which was a trend a few seasons ago, Agarvwal says use accessories to achieve blocks of colour. “If you’re in a red dress, wear purple shoes. If you’re wearing a black dress, wear red or neon shoes and carry an orange clutch,” he says. And make sure your make-up is nude and hair is simple. Stay away from the allblack look, suggests Joshipura, recommending bags in fuchsia or neon green. u Metallic shoes are still trendy for men, says Khanna. “Sports shoes are also still strong, from Converse, Puma or Adidas.”

For Neelakantan, Sagar and Gupta, patent leather shoes do the trick, in dark blue, brown or white. u

and matching—red trousers with a white shirt and a beige jacket, or a parrot green jacket with an all-black ensemble or a fuchsia tie with a navy suit.

What to wear: The all black look How to wear it: Neelakantan’s tip to wearing all black: “Play with textures and shades. Mix a silk shirt with a cashmere jacket or a cotton shirt with a velvet waistcoat.”

What to wear: Sheen How to wear it: Gupta says satin-finished suitings give a subtle sheen. “Satin suits in silver, grey or navy are very chic,” says Neelakantan. And yes, he says, men can wear sequins; toneon-tone or contrast sequins on the placket of shirts or side seams of trousers.

What to wear: Leather How to wear it: To brave the winter, team a chocolate leather jacket with a brown turtleneck pullover and beige denims, says Sagar.

THE PANEL

Raakesh Agarvwal

“Now everyone is investing in accessories as they cost less than clothes, they give old outfits a new twist and you can keep recycling them,” says Shilpa Chavan. u Your pieces should either be design oriented (made of inexpensive materials but high on creativity) or high in value, crafted with precious stones or metals, says Chavan. “Whether you pick a bag, headpiece or necklace, it should make a statement.” u Stilettos are Agarvwal’s first choice, “but if you have to dance and can’t wear stilettos, try a hybrid shoe. It has a platform in front and a high heel, and every label is doing them”, he says. u For more laid-back dressers, boots and gladiator sandals are a good choice. “It’s amazing how quickly trends trickle down from the ramp to the street these days,” says Gupta. u

Dance party: Hybrid shoes combine a platform and a stiletto.

&

What to wear: Colour and more colour How to wear it: Joshipura recommends short shift dresses with sequins, in colours such as tangerine and magenta. Agarvwal votes for colours such as champagne, black (“of course”) and Valentino’s trademark red.

“After his retirement, people are realizing just how important that red is,” he says.

Shine on: Patent leather shoes for men.

ACCESSORIES

Short shift: Forget the little black dress, it’s time for some colour.

parizaad.k@livemint.com

RAAKESH AGARVWAL

Namrata Joshipura

Gaurav Gupta

Arjun Khanna

Hemant Sagar

Mohan Neelakantan

Shilpa Chavan aka Little Shilpa

Party pick: A small Miu Miu bag in black with gold rivets which I carry all the time.

Party pick: A loose, dou­ ble­breasted, sleeveless knit vest from All Saints in London, that can be worn over anything.

Party pick: A rugged denim waistcoat I got from Levi's in Turkey. I wear it so often, it’s become a uniform now.

Party pick: Plaid trousers with a washed wool black jacket and fake python moccasins.

Party pick: A Giorgio Armani navy blue velvet waistcoat with a draped collar.

Party pick: In a London flea market I found an old piece of leather, moulded to fit the head. I’ve put a ribbon around it and wear it as a hat.

FASHION DESIGNER

FASHION DESIGNER

FASHION DESIGNER

FASHION DESIGNER FOR LECOANET HEMANT

FASHION DIRECTOR—’ELLE’ AND NDTV GOOD TIMES

ACCESSORIES DESIGNER