Lounge for 01 Oct 2011

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Saturday, October 1, 2011

Vol. 5 No. 40

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE Silk Smitha on the cover of Cinema Express magazine in March 1984.

BUSINESS LOUNGE WITH LEVI STRAUSS’ SANJAY PUROHIT >Page 9

BUTTERFLY EFFECT Your search ends here. Every perfect blouse on Katrina Kaif, and many more varieties, are in a 43­year­old tailoring shop in Delhi >Page 7

SILK ROUTE REPLY TO ALL

N

arendra Modi is positioning himself to be prime minister. What sort of leader will he make? We can tell by understanding him as a man. Look on this piece as his biography.

Born 17 September 1950, Modi is 61. His resume says he has a master’s in political science. He speaks a Gujarati purged of Persian words (like Advani’s Hindi, but better crafted). His Hindi is marked by his nasal accent, but is correct. His English is poor and he works on it. Modi is called “NaMo” by his fans... >Page 4

>Pages 10­12

THE GOOD LIFE

AAKAR PATEL

UNDERSTANDING NARENDRA MODI

Ekta Kapoor’s forthcoming film ‘The Dirty Picture’ revisits a sequins­and­pelvic­ thrust era of Tamil cinema which was propelled by talent, scheming, hypocrisy and the intense loneliness of women like Silk Smitha

PIECE OF CAKE

SHOBA NARAYAN

WHEN KOLKATA IS A MUSEUM

I

t is 1am, but the Shiv Mandir para (neighbourhood) in Kolkata is hopping.

Shorts-clad young men named Deb and Dickie are working alongside about 20 artisans who are erecting what seems to be a gigantic bamboo stage set, but is in fact a homage to Ma Durga. Tall tribal musicians made of bamboo are hoisted upright as five men anchor them to the ground. About eight bamboo musicians stand at the entrance to the pandal, serenading a... >Page 5

PAMELA TIMMS

THE ORGAN GRINDERS A journalist’s book on the organ and blood trade in India unveils grim truths about public health systems >Page 14

REVIVAL OF ‘BALAKA’ AND ‘BANALATA’ They are romantic, but are easy sacrifices for progress. This Durga Puja, two dolled­up trams will be on the roads in Kolkata >Page 18

DON’T MISS

in today’s edition of

FINALLY, A SLICE OF THE PIE

I

t’s time for everyone to meet Priyanka.

Priyanka is the wonderful young woman who comes to my house every other Friday afternoon to take the pictures for this column.

She’s a great photographer and genuinely interested in learning how to bake. She’s also greatly loved by our dog, Spike, who is under the impression that she comes purely to play ball with him. Our baking, clicking and ball-throwing sessions are always a good way to end the working week. >Page 6

PHOTO ESSAY

FORTY AND DONE

HOME PAGE L3

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

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

LOUNGE REVIEW | ROYAL ENFIELD

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Easy rider

Write to us at lounge@livemint.com

while they are on the field.

I thoroughly enjoyed the article and recommended the video to all my friends.

I have been a regular reader of ‘Lounge’ and look forward to Brijnath’s articles.

SHREYAS SHENDE

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

SMELL THE COFFEE

MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

Anindita Ghose’s “On a bitter trail”, 17 September, was a beautifully written essay on something that’s around us, and yet something we fail to look at. Discovering the unknown makes for good stories, but rediscovering the known makes for fabulous ones.

SHEREEN BACHANI

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT JASBIR LADI

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New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Pune

Saturday, September 17, 2011

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

ON A BITTER TRAIL

FOUR SEASONS IN YOUR CLOSET >Page 5

‘JOL’ IS ALWAYS ‘PAANI’ The PM’s Bangladesh visit was marked by a historic agreement. But people reveal how two Banglas segue into one >Page 6

I am a 14­year­old student of Delhi Public School and live in India is now the third largest exporter of coffee in the world. So why can’t Ahmedabad. I read Rohit you find a good cup to drink?

Brijnath’s article, “When athletes do the math, calculate genius”, TURN YOUR FLAWS FLASHPOINT INTO ASSETS BATMAN 24 September. As soon as I was T A done reading it, I searched for the video on YouTube; it was mesmerizing.

I am a great fan of Cristiano Ronaldo—the tests conducted on him were mind­boggling and helped unravel his secrets. Such tests should be conducted on all world­class sportsmen so as to reveal the way their minds work >Pages 10­11

THE GOOD LIFE

he most disconcerting—and oddly delightful—scene at the stunning new Oberoi Gurgaon’s lobby is the sight of a blue-uniformed man with his mosquito-killer racket crouching down amid the stylish fuchsia furniture, clap-clapping his way through the fleas and bugs that dare enter this pristine white haven that the Oberois have created among the hazy high-rises of Gurgaon. The hotel should make performance art out of this quaint character—dress him up as a man in the bowler hat... >Page 4

I

Cruiser: The Classic has RE’s most advanced engine family yet. with a French legionnaire of the early 20th century.

Before I get completely carried away with the romantic visuals of riding across the Sahara, let me quickly come back to reality and tell you what the ride felt like. I remember being pretty impressed with what a major leap the Classic was from the older RE bikes when it first arrived. The Desert Storm and Classic Chrome are every bit the same sorted and stable bikes, which offer ease of use, smooth gear shifts and reasonably quick acceleration. They both carry over the features like the self-start, and the simplistic instrument cluster.

The bikes don’t feel heavy and clumsy, despite the cruiser stance. The optional rear seat means you can take someone else along for the ride.

I have to say there was marked improvement due to the reworked suspension, especially up front.

The bike also uses twin gascharged shock absorbers, which give you a smoother ride. This is very much in line with the touringbike philosophy of being able to glide over the road. The Classic is powered by a 499cc engine with 27.2 bhp power output.

It was an enjoyable ride for the most part, though of course when it comes to sheer performance, those with the need for speed should consider sportier offerings. The Classic is every bit the leisure bike, meant to be enjoyed in the same way. It is not a very fast bike, which is why RE in fact is still far behind in image, in some of its export markets where bikers expect touring bikes to breach the 100 miles per hour barrier.

Of course for those who have the money, and the will to go faster, there are several other tourers available in India now, primarily from the Harley-Davidson stable.

But for those who want a less expensive yet fun weekend ride, and don’t want to get caught in the commuter biking market that stretches from about `40,000 to `1 lakh, or go down the sports-biking route, there is a Classic waiting to find its home in your garage.

Siddharth Patankar is Editor, Auto, NDTV. Write to lounge@livemint.com

Anindita Ghose’s story on coffee, “On a bitter trail”, 17 September, is the best example of why I read ‘Lounge’ every Saturday. A well­researched and beautifully written article that covered every aspect of the production chain. I’m a slow reader but I read it three times over.

R.K. SHUKLA

Why has DC Comics restarted its storylines? A comics nerd explains why ‘The Man of Steel’ is getting a suit of armour >Page 12

SHOBA NARAYAN

B Y S IDDHARTH V INAYAK P ATANKAR ································ t’s a niche yet growing culture among upwardly mobile and primarily urban Indians. Leisure biking is riding a bike simply for the joy of it and not to get from point A to point B—a ride on a sunny weekend, a trip to the mountains or heading to the mecca of biking in India, Ladakh. Bike enthusiasts revel in the feeling of being one with their machines and letting the wind take over.

It’s that kind of mood that I wanted to get into when I donned my Harley boots, grabbed my glares and decided to get some sun on my back with the newest babies from the Royal Enfield (RE) stable.

In fact RE, India’s original cruiser manufacturer, has been cashing in on a growing interest in leisure biking, and indeed fuelling it to quite an extent. The company has spent some time and money over the past four years reinventing itself. Its bikes are now technically better, easier to use, more attractive to look at and better finished than in the past. The image of the company as well as the aspirational quotient of its products has certainly shot up in recent months.

The company credits its Classic range for helping boost sales and the way RE is perceived.

No longer just the Bullet, the Classic also has RE’s most advanced engine family yet. The bike was introduced in India in two avatars, the 350cc and 500cc models, a couple of years ago. Now the company has launched two new variants in the Classic family. And both pack in a fair amount of attitude and oomph.

The Classic Chrome is literally just that. The regular Classic but with better overall finish and lots of gleaming chrome fittings. The bike is mechanically identical to the erstwhile Classic 500, but it certainly looks very regal now.

Before I could even think of riding it though, its new sibling caught my eye.

The Desert Storm variant is simply what today’s generation of bikers would love. Having said that, the bike holds tremendous appeal even for the baby-boomer generation, since it draws on the retro appeal of bikes from the World War era. The Desert Storm is sand-coloured, and while it still uses the underpinnings of the modern Classic from RE, it looks like it belongs

CAFFEINE KICK

THE ALGEBRA OF INFINITE CRISES

SPORTS MATH

©2011 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

Vol. 5 No. 38

CULT FICTION

R. SUKUMAR

COFFEE DYNAMICS “On a bitter trail”, 17 September, made for a fine read. I’m a professor of biodynamics and have DON’T MISS been advocating intervention at TRAVELLING FOR MUSIC the planting stage for several S years now. I commend the work that David Hogg and the Naandi Foundation are doing in Andhra Pradesh. That having been said, since this is a field not covered well even by science reporters, I was pleased to read about interventions in coffee production in the article.

A. PALLONJEE

Batman by any other name... I didn’t particularly enjoy Flashpoint, the crossover story arc DC Comics introduced in May ahead of the reboot of the entire DC Universe, beginning, as it were, from scratch. I will not get into the subject of the reboot except to say that the first issue of JLA was a disappointment, the first issue of Swamp Thing rocked, and the first issue of Superman was very, very intriguing. What I do want to get into, however, is Flashpoint itself... >Page 13

THE GREAT ASSEMBLER

Keshav Dev, proprietor, Devan’s South Indian Coffee & Tea, at his New Delhi retail outlet and roastery.

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

inger-songwriter-composer Moushumi Bhowmik’s splendid online archive of music can be accessed at www.thetravellingarchive.org, a remarkable virtual archive of the folk music of Bengal. The neat, minimal site design and simple interface reflects meticulous planning with an eye for detail, and provides access to music that has been painstakingly researched and collected by Bhowmik and recording engineer... >Page 16

No artist engages with disparate strands of contemporary India like Atul Dodiya does. Is that why instant international attention eluded him? >Pages 14­15

in today’s edition of

SATURDAY Q&A

RAYMOND N BICKSON

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY: ROJA MUTHIAH RESEARCH LIBRARY COLLECTION

...for magical, memorable moments Like the majestic monuments that rise from misty plains and sparkling sea, rich and colorful traditions fascinate and inspire those who see them in all their glory. Come to an ancient land and witness age-old customs that have stood the test of time.

Come and be inspired by the endless wonders of the archipelago.

www.indonesia.travel

L4 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

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AAKAR PATEL REPLY TO ALL

Everything you need to know about Narendra Modi

N

arendra Modi is positioning himself to be prime minister. What sort of leader will he make? We can tell by understanding him as a man. Look on this piece as his biography. Born 17 September 1950,

Modi is 61. His resume says he has a master’s in political science.

He speaks a Gujarati purged of Persian words (like Advani’s Hindi, but better crafted). His Hindi is marked by his nasal accent, but is correct. His English is poor and he works on it.

Modi is called “NaMo” by his fans (the word also means “bow down before”). His father was Damodar, however his early opponents invented the middle initial “ka”, calling him NaKaMo (“useless”). That joke isn’t funny any more.

He radiates charisma and Gujaratis love him. Gujarati women are greatly attracted to him sexually, as women are towards all men of power.

Modi is the finest manager of media of any Indian leader. During one speech in Ahmedabad, he learnt a national channel, I think it was Aaj Tak, would broadcast him live at a particular time. He switched to Hindi mid-speech and then reverted to Gujarati when the 2-minute patch was over.

He takes his image very seriously.

He is vain and terrified of being humiliated. When shoe-throwing began in the last election, he insisted on a fine mesh between the stage and his audience.

He is stylish, wearing perfectly cut half-sleeved kurtas. These are not inexpensive and are crafted for him by the Ahmedabad store JadeBlue. He has a problem with his weight because Ahmedabadi diet is rich, but neither drinks nor smokes and is vegetarian.

On his website (www.narendramodi.in), Modi uses these words to describe himself: “great dreamer”, “remarkable ability”, “realist”, “idealist”, “excellent organizational capability”, “rich insight into human psychology”, “sheer strength of character and courage”.

He is possessed with self-belief and utterly uninterested in what others say. He has over 360,000 followers on Twitter, but he follows nobody.

He is above caste.

Gujarat’s BJP vote bank is Patels + upper castes. As a ghanchi from the OBC, or Other Backward Classes, community of oil-pressers (teli) Modi has no caste base. Ghanchis get little respect in a state of merchants and my family will use the word “ghanchi” sneeringly.

He has united a very caste-minded society by first rallying it against Muslims/Pakistan/jihad/terrorism and then rousing their pride in their state.

He has put to pasture one Patel rival (Keshubhai) and made another Patel, the clownish Pravin Togadia, irrelevant. He has neutralized Patel “unhappiness”. Four of his nine cabinet-ranked ministers are Patels.

Modi has brought to heel an unruly and factional Gujarat BJP by creating unity of command.

Modi has dismantled the Congress strategy, called KHAM: Kshatriya + Harijan + Adivasi + Muslim.

After Modi, Harijans and Adivasis are almost as likely to vote BJP because of the popular appeal of Hindutva and the great social work done by the Sangh in northern Gujarat and the Panchmahals.

He has excellent sources and usually has research done on those he

is about to meet.

I first met him in 2002 when the Editors Guild sent a three-man team to assess if there was media prejudice against Muslims during the riots (of course there was).

In his Gandhinagar office Modi took me aside. He slipped his left hand into my right, interlocking our fingers, and began swinging it playfully in the manner of Indian men. “Saurabhbhai saffron, Aakarbhai red,” he said with a chuckle.

The reference was to my colleague, the editor of a Gujarati paper whom I got fired because he wrote what I thought was an appalling editorial justifying the riots.

He doesn’t share power. For years, Gujarat’s finance minister (Saurabh Patel) and home minister (Amit Shah) were denied cabinet rank.

I once met an IAS officer on a flight out of Ahmedabad and told him I had just met the CM. “You’re fortunate,” he said, “my minister hasn’t met him in six months.”

Modi does not hesitate to get rid of high-quality and dedicated civil servants if they cross him. Young and upright IPS officers like Rahul Sharma and Satish Verma who defied the Gujarati consensus to “go easy” on rioting Hindus have been fixed.

Sharma, who cleverly secured the damning cellphone records of Modi’s ministers during the riots, is being prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. Verma is facing action on charges of negligence.

Modi is probably one of India’s three most disciplined leaders in terms of control over policy and work ethic.

Those who are given time to meet him are guaranteed to be led into his office at precisely the appointed hour.

He is decisive, and persistent in his policies. The Panchamrut schemes he initiated 10 years ago are still the thrust of his vision for the state.

Economist Shankar Acharya wrote in Business Standard (14 July) that under Modi, Gujarat’s agriculture grew at an astonishing 8%.

How? In their book, High Growth Trajectory and Structural Changes in Gujarat Agriculture, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) professors Ravindra Dholakia and Samar Datta explained Gujarat’s agricultural success thus: “It is fully endogenous, systematically led by long-term vision and comprehensive strategy requiring solid commitment and dedication to the cause, political will to pursue market-oriented reforms of policies and institutions, interdepartmental and inter-ministerial coordination and cooperation, and a responsive and entrepreneurial farming community.”

Acharya wrote that, given this was not possible in our other states, “it seems closer to an ‘exogenous’ miracle”.

Meaning that it was influenced and created from the outside, by Modi.

This is true.

He makes no concession to Muslims.

For four consecutive Lok Sabha and assembly elections he has given not a single ticket to Gujarati Muslims. That is 364 assembly and 52 Lok Sabha tickets handed out. Muslims are 9% of Gujarat’s population, but Modi has

made them electorally irrelevant. He reminds them of that by not throwing a token ticket their way.

Gujaratis are used to leaders who compromise. Modi is another kind of Gujarati leader. Not inclusive and ideologically unbending. Gujaratis wrongly believe Patel was such a man and call Modi “Chhote Sardar” (I’m certain he seethes at chhote).

In his book Sardar Patel and Indian Muslims, Rafiq Zakaria wrote of how Articles 25 and 26, the right to convert Hindus and to set up Muslims-only institutions, were actually put in place

by Vallabhbhai, his gift to Muslims.

Gujaratis are horrified to be told this but Vallabhbhai Patel was no bigot.

Modi does not have a problem with minorities as such. He loves Parsis, whom he sees as patriots, and he is in turn popular with them. He was chief guest for their oldest fire temple’s 1,290th anniversary in Udvada earlier this year. One day I went to meet Modi with a friend from Surat, Aadil Bhoja. When I introduced him by first name to Modi, the chief minister, who was expecting only me, hesitated and said: “Aadil etle... (Aadil meaning...)?”

“Parsi,” said Aadil (Gujaratis always place each other by community and caste). Modi was immediately at ease, talking about how colourful Parsis were. His problem is Muslims.

During the Ayodhya movement, when Modi was in his late 30s, sociologist Ashis Nandy interviewed him. In 2002, Nandy wrote this in Seminar: “It was a long, rambling interview, but it left me in no doubt that here was a classic, clinical case of a fascist. I never use the term ‘fascist’ as a term of abuse; to me it is a diagnostic category comprising not only one’s ideological posture but also the personality traits... He had the same mix of puritanical rigidity, narrowing of emotional life, denial and fear of his own passions combined with fantasies of violence—all set within the matrix of clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits.”

That such a man became not just a leader, but a popular one led Nandy to add: “I am afraid I cannot look at the future of the country with anything but great foreboding.”

In a nation that responds to emotion, Modi is one of our great orators. I would say that along with Balasaheb Thackeray and Lalu Prasad, he is one of our three best. All three men are hugely entertaining and original. About the US president, Modi said his name reminded him of a Gujarati child in pain screaming for its mother: “O ba! O ma!”

The late Chandrakant Bakshi, one of AMIT DAVE/REUTERS

Gujarat’s most famous writers, told me over a drink that he trembled each time he heard Modi’s rallying cry: “Paanch karod Gujarati (50 million Gujaratis)”.

There is no whiff of corruption about Modi, and he isn’t interested in money in that sense.

He does not have much of a life or interests outside of his work. One night I was the last person on his list of people to meet for the day. As we wound up, I asked him what he would do now. “Go home to my mother, of course,” he said, surprised.

He has a wife, a villager, whom he discarded very early on. He does not respond to stories about her.

His elbow is sharp. Seven years or so ago, he upset the RSS because he was autocratic and dismissive of their advisers. Among them was a powerful swayamsevak named Sanjay Joshi. It appeared Joshi had Modi in trouble.

Then Joshi, or someone looking exactly like him, was secretly videotaped bedding the young daughter of a family friend. These CDs were distributed anonymously to leaders at the meeting of the BJP national executive in Mumbai in 2005.

The visuals made the front pages of Gujarati newspapers. Soon SMS jokes began where Joshi’s sorry sexual performance and orthodox underwear were skewered (“why did he even bother taking off his langot?”).

Modi has ruled unchallenged since.

His economic success and national popularity has silenced the Sangh.

Modi has great patience. He has worn out the secularists. His insistence on economic performance has trumped their insistence on secularism. His understanding of middle-class Indians and what moves us is first-rate, better than any politician on the subcontinent.

He is street-smart and clever but not intellectual. He isn’t widely read, and the books he has written are by way of hagiography. His poetry is shockingly banal. Here he has escaped criticism because he writes only in Gujarati, but sample this translation: “At sweet sixteen, melody of a cuckoo within On whom showers romance, the flowers of spring?

Appearing poor, but rich within From the heart of autumn, Rises the cooing of spring Who’s getting wedded in woods?

Each tree is lit in festive moods!”

Personally, I am not enamoured of a man who thinks up such rubbish.

However this is the sort of mush that Indians love and perhaps Modi has calibrated it. The man himself will be much harder, as we will learn.

Manmohan Singh gave Indians our best laws in half a century: Right to information, right to education, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the nuclear deal and soon the right to food.

Unlike America, India’s parliamentary system conflates legislature with executive. It is fair to see Manmohan Singh as passing the first part of his job and failing the second.

In that sense Modi will be right for a people who have always required firm governance more than they have the freedom to write their laws.

Aakar Patel is a director with Hill Road Media.

Send your feedback to replytoall@livemint.com www.livemint.com

Orator: In his speeches, Modi speaks a Gujarati purged of Persian words.

Read Aakar’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/aakar­patel

COLUMNS L5

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

SHOBA NARAYAN THE GOOD LIFE

When Kolkata turns into a museum

I

t is 1am, but the Shiv Mandir para (neighbourhood) in Kolkata is hopping. Shorts-clad young men named Deb and Dickie are working alongside about 20 artisans who are erecting what seems to be a gigantic bamboo stage set, but is in fact a homage

to Ma Durga. Tall tribal musicians made of bamboo are hoisted upright as five men anchor them to the ground.

About eight bamboo musicians stand at the entrance to the pandal, serenading a multi-hued peacock made by sticking coloured wrapping paper on circle-cut bamboo. Can you imagine staple-gunning red, yellow and blue wrapping paper cut in small circles over bamboo that has been fashioned to resemble a peacock’s tail?

That’s what these artisans did over the last three months.

The man in charge, artist Subrata Banerjee, walks around, cigarette in hand, smiling at our compliments. He’s done the Suruchi Sangha pandal too, he says, and used the theme of Kashmir. Inside the pandal, on a red-oxide floor, white alpona designs are being drawn under the watchful eye of the club’s general secretary, Partho Ghosh. The volunteers have day jobs—they run cable companies, work in the tea industry and teach in colleges. Every now and then, they sit in cane chairs beside the pandal, and have—what else—an adda. Yet, they have assembled here, night after night, for the last three months, erecting a pandal that will open on Sunday to a mass of humanity that will dwarf the carnival at Rio. “For us, Durga Puja is over on the 30th,” they tell me. “After that, we plan for next year.” Planning involves collecting money from the neighbourhood, finding sponsors, hiring the right artisan group, building the idols and accoutrements—off-site at first and then on-site, vying for the prizes that are on offer, and then pulling it all together days before Durga Puja officially opens on what Bengalis call Shasthi, which is on Sunday. There are more prizes than pandals these days, laughs my friend Ghoshi (who didn’t want to be named). Some say

`500 crore is at play in the market during Durga Puja in Kolkata.

How much did it cost to put up the pandal at Shiv Mandir? “`12 lakh,” says a man called Indranil. For the whole thing? We look up and around. It is like Arabian Nights meets Rajinikanth’s set.

Dim lighting, lovely polished floor, elegant Durga. We are sceptical. “How much will bamboo and wrapping paper cost?” Indranil insists. Ghoshi and I bet that Shiv Mandir will win a few awards.

At Mudiali, another para, about 50 people are hard at work. Ma Durga is tress-less. Her long black locks are being washed and blow-dried nearby, an artisan tells us. Another is tying a red glittering dhoti for Lord Ganesh. Ma Durga’s sari and make-up are done but her family is being ministered by a few artisans. There are giant pillars with intricate drawings all around, each one different from the other. A policewoman sits swatting flies outside. Why she’s keeping watch, I don’t know. I have never felt this safe in a neighbourhood after midnight.

The 66 Palli has created a chess set made of coir. They have wrapped the coir rope in tight circles to create the bishop, king, queen and pawns, all of whom lead up to Ma Durga, who is covered, while men paint her surroundings. It is subtle and very elegant. Last year, they won an award for the safest para. Others compete for the eco-friendliness, recyclable materials, sustainable, creative (of course), traditional, safe, and pretty much every calibration you can think of to rate human endeavour.

Badamtala is hopping. There is music. Women are chewing paan and drawing designs. Men shave wood for last-minute adjustments. In a nearby gali (lane), the entire pandal is made of what seems like paper. But it cannot be, for it rained last week. A broken fort has been erected, the entire thing made of

thermocol.

The Dhirendranath Ghosh Road pandal is covered with grass. I am not kidding you. The entire building is a deep verdant green. The entrance has an agricultural theme. There are carved-wood scenes of farmers sowing seeds. Inside, lipstick is being painted on Ma Durga by four lungi-clad, bare-torsoed men. Nandan Park is way behind. Their Durga hasn’t even arrived. And so it goes, lane after lane, till my head spins.

All the pandals have colour, intricate designs, stupendous sets and a Ma Durga. They use topical themes, says Ghoshi. In the past, paras have woven current news—the twin towers, saving tigers, the Taj Mahal hotel, cricket World Cup victories—into their pandals.

We speculate on this year’s themes.

“Bin Laden,” shouts Ghoshi as we bounce over the Howrah Bridge, simply because they insist a first-time visitor has to see it. “Bin Laden as an asur (demon). Definitely.” “Anna Hazare,” shouts his wife. “Anna Hazare praying to Ma Durga along with Kiran Bedi and (Arvind) Kejriwal.”

“What about Mamata (Banerjee)?” I ask. “Mamata celebrating her win by vanquishing the demons. If Hema Malini can become Durga, why not Mamata?” We ponder the idea of Mamata as Durga as we turn around and ride back over the bridge because the pandals are on this side. Mamata as Durga? Doubtful.

The pandals take a lot of creative licence, says Rakhi Sarkar, the force behind the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art. It is just after noon. We are in her car, driving towards the Ekdalia Evergreen Club, where a German artist, Gregor Schneider, is creating the pandal. “Kolkata has become a temporary museum,” says Sarkar as we drive through the by-lanes, all of which seem to have a pandal. “It is as if the city is filled with installation art. There are concepts, visual imagery, and the paras take a lot of creative licence in how they depict the images.”

Ekdalia Evergreen has taken a fairly large creative leap and is in the local news because of it. Schneider has created a pandal based on his grandmother’s house. There is a road going straight up, a staircase going sideways and segments of a room.

When we arrive, Schneider is out to lunch but the club’s general secretary, a Sikh, escorts us around. How does he think Kolkata will take the German’s installation, I ask him. “We are in an anxious moment because we cannot predict whether the people will like it,” he says. “We have to make them understand it. Because, you know, the German brain is a bit different from Kolkata people.”

His comment defines the question I have been mulling since I arrived in Kolkata: How does tradition evolve? The Durga Puja celebrations epitomize the best of Indian festivals. They bring the community together; allowing people to take time off to celebrate and for creativity to flourish. Or do they? I saw dozens of pandals over three days. But I saw nothing that blew my mind in the way installation art can. Most pandals were extraordinarily artistic, meticulously executed, and used materials creatively—rope to create a chess set, for example. But there was no huge differentiator in terms of content and creation. They were, at the end of the day, just pandals. Except the German’s. He was trying new things. He was creating a vertical road. This is my question: Is Ekdalia Evergreen to be lauded for taking such a brave approach to an ancient tradition? Or is it a foolish attempt at change just for the sake of it? Taali ya gaali (brickbats or bouquets)? What is the verdict?

Some of my Kolkata friends think that Ekdalia Evergreen’s pandal will “bomb” because they are taking such a radical approach. Evolved art connoisseurs such as the Sarkar sisters who run the Centre of International Modern Art in Kolkata can appreciate such an attempt. “Only in Kolkata will you not have an agitation because a German artist is doing a pandal,” says Pratiti Sarkar. It’s true.

Ekdalia Evergreen’s model could be taken so much further. In a creative city like Kolkata, the pandals can be a way for collaborations to happen. I can see fashion designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee or Anamika Khanna designing a pandal—locals both. How about if local artist Shreyasi Chatterjee, who stitches on canvas, designs a pandal? Artist Sumitro Basak says they do get involved. But not in any significant way.

The thing that I am not clear about is INDRANIL BHOUMIK/MINT

whether getting a Sabyasachi or a Schneider involved in the making of a pandal is a good thing or not.

Personally—given my taste for radical installation art, the more cutting-edge the better—I would love it. I think getting big-name artists to design the pandals would transform the artistic landscape of the city. It would be a game changer and show artisans what can be done. It wouldn’t be easy; it would take years of gaalis from the locals before a smattering of applause would begin.

It would need a visionary director of pandals, if such an office exists, to make it happen. But it would—and I know I sound impossibly arrogant here—lift a city’s creative sensibilities from the realm of tradition and connect it with what’s happening on the global art scene. And it can only be done in a city like Kolkata, with its highly honed instinct and appreciation for beauty.

But should it be done? Should artistic traditions evolve by consensus or should they be jump-started by visionaries? Should a pandal go from year to year through communal give-and-take, artistic and otherwise, or should an Anamika Khanna or Aparna Sen take over the making of it?

Actor Parambrata Chatterjee would fall into the “don’t mess with tradition” camp. I meet him at a director’s adda (more on that in another column), and like a movie star, he lights up the room as he enters. Two pegs down and we are friends. “Bengalis are the sixth most spread out race all over the world,” he tells me. Only in Bengal will a male movie star give me gyan (educate me) on human migration patterns. “This festival connects people all over the globe, somewhat like Ganesh Chaturthi in Maharasthra, but much much bigger.

More like Mardi Gras. Bengalis of every religion and community come together to make the pandals. The artisans painting the Goddess might happen to be Muslim.” Why mess with it, is what he leaves unsaid.

It is this passion that Durga Puja evokes that is the biggest obstacle to any wholesale redesign of the pandals. I might want a Paresh Maity pandal or a Rituparno Ghosh designed pandal, but for that, I have to get past how much every Bengali is invested in this. It isn’t a myth. I saw it with my own eyes.

Around 4am, Ghoshi has a crisis on his hands. We are still pandal-hopping in his Toyota Innova, but there is a problem in his para in Salt Lake. They don’t have a sponsor for the entrance gate and they want Ghoshi to sponsor it. A heated discussion ensues in Bengali. Ghoshi tells them he will sponsor the gate but he doesn’t want his fledgling company’s name on it.

The marketing and communication strategy for his firm is being done by Ogilvy in Mumbai, he pleads. We have a plan and deliverables. We can’t put our company name on Ma Durga’s pandal at first shot. The ad guys will walk out if we supersede their communication.

The pandal organizers are adamant.

We already have made a space for the sponsor at the entrance gate. We can’t leave it blank.

We are standing on the side of a road beside the high court that serves the best street food in Kolkata. Stately white buildings glow in the dark.

In the distance, the Hooghly or Ganga river (call it what you like) flows through the City of Joy. At that moment, as I watch artisans painstakingly draw Ma Durga’s eyes in black, and my friend Ghoshi argue over sponsor names in Salt Lake, there is no place on earth I’d rather be.

Shoba Narayan thinks Kolkata has the sexiest taxis in all of India. And Bengalis drink superb Darjeeling tea. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com www.livemint.com

Religion meets art: German artist Gregor Schneider’s road­themed pandal for the Ekdalia Evergreen Durga Puja radically interprets the concept of a pandal as an artwork.

Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

L6 COLUMNS

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

PIECE OF CAKE

WATCHMAN

PAMELA TIMMS

SIDIN VADUKUT

Finally, a slice of the pie

GEE, SHOCK A

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

This short­crust pie with a juicy fruit filling is the perfect initiation for pastry novices

I

t’s time for everyone to meet Priyanka.

Priyanka is the wonderful young woman who comes to my house every other Friday afternoon to take the pictures for this column. She’s a great photographer and genuinely interested in learning how to bake. She’s also greatly loved by our dog, Spike, who is under the impression that she comes purely to play ball with him.

Our baking, clicking and ball-throwing sessions are always a good way to end the working week.

However, Priyanka is unfortunately allergic to eggs, which means week after week she has to stand by and watch a procession of cupcakes, macaroons and biscuits take shape without any hope of tasting them.

It was partly watching Priyanka leave empty-handed every week that prompted me to devise a series of egg-free treats. But then for the first couple of weeks, her services were required elsewhere on Friday afternoons and she missed the flapjacks (www.livemint.com/flapjack. htm) and baklava (www.livemint.com/baklava. htm), both ideal for anyone who has to avoid eggs.

To my great relief (and Spike’s) she was back this week, and thoroughly enjoyed a great big bowl of this heart-warming rustic fruit tart with lashings of cream. I’m not sure, but I think there may have been a tear in her eye—can she please be excused other Friday afternoon duties for at least the next couple of weeks?

Note: I used the last of the Himalayan plums for this tart along with a punnet of Afghan apricots but you can use pretty much any fruit that’s in season.

The pastry is a sweetened short

Rustic charm: This eggless open pie with a rich filling is the perfect initiation for pastry novices. crust—simple, but remember to keep everything, including your hands, as cool as possible and handle the dough as little as possible. This pie is perfect for pastry novices—it doesn’t matter how ragged your edges are. This is a “rustic” tart after all—it won’t win any perfect patisserie prizes but it will taste really good.

Rustic Plum and Apricot Tart Serves 4-6 Ingredients For the sweet-crust pastry 250g refined flour (maida) 50g vanilla sugar, or plain caster sugar 125g cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces A few tablespoons of iced cold water For the filling 500-750g plums and apricots 50-75g vanilla or caster sugar—depending on how sweet the fruits are You will need a large baking sheet, lined with baking parchment Method First, prepare the sweet-crust pastry. Sieve the flour into a large bowl and stir in the sugar.

Add the butter cubes. With your thumbs and fingertips, quickly

and lightly rub the butter into the flour and sugar until the mixture in the bowl resembles breadcrumbs.

Add one or two tablespoons of the iced water and, with a knife, mix until the pastry starts to come together. One of the secrets of successful short-crust pastry (apart from quick, cool handling) is to use as little water as possible. The mixture should just be starting to bind, but with crumbs still in the bowl. Then with your hands, gently press it all into a ball—don’t knead or the pastry will be hard when baked. Wrap the ball of pastry in some cling film, then leave it in the fridge to rest for about 30 minutes.

Prepare the fruit. If you’re lucky and the fruit you’ve bought is naturally sweet and juicy, simply halve the plums and apricots, remove the stones and mix them in a bowl with a couple of spoonfuls of vanilla/caster sugar.

If your fruits are a little more “challenging”, hard or sour, halve and stone them and cook for a few minutes in 2-3 tbsp of vanilla/caster sugar and a splash of water until they’ve

softened and sweetened.

Heat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. When the pastry has rested, roll it out on a clean, dry, lightly floured work surface. Roll into a rough oval shape about 3-4mm thick. Don’t worry about making the edges even, a crooked edge will only add to the tart’s charm.

Carefully lift the pastry on to the baking sheet. Spoon the prepared fruit into the centre of the pastry, leaving a border of about 6-8cm. Take the edges of the pastry and fold them up over the fruit, pinching together any gaps to stop the juices running out. Brush the pastry with some milk and sprinkle with caster sugar.

Bake for 30-40 minutes until the fruit is tender and the pastry golden brown. Serve as a dessert hot with cream.

Pamela Timms is a Delhi-based journalist and food writer. She blogs at Eatanddust.com Write to Pamela at pieceofcake@livemint.com

www.livemint.com For a video of how to bake a rustic tart, visit www.livemint.com/plumpie.htm Read Pamela’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/pieceofcake

few days ago I was talking to a public relations professional on our way to a set of interviews at a mobile phone factory.

My job was to ask awkward questions, and his was to make sure that no lasting damage was forthcoming to his client.

My companion represents several watch companies as well and we soon began discussing the major watch fairs that take place in Switzerland each year: Baselworld and SIHH (Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie).

From the outside it looks like a dream gig. But, in fact, the events are, from the perspective of most serious attendees, violations of every tenet of the Geneva Convention. Catch one of the brand managers in private, and they’ll readily admit to a secret desire to strangle at least one watch journalist a day with their bare hands. The journalists, meanwhile, having dragged around 2.5 tonnes of press kits the whole day, would gladly return the favour.

We were discussing all this heartburn when my co-traveller admitted to being a committed collector of Casio G-Shock watches.

This might seem a little bit like admitting to preferring Twenty20 (T20) to Test cricket. But, in fact, the gentleman has merely revealed a most admirable penchant.

The G-Shock is an astonishingly good watch.

In 1981, the story goes, Casio’s chief research and development (R&D) engineer Kikuo Ibe dropped his watch and broke it. It was a watch he had been gifted by his father and Ibe was a very upset man. And he decided to make amends like a man possessed. Ibe spent the next two years creating a watch that you could drop without breaking. In 2008, Ibe travelled around the world to celebrate 25 years of the G-Shock. In Malaysia he spoke to The Star newspaper. He told them how he tested prototypes by dropping them from windows in his office building. Finally he made one that stayed in one piece. But then came another problem. And one that watchmakers have spent, literally, centuries trying to solve.

One of the greatest threats to a mechanical watch’s accuracy is the force of gravity. Watches are powered by springs, and springs can behave erratically depending on how they are oriented to a gravitational field. Traditional watchmakers solved this problem by inventing movements, such as tourbillons, that reduced the impact of gravity. Some brands have taken this one step further. Zenith’s Christophe Colomb limited-edition piece suspends the tourbillon in a three-dimensional bubble.

The entire mechanism is allowed to move freely within this bubble. Thereby always keeping the mechanism oriented correctly, irrespective of how you move your wrist.

Ibe’s enemy was the same, but gravity affected him differently. His case managed to withstand the fall from his office window, but the jolt rattled the Resilient: electronics inside his watch. Ibe told The Star that The G­Shock the solution came to him when he saw a child play watch. with a ball. He proceeded to design a new system that suspended the digital module inside the case, isolating it from exterior shocks. The G-Shock, now protected from gravitational shock, was born. It is remarkable how that simple concept has now produced an entire range of products complete with limited editions, international fan following and very serious collectors. Go to www.g-peopleland.com to see one Dutch collector’s massive accumulation of models.

Around two years ago, I bought my own G-Shock watch from a store in New Delhi (a DW-6600, the same piece that appears on the G-Shock Wikipedia page). Since then it has become my primary timekeeping device, alarm and timer. God knows I’ve subject it to the most brutal mishandling: drops, hot coffee showers, brutal rubbings against stone walls... and yet it barely has a scratch.

Kikuo Ibe will be proud to hear how the salesman in Delhi impressed me. He took a piece and threw it hard against the shopping mall floor. And then he picked it up. It worked perfectly. “Only G-Shock sir... Only G-Shock.”

Since then I’ve done that many times myself. I find it tremendously therapeutic.

Write to Sidin at watchman@livemint.com

THINKSTOCK

MY DAUGHTERS’ MUM

NATASHA BADHWAR

A LETTER TO A FRIEND ON THE THRESHOLD

W

e became parents for the first time in Port Blair.

Within a couple of weeks, we were on a beach in Havelock Island. In the photograph from there, I am holding our baby wrapped in my light blue bandhini dupatta. Her father’s shirt on my shoulders, over my sarong. Post-partum afterglow.

My wet hair flying.

Romantic, no?

The photo I do not have is the father’s face. But I remember the insane conversation we had.

“In another 10 years or so, I will leave all this and go to the mountains,” he says. Looking gravely at the baby sleeping on a towel over the white sand.

Under the shade of a large umbrella.

“Why? What?” I ask.

“I can’t deal with all this,” he says, looking around. There are some Indian families enjoying their annual LTA, Israeli tourists, other couples.

“What can’t you deal with?”

I ask.

“I know how guys look at girls on a beach. I can never come to a beach with my daughter,” he says. “I don’t want to deal with this, man. I’ll run away.”

I looked around. Fathers and teenage children bobbing in the dazzling purple-blue water of the Andaman Sea. The soundtrack of waves crashing and breeze in

the palm trees. Picture-perfect.

And the new father next to me, miserable. Temporarily overwhelmed by fear and confusion and the frightening responsibility of keeping his baby safe. For life.

This is a letter to you, my friend. You, super-cool person on the verge of becoming a parent.

Without love, we are lost.

Your child will change your life. The unconditional acceptance s/he will offer will shock your system and move things inside you that you didn’t know existed. Love and despair, exhilaration and exhaustion will hold your hands as if they are twins, demanding equal attention. You will know trust, you will stare at the serenity of your baby’s sleep and absorb it.

Ultimately that will not be enough. You will find that lost-ness will come creeping back into your life. You will become sad and distracted, addictive and sleepless like you have been many times before.

Shoulder on: It’s a demanding job.

Becoming a parent eventually demands squaring up to one’s growing-up years. Your childhood will revisit you, and not just as a useful lullaby. You will become your father. And your mother. Together. I know I did. It was scary at first. But it was also a fabulous laugh as I began to identify and unravel the story. Step by step.

Now, for the good news.

Your children will stand up to you. Your authoritarian voice will lose its usefulness. You will pretend to be shocked at the new generation, but actually you will relish this. Your children will protect you. They will tell you to get off the computer and put your phone away when you are at the dining table. They will call you when you are stuck in traffic and make you talk to them in your funny jelly voice.

Just 5 minutes ago, little Naseem climbed into her father’s lap and put her hands on his mouth. “Stop talking,” she said. “Just drink your tea.”

He had been ranting in a loop.

He stopped.

And those whoops and dance in your honour, as baby runs out to greet you when you return home, that is your everyday red carpet welcome.

You will realize new talents.

The excellent father in our home is also an expert baby-burper.

Every time we visit friends who have made a new baby, I can’t

stop myself from showing him off. “Burp the baby, no?” I will say. He will smile and make the baby burp. The new baby will recognize an old hand and surrender on his shoulder.

On the way back home sometimes he will tell me something I know already. “You know, in my home, fathers hardly ever touched their children. Except my uncle, who whacked his kids once in a while.”

Because, you see, identity is really like a porcelain piggy bank. One day you’ve got to shatter it to start something new.

Leave behind the broken pieces.

Take the money and run. Free.

Natasha Badhwar is a film-maker, media trainer and mother of three.

Write to Natasha at mydaughtersmum@livemint.com www.livemint.com To read Natasha’s previous columns, visit www.livemint.com/natasha­badhwar

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011

L7

Style

LOUNGE t The mother­in­law blouse

t A wire­cut blouse tA halter­neck blouse

BLOUSES

That butterfly effect PHOTOGRAPHS

BY

PRIYANKA PARASHAR/MINT

Your search ends here. Every perfect blouse on Katrina Kaif, and many more varieties, are in this 43­year­old tailoring shop

B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

···························· t is around this time of the year—just before Dussehra, Diwali and the looming wedding season—that the operations of a cramped 16ft-long room in a bylane of Greater Kailash-I’s M-block market in New Delhi require additional store hands.

Close to 120 sari blouses are ordered every day at “the designer blouse shop” Eve’s. Most are delivered within 10 days. This is the blouse tailoring shop of a woman’s dreams.

Four years ago, the space was declared too small for the store’s growing clientele. Eve’s now has an additional “showroom” right in the heart of M-block market, close to a KFC outlet, and above two diamond stores. Every blouse you ever saw on actor Katrina Kaif is here on a mannequin.

For those who still think of a blouse as a utilitarian garment fashioned from the fabric torn off a sari, there are placards dispensing education on wire-cut, butterfly-style, and princes-cut blouses.

“If you have a small bust and are not Confident of Carrying off a Sari,” says one, “the best option for you is a Padded Blouse.” The designs either promise to “make him go ga ga” or “make him start at you” (sic). At the showroom, there is a blouse magically held up by one bejewelled ring, one that’s made entirely of faux pearls and one that’s constructed from so many strips of coloured brocade that you could lose track counting. The most elaborate one on display is a blouse made with crystals on champagne-coloured chiffon and tulle. It costs `10,000. A sign says credit cards are welcome.

In New Delhi, far from the rich weaving traditions of the west, south and east India, the sari is not an ethnic idiom worn customarily to family functions and religious occasions. Here in north India, the sari is a fashion statement, and the blouse, its subject.

Vineet Kumar, whom everyone simply calls Master, knows this only too well, and this is what his business thrives on. His father, Santosh, started Eve’s in 1968. He had moved from Dehradun to Delhi and assisted a tailor in Karol Bagh for a few years. Blouse tailoring was a new and attractive market. Many Punjabi women were just getting out of their salwars and learning how to drape a sari. As late as the 1980s, Eve’s was the only blouse tailoring shop on that block. Now, there are

I

Ring master: Vineet Kumar at the Eve’s showroom in Delhi.

In the background, a customer surveys the latest designs. close to 10—all bunched around Eve’s. They have shimmery blouses in de rigueur colours of silver, pale gold and red displayed on hangers. The homogeneity of the shops is baffling. They all look like Eve’s. They even advertise the same starting prices: `600 for a basic blouse.

Vineet, 34, tells us he was coerced into joining the business when he was 17 under the guise of learning accounts. “I really wanted to do other things,” he says. After his father died, he took over as the master or head tailor, and he is now dressed for the part, with a pair of glasses perched on his nose and a measuring tape around his neck. He learnt how to measure a woman flatteringly and create individualistic designs by observing his father at work.

Soon, he was hooked. “It’s very creative,” he says.

“And rewarding. You see, these women, they trust me with their life’s most important occasions.”

Vineet hit the socio-sartorial pulse of the city with one ingenious flourish: the motherin-law blouse. This is a risque, backless blouse that comes with add-on Velcro strips. You put on the strips when your mother-in-law is around and metamorphose into the good daughter-in-law.

An early triumph for Eve’s was the discovery of the padded blouse, which continues to be a best-seller. Around 10 years ago, Vineet recalls, he came across padded swimsuits on the streets

Storm in a D­cup: (from top) Zircon­string blouse, `6,500; the most expensive at Eve’s is a crystal­studded chiffon and tulle blouse, `10,000; and the ‘Katrina’, `4,500. of Janpath. He bought a couple, removed the foam cups used to accentuate a woman’s breasts, and stitched them into a blouse. A happy customer recommended these to her friends, and Vineet had more orders. He, however, didn’t know where to buy the

cups. “I started buying the swimsuits, taking out the cups and throwing the rest out,” says Vineet, laughing. “These were cheap swimsuits from Bangkok, so I was still making a profit.”

Because of the continuing popularity of its padded blouses, Eve’s

now has a dedicated supplier of foam cups. They come from the Govindpuri area, not too far from Greater Kailash—both hard and soft, in various shapes and thicknesses. For the woman who wants more, Eve’s also offers a double padding option.

While we’re there, Vineet is battling with a teenage customer who wants her blouse a little tighter than his measuring tape goes. Vineet quietly refuses, and the girl and her mother launch into an argument. “Sexy aur vulgar ke beech 4mm ka difference hai (There’s a difference of just 4mm between sexy and vulgar),” he tells me later.

Vineet says that while he is inspired by the fabric a customer brings—whether she is from Daryaganj, Mumbai or Toronto—he creates designs based on what would work for her. Eve’s has customers ranging from teenage girls to women in their 60s. And some ask for outlandish things. “Look, I cannot change a woman’s figure.

But I try and reach a middle ground. I like the customer to think they got what they wanted.”

Over the years, Vineet has appropriated Western dress and lingerie cuts for his designs. The balconette or demi bra, for instance, is coquettishly renamed the butterfly blouse—it comes with sheer, slightly flared sleeves.

But despite the Ekta Kapoor soap opera vibe of the place, there prevails a sense of humour. We see a mother-in-law blouse made in the Indian cricket team’s jersey colour. It says “I love Sehwag”. It allows you to hide your love for Virender Sehwag if the need

should arise.

Vineet is available at the showroom five days a week, from 3pm.

Two junior tailors take orders in tandem. To keep working hours in check, Eve’s encourages advance appointments and caps orders at five blouses per customer.

Still, says Vineet, “In season, I can be here till 1am taking orders.”

“1am?”

“Yes, 1am.”

On Saturdays, out of deference for where they started off, Vineet sits at the small shop in the bylane. “Old customers like to come there,” he says. “Some of them can’t climb the stairs to the two-storeyed one.”

What every woman wants, no matter where she comes from or how old she is, is “kuch alag (something different)”, says Vineet. “That’s the first thing they say when they come. That’s why it’s difficult to tell you what’s popular. If you want something popular, you don’t come to Eve’s.”

The most creative Vineet ever got was with a blouse he designed for his wife for their wedding reception. It was a seethrough blouse with around 300 diamante and velvet flowers in the right places.

If a white cotton blouse is all you need, though, Vineet will make you the best white cotton blouse you ever wore (but he will look at you with some disappointment).

While he might inform you that zircon-studded rings are hot property as embellishments this season, he’d be more than happy to design a blouse around that birthmark on your back you don’t like. At Eve’s, it’s all about you.

What woman could refuse?

L8

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011

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Finding the perfect new phone BLACKBERRY TORCH 9810

The specifications may be similar but different phones can be for different users. We help you pick the right one

For the enterprise user, anyone who’s serious about productivity; price, `29,990 The new BlackBerry Torch is a significant update over the previous model, but everything that happens takes place below the surface. As a result, the phone has a bulky profile, a solid body, and the under-the-hood changes mean that the phone is now good for more than just creating a PowerPoint deck while you’re supposedly on holiday.

All new BB7 devices use a “Liquid Graphics” touch-screen technology, and unlike the earlier BlackBerry touch screens, the new screens are responsive, matching the best of Android or iOS. The slider is a solid one, and the keyboard comes out with a satisfying click. The OS update also brings terrific battery life improvements.

A 1.2 GHz CPU with 768 MB RAM help power the improved display and touch screen, a sign that Research In Motion (RIM) is taking the competition seriously.

RIM has also completely upgraded the built-in BlackBerry browser, and what was once the fatal flaw of the device—Web browsing—is now handled smoothly, a lot of lessons having been learnt from the experience with the PlayBook.

On the other hand, the camera is fairly typical of BlackBerry, and it’s not going to keep anyone happy for long. The other real issue with the device is that cosmetically, OS7 looks and feels a lot like OS6, despite the huge overhaul.

The “home” screen is not a proper home screen the way it is on an Android device or the iPhone—you can’t install widgets, or create folders easily.

Smartphones have moved outside the business set and the new Blackberry is trying hard to make something for everyone. The new phone does handle media and browsing well, but it’s not enough.

For BlackBerry loyalists who want to work on the go, this is an excellent phone, but it doesn’t offer any of the style or the app experience that Android and iOS devices deliver. The solid keyboard and heavy build scream business, and that’s what the phone is good for.

BY G O P A L S A T H E gopal.s@livemint.com

·························································· hree powerful new phones launched recently by HTC, Sony and RIM (BlackBerry) are all powered by Qualcomm chips. The similarities end there. Each device is unique and will appeal to very different people—which one is right for you?

T

SONY ERICSSON XPERIA RAY

a high-quality screen, based on Sony’s Bravia LCD technology, and the small screen looks incredibly sharp.

Clearly, the camera is the strongest point of the phone and it works really well for the most part, but there are some quibbles—there is little fine control with the digital zoom, making small adjustments difficult, and the camera really struggles in low-light conditions. The flash can also be set to run continuously, as a torch for steady lighting, but while this makes a difference, it’s often not enough.

The ray has a 1GHz processor that handles all apps and widgets with ease, but the only caveat is the battery life—the claimed 7 hours never came through, and charging the phone in the morning and then again in the evening was necessary.

The phone is affordable, small and unobtrusive, so if the battery life isn’t a big issue, then it’s a great phone for people in love with Twitter and Facebook.

For the compulsive cameraman and social sharer; price, `18,995 The Sony Xperia ray is tiny—it’s the first thing you’ll notice. It has a 3.3-inch screen with a widescreen ratio, making it almost too small to hold for men. The phone also weighs only 100g, yet packs in an 8.1 megapixel camera, with 16x digital zoom, scene detection for autofocus and smile recognition.

A built-in app called Xperia Timescape displays feeds from Twitter and Facebook, can share pictures and make updates on both, making the ray ideal for social network fanatics, who love to take pictures.

With a one-touch interface that goes from taking a picture to sharing it online, the ray was clearly built with sharing in mind, but has enough features to be a good entry point to highend smartphones.

Though the screen is really too small to watch movies on, the ray does have

HTC EVO 3D For the early adopter, who needs some­ thing unique even if it’s not fully polished; price, `35,990 HTC phones have a strong pedigree and the EVO 3D has the typical HTC design and specifications—there is an enormous qHD 4.3-inch screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio beaten only by the Samsung Super AMOLED display, and most users won’t be able to tell the difference.

It’s also a powerful phone, and can easily handle all the latest Android applications.

What really sets the EVO 3D apart, though, is the 3D camera, and a glasses-free 3D display. The camera dominates the look of the phone—those twin lenses are attention grabbers.

Users must keep their head directly

in line with the phone, a whole arm’s length away, to get the 3D effect—not a natural pose at all. While the display itself works well in 3D, maintaining the correct angle and distance to watch a movie is not so easy.

The 3D still and video camera works excellently, and taking nice 3D pictures is a breeze, but composing good shots has the same problem of focus. Unfortunately, the camera is not so good in 2D mode, and can’t match up to the quality of other phones that cost about the same.

The price of the phone is a reflection of the 3D capabilities, other similar phones from HTC being almost `10,000 cheaper.

So this phone is only right for the early adopter, who needs a 3D camera and player before anyone else in the neighbourhood.

‘Gears of War’ grows up This latest game lives up to the hype created by Microsoft

B Y G OPAL S ATHE gopal.s@livemint.com

···························· icrosoft exclusive Gears of War saw the launch of the third game of the series on 20 September. The series is known for excellent gameplay and powerful visual design, and Gears of War 3 manages to live up to the expectations.

Gears is a cover-based shooting game with excellent level design, suiting varied play styles.

Epic Games has crafted a comprehensive offering—there’s a fun campaign, and Horde mode, in which players have to work as a team to defend a base against enemies, makes a return with some fine tuning. But just as the last game introduced us to Horde (which was picked up by most games that came later, including Call of Duty and Halo), this time Gears of War 3 gives us Beast mode.

It’s a chance to play as one of the many enemy monsters; bent

M

on destroying a small force of heavily armed humans. Against the shotgun-toting survivors, you’re going to fight using claws and brute force, making it unlike any shooter so far. Beast mode is a lot of fun, particularly once you kill a few humans, because you earn money to unlock newer, more powerful monsters, and the humans get tougher over time too.

Near the end, the heroes make appearances as you unlock enemies like the nigh invulnerable Berserker.

Horde mode has seen small updates too, with lessons taken from other games. Now you can buy decoys and fortifications, or weapons, instead of relying only on the resources already present in a map. This gives the players flexibility to play according to their own styles.

As for the campaign, well, it’s

Something for everyone: The new smartphone market is varied, and new phones are being made to appeal to new audiences.

bigger, and arguably better than before in terms of gameplay.

There’s a lot more colour than the traditional Gears of War brown uniforms in brown arenas under a brown sky. But the remarkable change is in the writing. A game like Gears of War doesn’t really need good writing—it’s enjoyable because of the gameplay. The dialogues in the previous games felt like they were written by a 10-year-old who was high on paint thinner, so the

decision to get noted science fiction writer Karen Traviss on board was a great one.

The characters talk in more believable tones, and the character, Augustus Cole, actually gets to have some of the best lines. The enemies are also fleshed out now, and for the first

Delta Squad: Players ready for battle.

time you learn more about the wars that have defined the history of the planet, and what you’re fighting for.

In terms of gameplay, there have also been tweaks to the campaign, such as the inclusion of Mutators, which change the way the game functions. This can range from simple difficulty modifiers, like the no ammo mutator, all the way to the ludicrous headless chicken mutator that sends wounded enemies off on blind rampages against their cohorts.

All in all, Gears of War 3 comes off as a hugely polished shooter, and has enough content to keep people playing for quite some time. The last two Gears of War games had imperfect multiplayer experiences, with bad matchmaking, dropped matches and other small technical issues. A long beta test of just the multiplayer answered that complaint handily, and Epic manages to bring enough new content to keep the most demanding fans happy.

Gears of War 3 costs `2,499 and is available for Xbox 360 only.

www.livemint.com

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011

L9

Business Lounge

LOUNGE SANJAY PUROHIT

Man with the red tab The managing director of Levi Strauss India on challenges in retail and working for the world’s best­ known jeans brand

B Y M ADHURIMA N ANDY madhurima.n@livemint.com

···························· anjay Purohit has just returned from a trip to the US. He and his wife Apurva had gone there to “drop” their 18-year-old son Siddharth at Boston’s Northeastern University.

“What advice do you give an 18-year-old who doesn’t want to listen to mom and dad, and is miles away?” reflects Purohit. “I told my son that there is no substitute for hard work; if he is considerate to people, he will be successful; and if he reflects, more often than not, he will figure things out,” he says, as we sit down to chat in his sunny, glasswalled cabin at the Levi Strauss and Co. India headquarters on Bangalore’s Commissariat Road.

Standing tall, with a deep voice and a smile that seldom goes away, Purohit adds, “We are empty nesters early on in life.”

In a deep blue Denizen shirt and non-denim Levi’s trousers, the 46-year-old managing director is probably the brand’s best endorsement. He says he has switched to Levi Strauss products in the last one year, since he came on board. His shoes, though, are mostly from Cole Haan and Clarks.

The fourth-floor office is unassuming, bearing no resemblance to the striking red stores that sell the world’s most iconic jeans brand. Post-lunch, the office is buzzing with people streaming in and out of the many small rooms that lace a curved corridor.

Purohit, who has completed 14 months in the company after an 11-year stint at Cadbury India Ltd in Mumbai, says the San Francisco parent office is cool—and he would prefer something like it in India. “We’ll transform this office too,” he says.

But his more serious role in a difficult retail environment is twofold: to grow the company exponentially and profitably, and to build the organization and processes, both in terms of talent and capability. “The biggest requirement of a new company head is continuing growth. And while you have to deliver in the

S

immediate quarter, you also need to look at long-term growth,” he says.

While China is a bigger market than India in the Asia-Pacific region, Purohit says strong brand equity, and what it means to customers, makes India unique in the Levi Strauss world. “Therefore, the opportunity is outstanding.”

In its 16th year in India, the denim maker now has 380 Levi’s stores and 250 Denizen stores in the country—all franchised. Last year, around the time Purohit came on board, Signature, the cheaper brand from Levi Strauss, was converted into Denizen. Stores across the country underwent a makeover, and Bollywood actor Imran Khan was signed on as the new face of Denizen. The transition stemmed from the fact that Signature was a fragmented brand without a definite audience, while Denizen invites 16- to 24-yearolds to try it. It has entry-level pricing of `1,099-1,799 for a pair of jeans, while Levi’s jeans cost between `1,999 and `6,000.

“The broad vision is to have a twobrand portfolio, with Levi’s as the superpremium and premium brand and Denizen in the value segment,” Purohit says.

The Denizen transition, in hindsight, was an outstanding thing to do in an emerging market, he says—there are “three Indias in India”, the super-premium, premium and value or mass segments, and one needs to cater to all of them.

I ask him about the other transition in his life—from chocolates to clothes.

Newspaper reports in 2010 cited his not being given a satisfying role in Cadbury after it was acquired by Kraft Foods Inc. as the reason for him leaving. Purohit says he loves food, and remembers his years there as “an emotional journey” and “the experience you gather from being in a stodgy company, and It’s in the jeans: Purohit has just bought himself an Audi Q5 and loves Bangalore for being able to play golf all year.

then to be part of a company which revived it”. He quit Cadbury as executive director, India marketing, Asia chocolate category.

He says matter-offactly that Levi Strauss offered him a chance to be part of an emotionally relevant brand like Cadbury and an opportunity to head a business.

Purohit has more than 23 years’ experience of managing businesses and brands in different consumer product industries, from apparel to food and confectionery, oil and gas, paints and luggage. He’s had stints with Mobil Oil, Asian Paints, Aristocrat Luggage and Goodlass Nerolac Paints in marketing, business development, strategy and sales. But like food, he says, “apparel makes you so much invested, you like to come to work”.

His 11 years at Cadbury probably tested the marketing and finance skills he picked up at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, more than the mechanical engineering lessons he learnt at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal.

Analysts who track the retail sector say Purohit was a top performer at Cadbury—a key leadership member involved in damage control when the worms-inchocolate crisis, easily one of the worst in Cadbury’s history, broke out in 2003 in India—and was brought in to increase Levi’s market share in India.

As the retail sector underwent a crisis during the 2008-09 economic downturn, apparel brands realigned strategies and closed non-performing stores. Levi Strauss phased out its semi-formal wear brand Dockers in 2009 in India owing to unsatisfying sales.

Apparel retailers faced another challenge when cotton prices soared to `62,000 a candy (a candy is 365kg), pushing up garment prices by 20-25% between 2010-11. A candy cost about `40,000 as of September. Sales have been hit, and retailers are now depending on big discounts to offload inventory—they are also relying on innovation.

Last year, Levi Strauss introduced custom-fit jeans for women, to fit the curve of their bodies.

Nearly 60,000 body types were researched across the world before

zeroing in on four—slight, demi, bold and supreme. The supreme variety is not available in India.

“This was great because so many women, including my wife, had earlier complained that the jeans don’t fit them,” says Purohit. Conversion rates, or a calculation of actual sales in stores, have shot up to 90-95%, he says.

During the early months of his current job, Purohit would travel a lot, visiting stores across cities.

Now, he travels for about a week to 10 days in a month. On other days, though, he works for about 10 hours a day and likes taking work home. Even on weekends, when he works for a few hours, he says he never stops thinking about work. “I chew the cod and like to reflect on a few things that happen during the day. Solutions come out of reflections.”

He confesses to checking his email once a day. He glances through what is important, and believes the need to respond to emails stems from “the inability to differentiate between urgent and important”.

Ask him if he has a retirement plan, and he speaks of the Clint Eastwood-directed film Unforgiven. Though successful, he says, Eastwood was a one-dimensional actor till he hit the age of 60 and started directing.

“He is an inspiration. If I am productive till I die, I would love to do different things like that, those that would make a difference,” he says.

IN PARENTHESIS Sanjay Purohit likes taking breaks and doing one “big” holiday and another “small” one every year with family. The idea of a holiday is to spend a week in a big city and then one in a quaint, non­touristy destination, he says. Last year, he spent a week in Sydney and the Gold Coast in June, and the rest of the days at Port Douglas in Australia. Remembering his trip to Norway in June 2009, he says: “We stayed at this small village called Urke, on a beautiful fjord called Hjørundfjord, around 500km north­west of Oslo.

It had only 50 people.” When on holiday, the Purohits like renting a self­catering apartment, so they carry ingredients to cook wherever they go.

He likes a good steak and loves cooking Thai food. But he has a complaint—not many places in Bangalore sell all the ingredients.

JAYACHANDRAN/MINT

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TAMIL CINEMA

Silk

route

Ekta Kapoor’s forthcoming film ‘The Dirty Picture’ revisits a sequins­and­pelvic­thrust era of Tamil cinema which was propelled by talent, scheming, hypocrisy and the intense loneliness of women like Silk Smitha B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· ilk Smitha says ‘let’s go to the temple’, and she manages to even make that sound sexy.” Eminent Tamil film historian S. Theodore Baskaran, author of the out-of-print last word on Tamil cinema The Eye of the Serpent (East West Books, Chennai), now a recluse in his Bangalore home, recalls how Tamil director Baalu Mahendra once described the appeal of the woman known to millions as “thunder thighs”.

“Films that had lain in cans for years were sold by the simple addition of a Silk Smitha song,” says Randor Guy, Tamil crime writer, screen writer, author of A History of Tamil Cinema (1991, published by the government of Tamil Nadu) and legal historian for The Hindu, of the woman with whom he shared a warm work friendship in the years from her unexpected fame until her suicide in 1996.

Leading actors such as Chiranjeevi, Kamal Hassan, even Dharmendra and Mohanlal, sought her dates. Yet, says Baskaran, though well paid, she could not command her price or call the shots. For Baradwaj Rangan, film critic for The Hindu, who remembers her as the “more petite of the vamps”, the most evocative image of Silk Smitha comes from an interview she gave to a local gossip magazine: “When heroines pack up they get to keep their dresses, I have to return mine,” she said. The inherent caste system of a film industry Silk Smitha spun money for is palpable even today. When this reporter asked a leading feminist Tamil actor-producer to comment on the pathetic working conditions of women in Silk Smitha’s world, she replied, “Your story is not relevant to me or people like me.” Then, vamps like Silk Smitha were relegated to chasms across from “people like me”, and that’s where their mem-

S

ories survive even today. Actor Revathi refused to comment via phone or email, stating that the exploitation and suicides of female actors was a subject of great sensitivity to Tamil cinema and required a fuller exploration of the subject in person.

The fictionalized biopic by Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Telefilms, The Dirty Picture, based nebulously on Silk Smitha’s life, is set to release on her birth anniversary on 2 December. What pulled Rajat Arora, its scriptwriter, to the story—far removed from his north Indian milieu in which most of Bollywood functions today? “It is a biopic in as much as when you write about doctors, you would want to include a famous surgery that actually happened as a hub around which fictionalized events turn,” says Arora, who took his cues from producer Ekta Kapoor, who, he says, initially looked at it as a smaller film on the soft-pornography phenomenon of the 1980s.

Arora confesses he has not really watched Silk Smitha’s films. “If you look at Marilyn Monroe, everyone remembers that iconic shot of her dress flying above a New York vent. And yet she committed suicide. What happened between those two periods? That is where the story lies.” The question is, will the film be able to tear away from the caricature of her life or will it further propagate its myth?

The context of Silk Smitha is fraught with obvious pain. Like musical genius Ilayaraja, whose songs Silk Smitha gyrated to, now in quiet, philosophical retirement, Mahendra, the Sri Lankaborn Tamil film director who elevated Silk Smitha beyond cabaret numbers in his films, is himself reluctant, even if only in memory, to return to an era of films he once helped define. In a religious ashram on the outskirts of Chennai, Mahendra now teaches schoolchildren from 8am-9pm on weekdays. “I am now very far from everything you are asking me,” he says.

Mahendra’s first film, made in Kannada—Kokila (1976)—won him a National Award and was the precursor to a stellar career that pursued the social cause through films such as Azhiyatha Kolangal (1979), Veedu (1988) and Sandhyaragam (1991). A brilliant cinematographer-turnedfeminist director, he broke the stereotype by establishing women as his protagonists in a still maledominated industry. He was one

of the few directors who briefly wrested back control from singleactor-led films. He modelled himself on Satyajit Ray and Vittorio De Sica.

He has been misquoted many times, he says. Mahendra flourished in the 1980s, when politics was synonymous with cinema in Tamil Nadu—many actors and directors of that era are now prominent political players. “Why just Silk Smitha? Disco Shanthi, Jayamalathi, Bindu, Sasikala— there were many women who broke the mould, who were bold and daring, who brought sensuality to the screen,” Mahendra points out. Yet it was only in the 1980s that these women’s potential was maximised by discerning directors who saw them as the repositories of society’s dark side.

“It was a short period of such directors and it ended all too quickly,” says Baskaran of the time when feminist thought, open sensuality and the eroticism of women were tools in an able director’s hands, freeing films from a hero who called all shots.

The underlying sorrow of the 1980s ran deeper than a single actor who killed herself, or a talented director who withdrew.

Just as women in the Tamil film industry were discovering the freedom to express themselves sensually, nine female actors committed suicide (see The suicide sisterhood). They weren’t just vamps: Shoba, who won the National Award for Pasi in 1979 and was widely rumoured to be a much-married Mahendra’s lover, killed herself the following year after a lovers’ spat. She was 17. Mahendra subsequently wrote a series of sentimental musings in the Tamil magazine Kumudam titled Shobavum Naanum (Shoba and me) and more recently claimed Shoba as his wife on Anu Hassan’s Tamil TV show Koffee with Anu. Their story inspired the Malayalam National Award-winning film Lekhayude Maranam: Oru Flashback (1983), and the tragedy inspired Mahendra’s own National Award-winning film Moonrampirai (1982) starring Silk Smitha (the film was remade in Hindi as Sadma, 1983). That parenthesis, which ended with Silk Smitha herself committing suicide in 1996, was the context of such an industry.

Cho Ramaswamy, former actor, editor of the Tamil news magazine Tughlak and political and social commentator, does not believe the Tamil industry in the

Oozing oomph: Silk Smitha often designed her own costumes and Malayalam directors making family­ oriented films frequently asked her to tone down their raciness; (top) a poster of Reshma ki Jawani, still a cult Internet download, was a remake of the Malayalam hit Layanam (1989). Silk Smitha’s co­star in the film, Nandu, also later committed suicide.

1980s was exploitative of women.

“Did so many women commit suicide? It was mostly caused by foolish personal entanglements.

The 1980s were a time when I was leaving the industry, but I personally know many women in it, and women felt safe. Of course there was an ‘upper class’ and a ‘lower class’and even a ‘scheduled tribe’, if you will, of female actors—but wasn’t that the same for men?

And for any industry? In any case, the films always depended on heroes, not heroines, for hits.”

Yet, even towards the end of her career, Silk Smitha just needed to appear in a blouse and a lungi in Ezha mala poonchola with Mohanlal in Spadikam (1995), and teenage boys became men. Producers circulated songbooks, small towns staged live cabarets which routinely involved stripteases, and the cult following catapulted ordinary movies to blockbuster status.

What became of them, the stars of this phenomenon, was someone else’s problem.

Silk Smitha, sometimes called Silk Sumitha, was born Vijayalakshmi in the town of Eluru in Andhra Pradesh in 1960. Guy met Silk Smitha on film sets in the course of his writings, and developed a warm rapport with the otherwise reserved actor because they shared a mother tongue, Telugu. “‘Yemmendi, yemmendi’, she would say when she saw me,” he recalls (yemmendi is a Telugu term of respect commonly used to hail a senior). “She was a voluptuous, extremely good-looking woman. This led her to being ‘exploited’ by men (for) most of her youth. To solve this, her family married her off at a very young age. But this just made it worse.

Ill-treated in her marriage, Vijayalakshmi ran away to Chennai and lived with an aunt while she tried to make a new start.”

In Chennai, she began as a touch-up artiste for a B-grade actor, but her beauty quickly got her the kind of character roles that would allow her acting talent (of which she had plenty) to shine. She made her debut with a character role in the Malayalam film Inaye Thedi (1979). But her extreme sexiness intervened, demanding cabaret dances and vamp roles that became monetarily lucrative for the film industry.

In the late 1980s, Guy wrote a TV crime series, Senior Junior, which aired a single episode starring Silk Smitha in a role where she is mysteriously found dead in a bathtub. Guy knew her well from the height of her fame to this time of descent, and describes her

as a warm, fantastic person, a talented actor, shrewdly aware of the lengths her sex appeal could take her, very reserved, and so sexy that it overwhelmed everything else about her.

Guy claims to have met Silk Smitha’s husband a few times.

“She married again after she came to Chennai. He was a nice man. She kept him quiet and he was content to let her take the limelight.” (Lounge could not independently verify that Silk Smitha was married.)

Silk Smitha, Guy says, was no fool. She carefully designed her costumes. She spun her image.

She worked with greats. She did the critically acclaimed role of a demure sister in Bharatiraaja’s Alaigal Oyvathillai, performing brilliantly. “But I remember people told her: ‘Why are you wasting time with this? Take a sexy role and make some money.’” Once the name “Silk” stuck after her character in Vinu Chakravarty’s Vandi Chakram became a huge hit, even if she tried she could not take on other roles,” Guy recalls.

As The Dirty Picture gets set for launch, it is important to note that it was in the films of men like Mahendra and National Awardwinning film director K. Balachander, in Bharatiraaja’s Alaigal Oyvathillai and in the musical genius of Ilayaraja, that Silk Smitha came to life. Not semipornographic gyrations in a seedy dance-bar setting in front of lascivious men—the image the world remembers her by. “You have to understand that the myth of the vamp was an image, spun for the benefit of making a film, and an industry, based on her, work,” points out Rangan. The public perception of Silk Smitha was a careful social construct.

Shobhaa De, then editor of glamour magazine Stardust, recalls an era of “thunder thighs and padded bras (no size zero, no botox, no surgically enhanced breasts— poor things!)”. Women seeking stardom were left coping with what came their way. “They were paid a pittance and treated like props—anybody could hire or use them. They ‘belonged’ to the producer/director and had zero social prestige. Even a prostitute’s life was superior—at least a sex worker was not made to believe she was a star in the making. Plus, sex workers are spared the narcotic of the big screen—once hooked, you’re dead,” says De. By the early 1980s, Helen, the most successful of the seductive “vamps”, was a legend. Poor imiTURN TO PAGE L12®

“

The most evocative image of Silk Smitha comes from a local gossip magazine interview she once gave: ‘When heroines pack up they get to keep the dresses, I have to return mine,’ she said. The inherent caste system of a film industry she spun money for is palpable even today.

”

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

COVER L11

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GNANAPRAKASAM E

EXP GALLERY COURTESY W+K

TAMIL CINEMA

Silk

route

Ekta Kapoor’s forthcoming film ‘The Dirty Picture’ revisits a sequins­and­pelvic­thrust era of Tamil cinema which was propelled by talent, scheming, hypocrisy and the intense loneliness of women like Silk Smitha B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· ilk Smitha says ‘let’s go to the temple’, and she manages to even make that sound sexy.” Eminent Tamil film historian S. Theodore Baskaran, author of the out-of-print last word on Tamil cinema The Eye of the Serpent (East West Books, Chennai), now a recluse in his Bangalore home, recalls how Tamil director Baalu Mahendra once described the appeal of the woman known to millions as “thunder thighs”.

“Films that had lain in cans for years were sold by the simple addition of a Silk Smitha song,” says Randor Guy, Tamil crime writer, screen writer, author of A History of Tamil Cinema (1991, published by the government of Tamil Nadu) and legal historian for The Hindu, of the woman with whom he shared a warm work friendship in the years from her unexpected fame until her suicide in 1996.

Leading actors such as Chiranjeevi, Kamal Hassan, even Dharmendra and Mohanlal, sought her dates. Yet, says Baskaran, though well paid, she could not command her price or call the shots. For Baradwaj Rangan, film critic for The Hindu, who remembers her as the “more petite of the vamps”, the most evocative image of Silk Smitha comes from an interview she gave to a local gossip magazine: “When heroines pack up they get to keep their dresses, I have to return mine,” she said. The inherent caste system of a film industry Silk Smitha spun money for is palpable even today. When this reporter asked a leading feminist Tamil actor-producer to comment on the pathetic working conditions of women in Silk Smitha’s world, she replied, “Your story is not relevant to me or people like me.” Then, vamps like Silk Smitha were relegated to chasms across from “people like me”, and that’s where their mem-

S

ories survive even today. Actor Revathi refused to comment via phone or email, stating that the exploitation and suicides of female actors was a subject of great sensitivity to Tamil cinema and required a fuller exploration of the subject in person.

The fictionalized biopic by Ekta Kapoor’s Balaji Telefilms, The Dirty Picture, based nebulously on Silk Smitha’s life, is set to release on her birth anniversary on 2 December. What pulled Rajat Arora, its scriptwriter, to the story—far removed from his north Indian milieu in which most of Bollywood functions today? “It is a biopic in as much as when you write about doctors, you would want to include a famous surgery that actually happened as a hub around which fictionalized events turn,” says Arora, who took his cues from producer Ekta Kapoor, who, he says, initially looked at it as a smaller film on the soft-pornography phenomenon of the 1980s.

Arora confesses he has not really watched Silk Smitha’s films. “If you look at Marilyn Monroe, everyone remembers that iconic shot of her dress flying above a New York vent. And yet she committed suicide. What happened between those two periods? That is where the story lies.” The question is, will the film be able to tear away from the caricature of her life or will it further propagate its myth?

The context of Silk Smitha is fraught with obvious pain. Like musical genius Ilayaraja, whose songs Silk Smitha gyrated to, now in quiet, philosophical retirement, Mahendra, the Sri Lankaborn Tamil film director who elevated Silk Smitha beyond cabaret numbers in his films, is himself reluctant, even if only in memory, to return to an era of films he once helped define. In a religious ashram on the outskirts of Chennai, Mahendra now teaches schoolchildren from 8am-9pm on weekdays. “I am now very far from everything you are asking me,” he says.

Mahendra’s first film, made in Kannada—Kokila (1976)—won him a National Award and was the precursor to a stellar career that pursued the social cause through films such as Azhiyatha Kolangal (1979), Veedu (1988) and Sandhyaragam (1991). A brilliant cinematographer-turnedfeminist director, he broke the stereotype by establishing women as his protagonists in a still maledominated industry. He was one

of the few directors who briefly wrested back control from singleactor-led films. He modelled himself on Satyajit Ray and Vittorio De Sica.

He has been misquoted many times, he says. Mahendra flourished in the 1980s, when politics was synonymous with cinema in Tamil Nadu—many actors and directors of that era are now prominent political players. “Why just Silk Smitha? Disco Shanthi, Jayamalathi, Bindu, Sasikala— there were many women who broke the mould, who were bold and daring, who brought sensuality to the screen,” Mahendra points out. Yet it was only in the 1980s that these women’s potential was maximised by discerning directors who saw them as the repositories of society’s dark side.

“It was a short period of such directors and it ended all too quickly,” says Baskaran of the time when feminist thought, open sensuality and the eroticism of women were tools in an able director’s hands, freeing films from a hero who called all shots.

The underlying sorrow of the 1980s ran deeper than a single actor who killed herself, or a talented director who withdrew.

Just as women in the Tamil film industry were discovering the freedom to express themselves sensually, nine female actors committed suicide (see The suicide sisterhood). They weren’t just vamps: Shoba, who won the National Award for Pasi in 1979 and was widely rumoured to be a much-married Mahendra’s lover, killed herself the following year after a lovers’ spat. She was 17. Mahendra subsequently wrote a series of sentimental musings in the Tamil magazine Kumudam titled Shobavum Naanum (Shoba and me) and more recently claimed Shoba as his wife on Anu Hassan’s Tamil TV show Koffee with Anu. Their story inspired the Malayalam National Award-winning film Lekhayude Maranam: Oru Flashback (1983), and the tragedy inspired Mahendra’s own National Award-winning film Moonrampirai (1982) starring Silk Smitha (the film was remade in Hindi as Sadma, 1983). That parenthesis, which ended with Silk Smitha herself committing suicide in 1996, was the context of such an industry.

Cho Ramaswamy, former actor, editor of the Tamil news magazine Tughlak and political and social commentator, does not believe the Tamil industry in the

Oozing oomph: Silk Smitha often designed her own costumes and Malayalam directors making family­ oriented films frequently asked her to tone down their raciness; (top) a poster of Reshma ki Jawani, still a cult Internet download, was a remake of the Malayalam hit Layanam (1989). Silk Smitha’s co­star in the film, Nandu, also later committed suicide.

1980s was exploitative of women.

“Did so many women commit suicide? It was mostly caused by foolish personal entanglements.

The 1980s were a time when I was leaving the industry, but I personally know many women in it, and women felt safe. Of course there was an ‘upper class’ and a ‘lower class’and even a ‘scheduled tribe’, if you will, of female actors—but wasn’t that the same for men?

And for any industry? In any case, the films always depended on heroes, not heroines, for hits.”

Yet, even towards the end of her career, Silk Smitha just needed to appear in a blouse and a lungi in Ezha mala poonchola with Mohanlal in Spadikam (1995), and teenage boys became men. Producers circulated songbooks, small towns staged live cabarets which routinely involved stripteases, and the cult following catapulted ordinary movies to blockbuster status.

What became of them, the stars of this phenomenon, was someone else’s problem.

Silk Smitha, sometimes called Silk Sumitha, was born Vijayalakshmi in the town of Eluru in Andhra Pradesh in 1960. Guy met Silk Smitha on film sets in the course of his writings, and developed a warm rapport with the otherwise reserved actor because they shared a mother tongue, Telugu. “‘Yemmendi, yemmendi’, she would say when she saw me,” he recalls (yemmendi is a Telugu term of respect commonly used to hail a senior). “She was a voluptuous, extremely good-looking woman. This led her to being ‘exploited’ by men (for) most of her youth. To solve this, her family married her off at a very young age. But this just made it worse.

Ill-treated in her marriage, Vijayalakshmi ran away to Chennai and lived with an aunt while she tried to make a new start.”

In Chennai, she began as a touch-up artiste for a B-grade actor, but her beauty quickly got her the kind of character roles that would allow her acting talent (of which she had plenty) to shine. She made her debut with a character role in the Malayalam film Inaye Thedi (1979). But her extreme sexiness intervened, demanding cabaret dances and vamp roles that became monetarily lucrative for the film industry.

In the late 1980s, Guy wrote a TV crime series, Senior Junior, which aired a single episode starring Silk Smitha in a role where she is mysteriously found dead in a bathtub. Guy knew her well from the height of her fame to this time of descent, and describes her

as a warm, fantastic person, a talented actor, shrewdly aware of the lengths her sex appeal could take her, very reserved, and so sexy that it overwhelmed everything else about her.

Guy claims to have met Silk Smitha’s husband a few times.

“She married again after she came to Chennai. He was a nice man. She kept him quiet and he was content to let her take the limelight.” (Lounge could not independently verify that Silk Smitha was married.)

Silk Smitha, Guy says, was no fool. She carefully designed her costumes. She spun her image.

She worked with greats. She did the critically acclaimed role of a demure sister in Bharatiraaja’s Alaigal Oyvathillai, performing brilliantly. “But I remember people told her: ‘Why are you wasting time with this? Take a sexy role and make some money.’” Once the name “Silk” stuck after her character in Vinu Chakravarty’s Vandi Chakram became a huge hit, even if she tried she could not take on other roles,” Guy recalls.

As The Dirty Picture gets set for launch, it is important to note that it was in the films of men like Mahendra and National Awardwinning film director K. Balachander, in Bharatiraaja’s Alaigal Oyvathillai and in the musical genius of Ilayaraja, that Silk Smitha came to life. Not semipornographic gyrations in a seedy dance-bar setting in front of lascivious men—the image the world remembers her by. “You have to understand that the myth of the vamp was an image, spun for the benefit of making a film, and an industry, based on her, work,” points out Rangan. The public perception of Silk Smitha was a careful social construct.

Shobhaa De, then editor of glamour magazine Stardust, recalls an era of “thunder thighs and padded bras (no size zero, no botox, no surgically enhanced breasts— poor things!)”. Women seeking stardom were left coping with what came their way. “They were paid a pittance and treated like props—anybody could hire or use them. They ‘belonged’ to the producer/director and had zero social prestige. Even a prostitute’s life was superior—at least a sex worker was not made to believe she was a star in the making. Plus, sex workers are spared the narcotic of the big screen—once hooked, you’re dead,” says De. By the early 1980s, Helen, the most successful of the seductive “vamps”, was a legend. Poor imiTURN TO PAGE L12®

“

The most evocative image of Silk Smitha comes from a local gossip magazine interview she once gave: ‘When heroines pack up they get to keep the dresses, I have to return mine,’ she said. The inherent caste system of a film industry she spun money for is palpable even today.

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L12 COVER

LOUNGE

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

® FROM PAGE L10 L11

tations sprang up everywhere.

Writer Jerry Pinto says that while researching his book Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, most dancing girls told him how deeply Helen influenced them.

But there was a difference, Pinto says: “Helen’s dances were an extension of who she was.

There was no music video to emulate, no MTV, so directors would tell her ‘chalo abhi kuch kar’. Helen’s dances were largely an expression of her personality.

She had freedom.”

Women like Silk Smitha were entirely in the hands of the dance director, who perhaps had only Helen to copy moves from. So the dance that ensued was more choreographed gymnastics. “Watch Silk Smitha’s sequences and you will find a sense of lingering sorrow. It’s almost as if there were two Silk Smithas there: One watching her own self dance, detached and dispassionate about being put through these calisthenics,” says Pinto.

Not that the strain of sorrow has lifted even today. The Kannada film industry, reacting to allegations of domestic abuse against married actor Darshan, ganged up to ban his lover Nikita Thukral, quickly backtracking to reveal a seamy underbelly.

Baskaran says: “What is happening today in the Kannada film industry is exactly what happened in Tamil Nadu in the 1980s. Affairs, broken relationships, abuse, exploitation—those who were rising stars had their careers curtailed when they married, those who didn’t suffered worse fates. It is what women of the time dealt with.”

In The Eye of the Serpent, Baskaran spans the eras of films before they became sheer entertainment—key being as vehicles of Hindu mythology, social welfare and political propaganda.

During each, upholding mythology-inherited virtues like chastity was an ideal. As the era of director-led films like Avalum Penthane (1975) by D. Durai, and Aval Appaddithan (1978) by

“

Silk Smitha was not an isolated phenomenon, and The Dirty Picture, therefore cannot remain a biopic.

Milan Luthria, the director of The Dirty Picture, insists the process of discovering Silk Smitha has led to him developing “a tremendous regard” for women who paved the way. “To recreate the era, we went back not just to the colour and vibrancy of the industry, but to aspects like how these actors managed money, how they got cheated; typically, most of them had a string of broken relationships, led lonely lives and met with tragic ends,” he says. Women like Silk Smitha were often ignored by film magazines, except for gossip column mentions. Arora and Luthria culled their information from anecdotes, met-at-a-party stories, quick teabreak chats, and fictionalized them: “It’s not like we sat and watched Tamil films once we decided to make this film. If you Recreating an era: a r e a Vidya Balan plays movie Silk Smitha in the buff, 2011 Balaji y o u Telefilms biopic, have also featuring been Naseeruddin Shah. exposed to the impact of her.

Many incidents we heard from people over the years are part of the movie,” Arora says, refusing to pin The Dirty Picture to a genre, an actor or a region. “The dancing girls were not only in the Tamil film industry, but all over: Malayalam, Hindi, Tamil,” Arora says.

Instead of moving south, Arora took his inspiration from “the films of directors like Manmohan Desai, Vijay Anand, Raj Kapoor, Feroz Khan and G.P. Sippy”.

Women are held up to judgement more easily in roles men have gotten away with for ages. That’s why we’ve made this movie.

D. Rudhraiya dawned, films began to move towards sheer sensuality. But Tamil society was stuck in a quandary: women, the repositories of social virtue, could not take a 180-degree turn overnight.

Rangan explains the dilemma: “Till the end of the 1960s, the bulk of movies, unlike the Hindi film industry, were not shot at hill stations. They were family dramas with strong family-oriented cores. The heroine was sari-clad, demure and sexy in a girl-nextdoor way. There was no boa, no bikinis.

The first of the vamps were Jayamalini and Jyothilakshmi. They were made to stand for everything negative in society that the heroine could not represent. Who were the heroines at the time? Ambika, Radha, Revathi and Suhasini. These were the ‘sexy’ heroines in the non-erotic sense. They represented the family. As a variety of villains cropped up, they became gangster molls. The vamp began to represent society’s hypocrisy.” Tamil society needed an alter ego, someone to bear the burden of its dark side.

These were the precursors to today’s “item girls”, the “vamps”.

The suicide sisterhood

”

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY ROJA MUTHIAH RESEARCH LIBRARY COLLECTION

HINDUSTAN TIMES

From the mid­1970s, female actors in the Tamil industry, exhausted by exploitation and a lack of options, began to turn up dead ‘under mysterious circumstances’. All the deaths were eventually attributed to suicide 1974: Vijayashree According to a report in ‘The Hindu’ (‘It’s a heavy price to pay’; 3 May 2002), the first of the suicides began with Vijayashree in 1974. A well­established actor and co­star of stalwarts such as Gemini Ganesh and Sivaji Ganesan, she killed herself when an affair reportedly went awry. Her mother, suspecting foul play, requested an investigation, but the matter was never resolved.

1979: Lakshmisree Lakshmisree had just played sister to Rajinikanth in the film ‘Dharmayudham’ (1979) when she hanged herself while her live­in lover was reportedly asleep in the adjoining room. The case was investigated for foul play, but was ruled to be one of suicide.

1979: Kalpana Affectionately nicknamed “Mingu Taare” (or shining star), Kalpana was a Tulu­born actor whose name was originally Sharat Lata. She was known for her sartorial elegance, introducing trends such as ‘megya’­sleeves and frilled blouses, large earrings, necklaces and cocktail rings—with taste said to be still unrivalled in the Kannada film industry. She acted in numerous Tamil films. In true diva fashion, she killed herself en route to Kolhapur on NH 4 by swallowing a diamond from a ring given to her by a suitor who reneged on his commitment to marry her, in what is widely believed to be a copy of her role in the Kannada film ‘Gejje Pooje’ (1969).

Date unknown: Kumari Padmini Kumari Padmini starred in classics such as ‘Nee Ullavarai’ (1973). Not much has been reported about Padmini’s death. She was reported to have been in the company of a senior judicial official at the time of her suicide.

1980: Urvashi Shoba Born Mahalakshmi, multi­award­winning actor Shoba was the daughter of K.P. Menon and Malayalam

actor Prema. She made her debut as a child actor in the Kannada film ‘Udyogastha’ and at 17, won the National Award for the Tamil film ‘Pasi’ in 1979—the youngest actor to do so.

Her co­star Venu Nagavalli told news magazines how he had observed her relationship with the much married Baalu Mahendra, her cinematographer and then director, evolve on the sets of ‘Ullakadal’, directed by K.G. George. Shoba committed suicide on 16 September 1980 when Mahendra reportedly refused to leave his family for her. On the Tamil TV show ‘Koffee with Anu’, Mahendra claimed to host Anu Hassan that Shoba was his wife, describing how her suicide had inspired one of his greatest hits, ‘Moonrampirai’.

1981: Savitri Ganesh The much adored and beautiful wife of Gemini Ganesh, Savitri was known to be chatty and a versatile actor and director. Born in Andhra Pradesh, she acted in 318 films, and co­starred with actors

Lost lives: (clockwise from left) Divya Bharti; Lakshmisree; Silk Smitha; Phataphat Jayalak­ shmi and Shoba.

1993: Divya Bharti While it is widely known that Telugu actor Divya Bharti came into limelight in the Andhra Pradesh film industry with ‘Bobbili Raja’ in 1990, her earlier years of struggle in the Tamil industry are less documented. She made her debut armed with “a face like Sridevi” in the Tamil film ‘Nila Pennae’ (1990) and secretly married Bollywood director Sajid Nadiadwala shortly after. At the time of her death in 1993, she was 19. She had acted in 21 films and had 14 works in progress.

1996: Silk Smitha Born Vijayalakshmi in 1960 in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh, the actor oozed sensuality and quickly learnt to flaunt it. She made her debut in character roles in films such as the Malayalam film ‘Inaye Thedi’ (1979) and worked with greats such as Baalu Mahendra and Bharatiraaja. Her own production venture ‘Penn Simham’ (1987) marked a series of flops she never recovered from. She committed suicide in 1996, rumoured to be broken­hearted at her failures.

1980: Phataphat Jayalakshmi Telugu­born Jayalakshmi was a popular actor in the films of Andhra director Dasari Narayan Rao when she came to Tamil films, where she didn’t flinch from bold and brazen roles. She earned the tag “phataphat” following a popular dialogue from the film ‘Maro Charithra’ (1978) by K. Balachander. She routinely co­starred with top actors such as Rajinikanth, Kamal Hassan, Krishna and Chiranjeevi. She was reportedly either involved with or married to a nephew of politician­actor M.G. Ramachandran when she committed suicide in 1980 (reports differ).

Arora says, “Ekta and I clicked on even our Hollywood points of reference—the Oscar-nominated Boogie Nights (1997) and The People vs Larry Flynt (1996) put the global soft-porn industry in context for us.” The film by now had become a fictionalized, womenoriented, generalized perspective on the 1980s film industry.

Factually unmoored, the myth of Silk Smitha floats on.

So powerful was Silk Smitha’s sexuality that even today it overrides the data. Actor Vidya Balan was perturbed at first by the raw, brazen, oozing sexuality of the role, Luthria says, and needed much coaxing. “They were much bolder than we are today. These women had fewer inhibitions. I don’t think the same oomph is there today. If anything, we are more restricted,” Arora says.

Heroines had begun to take on the role of vamps. “Heroines began to look directly at the screen, bite their lower lips and do their pelvic thrusts and hold orgasmic expressions—it was a lustier life led,” Rangan says.

Luthria says today’s leading female actors vie for item numbers and can still expect to settle down with an industrialist. But De says reality lurks beneath the surface. “Today’s item numbers have an identity of their own. They are a ticket to making big bucks at international shows. The mindset of the movie industry can never change. It remains Neanderthal.

Women are seen and treated like meat. Savage, but true.”

The Dirty Picture in that sense is not an apology for the era, Arora stresses. “Everyone who aspires to be an actress starts in the same way. It’s about discovering where your strength lies and finding your own path to success.” It is entertainment, not a social message. It asks why.

“Women are held up to judgement more easily in roles men have gotten away with for ages.

That’s why we’ve made this movie. If we achieve asking the question why—forget answering it—we (will) have achieved what we set out to do,” he says.

2001: Viji

such as M.G. Ramachandran and Sivaji Ganesan. She married Gemini Ganesh while acting with him in ‘Manampol Mangalyam’ (1953). Though her son found her foaming at the mouth due to a diabetes­induced coma, it was widely rumoured to have been suicide due to financial circumstances, a drinking problem and a messy marital state of affairs (she was Ganesh’s third wife).

When Viji, with a career of more than a decade in Tamil films, hanged herself in Mahalingapuram, Chennai, on 27 November 2001, she left an audio tape in which TV director A.R. Ramesh professed his love for her, a letter addressed to the then chief minister of Tamil Nadu M. Karunanidhi—who had funded a surgery that had left her crippled a few years earlier—requesting the state to avoid disfiguring her body further with a post­mortem, notes for her father on her wealth, and her lawyer.

She was 34 and had featured in 40 Tamil films.

Gayatri Jayaraman

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011

L13

Travel

LOUNGE LOST WORLDS | SAFARNAMA

Khwaja Khusraw’s Palestine A medieval Persian travelogue recre­ ates pre­Crusade Syria and Palestine with elegant clarity

B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· ho was Nasir Khusraw? An 11th century Persian poet and traveller-pilgrim, various accounts of his life over the years have called him a king, a heretic, a cult leader and a magician who ate only once every 25 days (or one who could be sustained by the mere smell of food). Farid ud-din Attar, poet of the classic Mantiq at-Tayr (The Conference of Birds), once called him “a ruby in Badakhshan”. Khwandamir’s Habib al-Siyar refers to him as Amir Khusraw, but as modern scholars remind us, while it would be accurate of us

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to honour him as a hakim or khwaja, amir he was not.

A poet and da’i (missionary), Nasir Khusraw’s life took him from his birthplace in Greater Khorasan to travel eastwards, learning languages and sciences, and then to return to the Seljuk court of Tugrul Beg to become a finance official.

From our distance, Iranian empires may seem to follow one another as a matter of tranquil predestination, sort of like the China of Zhang Yimou films. But medieval Persia in the time of Nasir Khusraw was a fractious place, both internally and within the borders of the larger Muslim world of West Asia and north Africa. As

the Abbasids and Buyids tussled to the west of the Seljuks, the Fatimid empire of Cairo towered over all of them, intellectually and culturally.

Around 1037, Nasir Khusraw lit out for a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. He spent the next seven years travelling around West Asia. Setting out from Marv in modern-day Turkmenistan, crossing Mesopotamia and southern Persia, he went to Syria and Palestine, where he stayed for four months, before leaving Jerusalem for Mecca, and then on to Egypt. All told, it would be seven years before he saw Marv again.

His Safarnama provides a meticulous account of his trav-

els, reminding us of our own cultural familiarity with the historic Aleppo and Tripoli, Cairo and Basra. His narrative voice is low-pitched and even, but keenly interested in everything from water conservation in Jerusalem to the architecture of Tripoli. People may seem relatively sparse in its pages, but humanity is not at all absent from the Safarnama; this is only in comparison with the touchy-feely travel writing to which this column has devoted attention in the past.

The scholar Alice Hunsberger says that if Nasir Khusraw is today less known than Sa’adi, Khayyam, Rumi and Hafiz, even in Iran, it is

because of the trials to which his Ismaili Shia faith was subjected during his lifetime, contra the state’s official Twelver (or Imami) Shi’ism and later Sunni hegemony. His religious verse was more easily set aside than the perfumed abandon of Persian love poetry. And when the Fatimid empire dissolved in 1171, Shias in Iran resorted to concealing their faith, and with it, works like Safarnama.

Only a part of the travelogue, Nasir Khusraw’s diary of Syria and Palestine, translated to English in 1893 by Guy Le Strange of the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society, is available to read online freely (http://bit.ly/o1qZJ6).

HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

WESTERN ILLUMINATION ARTIST

Nasir does Tripoli They were, at the time of our arrival, extracting the juice of the sugar-cane. The town of Tripoli is so situated that three sides thereof are on the sea, and when the waves beat, the sea-water is thrown up onto the very city walls. The fourth side, which is towards the land, is protected by a mighty ditch, lying eastward of the wall, in which opens an iron gate, solidly built. The walls are all of hewn stone, and the battlements and embrasures are after the like work. Along the battlements are placed balistae (’arradah), for their fear is of the Greeks, who are wont to attempt the place in their ships. The city measures a thousand cubits long, by the like across. Its hostelries are four and five stories high, and there are even some that are of six. The private houses and bazaars are well built, and so clean that one might take each to be a palace for its splendour.

Every kind of meat and fruit and eatable that ever I saw in

History in art: (above) A castle near Tripoli, Libya, on the river Kadesha, circa 1840; and an illumination showing a mosque in medieval Jerusalem.

all the land of Persia, is to be had here, and a hundred degrees better in quality. In the midst of the town is the great Friday Mosque, well kept, and finely adorned, and solidly constructed. In the Mosque court is a large dome, built over a marble tank, in the middle of which is set a brazen fountain.

In the bazaar, too, they have made a watering place, where, at five spouts, is abundant water for the people to take from; and the overflow, going along the ground, runs into the sea. They say there are twenty thousand men in this city, and the place possesses many adjacent territories and villages.

Nasir examines the location of Hell Lying between the mosque (in Jerusalem) and this plain of the Sahirah is a great and steep valley, and down in this valley, which is like unto a fosse, are many edifices, built after the fashion of ancient days. I saw here a dome cut out in the stone, and it is set upon the

The common people state that when you stand at the brink of the valley you may hear the cries of those in Hell which come up from below. I myself went there to listen, but heard nothing.

Nasir meets a badass in Ma’arrah

summit of a building. Nothing can be more curious than it is, and one asks how it came to be placed in its present position.

In the mouths of the common people it goes by the appellation of Pharaoh’s House.

The valley of which we are speaking is the Wadi Jahannum. I inquired how this name came to be applied to the

place, and they told me that in the times of the Khalif Omar—may Allah receive him in grace!—the camp (of the Muslims, who had come up to besiege Jerusalem) was pitched here on the plain called Sahirah, and that when Omar looked down and saw this valley, he exclaimed, ‘Verily this is the Valley of Jahannum.’

There, was living here (at this date) a certain personage called Abu’l Ala Ma’arri, who, though sightless, was the chief man of the city. He possessed great wealth, and slaves, and very numerous attendants; for it was as though all the inhabitants of the city were of his people. As for himself, he had adopted the way of the ascetics, being clothed in a rug (gilimi), sitting quiet in his house, and taking for his daily bread half a mann

of barley bread, and beyond this eating nothing more...This personage, too, has attained such renown as poet and writer that the learned of Syria, Maghrib and Irak, all agree that no one of these days is his equal, nor can be. He has written a book under the name of Al Fusul wa-l Ghayat (The Divisions and Conclusions), wherein enigmatical words are employed, with such wonderful and eloquent conceits and similitudes that it is only a very small part thereof that one can understand, and that only when one may have perused the work under the author’s direction... there are continually with him some two hundred persons, come from all parts of the world...A certain one inquired of him why, since God—may He be praised and magnified!—had endowed him with all this wealth and goods, was it that he thus gave all to other men and used none for himself. The answer was, ‘No more than what I must eat, can I take.’

L14

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011

Books

LOUNGE PHOTOGRAPHS

THE RED MARKET | SCOTT CARNEY

BY

SCOTT CARNEY/HACHETTE INDIA

The organ grinders B Y D AVID S HAFTEL

A journalist’s book on the organ and blood trade in India unveils grim truths about public health systems

The Red Market—On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers: Hachette, 254 pages, `550.

david.s@livemint.com

···························· he subtitle of journalist Scott Carney’s investigation into the flesh trade—literally, the trade in human flesh—announces that the author has reported from “the trail of the world’s organ brokers, bone thieves, blood farmers, and child traffickers”. Don’t be fooled; his is a book about India, with eight of 10 chapters being at least partially set here.

In the compelling first chapter of Carney’s book, he tells the story of the death of “Emily”, a student in his charge who likely committed suicide at the Bodh Gaya pilgrimage site near Varanasi. Carney is charged with shipping Emily home to the US for burial, but first must find ice to keep the body cold, oversee a grisly autopsy and keep a pack of baying TV cameramen away from the corpse—a task anyone who’s ever attended a press conference in India knows is futile. By that time, “the person who Emily was has been replaced by the problem that her body represents”, Carney writes.

The affair, he says, was the beginning of his understanding of the red trade, or the international market for human parts and babies. While transporting a corpse is only tangentially related to the red trade, it’s impossible not to find Carney’s account of the three days he spent in India with Emily’s lifeless, decaying body riveting. He uses the ordeal as a springboard to the trade in human body parts, the appetite for which, he writes, is at its apex.

“It doesn’t matter what our moral position is on the subject, bodies are unquestionably commodities,” Carney says. He reckons his own body’s parts—those of a light-skinned, tall, healthy male— are worth around $250,000 (around `1.2 crore).

Carney, a contributor at Wired, starts what at times feels like a romp through a series of hellacious situations in West Bengal, where he investigated the trade

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in human bones. “For almost two hundred years,” he writes, “India has been the primary source of bones used in medical study, renowned for producing specimens scrubbed to a pristine white patina and fitted with highquality connecting hardware.”

The export of human bones was banned in 1985, says Carney, but “there are open signs the trade never ended”, as evidenced by a consignment of skulls viewed by Carney at a rural police station, estimated to be worth $70,000.

From there, Carney takes the reader to Tsunami Nagar, a refugee camp in Tamil Nadu for survivors of the 2004 tsunami, where organ brokers “make a fortune” selling refugees’ kidneys, which are often viewed by their original owners as “a critical social safety net”. The supply of developing world donors, matched with long waiting lists for kidney transplants, enables the illegal trade in Indian kidneys, Carney argues.

He reports that the price of a kidney transplant in an Indian hospital is about one-twentieth of a transplant in the US. The health consequences for the donor are often dire.

The most disturbing chapter might be Carney’s investigation into the dysfunctional Indian blood donation system, in which a patient in need of a blood transfusion must first replace the blood they intend to use. The policy, coupled with the fact that many patients are prohibitively superstitious about parting with their bodily fluids, has resulted in a class of for-profit blood donors who chicken-hawk patients in front of Indian hospitals. Carney meets one such man who says he is HIV-positive.

The system also enables men like Pappu Yadav, a blood thief in Gorakhpur, near the border with Nepal, who applied the same principles used on his dairy farm to harvest blood from imprisoned refugees from Nepal. Carney cites a “near total absence of a plan to collect blood in an ethical manner or at a scale that will meet the nation’s needs. The vacuum

Q&A | RAKHSHANDA JALIL

‘I’m no theologian’ The Delhi­based author on her short stories about India’s middle­class Muslims B Y M AYANK A USTEN S OOFI mayank.s@livemint.com

···························· akhshanda Jalil, 48, has edited short stories, co-authored books on history, published translations, and written a collection of essays on Delhi’s monuments. She is a columnist for The Friday Times, Pakistan’s biggest weekly paper. In a previous book titled Neither Night nor Day, Jalil put together 13 short stories by Pakistani women writers that sought to challenge the stereotypes of Pakistanis as religious fundamentalists.

Her own collection of short stories, Release and Other Stories, her first experiment with fiction writing, has a similar aim. These stories claim to “explore the lives of Indian Muslims, not the marginalized or ghettoized Muslims of popular stereotype but ordinary,

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mainstream ones”. Jalil spoke to Lounge about the new book and using stereotypes to make a larger point. Edited excerpts from an interview: Thanks to activist Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement, there is a new interest in the middle class, and thanks to 9/11, there has been a decade-long curiosity to know about Islam’s inner world. Your stories are on the big-city middle-class people, and they are all Muslims. This book is a clever marketing strategy.

It’s sad to see such cynicism.

When you reach my age you know that cleverness and strategizing don’t make a good book. These stories were written over a long period of time and not with the desire to be published in any great haste or to coincide with some breaking news. I did these

Roving eye: (above) A blood donation camp; and author Scott Carney.

between legal mandates and police priorities creates an opportunity for a black medical market to flourish.”

A photo of Carney on the jacket suggests he’s an Indophile—in it the author is shown tilak-ed, at an Indian bus depot.

Carney says he learnt Hindi at university, has reported extensively in India and lived for years in Chennai. His website says he lived in the subcontinent for “half a decade”; his bio on the book’s flap says he has a “decade of experience living and researching in India”. Either way, his experience in India allows him to write with nuance and context on situations he

encounters here. But the chapters outside India don’t come alive like the ones set here, and some reporting trips feel cursory in comparison. A chapter set in an in-vitro fertilization clinic in Cyprus falls a bit flat, and a chapter on bio-ethics, albeit deftly executed, slows the pace of the book.

To be sure, Carney’s reporting is thorough and often intrepid, his synthesis of complicated issues commendable. A standout chapter is the one on adoptions of kidnapped Indian babies by families in the West. In the chapter, Carney must tell the parents in the US of an adopted child that their baby was stolen from

who has ‘Outlook’ magazine for bedside reading. The wife is a software engineer. When they are ill, they go to Max Hospital. Does such an aspirational Muslim middle class exist outside fiction?

Partition decimated the Muslim middle class. It took many decades to produce a new middle class among the Muslims in India. We are a sizeable presence now.

Why is the rest

of mainstream India blind to us? Is it because we are like one of them? Or is it because we are a largely silent group?

Are you attentive only to the squabbling, vociferous set of our community? Does it suit some purpose to believe that ordinary, middle-class Muslims such as the ones I have portrayed don’t exist outside a writer’s imagination?

They didn’t write in English but Urdu authors such as Ismat Chughtai and Saadat Hasan Manto too have written stories on Indian Muslims. How different was the

stories on the sly, while doing other kinds of writing. I wanted to write about a milieu familiar to me. That’s why you find a lot of Muslim characters in my book, though the stories aren’t about Islam. I’m no theologian but can talk about Indian Muslims, being one myself.

The first story, ‘A Mighty Heart’, is about a Muslim man with two wives. How is that breaking the stereotype of a Muslim man?

While the idea of a Muslim man with two wives is something of a hackneyed image, I don’t think my treatment of it is banal. I wanted to use a stock image to make a larger point about the large-heartedness a human being can display in the midst of a tragedy.

Moreover, the deliberate, even ironic, use of stock characters is a perfectly bona-fide literary device.

In ‘The Perfect Couple’, the husband PRADEEP GAUR/MINT is a market analyst

Word’s worth: Rakhshanda Jalil recently launched her new book.

its Indian parents, who very much want to re-establish contact with their child, by then a pre-teen. The adoptive father says he long since suspected his child could have been stolen. He told Carney they paid $15,000 in “fees” for the child. “‘We looked at Korea and South America, but India was the most open’—as in less difficult,” Carney quotes.

One of Carney’s conclusions is that “flesh moves upward—never downward—through social classes”, making the red market inherently exploitative. A solution, he says, would be to infuse transparency by eliminating the notions of privacy and altruism that “pervade the market for human body parts”. The aim, he writes, “should be to integrate and repersonalize human identities into the supply chain.

Every bag of blood should include the name of the original donor, every adopted child should have full access to their personal history, and every transplant recipient should know who gave an organ.”

IN SIX WORDS Grim trade in bodies and parts

world of their stories?

The writers you mention wrote about Indian Muslims; as did scores of others from Premchand and Upendranath Ashk to Krishan Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Rashid Jahan, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, and Qurratulain Hyder. That they wrote in Urdu immediately meant that they were writing for a readership that was familiar with that world. Among those who wrote about the Indian Muslims in English I can only think of Attia Hosain, who wrote Sunlight on a Broken Column, and the translations of her own work into English done by Qurratulain Hyder. We haven’t got much to show in English on the Indian Muslims. So, yes, for you to detect a clever marketing strategy in the subject choice of my book could be excusable.

You have written a lot of non-fiction. What’s more fun, fiction or non-fiction?

While writing non-fiction, I sit surrounded by piles of books, notes, and reference material.

Every next sentence is followed by relentless footnoting and copious cross-referencing.

When I write fiction, thoughts run freely from the mind, race down the fingers and go straight into the laptop. It’s liberating.

BOOKS L15

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

CONTROVERSIALLY YOURS | SHOAIB AKHTAR

CULT FICTION

Rawalpindi revelations

R. SUKUMAR MIKE HEWITT/GETTY IMAGES

Just how much controversy does the Pakistani fast bowler’s autobiog­ raphy really court?

BY A Y A Z M E M O N ···························· he only occasion on which I spoke to Shoaib Akhtar was at the Blue Elephant discotheque in the Hilton at Colombo, Sri Lanka. I was part of ESPN’s Hindi commentary team and one night decided to join the members of the production crew to shake a leg.

Several players were around too. There was no match the next day so there was no breach of curfew. Shoaib walked in well past midnight in a shimmering, bodyhugging shirt and jeans I am sure he would have found impossible to peel off alone.

The world’s fastest bowler was quickly on the dance floor, alone, and worked himself into a sweat before taking a breather.

When we were introduced, he broke into conversation that seemed to be made up of six words—half of them sounded distinctly unparliamentary.

I could be wrong in both math and semantics because he spoke with an accent that was almost impossible to follow. For many days I wondered where and how a guy born and brought up in Rawalpindi could have acquired such an outlandish accent.

The mystery is finally solved, a full seven years later, in Controversially Yours, Shoaib’s autobiography.

Around 1998-99, Shoaib spent four months in Ireland playing league cricket. There, he stayed with the Patton family. One day the Pattons took him to a restaurant where he noticed a white girl looking at him. The conversation that followed between them is best described by Shoaib himself: “She stopped in front of me and said, ‘How are you?’”

“Good,” I answered.

“What have you been up to?’’ she continued.

“Good,” I replied hopefully.

“Would you like to have a drink with me?” she asked.

Main kya (I said) “Good!’’

She started giggling and asked, “Do you know any other

THE EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN’S LATEST

F

T

Motor mouth: Akhtar makes general criticisms but does not substantiate them.

Controversially Yours: Harpersport, 271 pages, `499. word in English?’’

“Good,” I grimaced back.

They became good friends thereafter, which gives a good idea of what Shoaib himself describes as “this unique blend of Irish-laced Punjabi English”.

The autobiography runs into 271 pages (approx. 50,000 words), which suggests that Shoaib’s literacy in English has grown by leaps and bounds, even allowing for the liberal help from co-author Aanshu Dogra. One wishes there were more such anecdotes to not only bring some levity to the book, but also spring the character to life.

Shoaib was (is) a combustible, rebellious personality, but the book overloads the reader with laments about his troublesome knees and non-stop whining

about the Pakistan cricket establishment, including generals who wanted to rule over players, or fellow players who tried to be dressing-room generals.

Of the criticism about Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid which has caused so much consternation. I found it too unspecific and generic in its sweep. While he does mention that neither of the Indian stalwarts is a “matchwinnner”, it is in a limited context and inadequately explained.

Ironically, he qualifies his criticism of Tendulkar by complimenting him, saying that for several years the Pakistan team knew that if they got him, India were sunk. He also says that in the past three years, Tendulkar has been able to bat freely and win more matches because of the arrival of players like Virender Sehwag et al, which pretty much stymies his original premise.

Test cricket demands different players perform different roles. It is only a stereotype that a batsman who goes helter-skelter for runs is a match-winner; a “defensive” Dravid might be a match-winner simply because of the manner in which he has coped and the time he has occupied the crease.

Shoaib’s argument about Tendulkar and Dravid panders to a populist—not expert—belief of how Test cricket is played, which I find preposterous. But even more preposterous is to deny him the right to say this.

Controversially Yours tries hard to live up to its title but provokes

only mildly. It moves in fits and starts and disappointingly falls short of full realization of potential—much like Shoaib’s career itself. The overall tone is sanctimonious, and the frequent use of Punjabi lines begins to jar. The scourge of match-fixing—in which he incidentally remains one of the few players untainted—is largely glossed over.

Where the book does score in bringing out his personality is in describing Shoaib’s growth into international cricket, overcoming the hardships of an underprivileged background and of a loner’s existence in a dressing room full of volatile players not averse to chasing drugs, women, or each other with bats; or when he debunks the so-called “religiosity” during Inzamam-ul-Haq’s captaincy when players practised their faith everywhere—from playing field to hotels to airplanes—for fear of being dropped.

I reckon the last point of view Shoaib could find more problematic—especially back home—than coping with the imagined slight against Tendulkar and Dravid.

Ayaz Memon is a sports columnist and commentator who writes the column Beyond Boundaries for Mint.

Write to lounge@livemint.com IN SIX WORDS Pindi incendiary, more smoke than fire

irst, let’s start with the parts, a survey of sorts of the bar before we start imbibing.

There’s Oliver Haddo, the protagonist of The Magician, a book

by W. Somerset Maugham, loosely based on, and an unkind representation of Aleister Crowley.

There’s Andrew Norton, the time-traveller from Slow Chocolate Autopsy, a book by Iain Sinclair.

Then there are the constant characters, Wilhel“mina” Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Allan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and Orlando (probably from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando).

Throw in pop references, such as Harry Potter, the Iraq war, Universal Exports, and Rosemary’s Baby, and what do you have?

Alan Moore regulars would have recognized the characters.

They are from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, by Moore and Kevin O’Neill. And this particular edition of Cult Fiction is about the fourth book in the series (after Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 and The Black Dossier), Century.

Century is a book in three parts, two of which are out (the second came out a few months ago).

The broad plot of Century (the one that you can say in two lines) is similar to several works that have come before it: A secret group works towards the birth of the Antichrist; another group works to stop them; they clash.

Only, this mix has a man called Moore in the middle, so the plot is anything but linear or simple. Allusions and references, some of them musical (Brecht and Weill, The Sex Pistols), come hard and fast. I have read the two parts that are out so far, and loved them (Moore is his usual self and O’Neill outdoes himself with the artwork), but even I couldn’t help but feel that Century treads the slender line between a masterpiece and an indulgence.

Anyway, this fanboy will leave that to the critics, some of whom have trashed Century (and Moore) for the abundance of references, some of which will likely sail over the heads of most readers, and which do seem vestigial to the plot.

Part 1 is 1910: What Keeps Mankind Alive. It is Moore mania: A mix of references. set in London of the 1910s and starts with the League in quest of a secret cabal that is looking to create the Moonchild (the Antichrist, and also a novel by Aleister Crowley).

Part 2 is 1969: Paint it Black. It is set in London in the late 1960s and after, replete with hippie and punk overtones. It starts with the death of Basil Fotherington-Thomas (another reference, and this one I will leave for you, Constant Reader, to work out; just google it, silly) at the hands of Haddo’s men and the subsequent entry of the League, which continues its investigation into the coming of the Antichrist.

Part 3, which hasn’t been released, is supposed to be set in 2009 and in a 2008 interview Alan Moore told Forbidden Planet, a magazine on fantasy, science fiction, comics and pop culture, while speaking about the freedom that moving away from a mainstream comic label (Century is published by Top Shelf), that the series is “a lot more atmospheric, it builds to a tremendously bloody climax…”

I can hardly wait.

R. Sukumar is editor, Mint.

Write to him at cultfiction@livemint.com MINT

THE READING ROOM

TABISH KHAIR

THE HUMANE CONDITION

T

he main attraction of book fairs for me, an Indian writer who writes in English but lives in Denmark, is that I get to meet specimen of the same species.

Such meetings are not always an unalloyed pleasure. However, they were this summer.

I was lucky in the specimens I met this year: ranging from Manu Joseph and Indra Sinha to Namita Gokhale, whose novel Priya I read with enjoyment.

But I was unlucky to have missed one author whose book I had just read: Rahul Bhattacharya had done his stuff at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and flown out hours before I blew into town for my 45 minutes of watery limelight.

Set mostly in Guyana,

combining novelistic elements with travel writing, history and memoir, Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People who Care is a novel in the real sense of the term: a book that tries to do something a bit different, something “novel”. With an ear for Guyanese English and Caribbean humour and an eye for the landscape, with a mind sharp enough to understand and, what is rarer, a heart large enough to comprehend, Bhattacharya is a writer to treasure and look forward to reading again.

As a “novel”, The Sly Company of People who Care belongs to a distinguished cross-generic tradition, and ranks with the best of its sort: “novels” like V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and Amitav

Ghosh’s In an Antique Land.

Talking of Ghosh, his new novel, River of Smoke, is definitely among his best in recent years. Spanning continents and decades, telling a story full of passion and storms, delving into pasts not fully recorded by historians, it will be hailed as a great “historical novel”. But actually, Ghosh is not really writing historical novels any more: His last and perhaps only “historical novel” was The Glass Palace. Instead—and this might be his main claim to immortality—he has perfected a new sub-genre: the socio-anthropological novel.

In any case, River of Smoke is a great read!

I, Lalla Ranjit Hoskote is that rare thing: an uncompromising writer, whether as a critic, a scholar, a poet or, now, a translator. In I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded, Hoskote not only translates the poems of the 14th century Kashmiri mystic, Lal Ded (popularly known as

World­roving: Ghosh in Delhi, days before his latest book was released.

Lalla), but also adds to the critical scholarship on her by considering Lalla, rightly to my mind, as not just a person but also a signifier for “a contributory lineage of questors and reciters who followed in her wake”.

But don’t worry if you are not into such scholarly matters.

Read Hoskote’s accomplished translation for the sheer power

and colloquial vibrancy with which he retrieves Lalla from the verbosity of Victorian-inflected translations.

“Restless mind, don’t infect the heart with fear/That virus is not for you...”

welcome addition to English-language literature from India and gendered texts.

Published first in 1972, Apradhini was perhaps the first book of its kind, in which (as Mrinal Pande puts it in an afterword) “a popular Hindi writer had tried painstakingly to profile the lives of indigent women behind bars”. The stories recounted are often more gripping than fiction.

An important Danish writer, Stig Dalager’s fourth novel in English translation was released in the UK and US last month.

Described as a “triumph” by European reviewers, Dalager’s Land of Shadows sweeps powerfully from 9/11 New York to Hebron in 2002. When it came out in Danish, it was one of the first novels to explore the situation inside the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Two translations

Tabish Khair is the Denmark-based author of The Thing about Thugs.

Ira Pande’s translation of her mother, the major Hindi writer, Shivani’s Apradhini is a

Write to Tabish at readingroom@livemint.com

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011

Culture

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Q&A | NAGESH KUKUNOOR

‘Love stories hinge on one element’ ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

The film­maker on why he’s finally making a love story and how people are less forgiving when you’re a ‘veteran’

I

The new veteran: (above) Kukunoor at his residence in Mumbai; and Ayesha Takia and Rannvijay Singh in a still from Mod.

Why a love story now?

I hadn’t tackled a love story because I felt I had nothing new to offer, given that 100-odd love stories get made every year in the Hindi film industry. As a writer, you approach material and if you keep feeling it has been done before it becomes a horrific process. In my films, even when there is a love quotient, it is a small part of it. Then I saw the Taiwanese film Keeping Watch. I loved the premise of

B Y U DITA J HUNJHUNWALA ···························· n 1998, when the small film Hyderabad Blues released, engineer-turned-film-maker Nagesh Kukunoor was regarded as the pioneer of the crossover, independent film movement in India. Thirteen years and 11 movies later, as he prepares for the release of his first love story, Mod (starring Ayesha Takia and Rannvijay Singh), he is now regarded as a “veteran”, having slowly repositioned himself as a commercial director. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Delicious tension The remake of John Le Carré’s classic has something even for the die­hard fan B Y S IDIN V ADUKUT ···························· n most novels and films of the crime, thriller or espionage ilk, one assumes that the author or the film-maker is on the readers’ or the viewers’ side. They want, you assume in the normal course of things, closure as much as you do. And they want you to get closure too.

Isn’t that the whole point?

You keep on reading and viewing, comforted by the fact that the lead protagonist is as eager to catch the murderer or corner the terrorist, or, as in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (TTSS), steam out the Soviet mole in British intelligence, as much as you are.

We are all supposed to be in this together.

I

But not so for John Le Carré.

And, thank God, not so for film director Tomas Alfredson. Here, the spectator is on his own.

Like the book published in 1974 and like the classic BBC television series broadcast five years later, Alfredson’s movie uncoils slowly.

The thick, murky waters clear with excruciating lack of pace. This tension is delicious.

The story is simple enough. In the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, there are whispers of a Soviet double agent high up in the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Perhaps the mole could be the chief of MI6 himself. Or his deputy. Well, somebody knows who it is. George Smiley, a retired MI6 mandarin, is covertly activated again. He is to work secretly, from

this girl who ran a clock store and a stranger who comes to her shop daily to get his watch cleaned. The Taiwanese version is more quirky. But I felt that if I could capture the essence of the little town—my version of utopian India—then this would be a story I would love to tell.

For me, good romantic films are the ones where we get to see the process of the couple falling in love. In Hindi movies, for the

most part, the hero enters, the heroine enters, they fall in love and most of the films are about how it plays out after that. Mod is about how they fall in love. I bought the rights, rewrote it for an Indian setting, added elements to the second half and that’s Mod. How difficult was it to tell a love story?

Love stories hinge on one element—that the audience likes

both characters—and that was a serious challenge. Plus, if you are casting unknowns who are going to fall in love, you have to make them likeable but you also have to make the love story believable. In this script, the guy does not have witty one-liners to make the audience immediately fall in love with him. He is painfully shy, says little, and Rannvijay Singh is completely fighting against his macho Roadies image.

What has been the learning from your last two unsuccessful films?

There are people who survive just as well without their movies working. But you have to be in the circuit, mixing. This startstop-appear-disappear (which I have been doing) does not work.

I have learnt that you have to be out there, promoting yourself. I

the outside, with a slim staff, and hunt this mole down. In the TV series, Smiley is played by the spectacular Alec Guinness. TTSS is a story in dull colour, cold weather and grey emotions, and Guinness is a kind of grand metaphor for it all. He is as cold as London itself. Guinness’ Smiley is as opaque, unyielding and uncooperative to the viewer as the mole himself—exactly as Le Carré wrote him.

It is almost 11 minutes into the movie, well after he has made his on-screen appearance, that Gary Oldman speaks for the first time (I can’t think of such a delay in any movie not starring Keanu Reeves).

For a moment, he sounds exactly like Guinness. Down to the way his mouth undulates around the name of one of the suspects: Percy Alleline. “Alleline.” “Alleline.” Oldman. Guinness.

But that is a brief illusion. One borne out of familiarity. Soon, Oldman makes Smiley his own.

The film and the story is as much about Smiley uncovering the mole, as much as the viewer uncovering Smiley himself. What

makes a man so cold?

Is it the work itself? The cheating wife who is heard but never shown? Or is it the sheer mental burden of moral ambiguity that being a spy entails? You’ll have to figure that one out by yourself.

There is a moment in the film, however, when a tipsy Smiley begins to speak to a subordinate—Peter Guillam, played by a

splendid Benedict Cumberbatch. And suddenly he seems almost human. But the momentary high is lost.

Many reviewers have commented on how well Alfredson has captured the psyche and ambience of 1970s Britain in the film. This could be true. But save for an opening in medias res scene, the film is crafted and pic-

Grim and grey: Gary Oldman plays the retired MI6 agent George Smiley.

learnt two other valuable lessons. There was a buzz about Aashayein when it was supposed to release in 2008. I totally get it now when they say “picture garam hai (the film is hot)”. But the film got caught between Percept and Reliance and two years later we tried to resuscitate it, it wasn’t as hot any more. Aashayein was always a hard sell because not many people want to deal with death.

The other film, 8x10 (Tasveer) suffered from a chain of events, including not enough time to build PR and buzz. It was released just before the producers-exhibitors strike and the PR of the strike was far better than the PR of the film. Now I know that marketing the film is critical but marketing is driving me dizzy. It’s unfair that I am required to have two skill-sets: film-maker and marketer.

You were considered one of the pioneers of independent cinema in India but the ‘Hyderabad Blues’ generation has grown up...

That mantle was thrust on me by accident; it was not a conscious design to change Indian cinema. I do movies the way I do movies. If a script requires `20 crore, I will go after a star; if a script can be done in `4 crore, I have the liberty to cast who I want. I went through a phase where I did Hinglish films and hence became the face of independent cinema. Now I am making Hindi films so I have been able to reach out to a larger audience post Iqbal. Plus, I am going through a phase of telling stories that are set in rural India and smaller towns. When I was the new kid on the block, there was a lot more interest in me and our films and people were a lot more forgiving.

But not once you become a “veteran”.

What’s next?

A genre change for sure, because I get bored and still want to explore genres like full-blown action, horror and a sort of Iqbal-meets-Hrishi da (filmmaker Hrishikesh Mukherjee) genre. I am also hoping to release Yeh Hausla soon.

Mod will release in theatres on 14 October.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

tured beautifully. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shines.

That scene of an operation gone bad in Hungary looks entirely synthetic. It seems too obviously shot on a set. But then that scene was also poor in the TV series. Maybe it is just one of those scenes best read on paper.

There are several clever visual metaphors in the movie. Some are hard to tell without giving away the plot. But do watch out for the little schoolboy in spectacles. The one who can “look far”. Surely that is Smiley himself?

Another pleasant departure from the TV series is the role of Ricki Tarr. It is a small but important role in the original. Here Tom Hardy plays it with lingering intensity and eagerness. It is a turn that stays with you.

TTSS is a superb film of a superb book. It is a movie that demands much of everyone: maker, actor, viewer.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy released in the UK on 16 September.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

CULTURE L17

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OBITUARY

A brief history of everything

MUSIC MATTERS

SHUBHA MUDGAL

GLORIOUS RECORDINGS

COURTESY NARESH FERNANDES

N

Musician Micky Correa was present when they served poularde soufflé Independence at the Taj Ballroom on 14 August 1947

B Y N ARESH F ERNANDES ···························· ne day in 2007, as the historian Ramachandra Guha and I were making our way to a coffee shop in Colaba, we encountered Micky Correa outside his building on the Causeway. It was most serendipitous. The legendary musician had been the subject of the first conversation I’d had with Guha four years before, when I accosted him at a lecture at Mumbai’s Press Club.

I had just finished reading A Corner of a Foreign Field, Guha’s social history of Indian cricket, and had been gobsmacked by the breadth of his vision and the depth of his research. My admiration reached boiling point when Guha described the celebrations that followed Vijay Hazare’s triple century in the finals of the Pentangular Tournament of 1943. At a reception organized by the Catholic Gymkhana to honour their coreligionist, Guha noted that “three hundred couples took to the floor, swaying to music by Micky Correa’s band…”.

I later sent Guha a photo of Correa’s band, and the historian began taking a generous interest in my research on Indian jazz. Now here, as we sauntered past Esperança building, was Correa himself.

We shook his hand enthusiastically, and peppered him with questions. At first, the 94-yearold musician looked a little befuddled as we swarmed around him, barking, “Vijay Hazare!”, “Pentangular!”

“1943!”. But he soon broke into a sweet smile and said something like, “It was all such a long time ago.”

O

Drum and bass: Members of the Micky Correa band pose for a photograph at the Taj in the mid­1940s.

It may have been a long time ago but Correa’s triumphs are easy to recall, thanks to the thick scrapbook that he and his wife Doreen maintained meticulously over six decades. The Correa family graciously allowed me to make a copy of it a few years ago and I flipped through it on 25 September after returning from Micky Correa’s funeral. He died on 22 September, just days before his 98th birthday. He was still giving music lessons the week before he died.

Correa was a witness to—and participant in—vital moments in India’s history.

One menu card pasted in his scrapbook lists items like delices a l’Hindustan, poularde soufflé Independence and vacherin de peches liberation, culinary creations that were served up in the Taj Ballroom on 14 August 1947. Correa’s band was on the stage to ring in independence, along with an outfit headed by his trumpeterfriend Chic Chocolate. As midnight struck, they launched into a jaunty version of Jana Gana Mana.

The photographs and articles in his album show that Correa, like the jazz music he loved, travelled widely. His family had its roots in the Goan village of Moira, but he was born in Mombasa, Kenya, and grew up

in Karachi. He fell in love with the sound of America when he heard swing on the radio and on thick shellac records. He perfected his art in Mumbai in the ranks of ensembles headed by trumpet player Crickett Smith and pianist Teddy Weatherford, African-American pioneers who had headed to India in the mid-1930s and spent much of their lives on the subcontinent. Smith and Weatherford were mentors to several members of that first generation of Indian jazzmen, teaching them techniques that couldn’t be learnt simply by listening to records.

In 1939, Correa began to lead his own band at the Taj—and stayed there until 1961. He, in turn, became an avuncular figure to a second generation of Indian jazzmen, nurturing such talents as trumpet player Pete D’Mello and saxophonist Norman Mobsby.

When diphtheria weakened his lungs, he began to give music lessons. His students went on to join some of Mumbai’s hottest rock bands.

The musician who was inspired most profoundly by Correa’s ethic is his daughter, Christine, a cutting-edge singer in New York. She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music and now teaches at Columbia’s department of

music. She performs frequently, often in formations headed by her husband, the pianist Frank Carlberg. Her 1993 debut album, Ugly Beauty, featured jazz versions of tunes

by Bappi Lahiri and Kishore Kumar, an ode to her ancestral village titled Moira and a wordless evocation of a train leaving Churchgate station. She’s made several albums since, including Out of the Shadows last year with pianist Ran Blake. It was ecstatically received. “Each note and phrase and metaphor tells a story like a film of life unravelling…,” said one critic.

The album is bursting with a whole range of influences. It is evidence of how Christine, like so many of Correa’s students, took to heart a piece of advice he often repeated. “Be like a shark and listen,” he would say—learn from the people around you, absorb every detail and make it your own. It’s a message that’s as relevant to jazz as to writing non-fiction.

Fernandes’ book, Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age, is scheduled to launch in November. To listen to samples of Micky Correa’s music, visit www.tajmahalfoxtrot.com

estling snugly between the covers of an elegantly designed book titled The Glorious Tradition of the Etawah-Imdadkhani Gharana—The Greats of Seven Generations is a compact disc with 25 very exclusive and rare tracks that are a collector’s delight. Authored by Arvind Parikh, octogenarian sitar guru and leading disciple of the legendary sitar maestro Vilayat Khan sahib, the book offers an “analytical presentation of its (the Etawah-Imdadkhani gharana) glorious traditions evolved during the last two centuries”. The accompanying CD is meant to provide an aural complement to the analysis presented by the author and contains rare gems for those with a fine taste in Hindustani raagdari music. And if that wasn’t bounty enough, the gorgeous archival photographs that adorn the pages of the book make it even more delectable.

There is musical bullion dripping from each pit and bump on that CD, with the 25 representative tracks providing glimpses of the gharana greats, including Imdaad Khan sahib, Enayet Khan sahib, Hafeez Khan and Wahid Khan. Among the 17 tracks by Vilayat Khan sahib, is a rare Miyan ki Todi recorded by the genius at age 9. It may be noted that this track does not contain the Li’l Champ variety of precocious talent that is the flavour of the day, but is an invaluable record of the blossoming of a master musician anchored to his art by the force and gravitas of discipline and taleem (education).

But the one track on this CD that is unique in its charm is track 24, labelled, or rather mislabelled, Raag Thumri. There is, of course, no such raga, and it is rather surprising to see how such an error could creep into a book that otherwise is very evidently a labour of love and dedication. Nevertheless, track 24 has Vilayat Khan sahib teaching none other than Begum Akhtar, the great ghazal and thumri diva, the subtle twists and turns of thumri gayaki. Recorded at the author’s residence, it makes for fascinating listening. Vilayat Khan sahib leads and Begum follows obediently, never stepping out of line or adding an extra flourish to show her prowess, of which she had plenty. A harmonium accompanies the two legends, and makes one wonder who was playing it.

Could it have been Khan sahib himself or was it Begum, who regularly accompanied herself on the harmonium? Possibly only the author could tell, as his voice too is recorded on the track encouraging Begum Akhtar with a “Bahut khoob, bahut achha” as she declares “Khan sahib, thak gaye isse” (Khan sahib, I have tired of this”), possibly meaning that the rigour of the lesson was too demanding and tired her out. The ustad and the diva never move to the actual bol or lyrics of the thumri, Remembered notes: Arvind Parikh. but float effortlessly in the prefatory movements till she falters slightly in repeating a glide that the ustad had enunciated. He points out the mend or glide to her again, and she attempts it repeatedly till she bursts into an infectious giggle, laughing at herself. Sadly, that is where the track is cut short and the listener left high and dry, wondering what happened next. Perhaps a petition could be made to the author to reveal the rest of this unique recording in subsequent editions of his book, which incidentally may not be easy to find in stores.

Possibly the only way to get details of how to acquire a copy would be to write to the International Foundation for Fine Arts, Mumbai.

Write to lounge@livemint.com Write to Shubha at musicmatters@livemint.com

Great stories from the greatest show Revisit the carefully selected gems in Jerry Pinto’s anthology of writings on Bollywood B Y S ANJUKTA S HARMA sanjukta.s@livemint.com

···························· very unapologetic fan of Hindi cinema knows that the magic doesn’t begin with those few restless minutes in the dark theatre before the opening credits roll in, or end with “The End”. The love affairs, the myths spun around heroes and heroines, the exaggerated quirks, the past, are integral to this love. It’s not enough to love Dharmendra the screen god; you need to know how drunk he was when he pleaded with Hema Malini not to marry Jeetendra a day before the marriage was to take place.

The real life stories, interpreted and reinterpreted, matter; they add to the delicious myths.

Author and journalist Jerry Pinto possibly had this in mind when he was gathering material for it and editing Penguin’s spectacular new anthology of

E

The Greatest Show on Earth: Penguin, 452 pages, `499.

writings on Bollywood, The Greatest Show on Earth. It has famous, previously published interviews, excerpts from books, essays, fiction and journalism by authors as diverse as Saadat Hasan Manto and Pritish Nandy—a compendium that every Bollywood fan (and anyone who wants to be initiated to this magnificent circus, if such a person exists in this world) should have in their collection.

Some gems from the book, divided into six parts (The Stars, The Films and the Film-Makers, The Music and the MusicMaker, The Gossip, Ringside Views, The Fiction): Vinod Mehta is smitten, an unapologetic fanboy, when he writes why only one role, that of chhoti bahu in Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, could do justice to Meena Kumari. Rachel Dwyer writes on the founding of Yash Raj Films, Mumbai’s romance factory. Manto writes on the sexual prowess of Sitara, “the dancing tigress from Nepal”. Vijay Anand’s Guide is seen from two views—by Dev Anand, its star, and author R.K. Narayan, whom the film seriously

offended. And there is Nandy’s absurd and riotous encounter with Kishore Kumar, The Man from Khandwa. While reading the book, I called up Nandy to ask what he remembered from that interview. “It was the first time I was meeting Kishore Kumar. There were no introductions before that day. I went with disrespect, just with questions I had to ask him. There was no adulation for who he was and I think that is why it went the way it did.” Kumar was a genius, Nandy says, who respected people who did not go with the purpose of praising him or asking the boring, politically correct questions.

Who gets subjects like Kumar in the age of mindless, overoiled public relations?

The Greatest Show on Earth is a book that is strictly the antithesis of the majority of Indian film books available in the market—glossy, hagiographic coffee-table tomes. If you like your cinema, these are interviews and essays you would like to revisit, recount and pass on to your young cousin or granddaughter.

THE WATER DIVINER Sheba Chhachhi’s ‘The Water Diviner’, conceived in 2008 as a public art project at the Delhi Public Library, is a beautiful, immersive installation with video, books, light boxes, light and water. It draws on the symbolism and importance of water in Indian culture.

The installation is one of the 15 finalists—and the only one from India—at the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation’s Signature Art Prize 2011.

It was picked from among 130 artworks from 24 Asia­Pacific countries and territories which were nominated for their “groundbreaking artistic insight and concept”. The finalists are vying for a Singapore dollars (S$) 45,000 (around `17.08 lakh) Grand Prize, three Jurors’ Choice Awards (S$10,000 each) and a People’s Choice Award (S$10,000 each).

The finalists’ work will be on display at the Singapore Art Museum from 11 November­4 March. Winners will be announced on 17 November.

Voting for the People’s Choice Award opens today. Visit www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/ signatureartprize to vote for Sheba Chhachhi.

Anindita Ghose

Underwater: A video still.

L18 FLAVOURS

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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2011 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM

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KOLKATA CHROMOSOME | SHAMIK BAG

The revival of ‘Balaka’ and ‘Banalata’ They are romantic, but are easy sacrifices for progress. This Durga Puja, two dolled­up trams will be on the roads

T

rams may often be considered rambling relics of the past, but at the Calcutta Tramways Co. (CTC)’s Nonapukur workshop in central Kolkata, the workers are running against time.

They have to finish some of the repairing and recommissioning work by Monday, the first day of Durga Puja: Three newly refurbished trams are expected to be commissioned and repair work completed on old ones.

One of the three is ready; the two others should be ready during the four-day festival.

Despite the pressure—it’s often compared with a mini railway factory by senior employees of CTC, a state government undertaking—there are none of the fumes or diesel spills that scar conventional motor workshops. The unpolluted air attests to the fact that Asia’s oldest surviving electric-operated tram system continues to be Kolkata’s most environmentfriendly mode of travel.

Under a large factory shed, surrounded by the wreckage of phased-out trams, stand Balaka and Banalata. They wear fresh colours, their spotless glass windows are draped with lacy curtains, the thickly cushioned seats look inviting, the small speakers are ready to channelize soft music, CTC employee Ujjal Dhar’s line drawings of a cityscape reflecting the era of horse-drawn trams decorate the walls, and red and green mats cover the floors. Amid the grey grimness of the workshop, the single-bogey Balaka, which can be driven from both ends, and the double-bogey Banalata—with their feminine Bengali names— stand out like brides-in-waiting.

During the four-day Durga Puja festival, Balaka and Banalata will roll out of the workshop “as a Puja treat for common people”, says Shantilal Jain, CTC chairman. Though both trams have been part of the CTC

stable for many years and have been used for film and commercial shoots, this will be the first time the general public will get an opportunity to ride them, for a nominal price. They will run for the four Puja days.

Jain did not give a clear idea of post-Puja plans for Banalata and Balaka but did mention that the two “luxury trams” will be used and seen more often.

“This, I thought, will be the best way to make people aware about the heritage and historical value of trams,” explains Jain.

At the CTC main office in the Dalhousie area, the mood is upbeat in the labyrinthine corridors of the old British-era building. Here, as well as at the Nonapukur workshop, senior employees are not as despondent about the future as in an earlier decade, when the idea of removing trams from Kolkata’s streets was actively considered.

By then, tram services had already been discontinued permanently in Kanpur, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai.

Despite being considered anachronistic in an age of speedier transportation, the only reason trams have survived in Kolkata is that any news of tram

removal is immediately countered by “an undercurrent of discontent” among people, says Debashish Bhattacharyya, a tram activist and deputy director of the Kolkata-based Indian Institute of Chemical Biology.

“Other than city support groups and environmentalists, our main backing comes from senior citizens for whom trams are a habit,” adds Aniruddha Bhattacharjee, personnel manager at CTC. But it has been a precarious ride. Tram tracks were the first to go whenever infrastructural development came calling by way of flyovers, underground and overhead Metro railway projects and an overhauling of drainage and sewer lines. The dedicated corridors for trams were dereserved to make way for wider roads. Currently, there are just 10 fully operational routes. Some “stalled” routes, where tram services were discontinued for civic and infrastructure work, still have tracks.

“The united chorus of the police, transport and municipal authorities has been for removing trams or to create a situation where people can’t use it,” says Bhattacharyya, who filed a Right

to Information (RTI) application about the closed BallygungeGariahat tram route a year ago. It is yet to be answered. “Most such decisions are taken by senior police officers who have never been on a tram or would like to be seen on one,” he adds.

CTC says it has a total of 268 trams, and about 80 of them are on the road. In 2007-08, there were 319 trams in the CTC stable, according to the Statistical Handbook, 2008, compiled by the West Bengal government. The number of routes is down from 29 in 2003 to about 10 now, while passenger count has plunged, to just around 30,000 users a day today. “In 2010, our budget deficit was for `300 crore and every month the state government has to give a subsidy of `12 crore for salaries of CTC employees,” Jain says.

So why is the mood upbeat?

It’s because of the news that the new state government is not keen on phasing out trams. In recent years, the CTC, strapped for money, has completely remodelled some of its condemned cars with semi-transparent fibreglass ceilings and sides, fancy lighting, and comfortable, moulded chairs—spending, on an average, `13-14 lakh on each. These are used for daily passenger services.

Twenty-two refurbished trams are already operational. And another three should be ready to run next week alongside wooden-body trams dating back to the 1940s and 1950s. The CTC chairman expects a total of around 130 trams to be operational this month.

The August issue of Tramways

& Urban Transit, the international light rail magazine, has indicated “a modest revival” of Kolkata’s trams against a backdrop of growing “green movements” clamouring for the revival of tramways in cities across the world.

Jain shares some of his plans—from organizing an international seminar on tramways in the city to reintroducing trams on “stalled” routes, utilizing the sprawling tram depots occupying prime city land for commercial purposes, and having only a single class on trams. Currently, CTC trams have two classes: noisily whirling ceiling fans and a 50-paise ticket rate difference separating first-class from second-class.

Both Balaka and Banalata date back to the days when trams were representative of class and struggle in Kolkata. For much of the pre-independence period of fervent nationalistic activism in the city, the 1880-established CTC was seen as a metaphor for the British ruling class and consequently, tram cars were often vandalized. In later decades, with the advent of radical Communist politics, any hike in fares would result in the carriages being damaged. In the 1950s, the Communists organized a Tram Fare Enhancement Resistance Committee. At one point, 13 trams were torched on Kolkata’s streets in a single day

by Left activists protesting a single-anna fare increase.

Banalata was retired after it was scorched by political workers during a street protest near south Kolkata’s Charu Market in the late-1960s, says S.S. Ghosh, works

Chug along: (clockwise from above) Balaka at the Nonapukur workshop; inside Balaka; and a workshop where the old parts of trams are recycled. manager at the Nonapukur workshop. It was here, after decades of neglect, that the tram got a steel body, and another shot at life, in 2002. Its old number, 568, still links it to its past.

Yet it’s the name that brings up yet another close association— one that is tied romantically and aesthetically with the city. The leading characters in Bengali literature and films have gone to work in trams, and have fallen in love in them.

While Balaka borrows its name from Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s collection of poems, Banalata references the iconic poem Banalata Sen by the poet Jibanananda Das, who was killed by a speeding tram near Deshapriya Park in 1954.

“Worldwide, trams and light rail are the only sustainable transport systems. Private cars and buses lead to a saturation, are costlier to maintain and cause immense air pollution. Fuel prices will also increase further.

Even the underground Metro system is expensive to build and operate and doesn’t have the penetrability of trams or light rail systems,” says tram crusader Bhattacharyya. “Though no honest effort has been made yet to revive trams in Kolkata, I’m optimistic. My opinion is based on a future necessity.”

Write to lounge@livemint.com