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actor-vidya-balan-interview

Fri Apr 12 11:50:21 IST 2024

Interview/ Vidya Balan, actor

In an industry obsessed with fillers and filters, calling someone a chameleon could invite ire or scorn. But how else do you describe Vidya Balan, the actor? Not that she would mind. For, she would rather we talked about her body of work than her body.

Balan breathed nuance into Lolita, the lead in Parineeta (2005), bringing the innocent yet playful and resilient character to life. That was only her beginning in Bollywood. It brought her critical acclaim. Commercial success followed the next year with Lage Raho Munna Bhai. But if one were to gauge the true impact of her powerhouse performances in her nearly two decade-long career, it would be in the way she has redefined female characters in the Hindi film industry―she headlined films at a time when heroes called the shots, be it in Ishqiya (2010), No One Killed Jessica (2011), The Dirty Picture (2011), or Kahaani (2012). The Dirty Picture, based on the life of south Indian actor Silk Smitha, stands out―not for the ‘boldness’ of its theme, but for the sheer audacity with which she played the character. She piled on kilos for the role, but shed inhibitions about the ideal Bollywood body. Balan, who is currently shooting for Bhool Bhulaiya 3, made body positivity cool long before the term entered the ‘woke’ generation’s lexicon.

And, it shows even now when she talks about her favourite garment―the sexy sari. “… the only garment that embraces you and doesn’t expect you to fit into it,” says the award-winning actor in an exclusive interview with THE WEEK while promoting her upcoming Do Aur Do Pyaar. Excerpts:

Q\ Do Aur Do Pyaar has built a lot of expectation among your fans. What is the film about?

A/ Do Aur Do Pyaar is getting released on April 19 in the theatres, and I urge all to come and watch it. Choti muh badi baat hogi, lekin humne ek bahut mazzedar film banayi hai (It might seem like too big a claim but we have made a very entertaining film). It has romance. I am a hopeless romantic and I thoroughly enjoyed doing the film. It has lovely music and lovely actors― there is Ileana D’Cruz, Pratik Gandhi and Sendhil Ramamurthy with me. I am waiting for April 19.

Q\ How was it sharing screen with the three actors?

A/ I have had the good fortune of working with very good actors always. It is fantastic because acting is about reacting. So, when you are faced with a good actor, you up your game. So, I think whether it is Pratik, Sendhil, Ileana―they are all superb and I enjoy working with them. On the sets, we used to trouble Pratik a lot. There were so many women on the set. We just wouldn't allow him to talk. After a while, he said he might forget how to talk. With Sendhil, it was the opposite. All the women were crushing on him and were only waiting to see what he says! It was funny with both of them. And of course, Ileana and I were enjoying every moment of it. It has been fun. It is always great to work with good actors.

Q\ Sendhil Ramamurthy, an American actor of Indian origin, is a sensation. How was it filming romantic scenes with him?

I will just say, ‘Wait and watch!’ But yes, the film is full of romance. It is unexpected and lots of fun. And there is not just one angle of romance. I will leave it at that. With Sendhil being so good looking, naturally romance happens!

Q\ You still haven’t revealed much about the film.

A/ At this point, I cannot reveal much. My producer, Tanuj Garg, is here! (laughs)

Q\ The film’s soundtrack has a great mix, from big commercial names like Lucky Ali, Armaan Malik, Vishal Dadlani to indie ones like Lost Stories, The Local Train and When Chai Met Toast.

A/ I think the story is so unpredictable that the music also had to be that. We did not want music from any one composer. Shirsha Guha Thakurtha, the director, has a very keen sense of storytelling and she brings in a lot of fun. And music is Tanuj's forte. He is very passionate about it. I have done Tumhari Sulu (2017) with him before this and that film also had lovely music. I think it is a big strength, especially because it is a romantic comedy.

Q\ Is the film a bold take on marriage and modern relationships?

A/ The film is about modern relationships, but it is not a bold statement. It is just a sneak-peek into what happens between four people. It is teasing at some level. It teases your imagination. It is real, but it is fun and commercial.

Q\ Among all your films, we all have a favourite film. Which is yours?

A/ Oh! That is very tough to say. But as an audience, I enjoy the lighter films more. As I usually end up doing a lot of intense roles and films as an actor, I am actually very thrilled to have got a film like Do Aur Do Pyaar. But if you ask me which character is closest to you, I would say, ‘Sulu’ (from Tumhari Sulu) and also my personality traits in Kahaani. I would pick these two films, and even Shakuntala Devi (2020) and my role of ‘Silk’ in The Dirty Picture. Don't ask me how similar I feel to Silk and in what way! I loved playing the role of Silk.

What’s the kind of homework you usually do before shooting a film?

A/ I sit with the director and I pore over the script, ask questions. If there is a skill to be acquired, I do that. For every film that I need to drive, I relearn driving because I don't enjoy driving a lot and get very tense if I have any driving shots. If my character demands learning a new language, I will. For Shakuntala, I learnt a bit of Vedic mathematics. But don’t ask me anything about maths, I don’t remember it (laugh). Only my short-term memory is good.

Q\ You are considered a serious actor. Does that affect the kind of roles you are offered?

A/ It is actually unfortunate because I am actually not a serious person. I feel I only do my work seriously. But I do think that a lot of women-oriented films have a serious tone to them. I pick up these roles because stories about women are so new to cinema. But I also think that is changing, especially with films like Do Aur Do Pyaar, where you see women having very prominent roles that are fun and exciting. The characters are normal like any of us.

Q\ You have a unique style and are often spotted draped in a sari. What’s behind your love for saris?

A/ I absolutely think that the sari is the sexiest garment ever. It (the choice of sari) just depends on your mood. If you are going to a temple, you wear the sari a certain way. If you are going to a party, you wear it another way. If you are coming to work, it is draped differently…. I think it is the most versatile garment and the only garment that embraces you and doesn't expect you to fit into it, which is why I love the sari.

Q\ If Vidya Balan is not shooting, what is holding her attention?

A/ A lot of people who know me tell me that I hibernate in between films. I don't get out of the house as much as possible. I spend a lot of time with my husband and my family, just staying at home and doing things I like. While I am home, you can find me sleeping a lot, watching, reading and relaxing or even meeting people.

tca-raghavan-views-the-story-of-the-independence-movement-through-the-prism-of-friendship-love-and-loyalty

Sat Apr 06 17:25:42 IST 2024

In his new book, diplomat-turned-historian T.C.A. Raghavan offers a different view of India’s most well-known story―the independence struggle. Till now, notwithstanding the well-known bromances between big leaders, the story of the independence movement has never really been told through the prism of personal friendships. Raghavan does just that in Circles of Freedom: Friendship, Love and Loyalty in the Indian National Struggle.

At its heart, the book is about three men and their friendship with poet Sarojini Naidu―lawyer-politicians Asaf Ali, who became the first Indian ambassador to the United States, and Syed Mahmud, who became deputy minister of external affairs, and journalist Syud Hossain, India’s first ambassador to Egypt.

“I don’t think anyone was ever was blind to the fact that they were not in the foreground [of the freedom struggle],” says Raghavan. “The question I was asking was not about the big political issue or even about the big Hindu-Muslim issue, because those, of course, are there. The question I ask [is about] people and their personal feelings―love, friendship, loyalty. How was that part of the big political struggle?”

Naidu’s feisty, fearless and sometimes even flirty relationship with the men form the circle through which Raghavan views the politics of the time. “Radiant and restless, full of sparkling life and laughter”, is how Asaf describes Naidu, a mother of four in her thirties. “They (the men),” says Raghavan, “came from cloistered backgrounds, and nothing in their social experience prepared them to meet someone like her.”

Naidu soon became their guide and expanded their world. A fierce proponent of Hindu-Muslim unity, she did more than just preach. “I didn’t know the extent to which she invested in her Muslim friends,” says Raghavan.

The book offers a glimpse into her inner world, which included friends such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah. (There was a rumour that she and Jinnah were lovers, but she eventually became a “pillar of emotional support to Ruttie”―aka Rattanbai, Jinnah’s wife.) There are mentions of Naidu’s illness, which still remains a mystery. In one of her letters to her children, the 11-year-old Ranadheera in England, Naidu writes, “You know, a family is like a piece of machinery. Each separate part must be in good order… for the machinery to keep going.”

From the Khilafat movement to the partition of India, Raghavan steers his tale through the undercurrents of religious polarisation in the freedom movement. He also focuses on an unusual and ‘explosive’ marriage―between Asaf and activist Aruna in 1928 that, Raghavan writes, prompted an “explosion of political opposition”. “There were very few [such marriages], and they were not in this class,” he says. “Asaf Ali was no Jinnah. He was not even Motilal Nehru when he was in the struggling middle class.”

The Hindu Mahasabha threatened to harm the couple. “Apart from the obvious religious divide and the considerable difference [between them] in age, what was unusual was that this was not a union following a sudden infatuation or dramatic falling in love, but seemingly carefully thought through by both parties,” writes Raghavan.

Even Naidu, he says, was a bit shocked by the marriage. “It comes across in one or two of her letters,” he says. “‘It will not be a success,’ Naidu told Syud in 1928.”

Yet, the marriage held. Aruna emerged out of Asaf’s shadow to become a revolutionary in her own right, and refused to accompany him to Washington, even though Gandhi suggested that it was her “duty” to do so.

They also never had any children. “I don’t know why,” says Raghavan. “We can only take a guess. Somebody who worked with Aruna speculated that it was because she didn’t want to have a child. Because she felt it would be a huge burden on the child, given the Hindu-Muslim issues and the fact that the child would be largely [in a] Muslim ecosystem. But we don’t know that. Aruna does not appear to have left any kind of memoir papers.”

Raghavan brings to life the chaos and the complexity of the time―the breathless fight for free-India, the attempts to bring about Hindu-Muslim unity, the pressures of religious fervour on the freedom movement, and the impacts all these had on personal lives.

But in the age of the big, fat history book, Circles of Freedom has very much an offbeat, arthouse feel. For this is a compelling story of the lives that are often just out of focus.

The book is also littered with delicious details. When Asaf and Syed are locked up in Ahmednagar jail with such leaders as Jawaharlal Nehru, J.B Kripalani, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Vallabhbhai Patel, a jailer brings the inmates bread and butter in a thali. This sends Maulana into a “towering rage”, writes Raghavan. Tea was refused unless it was served in cups and on trays.

There is also the story of the almost-marriage of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to Syud. There was an elopement, but Gandhi and Motilal Nehru quickly stepped in. Under the watchful gaze of Gandhi, Pandit is packed off to the Sabarmati Ashram.

There have been many explorations of the independence movement, but Raghavan’s is the first to present it through the prism of friendship, love and loyalty. His protagonists may not be icons, but they are still worthy heroes. Read the book.

Circles of Freedom: Friendship, Love and Loyalty in the Indian National Struggle

By T.C.A. Raghavan

Published by Juggernaut

Price Rs799; pages 408

never-never-land-namita-gokhale-book-review

Sat Apr 06 17:22:27 IST 2024

Never Never Land is slim, but crams within its 176 pages a universe of friendship, love, family and belonging. Evocative, elegant and hugely satisfying, the book weaves a story of timelessness in a place where time stops.

Iti Arya―middle-aged, single, a freelance editor and an aspiring novelist―moves to The Dacha in the Kumaon to live with her grandmother, Badi Amma Lila, and Rosinka Paul Singh. It is where she spent her childhood and was happy. At the heart of the book is the relationship between her grandmother and Rosinka. “Friendship can be a good substitute for love,” writes Iti. “You need courage for both.” Her grandmother worked with Rosinka as a housemaid till she was “elevated to a Pahadi lady-in-waiting”. Rosinka refers to her as Lily. Their friendship―with its secrets, camaraderie, silence and its complexity―propels the book. There is, of course, an inequality as Rosinka suddenly switches the power equation to mistress. Despite the undercurrents, the ease of the relationship is at contrast with Iti’s own friendships, which are accessed digitally.

As Iti, unable to work on her new novel, chronicles the memories of the two women, their past gets entangled with the present and with folk tales of the mountains as well as Russian artist Nicholas Roerich and his paintings. And, Gokhale conjures up this shadowy, dream-like world from ageing memory as well as different perspectives evocatively. There are secrets that lie buried as well as relationships unresolved―Iti and her mother, her own failed romances and the appearance of Nina.

It is at The Dacha that she encounters Nina―a Gen Z, with straight bleach blonde hair, who refers to herself as Badi Amma’s granddaughter. This Iti knows is not true. And getting to the bottom of this ‘truth’ is another layer. “Every relationship cannot be so easily categorised,” says Rosinka. And it is in this lack of clarity, in the margins of messiness that life, love and friendship exist. It is a world dominated by women―those who have lived their lives and are unwilling to disappear quietly.

But the book is also about the mountains. When she was young, Iti imagined the mountains as wise men with long beards who spoke to her. When she told Badi Amma about them speaking, she told her, “You must listen carefully when the mountains speak to you.... They don’t speak to everyone.”

Gokhale is a writer who has listened to the stories of the Himalayas, bringing to the fore their magic, mysticism, mystery and their majesty. Never Never Land is no different. The mountains, a constant in Gokhale’s canvas, loom large over the story.

In Gokhale’s last novel―The Blind Matriarch―born out of and one that chronicles the pandemic, the main character is a woman at the end of her life. It was a book about dying. In Never Never Land―like J.M. Barrie’s fairytale utopia―Rosinka, over a 100, and Badi Amma, who is 90 something, may be frail but they are far from fading. It is very much a novel about life and living, and being alive.

Grab a book―and savour it―and go back again.

Never Never Land

By Namita Gokhale

Published by Speaking Tiger

Price Rs499; Pages 176

inside-an-exhibition-of-bengal-modernist-gobardhan-ash-s-artworks

Sat Apr 06 17:18:35 IST 2024

A new exhibition in Kolkata offers a retrospective of the pioneer Indian modernist artist Gobardhan Ash, offering a glimpse into four decades of his work from 1929 to 1969. Curated by Brijeshwari Kumari Gohil and Harsharan Bakshi, the exhibition showcases more than 100 artworks, featuring Ash’s diverse creative range, including sketches, landscapes, self-portraits, portraits, rural Bengal scenes, the iconic Avatar Series from the late 1940s, vibrant pastels from his outdoor studies, and his poignant Children Series, capturing the myriad moods of children.

“Our approach was twofold: to underscore Ash’s dedication to each phase and to illuminate the thematic evolution evident in his oeuvre,” said Bakshi. “As such, the exhibition primarily adopts a thematic approach, celebrating Ash’s enduring commitment across various periods of artistic exploration.”

In a year-long research on Ash and his body of work, the curators uncovered the remarkable diversity within each decade, reflecting distinct creative phases in his artistic journey. “Our aim has been to highlight each of his themes, styles and experimentations during these four decades,” explained Gohil. “These span from his time being part of and forming various groups and movements. It is a diverse portfolio, ranging from social realism to creative expressionism and experimentation.”

Rural Bengal is one of the main themes of Ash’s landscape paintings. His famine works in shades of dark and pale brown were painted in different phases in 1943. A skilful portrait artist, he depicted human faces in both line and colour. His Children Series―a collection of 16 oil paintings and 45 sketches painted in oil between 1957 and 1967―stemmed from his fondness for children. His avant-garde Avatar Series, exhibited at the Joint Show of the Calcutta Group and the Progressive Artists’ Group in 1950, inspired experimentation and dialogue.

“The retrospective consists of a world with many worlds, containing philosophies, political beliefs, social realities and visions of an idyllic society,” commented producer, publicist and curator Ina Puri. “It focuses critical attention on one of the most remarkable Bengal modernists of the last millennium, who spent his lifetime restlessly exploring different genres, never content to rest on his laurels for long.”

Born in 1907 in Begampur, West Bengal, Ash hailed from a simple family, living with his parents, three sisters and three brothers. Since childhood, he had a penchant for painting. In 1926, he joined the Government Art School in Calcutta, where he met Jamini Roy for the first time in 1929. Though he left the art school the following year, Ash’s creative life was shaped more by his experiences and relationships than by academic credentials. In his early years, Ash was defiant of the then-British way of teaching art. “Ash forged his own path and did not accept the British academic way of teaching art,” said Gohil. “He was also soaking in what he was witnessing around him during this time period, an important chapter in Indian history as a whole.”

Further, Ash embraced social realism, which is evident in works like Village Girl of Bengal, depicting rural life's realities with the utmost sensitivity. “Ash’s introspective self-portraits, empathetic social realism works, and versatile depictions of old Kolkata, rural Bengal, and animals exemplify his keen observation and artistic versatility,” said Bakshi.

In 1931, he trained at the Madras School of Art under the mentorship of painter and sculptor Devi Prasad Roy Chowdhury. The same year, he played a pivotal role in founding the Young Artists’ Union.

“While Ash considered Atul Bose to be his mentor, the prolific art practitioner had occasions to work alongside some of the most distinguished practitioners of his times when he started The Art Rebel Centre in 1933 with the purpose of making art that was fearless, anti-sentimental and bold; and later, when he joined The Calcutta Group, with Gopal Ghose, Nirode Mazumdar, Abani Sen, Zainul Abedin and Ramkinker Baij among others,” informed Puri. Though short lived, the Art Rebel Centre served its purpose, giving rise to several other larger factions and groups by the 1940s and paving the way for Ash’s artistic mastery to come forward, added Gohil.

“Alongside his peers, he drew inspiration from the common man, a labourer, a farmer toiling in the fields or stable hands, later moving to the turbulent time of the Bengal famine, painting powerful compositions of the starving multitudes thronging the city’s streets begging for a little bowl of rice water,” elaborated Puri. “Apart from these searing works are beautiful portraits of the family, self and spiritual leaders like Sarada Maa and Ramakrishna Paramahansa.”

Throughout his journey, Ash delved into self-portraits, showcasing his evolving artistic identity and mastery of techniques like cross-hatching. “There is a level of intricacy and depth in Ash’s self-portraits where he journals his own identity and its development,” said Gohil. “Given how frequently he dwelled into making self-portraits, it is almost as if he is also exploring different artistic styles of communicating, reflecting and building a visual diary for himself.”

Beyond his artistic contributions, the comprehensive showcase also highlights Ash’s enduring legacy as a mentor and influencer within the Indian art community. “As a dedicated teacher, he established the Fine Art Mission Free Art School in Begumpur in 1956, driven by a profound desire to impart his creative knowledge to future generations of artists,” said Bakshi. “He generously provided art supplies to his students, fostering a nurturing environment for artistic growth.”

In the realm of art history, Ash stands out as a figure of profound significance, and this exhibition bears testimony to this. “Ash embraced his love for his surroundings,” said Gohil. “Several of these human and natural observations not only depict his love for nature and human life, but they are also a way of expressing the human predicament, the struggles. He is journaling his surroundings with these works, but creating statements in the process. There is a strong sense of spirituality to these emotive works.”

‘The Prinseps Exhibition: Gobardhan Ash RETROSPECTIVE’ will continue till April 21 at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity.

when-top-dogs-of-pop-and-rock-came-together-to-help-ethiopians-four-decades-ago

Sat Apr 06 15:32:08 IST 2024

When you're down and out, there seems no hope at all

But if you just believe there's no way we can fall

Well, well, well, well let us realise

Oh, that a change can only come

When we stand together as one, yeah, yeah, yeah...

THEY STOOD TOGETHER despite their gargantuan egos, creative differences and even adulation for each other, to pull an all-nighter. They tried, improvised and perfected their lines. And they made a change, worth $63 million, for the famine-affected people in Ethiopia. ‘We Are The World'―penned by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, and released in March 1985―was a fervid appeal to human compassion and decency, a call to action like no other, as the people behind it knew that a beautiful song has the power to unite the world. Jackson called it “a love song to inspire concern about a faraway place close to home”.

Between 1983 and 1985, a famine in Ethiopia, caused partly by drought and partly by a debilitating civil war, is estimated to have killed between four lakh to five lakh people (according to some accounts, the death toll is about 10 lakh) and displaced more than 20 lakh people. The desperation and deaths, which reminded people of the kifu qen (evil days) or ‘Great Famine’ that happened a century earlier, decimating nearly up to one-third of Ethiopia's population, moved the world to tears.

Singer, activist and The Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof, who learned about the “biblical famine” from a BBC news report by Michael Buerk, had, in December 1984, brought together a charity supergroup―Band Aid―of predominantly UK and Irish singers that included the likes of Paul McCartney and Sting, and came out with a single, 'Do They Know It's Christmas?', to raise money for the victims of the famine.

Inspired by 'Do They Know It's Christmas?', civil rights activist and singer Harry Belafonte wanted to do something similar―bring together the finest American musicians and make them perform a song to raise money for the Ethiopians in distress. Belafonte pitched the idea to Lionel Richie through Ken Kragen, who was a music producer and manager for some of the popular stars then. In the Netflix documentary, The Greatest Night in Pop, Richie recalls being approached by Belafonte, “‘We have white folks saving black folks. We don’t have black folks saving black folks. We need to save our own people from hunger.’ He was trying to get us, the younger group, involved in what was happening in Africa. I said, ‘Of course.’” Richie roped in Jackson, who was excited about the project. Soon, Kenny Rogers was on board. Kragen initially thought of having about 10 to 15 artists, but eventually the number swelled to over 40.

From Richie to Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Rogers, James Ingram, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Dionne Warwick, Willie Nelson, Al Jarreau, Bruce Springsteen, Kenny Loggins, Steve Perry, Daryl Hall, Huey Lewis, Cyndi Lauper, Kim Carnes, Bob Dylan and Ray Charles, the recording room from where the song of collective empathy arose had the greatest musicians of the generation. Except Prince. But then the isolationist that Prince was, it would have been a miracle bigger than 'We Are the World' if he agreed to be in a room full of people, which included Jackson with whom he was having an ongoing professional feud.

Belafonte, Kragen and Quincy Jones, who set up the greatest lineup ever of superstar singers―USA for Africa, knew that most of them would be present at the 1985 American Music Awards on January 28. And so, this turned out to be the day the marvel that 'We Are The World' was born. Those who would not be present at the event, like Springsteen, too, managed to reach A&M Studios by the time the awards show, hosted by Richie, ended.

Not that all was rosy in the recording room, despite the note outside the door that read 'Check Your Ego at the Door'. Legendary loner Dylan was visibly uncomfortable; Sheila E. thought she was brought in only to charm Prince in; Cyndi Lauper reportedly said, “It sounds like a Pepsi commercial”; there was a debate over the word 'brighter'; and Waylon Jennings walked out midway after Stevie Wonder suggested that a line be sung in Swahili. As time passed, the realisation that they had just one night to pull off this wonder crept in. And they did just that. Setting aside their style, aesthetic and creative differences, (and in Lauper's case, her ornaments as well because they were jingling too much), they made a song that stayed on top at Billboard Hot 100 for a month and won four Grammys in 1986.

As the song turned 40 in March 2024, a group of rock musicians and music aficionados, under the banner of All For Rock (AFR), came together to pay tribute to this timeless and iconic anthem of solidarity. AFR, formed by Joe Peter―a singer who was part of bands like Exodus and Evergreen in the late 1990s, and who currently is a music/theatre director with GEMS school in Dubai―and two fellow music enthusiasts in 2003, was a collective of musicians who swear by the belief that ‘music is the best intoxicant’. However, the fraternity became defunct after Joe moved to the UK and got busy with other bands there. More than two decades after its initial launch, Joe, with a group of like-minded musicians―T.J. Gopinath, Suraj Pallan, James Peter, Moncy Francis and Alisha Mathew―decided to revive the community, and do it with a bang, by paying tribute to 'We Are The World'.

Joe tells THE WEEK that it was The Greatest Night in Pop that gave him the idea of a tribute. “I thought it would be a great idea to bring together the stalwarts of rock music in Kochi and Kerala to pay a tribute,” he says. “We had our doubts, but it was easier than expected.” The collective of musicians―Vinod Varma, Joe Peter, Darshan Shankar, Rose Johny, Alisha Mathew, Isabel Maria George, Ancel Edwin, Captain B.K. Iyer (GoGo Samy), George Peter and V.J. Traven―released a cover tribute to 'We Are The World' on March 24, at Kochi's Gokulam Park Convention Centre on an evening filled with the untamed energy of rock and roll.

“‘We Are The World’ holds a lot of memories. We look up to all these singers, and all of them on one stage together, it is quite a jewel of a moment,” says George Peter, lead singer of the band 13AD.

Nearly four decades after its release, the song continues to be etched into the collective memories of music aficionados across the world, transcending time and space, and embodying values of altruism, hope and universal brotherhood.

how-beauty-entrepreneur-diipa-bullerkhosla-stays-on-top-of-her-game

Sat Mar 30 16:26:16 IST 2024

Going through Diipa Büller-Khosla’s Instagram feed is like sitting in the front row of a glitzy couture show. There is Büller-Khosla in a red Rahul Mishra ruffled number at the Lakme Fashion Week; posing with a Burberry shield bag; modelling for Valentino at its first Mumbai store; wearing designer Hamda Al Fahim at a Cartier exhibition in Abu Dhabi; clad in ski gear at Cervinia, Italy. And going by the comments and likes of her 2.1 million followers, it is not just us who is blinded by all the dazzle.

And yet, despite seeming to live within the pages of a Harper’s Bazaar issue, Büller-Khosla is not perfect, and this combination of verve and vulnerability is what is so appealing about her. In one post, for example, she details the non-glamorous aspects of her life. Her biggest insecurity, she says, is the post-partum stretch-marks on her belly. No matter what she achieves in her life, she thinks it is never enough. She struggles with balance. “If I am working, I feel guilty for not spending time with my family, and if I’m enjoying life I feel like I’m not working hard enough,” she says.

Büller-Khosla was one of the first to get into the social media game, long before the words ‘influencer’, ‘digital native’ and ‘content creator’ had entered the public imagination. Although she earned her bachelor’s degree in international human rights law and interned at the UN, it was while doing another internship at one of the first influencer agencies in Europe that she really came into her own. What is admirable is not that she became one of the first influencers in the world at a time when Instagram was just starting, but that she stayed as one. The early bird might catch the worm, but can it keep it?

What followed for Büller-Khosla was an illustrious list of ‘firsts’, when she dared to wade into uncharted waters. In 2018, she became the first global influencer to walk the Cannes red carpet. In 2020, she became the first Indian to address the British House of Commons. In 2022, she became the first Indian female influencer to speak at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos. She also became the first Indian influencer to speak at Harvard Business School (She was invited to speak on ‘diversity in the beauty industry’). In 2023, her beauty label, ind¯e wild (which she founded in 2022), became the first to host a red carpet at Cannes, where she teamed up with singer Raja Kumari and influencer/actor Dolly Singh to celebrate South Asian women at the forefront of change.

Within nine months of founding inde wild, which is based on the concept of Ayurvedistry (combining Ayurveda and chemistry), it had launched in four countries―the US, the UK, Canada and India. Some of their innovative products include the AM vitamin C serum and a lip balm in which they have used biotechnology to mimic ghee and make it vegan. The company has grown 200 per cent to 300 per cent since its founding. It will soon become the first Indian brand to be available in Sephora―the French personal care retailer―in the US and the UK. “I believe it was destiny that pushed me to create the brand,” says Büller-Khosla. “My mother is a doctor and is interested in Ayurveda. When I had really bad acne for about 10 years of my life, it was a combination of Ayurveda and chemistry that solved it. In the beauty market, I did not see any brands combining both. So, that is what I did with ind¯e wild. Since then, things have been crazy, and products are getting sold out.”

She credits her mother―who invested €300 for her wardrobe when she first started out as an influencer―with her success. “My mom is my mentor, confidante, and best friend,” she says. “Being able to do business with my mom is so special because, when I was working as an influencer, I was not able to see her much. Maybe once a year, and this made me sad. But now, working together―bringing her hair oil to the world, and sharing her recipes―has been special. I think our community views it that way, too. The brand feels homely―it is by a mother-daughter team.”

And when the online space gave her so much, she wanted to give something back, and that’s how she started the NGO, Post for Change, with her husband Oleg, a former Dutch diplomat, in 2019. Post for Change mainly addresses gender issues by harnessing the power of social media. It has partnered with celebs like Manish Malhotra, Diana Penty and Manushi Chhillar for the Red Dot campaign, to dispel period myths. It has also worked with UNICEF to create awareness on menstrual hygiene. “I have, from a young age, observed how girls were treated differently from boys, be it at home or school,” she says. “When I became a content creator and started gaining traction, I quickly realised that there was so much power in what I was doing. So why was I not using it to do some good? Also, my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, was working as a UN diplomat. We thought about bringing our worlds together. And we started Post for Change, which is social media for change, where we work with NGOs, talk to influencers, and spread awareness online.”

When she is not jet-setting around the world, Büller-Khosla stays in Amsterdam with her husband, three-year-old daughter Dua, and pet pooches Kubii and Bimbo. Days are spent cycling, rowing, or visiting friends. Or simply sitting by the window and watching the kaleidoscopic life by the canal outside their home. For now, Diipa Büller-Khosla is offline.

actor-director-prithviraj-sukumaran-interview-the-goat-life-aadujeevitham

Thu Mar 28 17:34:38 IST 2024

Interview/ Prithviraj Sukumaran, actor-director

The name Prithviraj means ‘one who rules the world’. Actor-director Prithviraj Sukumaran dreams of the Indian film industry, particularly his home industry Mollywood, ruling the global entertainment landscape with quality content.

The 41-year-old, who has been in lead roles for 22 years, is considered a great visionary in Mollywood. He has been a successful director, playback singer, producer, distributor and action choreographer.

His latest film, The Goat Life, directed by the National Award-winning director Blessy, takes Malayalam cinema to a global audience. An international coproduction involving companies in India and the US, The Goat Life is an adaptation of the bestselling Malayalam novel Aadujeevitham by Benyamin. The novel is based on the experiences of Najeeb, a Malayali labourer who was forced into slavery as a goatherd on a secluded, Saudi Arabian farm.

Prithviraj spoke to THE WEEK about The Goat Life and its grand vision, and the struggles he and Blessy had to go through to complete the shoot. Excerpts:

Q\ The Goat Life is based on a novel about the experiences of Najeeb. Did you talk to him before undertaking the film? What insights did he share?

A\ The first time I spoke to Najeeb was after the last shot of the film. He was on location that day. So I did the final shot, the director said cut and wrap, and that is when I walked behind the camera and spoke to him for the first time. We recorded and shot the conversation, and I think it should be releasing very soon. My interpretation of Najeeb is largely dependent on the book and Blessy’s vision of the story.

Q\ As a filmmaker yourself, how would you assess Blessy’s efforts in bringing the book to the screen?

A\ I don’t think anybody else could have done it better. Blessy is a truly gifted filmmaker. The kind of time and conviction he has thrown behind this project―taking 16 years of one’s life to do the best version of the film that he wanted to do―is just incredible.

But one thing Blessy was acutely aware of is that you cannot make the entire book into a film. The book is narrated in micro-detail. And if you set out to make that entire narrative into a feature film, you would probably end up with a nine-hour film. We should also be aware of the fact that each person who read the book would have imagined his own world and his own Najeeb. So the effort and the idea was to make the audience feel what Najeeb must have felt in those days. So the dots are connected through his emotional arc, and that is what Blessy wanted to do and that is what he has spectacularly pulled off.

Q\ You underwent a significant physical transformation, and as a star who meticulously maintains your physique, did you ever find yourself questioning the toll the filming process took on your body?

A\ I said yes to this film back in 2008-09, and even then I knew that taking up this challenge involved going through this transformation…. I took it upon myself, and decided that I am going to do it, and I went all the way. But, of course, what was completely unanticipated was the pandemic and the fact that we had to postpone the shoot for almost a year and a half in between, which then meant that I had to go through the entire process of transformation twice. That was not easy at all. My doctors, trainers and nutritionist told me not to do it. But we were already neck deep in the film and we did not really have a choice. I am happy I was able to pull it off. I am happy my body responded to it twice.

Q\ You have a great vision for Malayalam cinema. With the release of The Goat Life, a mega movie with a worldwide audience, do you believe Malayalam cinema has finally claimed its place on the world stage?

A\ I don’t think it is a destination that you reach, put your legs up and relax. It is a constant journey; each time you hit a glass ceiling, something else comes around and you realise there is more to go. So when you say we have finally arrived, there is no place to be arriving at. Malayalam cinema still has a lot of potential and we are yet to discover a lot of untapped markets. We are yet to delve into churning out even more complex content; I think film lovers across the world are ready to be entertained by more complex content. And I am glad Malayalam cinema is leading the way in terms of making such films and coming up with good content.

Q\ Your father, Sukumaran, was known for his distinctive acting style, while your mother, Mallika Sukumaran, continues to be a prominent actor. When evaluating your own acting style, whose influence do you believe is more prominent in your acting?

A\ I think I am a very, very different kind of actor in comparison with my dad and mom. Let me let you into a secret―as actors, we are deeply narcissistic, so all of us believe we are the best in the world. It will be unfair asking me to judge myself. But I think as a filmmaker, because I have directed my mom, and have seen a lot of films with my dad, I am inclined to think and believe that as an actor I am quite different from both of them. They are both great actors. My dad was very good at what he used to do and my mom, I still think, is the most talented actor in the family.

Q\ Blessy, known for outstanding films like Thanmatra (2005) and Kaazhcha (2004), brings a wealth of industry experience to the table. But it has been a decade since his last feature film. As a prominent actor, was this a concern when committing to The Goat Life?

A\ Not at all. If anything, I am truly flattered that I am a part of a filmmaker’s vision behind which he threw 16 years of his life. And make no mistake, Blessy is not trying to make his first film. He is a National Award-winning filmmaker, and [doing] a Blessy film is a box that pretty much every actor in the Malayalam industry wants to tick off. [The fact that] he decided that he is going to spend a decade and a half into making his dream project and that I am the actor he wants is great.

Q\ I read that the crew encountered significant challenges, including a 70-day stint in the Jordanian desert from March to May 2020 because of Covid restrictions. And eventually you returned to India through the government’s Vande Bharat Mission. Could you elaborate on the obstacles and hardships faced in completing this ambitious project?

A\ Frankly, there were no hardships. I know the popular narrative here was that we were starving with no food and water, but we were in a wonderful desert camp in the middle of a spectacular terrain with a lot of food. We were playing cricket and all that. But, of course, what was worrying was that none of us knew when we could come back home. And there were rumours that it could take a year… so, of course, that played on all our minds. But, after the shoot stopped, the way the production house took care of the entire crew was truly commendable.

haiti-born-jimmy-jean-louis-on-making-his-indian-debut-in-the-film-the-goat-life

Thu Mar 28 20:43:03 IST 2024

The Goat Life is a story of resilience and of the indomitable human spirit in the face of extreme adversities as the character of Najeeb (Prithviraj Sukumaran) defies death and desert to escape to freedom. Actor-producer Jimmy Jean-Louis plays Ibrahim Khadiri in the movie, who, according to him, is a "godsend kind of character, like an angel, like a Moses who comes from nowhere" to help and guide Najeeb in his arduous journey through the desert to freedom. He describes the film as a "very intense and lonely movie" as the protagonist is fighting extreme adversities―"the climate, the sand storm, the animals, the hunger and thirst". "Every time you think that he is on top of the hill, there is another hill and another hill...," he tells THE WEEK.

Haiti-born Jean-Louis, too, is no stranger to struggles. He came to Paris with his parents as a young boy in the hope of finding a better life, but had to hustle hard before finding success in Hollywood. There were times when he was a homeless squatter as no doors were opening for him. He travelled halfway across the world in search of work―he did musical theatre in Spain, and modelling in Italy, South Africa and England, before moving to the US. He switched from modelling to short movies, documentaries, and indie movies, before getting better gigs in Hollywood.

After a series of uncredited and small roles in movies like Tears of the Sun (2003) and The Bourne Identity (2002), and shows like The Shield (2002-2008) and Arliss (1996-2002), he landed a major role in the superhero series, Heroes, in 2006. Over a career spanning two decades, Jean-Louis has an impressive body of work across languages, including French, Nigerian, Haitian, and English. The actor has won several awards to his credit, including the best actor in a supporting role at the Africa Movie Academy Awards 2023.

The Goat Life marks his entry into Indian cinema. Perhaps, there is a bit of Najeeb in Jean-Louis―and in everyone who dares to rewrite the narratives that circumstances force upon them. That is possibly why Najeeb's story, which the actor calls "inspirational", resonates with him. He says Najeeb and his character, Khadiri, barely speak to each other in the movie as they don't understand each other's languages, but Khadiri empathises with him. "There is so much depth in the movie, and at the centre of it is humanity. The character that I play is someone who comes out of nowhere, helping someone who is in need without expecting anything in return," says Jean-Louis.

Despite having limited knowledge about Indian cinema, he was excited to be on board as The Goat Life was based on a true story, and he believes true stories usually make for good movies. Basic research familiarised him with the works of director Blessy and Prithviraj. He calls the coming together of Blessy, Prithviraj, and Oscar winners A.R. Rahman and Resul Pookutty for the film as "an A-team put together”. "I had no reason to doubt that this was going to be a great project. When you are in the business for long, you can easily identify the key players, and that's why, without a doubt, I said yes to the project," he says.

From facing homelessness in Paris once to "mingling with the most powerful people, the most powerful heads of state", Jean-Louis has had quite a trajectory in life. He recalls meeting Nelson Mandela when he was living in South Africa. “These people (Mandela, Najeeb) with heavy life stories are just amazing,” he says. “Of course, I don't necessarily want to live that deeply and that brutally. But at the same time, when you come out of [such struggles], you become someone with an understanding of life that is completely different from everybody else's, because you know what it is to touch rock bottom. I am always attracted to such strong and heavy stories."

While accepting the role of Khadiri was a "no-brainer", the actor had to learn a new language, Arabic, and make a character that was "almost god-like" as believable as possible. He does have a method for internalising his characters. "When I have to portray a character, I often look at my life to see whether I have met a guy [like that] already or was I that guy at one point in my life,” he says. “Most likely, I was or I know of tWhat person, and that's how I craft my character. The fact that I have travelled a lot opened my mind to different cultures....”

The actor in him is hungry for more roles in Indian cinema. All that matters, he says, is that he understands the character. "Not necessarily the lines, which come last,” he says. “I need to know who the person is, and get a full sense of the person."

Much like Khadiri who came out of nowhere to help Najeeb cross the desert, the actor has been using his resources, fame, and popularity to be of assistance to people in need in Haiti. He says this came naturally to him. "When I was part of Heroes, which was very successful, I got a lot of attention,” he says. “I had access to many people. I was also going back and forth to Haiti, and I could see how people were struggling in the country. That's how almost automatically the thought occurred―what can I do to get the Hollywood community together for Haiti? So I came up with the foundation, 'Hollywood Unites for Haiti'. I got a bunch of people to come and speak about the problems in Haiti, and have done great work, including building schools." While the foundation has been defunct since 2020, his philanthropic activities haven't stopped. "I still work with other groups that are doing amazing work in Haiti," he says.

established-malayalam-filmmakers-and-writers-are-taking-up-lead-roles

Sat Mar 23 15:03:39 IST 2024

In Indian film industries, there is a prevailing belief that pan-India success is reserved for mega-budget films featuring larger-than-life characters capable of executing extreme action. The monumental, nationwide success of Tollywood’s epic film Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) laid the foundation for this notion. Post pandemic, Malayalam cinema gained significant traction and appreciation across India, thanks to its content-driven offerings on OTT platforms. However, attempts by the industry to crack the pan-India success code by emulating the style-over-substance formula, successfully executed in Tamil or Telugu cinema, resulted in dismal failures. But February 2024 brought with it an epiphany of sorts for Malayalam cinema―it realised that it could maintain its focus on content-driven filmmaking and still achieve pan-Indian appeal.

Dubbed “super February”, the last month saw a diverse range of Malayalam films sending cash registers ringing countrywide. Director Chidambaram’s Manjummel Boys was the biggest blockbuster. Based on a real-life story from 2006, it shows 11 young men from Manjummel near Kochi on a fateful mission to save a friend who fell into a crevasse during their trip to Guna Caves in Kodaikanal. With a budget nearing Rs20 crore, this survival thriller has grossed more than Rs200 crore and continues its successful theatrical run. Gireesh A.D.’s Premalu (Rs10 crore), a romantic comedy, has crossed the Rs100-crore mark, while Rahul Sadasivan’s horror film Bramayugam (Rs27.73 crore) has raked in over Rs85 crore.

“The success of our films proves that hereafter our attempt should not be to copy the format and style successfully pulled off by technicians from other industries,” Gireesh told THE WEEK. “For instance, the Telugu industry is well-versed in creating ‘mass’, larger-than-life characters. They have mastered it. But that is not the case with an industry like Malayalam. So we have to stick to our strengths.”

In addition to these box-office triumphs, another notable trend peaked in Mollywood during this season: prominent directors and writers transitioning into established actors. Manjummel Boys stands out by featuring the highest number of directors in acting roles. Soubin Shahir, who portrayed the lead character in the film, started out as an assistant director in 2003 (Chronic Bachelor); he donned the director’s hat in 2017 (Parava). Shahir is no stranger to acting though―he made his acting debut in 2013 with a supporting role in Annayum Rasoolum. In 2018, he won the Kerala State Film Award for Best Actor for his stellar performance in Sudani from Nigeria.

But, for accomplished directors Jean Paul Lal and Khalid Rahman, it was their first proper foray into acting. Ganapathi S.P., casting director for Manjummel Boys, said that it was not an intentional decision to cast directors in acting roles.

“Prior to filming Manjummel Boys, we conducted interviews with all the real-life individuals involved in the Guna cave incident,”said Ganapathi, who also played a significant role in the film. “We did the casting based on their mannerisms and lifestyles. The real-life Siju, played by Jean Paul, exudes swagger, style and possesses a unique fashion sense and distinct slang. Although Jean Paul has previously portrayed some small, villain roles, his humorous flair and style haven’t been fully utilised in any films until now. Additionally, Siju is the brother of Sixon, played by Balu Varghese, who is Jean Paul’s cousin. We saw an opportunity to leverage these unique dynamics on screen.”

Ganapathi saw in Rahman an unassuming and innocent Prasad, the driver of the Toyota Qualis that the friends hired for the trip. Rahman had impressed him on the sets of Sulaikha Manzil (2023). “Rahman has a limited number of scenes in Sulaikha Manzil,” said Ganapathi. “However, in those scenes, his innate calmness and natural acting stood out. We needed someone that serene to portray Prasad’s character.”

In Bramayugam, a horror classic by Sadasivan, director Siddharth Bharathan portrayed a distinctive and mysterious character. Despite debuting as an actor in the 2002 campus drama Nammal, Bharathan has acted only in a few films over the past two decades. Why did Sadasivan cast him alongside a formidable actor like Mammootty? “I envisioned this character to harbour a sense of mystery,” explained Sadasivan, who is known for delving into the profound reflections and tribulations of the human psyche and bringing them to the fore in his films. “I felt Siddhu could bring forth the irritability and subtlety required for this role.”

When it comes to Premalu, it was not an established director who took on a new role as an actor, but rather National Award-winning screenwriter Syam Pushkaran (Maheshinte Prathikaaram, 2016). Premalu was produced by Bhavana Studios, cofounded by Pushkaran with actor-director Dileesh Pothan and actor Fahadh Faasil. Interestingly, the people behind Manjummel Boys and Bhavana Studios played a significant role in establishing Mollywood’s most successful brand of ‘director-turned-actor in lead roles’ in recent years―Basil Joseph.

Joseph landed his first lead role in Jan.E.Man (2021), which was Chidambaram’s directorial debut and Ganapathi’s debut as a casting director. The character of Joymon in Jan.E.Man required a certain “boy-next-door” appeal to resonate with the audience. “We sensed a Joymon-like quality in Basil’s real-life persona, which is why we approached him for the role,” said Ganapathi.

Chidambaram and Ganapathi approached Joseph for the lead role in Jan.E.Man during the pandemic. “Even before Covid, some lead roles were offered to me, but I declined them,” recalled Joseph. “Supporting roles typically require a commitment of only 10 to 15 days, which isn’t the case with lead roles.” He confessed that he finds more enjoyment in his directorial ventures as he has control over the creative process. “However, during the pandemic, there was a dearth of work, and I found the character in Jan.E.Man appealing, so I accepted the offer,” he said.

Though more such offers came his way, he turned down most of them, except for Bhavana Studios’ Palthu Janwar (2022), Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (2022), Kadina Kadoramee Andakadaham and Falimy (both 2023). Interestingly, all of them became hits.

“After three consecutive successful projects, numerous offers poured in, and at one point, I felt overwhelmed; I felt pressured to participate in projects even if I didn’t want to,” said Joseph. Being a lead actor has its comforts, realised Joseph―decent income and fewer risks compared with directorial ventures. It was tempting to stay in that comfort zone. What made it more confusing for him were the conflicting advice he received from various quarters. “Some advised me to fully concentrate on directorial ventures at this stage of my career, while others expressed a desire to see more of me on screen,” he said.

However, Joseph seems to have found a balance and is now focusing on scripting a mega project, which is rumoured to be a pan-India one. “I have found that my profile as an actor is now complementing my profile as a director, and vice versa,” he noted. “My directorial profile helps me to say yes only to good scripts and projects, while my acting career provides me with the time to work meticulously on my directorial project and scripts. I no longer feel the need to take on too many directorial projects simultaneously.”

Financially, this has provided a sense of stability and peace of mind for Joseph. However, because he is engrossed in a mega project, he hints at taking an acting break for at least two to three years. After all, he is a former engineer from Infosys who sacrificed a secure IT career to pursue filmmaking.

indian-photographer-deepti-asthana-photos-projects

Sat Mar 23 14:57:28 IST 2024

A woman laughing uninhibitedly, her head thrown back, her hair fanning about her. Two women lolling by the river enjoying an unguarded moment. A girl clutching a laptop in a straw cottage. Kalbelia dancers from Rajasthan applying makeup on their faces. What Deepti Asthana wants to document through these photographs are not snapshots of rural India, but rather stories of its people. She wants to tell the stories of the girls in Uttarakhand who spend hours fetching water every day, which impact their education and their health. She wants to tell the stories of the elderly women who are fighting to save the rivers and mountains of their villages, even though they are now getting too old to take care of themselves or ever enjoy the fruits of their labour. She wants to tell the story of the two women forest guards struggling in a male-dominated field, one a widow and the other having suffered miscarriages.

Asthana―who was recognised as ‘Global Talent Asia 2020’ by the World Press Photo and received a National Geographic grant in 2022 to document the water crisis in Uttarakhand―says much of her fascination with the lives of women in rural India comes from her own childhood. She grew up in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh. Having lost her father at the age of four, her mother took care of her and her two siblings. The constant threat of being driven out of their house, which belonged to her father’s family, led to a deep sense of insecurity in her. And seeing her mother struggle made her passionate to tell the stories of women like her. She herself was abused by a relative and, as she says, it made her shy and submissive. It took the exposure of living in big cities to restore her self-confidence. “I had to put so much into changing the person that I had become,” she says. “There is so much of conditioning that when you are coming out of that environment, it takes a lot of energy to fight with yourself and live the life you really want to live.”

That is why the lens she trains on her subjects is such an empathetic one. It takes a special kind of person to go deep into the lives of rural women and capture the spectrum of their troubles and their triumphs. Because she has gone through it, she feels she can do justice to these stories. “Sometimes when I tell people about life in rural India, they are surprised,” she says. “They ask me whether this is still happening. I tell them that this is not what happened 10 or 20 years ago. Women in rural India are still fighting for basic things―for safety, for the right to education, for the right to choose their life partners.”

In many ways, for Asthana, her photography is a response to her own emotional state. She looks at it as self-therapy. Over the last few years, she sees her work growing intensely spiritual. During the pandemic, for example, she stayed for three years in Shillong. Living near the forest, she found the isolation to be healing. There, she did a portrait project, for the first time focusing on her own life. It looked at the journey of a woman who wanted to escape social mores, and so seeks refuge in the forest. Living close to nature, she learns life lessons that no books could teach her.

Another project close to her heart is documenting the Narmada Parikrama, a pilgrimage of three years, three months and 33 days by the Narmada river. “The pilgrims take nothing with them except some extra clothing,” she says. “There is so much of trust and surrender that they will find food and shelter. That was a wonderful project because I met so many people who might not have seemed very sophisticated, but yet had so much of wisdom.”

And everyone she has met in her own pilgrimage through life has taught her something. “I come from a very normal educational background, so my main education has been through meeting people who face so many difficulties and yet find so much joy and peace in life,” she says. She gives the example of a fisherman she met in Tamil Nadu’s Dhanushkodi while working on a project for the Serendipity Arts Festival. An accident while blast fishing had deprived him of an arm and his eyes. His face was completely deformed. And yet, she says, he was one of the happiest people she had ever met. He would still go to work, sing the loudest while pulling in the heavy nets and laugh the heartiest at the smallest of things. “He jumped into the sea just so he could show me how he could swim with one arm,” she says. “Seeing these people really changes your perspective on life. It is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.”

For Asthana, there is no compartmentalisation between her life and her work. She is constantly in touch with the women and girls she has shot. Over the years, witnessing the shifts in their lives has often been rewarding, she says. She refers to the photographs she took of a few girls in Uttarakhand when they were 10 or 12 years old. When she returned many years later, they had become young women and the changes in their behaviour were stark. “They laughed a lot when they saw their childhood photographs that I had shot,” she says. “It was probably the only photographs of themselves that they had ever seen.”

j-robert-oppenheimer-through-the-eyes-of-his-biographer-kai-bird

Sat Mar 16 11:45:45 IST 2024

There is one question that haunts many viewers of Christopher Nolan’s film on the creator of the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—J. Robert Oppenheimer—which swept the Oscars this year. Did Oppenheimer endorse the use of the bomb on an essentially defeated enemy? And if so, how can we hail such a man as a hero? One of the reasons he endorsed it might be because of his ego. He had spent three years building the bomb with his team at a secret facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and now he wanted to see the consummation of his efforts. Greatness was within his grasp. Also, he reasoned that the bomb’s power would ensure the end of all wars in future.

But the truth might be more complex than this, and encapsulated in a scene in the film right after the Trinity test, when the bomb was first successfully tested on the plains of the Alamogordo Bombing Range. While giving the victory speech to the thumping cheers of his colleagues and friends, Oppenheimer (played by a brilliant Cillian Murphy) blanks out and in the flash of a blinding light, he sees a woman’s molten skin. As he walks out, he imagines stepping on the ashen remains of a corpse.

“Oppenheimer knew the exact human suffering that his bomb would cause,” says Kai Bird, who co-wrote American Prometheus, the theoretical physicist’s biography on which Nolan’s film is based. “Yet this is the same man who gave instructions on the altitude at which to drop the bomb in order to inflict maximum damage.” Bird was speaking at a session of the Jaipur Literature Festival in February.

This complexity in Oppenheimer’s character is converted in the film into a meditation on the complexities of the universe from which the bomb’s power is harnessed.

Bird feels that what made Oppenheimer a great scientist was that he was a polymath. He read Marcel Proust, T.S. Eliot, and the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. “He was never good with his hands and failed in Cambridge as an experimental physicist,” says Bird. “But when he discovered quantum physics in the 1920s, he could hear the music of the science that explains this world, and he had the imagination to ask the right questions. He predicted the existence of black holes when we did not have X-ray telescopes. When we could not see anything out there in the universe, he could imagine it. He was a brilliant scientist precisely because he was a humanist.”

Interestingly, in the film, this versatility is shown through a sex scene when Oppenheimer’s paramour, a young communist named Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh), gets up from the bed and rifles through his collection of books. She picks out the Gita and asks him to translate a passage in Sanskrit. She is not satisfied by his attempt to paraphrase it. “No, read the words,” she tells him. And he does: “And now I am become death. The destroyer of worlds.” The camera focuses on the electric gaze of Oppenheimer. It is almost as if he knows that the words are a prophecy whose fulfilment hinges on him.

That is why, says Bird, Nolan was the right person to make the movie on Oppenheimer. Because there is much that is common to the filmmaker and his subject—both are interested in the human condition, in poetry and in stories. THE WEEK meets Bird during the JLF. The sessions are winding up for the day and he looks tired. Yet, he obliges us sportingly. He has answered questions on Oppenheimer countless times since the release of the book and the movie, but he shows no tiredness in recycling his views. He is mild-mannered, yet with a steadfastness that reminds one of the many scientists at Los Alamos, but Bird laughs it off. “My only link with science is the course on physics I took in college. It was called ‘physics for poets’,” he chuckles. “So yes, I had to try and understand a little quantum physics to write this book.”

In fact, it was Bird’s co-writer, Martin J. Sherman, who started researching American Prometheus back in 1979. In 20 years, he had collected “some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and FBI dossiers, stored in seemingly endless boxes in his basement, attic and office”. By 1999, he had got what Bird calls “the biographer’s disease”, when you cannot start writing because you want to do one more interview or visit one more archive. So, he enlisted the help of Bird, his friend who had by then written two biographies.

Initially, Bird refused, but Sherman was persistent. “He told me that if I didn’t agree to co-write the book, his gravestone would read, ‘He took it with him’,” says Bird with a laugh. The book released in 2005 to much critical acclaim and won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Unfortunately, Sherman died of lung cancer in 2021, the same year that Nolan read the book and was gripped by it. Within five months, he had finished writing a screenplay.

He asked to meet Bird in September to discuss the book. “We met at a small boutique hotel in downtown Manhattan. And we spent two and a half hours drinking tea,” says Bird with a laugh. “Nolan is half British, and he is a great tea drinker.” He says that there is nothing frivolous about Nolan. He is very intense, and does not do small talk. “My first question to him was whether he had managed to include in the screenplay Oppenheimer’s favourite toast when he was mixing his gin martinis. Which was, ‘To the confusion of our enemies’. Nolan laughed and told me that it had been in the screenplay initially, but he had to take it out for reasons of space,” says Bird.

Instead, what Nolan attempted is the sketch of a man who drew too close to the sun not to be scorched by the heat of what he discovered. The power of the universe is too wild to be tamed, and anyone who attempts to do so must pay the price. There is a scene in the film where Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb” (played by Benny Safdie), tells Oppenheimer: “Nobody knows what you believe. Do you?” And in history’s final reckoning, do we? Are we to hail him as the “father of the atomic bomb”—as TIME did when it featured him on its cover—who forced us to confront our own mortality? Or is he to be remembered as the “destroyer of worlds” because of whom, as Bird says, we teeter on the precipice of Armageddon?

hoping-on-to-the-4am-biryani-trend-in-hyderabad

Sat Mar 16 16:18:11 IST 2024

While most people have 3am friends, Hyderabadis have 4am biryani for company. And, it smells like team spirit, for hordes of people—foodies, techies and locals alike—throng the numerous 4am biryani joints that have popped up across the city in the last few months.

With social media doing what it does best, the 4am biryani outlets need no other promotion. Countless food vlogs and reels have brought with them a sense of FoMO (fear of missing out) among those who are yet to join this pre-dawn daawat (feast). So, we, too, went on a nocturnal adventure to join the 4am club.

Our first stop was Sai Anna 4am Biryani, located close to Madhapur, the city’s IT hub. Many of these eateries have found a sweet spot in the IT zone, strategically targeting techies and corporate employees who spend late nights in office. Most eateries open at around 2am and 3am and shut down by 6am.

Sai Anna runs his biryani business from a kiosk in an open area. As you near the kiosk, you smell the biryani before you see it. The biryani is cooked in huge vessels under Sai Anna’s supervision. “I come here once a week,” said Yashwanth, a startup employee. “This biryani tastes good only when eaten at this time. Try it and you will know what I am talking about.”

A plate of chicken biryani costs Rs200, and mutton biryani Rs300. The mutton biryani is essentially pudina rice cooked with medium-sized mutton pieces. A plate of chicken biryani consists of flavourful rice at the bottom of the plate, with deep-fried chicken pieces—cooked separately—on top. The flavours are unique, deviating from the typical Hyderabadi biryani, and the biryani is not too spicy.

A true-blue Hyderabadi never stops with just a plate of biryani, and so we headed next to Masthi 4am Biryani, which is quite a sensation online. While the menu is quite similar to Sai Anna’s, Masthi has ample seating and largely caters to families. The crowd swelled as the clock neared 5am. Here, the mutton was more tender, and the chicken packed an extra punch of spice.

A young couple was busy making an Instagram reel, while a couple of women were happily gorging on the biryani. “When the entire city is trying the 4am biryani, where’s the fun in missing out!” said Alekhya, an interior designer in her 20s.

We wanted to visit another joint, but the sun came up and the shutters went down. The 4am biryani was gone, and so were the biryani enthusiasts.

Burp! Time for burpees now.

love-jihad-and-other-fictions-book-review

Sat Mar 16 11:37:18 IST 2024

Have you heard the theory about actor Shah Rukh Khan propagating ‘population jihad’—the Muslim plot to overthrow Hindus by producing more children? There is, of course, no evidence for this except the fact that Khan has three children. Once upon a time, such theories would have seemed laughable. But now, they no longer are. Mostly because of two factors that are explained in the book, Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple Facts to Counter Viral Falsehoods, written by three journalists—Sreenivasan Jain, Mariyam Alavi and Supriya Sharma. First, these theories are increasingly getting political backing, with powerful ministers and MPs endorsing them. Second, they are having serious consequences—death, destruction and widespread prejudice and bigotry.

One example the writers give in the book is that of cow slaughter, or what PM Narendra Modi repeatedly called the ‘pink revolution’ while campaigning in 2014. Within months of his party’s victory that year, the attacks by the ‘gau rakshaks’ had amplified significantly. To find out the extent of the problem, the writers analysed media archives on the internet to count the number of cow-related attacks across two time periods—from 2009 to 2014, during the tenure of the UPA government, and from 2014 to May 2023, during the BJP-led NDA rule. While there was only one instance of cow-related violence in the former period, in the latter, there were 136 instances. At least 66 people were killed, of whom at least 70 per cent were Muslims. Even if simply relying on media reports is not an airtight way of finding out the truth, the overall trend from their research is clear, they say: cow-related violence has witnessed a dramatic spike since 2014.

In this post-truth age, when blatant falsehoods are endorsed widely, Love Jihad and Other Fictions is an important book. In it, the writers tackle four myths that have become truths: Love jihad, population jihad, forced conversions and Muslim appeasement. In each case, they take specific claims and systematically disprove them. For example, the claim of Muslim appeasement (the idea that Muslims are given preferential treatment to get their votes) being real in India. Contrary to what this implies, the writers prove the reality of Muslim backwardness on most social and economic indicators, including living standards, literacy and education, salaried jobs and business.

Or the claim that population jihad is real, because Muslim growth rate is off the charts. The writers cite experts and draw from census data to disprove this. Even though the Muslim growth rate is higher than that of Hindus, it is steadily coming down, because the Muslim fertility rate is dropping, they conclude.

The book is rigorously researched. The writers use conventional journalistic tools—ground reporting, government records, official surveys and polls, RTI applications and expert views—to uncover the truth. There are charts, graphs, illustrations, and elaborate endnotes to back their conclusions. The methods they use are so diametrically opposite to the ones used by the conspiracy theorists that one feels like one is sitting in the same cinema hall and watching two different movies. At a time when hindutva is becoming so powerful, it takes courage to take on the system. And in a land that has turned upside-down, it is nice to be shown what it means to stand upright.

Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple Facts to Counter Viral Falsehoods

By Sreenivasan Jain, Mariyam Alavi and Supriya Sharma

Published by Aleph

Price Rs799; pages 184

meet-nina-metayer-the-worlds-best-pastry-chef

Mon Mar 11 13:35:49 IST 2024

In late 2023, during a ceremony in Munich, the International Union of Bakers and Confectioners named a French woman the world’s best confectioner. It was the first time a woman had received this prestigious award in its 92 years. That historic night in Munich may not have transpired as it did without a French girl’s visit to faraway Mexico 19 years ago.

Nina Métayer was born in La Rochelle, a coastal city in western France. She prefers to keep details about her parents private, only revealing that they gave her a taste for good food. She grew up with two younger sisters and spent 10 years in Alsace in the northeast of France. A young Nina enjoyed playing the piano and theatre, and took art classes in school. She was particularly interested in travelling. So, naturally, when a student exchange programme gave her a chance to go to Mexico for a year, she took it. There, she met a French couple who ran a bakery, and inspiration struck.

She felt that French baking skills could be successfully exported to Mexico and went back to France with a plan.“I was dreaming to go back and live in Mexico,” Nina told THE WEEK. “My goal was to start a bakery in Playa del Carmen or Tulum, booming tourist destinations. So, after the baccalaureate, I started a vocational training course to become a baker.” She then moved to Melbourne and practised her craft there. But, the desire to go further in terms of technique and creativity pushed her to get trained in pastry-making at the renowned Ferrandi school in Paris.

She began her professional career at a Parisian five-star hotel and later became head pastry chef at another. Her first signature dessert, Lîle Flottante Exotique (Exotic Floating Island), was hailed by the press as the third best sweet discovery of the year. Nina’s accolades and accomplishments since then are too many to enumerate. She has also worked with several international establishments, which include contributions to projects in London, Shanghai and two exclusive collections for Jaeger-LeCoultre’s 1931 Cafés in locations around the globe.

In 2020, alongside her business-to-business services, she launched her first patisserie, named Delicatisserie. It was fully online―customers would place orders online and then either choose a collection point or opt for delivery. “The concept was consistent with my belief that excellence, ecology and social commitment are as necessary for a sustainable future as they are economically viable,” she said. Delicatisserie offers made-to-order pastries in plastic-free packs and has a zero-waste policy―fruit peelings, for example, are used in syrups, toppings or coulis.

Nina is happy that sweet tooths have followed her vision. All the same, the success of the business prompted her to expand offline, too. “I opened an outlet in 2021 in Paris, then in 2022 at Issy-les-Moulineaux (a Paris suburb),” she said.

Looking back, Nina said every moment has been essential, starting right from being introduced to the materials that go into food and pastry-making. “Apprenticeships in bakery, then in pastry-making, that required me to surpass myself; meeting the pastry chef Camille Lesecq and the kitchen chef Jean-François Piège was both important for me,” she said. “And, every day, my work alongside my teams is memorable.”

She said her greatest challenges were with herself. “I have had to acquire skills that I did not think I could achieve, outdo myself constantly, sometimes going against my character, for example, not being patient, and learning to be confident.” Nina said that when she started, the bakery profession in general was male-dominated. “In pastry-making, women rarely reached the position of chef,” she said. “It pushed me to prove people wrong when they told me I could not do it, and to give my best to show that, even if I was a woman, I could reach a high level.”

And reach a high level, she did. How did it feel at the summit? That night in Munich. “It is an honour and a great source of pride, especially since this award is recognition of a career path and, above all, of the day-to-day work of my teams,” she said. “It is awarded not for a ‘feat’ or a competition, but for a body of know-how, commitment to our craft, entrepreneurship, our capacity for innovation. And, as it is the first time this title has been awarded to a woman, it is even more gratifying.”

Nina is quick to add that the most important aspect of her work is the chance to share joy, make gourmets and her teams happy, and express feelings through pastries. She said it was essential to transmit both skills and “gestures” through the craft.

Gestures?

“The starting point can be smell, a landscape, the discovery of a town or countryside, a texture, a sound, an encounter, a memory,” she explained. “Everything that arouses in me an emotion, a sensation or a curiosity that I want to share to please people. That is where the creative process begins, always with its many missteps, that allow us to move forward and arrive at the desired result.”

Her 2020 galette des rois is an example. (Galette des rois translates to king cake. Also known as three kings cake, it is associated with the Christian festival of Epiphany.) The cake was a tribute to the majestic rose windows of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral. She worked with a designer for the motif, which was then printed using a 3D printer used to make food-grade silicon moulds.

While “gestures”―the art―are an essential part of her work, taste is at the heart of it. She said taste highlights the know-how of the pastry craftsperson. But, does the focus on taste raise concerns about health? Nina was candid. “Patisserie is a sweet pleasure and should remain so, but without [sweetness] masking the flavours,” she said. “Less refined sugars, such as muscovado (from sugar cane) are also interesting. So is using ripe, naturally sweet seasonal and local fruits. The use of high quality butter or cream in artisanal pastry is not a health issue [compared with] industrial products made with too much bad fat and added sugar.”

Having achieved everything she has by the age of 35, what is next? “I really love my life, both personal and professional, as it is,” she said. Her husband, Mathieu Salomé, is the general manager of her business. Her two daughters, one aged six and one aged three, are regular sous-chefs on her Instagram and YouTube accounts. She has close to 3.5 lakh followers on Instagram and just over 31,700 subscribers on YouTube.

“My priority is to take care of all our customers, as well as my teams, to give our best every day,” she said. “We do, of course, have plans, such as a new outlet in Paris, to expand a little in France and also to continue to work internationally.” The mention of working internationally begs the question whether she was considering coming to the Indian market.

She pointed out that she has to expand the business in a reasoned way, but, does not rule out the possibility. “India is an interesting country we would like to discover,” she said. “We may consider coming, one day.”

to-kill-a-tiger-documentary-film-shatters-the-silence-around-rape-in-india

Sat Mar 09 16:27:03 IST 2024

To Kill A Tiger, one of the five documentaries competing for an Oscar on March 10, opens to the early morning hum of a village in Jharkhand. After meandering a bit, it takes us to a farmer’s house where a young girl in a school uniform is combing her hair. We watch as she deftly weaves an orange ribbon into the ends of her two plaits. But instead of tying a simple, neat bow with two loops, she folds the ribbon over and over again to create a burst of orange festivity on either plait, like two big, messy marigold flowers. Or smiling dahlias, perhaps. This is 13-year-old Kiran, Ranjit’s eldest daughter and an inconvenience in her village.

One of the basic etiquettes expected of rape victims in India is that they remain anonymous and invisible. That is mandated by law, and also our culture.

Depending on how ardently rape victims adhere to this rule, we either celebrate and venerate them with lofty epithets like Nirbhaya (fearless), or interrogate survivors, their statements, their past, their behaviour and clothes.

Indo-Canadian filmmaker Nisha Pahuja’s powerful documentary, To Kill A Tiger, snatches that comforting buffer of anonymity and brings us face-to-face with Kiran (a pseudonym that means ‘ray’ in Hindi) as she laughs, cries and recounts how, at a family wedding near her house on April 9, 2017, three men grabbed her by the hair, dragged her to an isolated spot and raped her.

A traumatic, triggering, but also heartwarming tale of a girl’s courage and a father’s gentle determination to seek justice for her, To Kill A Tiger intimately follows Kiran, her family and members of the NGO supporting them in their court battle until the three men were found guilty and sentenced to 25 years of rigorous imprisonment in 2018.

Celebrated at several international film festivals and released in theatres in the US last year, To Kill A Tiger is being backed by some eminent Hollywood celebrities. Director Deepa Mehta, actors Dev Patel, Mindy Kaling and Priyanka Chopra-Jonas, among others, have come onboard as executive producers to give the film’s Oscar campaign some glamour and heft.

Chopra-Jonas called it a “hard-hitting piece of art” and the film is a top contender to take home the Oscar on Sunday.

In India, however, where rape continues to be linked to shame―for the victim, the family and the nation―To Kill A Tiger has neither been released, nor is it talked about. The little chatter about it on social media is critical of the film’s “western gaze” that “exotifies” the Indian victim. Last week, Netflix acquired the film’s rights and is scheduled to release it in Hindi, with English subtitles, on March 8. There has not been much publicity around it.

Part of this unease and silence comes from Indian law that prohibits anyone― media, police, lawyers, courts, even family members―from revealing the identity of rape victims, especially minors. A necessary safeguard for the lives, livelihood and reputation of the over 30,000 women who are raped every year in India, this restriction can be waived by the survivor at 18 years or above. To Kill A Tiger declares at the onset that Pahuja took Kiran’s consent before filming her. But the film was shot when Kiran was a minor. Pahuja also states in the film that she waited till Kiran turned 18 to take her consent, and only then did she release the film.

That does not matter because a larger part of our discomfort comes from our upbringing, our culture of silence, of the hush that surrounds sexual abuse and assault in our homes and families. Used to maintaining a distance from rape victims and incidents, we prefer to identify them by the places where they were committed―Kathua, Unnao, Shakti Mills, Suryanelli or Park Street.

Kiran’s perpetrators, too, tried to impose silence with threats. If she told anyone, they said, they would kill her.

But when she collapsed on her way home, and her father asked her what happened, she told him what Kapil, Langdu and Ishwar Munda had done to her.

Ranjit lodged a complaint and in court, the judge received a sealed envelope that contained documents about the internal injuries Kiran had suffered.

This almost paternal promise of anonymity and protection to rape survivors from prejudice, further victimisation and harassment does not extend much beyond court premises. In Kiran’s village, the elders, the women and the mukhiya (village chief) would often speak of “compromise”, and insist that she marry one of the perpetrators instead of ruining three lives.

We watch Kiran sob when she hears of the threats and intimidation her father faces, and when her little brother says, “If papa dies, I will also die”. We watch her go to school though no one speaks or plays with her, and say softly, quite casually, “I was born to do the right thing”.

In a country where rape survivors are invisiblised for their own good, so that the focus stays on the crime and not on them, To Kill A Tiger is discomforting and disruptive, because it draws our attention to Kiran, to what happened to her on the night of April 9, 2017, and thereafter, when she refused to be shamed or silenced.

The film humanises and honours her by letting her tell her story. It lets us watch Kiran as she walks into the court in a blue sleeveless kurta, wearing a bindi and lipstick. Her father later says that though she was crying, she continued to tell the judge what had happened that night. To Kill A Tiger is a film about Kiran, a rape survivor. It’s also a film that shatters the silence imposed on rape survivors to celebrate a tenacious young girl who is palpably anxious as she leaves the court, but when asked what she is looking forward to doing next, says, “Going home and eating mangoes.”

indian-air-power-contemporary-and-future-dynamics-book

Sat Mar 09 12:03:03 IST 2024

On February 21, Turkey successfully conducted the maiden flight of its fifth generation fighter jet KAAN, becoming one of the few countries in the world to master the cutting edge technology. India's fifth generation fighter, the Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft, remains a work in progress. In the history of aerial warfare, Turkey was the first victim, notes Air Marshal Diptendu Choudhury (retd) in his book, Indian Air Power: Contemporary and Future Dynamics.

On October 22, 1911, Italian pilots used aircraft to bomb a Turkish army camp at Ain Zara (in present day Libya) during the Italo-Turkish war. The audacious move by the Italians threw open endless possibilities and soon “command and control of the air” became the “key outcome and the dominant narrative” for air power thinkers and strategic experts. Just about two decades after the first air attack, in October 1932, the Indian Air Force was launched formally.

In Indian Air Power, Air Marshal Choudhury attempts a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the Indian Air Force. In 14 chapters, the book explains how the IAF transformed itself into one of the key guarantors of national security. The book is a timely addition to the scholarship on national security, especially with the unprecedented rise of China as a global power, rivalling the United States.

Beijing's aggression in the South China Sea and in north Ladakh and its deepening partnership with Pakistan “serve as a reality check that the days of peace and tranquility on the borders are over”, says Air Marshal Choudhury. He warns that the IAF's combat squadrons dropping below the required critical mass has become a major national security problem that should be addressed at the earliest. Time has come, he says, to take into account the enduring structural aspects of air power and consider doctrinal and paradigm changes that are relevant for the future.

Apart from conventional warfare, India's strategic leadership also needs to consider future vectors of aerospace power as it increasingly becomes a vital cog in the national security calculus. Space technology is the next frontier and Air Marshal Choudhury observes that while the US remains the world leader in this domain, China's confident strides in the field are likely to lead to the militarisation of the global commons. He says India needs to integrate space into a war-fighting domain in national security without any further delay.

Air Marshal Sir John Steele, India's Air Officer Commanding in Chief from 1931 to 1935, was initially dismissive of the ability of Indians to run the Air Force. “Indians will not be able to fly and maintain military aeroplanes. It's a man's job,” he said. Air Marshal Choudhury says it was the “sheer grit of the intrepid Indian airmen that not only proved Steele wrong, but earned the enduring respect and admiration of sceptics”.

The IAF's doctrinal and strategic evolution has been a critical element in the Indian defence ecosystem and the book suggests that more needs to be done to prepare it for future endeavours.

INDIAN AIR POWER: CONTEMPORARY AND FUTURE DYNAMICS

Author: Air Marshal (Dr) Diptendu Choudhury (retd)

Publisher: KW Publishers

Price: Rs1,480; pages: 244

author-nikhil-alva-interview

Sat Mar 09 11:57:41 IST 2024

Interview/ Nikhil Alva, author

Nikhil Alva’s first novel, If I Have To Be A Soldier, is shaped by his childhood journeys to the northeast. Thriller-like, vividly told and set during the Mizo insurgency, the book preserves the painful memory of the bombing of Aizawl―a fact forgotten, but which has found a new life in fiction. Excerpts from the interview:

Q/ Why did you choose to write this book?

A/ My mother was in charge of the Congress in the northeast. She took us on road trips. In the 1970s, insurgency was at its peak in Nagaland as well as Mizoram. For a young boy, this was quite scary. We couldn’t drive at night; security forces [were] all around; and there was this fear that permeated every exchange. We would be introduced as say, ‘Oh, they’ve come all the way from India, please welcome to India.’ I didn’t understand where that was coming from. My interest in the northeast started there.

I got hooked on to the idea when I first heard of the mautam 15 or 20 years ago. (Mautam is a cyclic ecological phenomenon that creates widespread famine in the northeast every 48 years.) I was fascinated by the linkage―the causality of the bamboo flowering once every 48 years, which leads to this plague of rats, which leads to this massive famine. Because it is mishandled, thousands die and that leads to this brutal 20-year insurgency, where thousands more lose their lives. It is a very powerful story with layers.

Q/ The leap into fiction is not always easy. Why fiction, rather than nonfiction?

A/ I chose the medium of the novel because I felt that nothing else will do justice. The insurgency is quite old now. Very few insurgents are alive, [and] they are quite old. I didn’t have the experience, the expertise or the volume of research that will be required for a nonfiction book. I felt that a novel with fictional characters, but against the backdrop of historic events, was perhaps the best way for me to get into this story.

Q/ You write about Aizawl being bombed. It is a memory that has been wiped out. Could you really talk about that memory?

A/ The tragedy is that there is so little information available of what actually happened. Sometimes we like to forget uncomfortable events or truths in modern history. Among all the uncomfortable events, the bombing of Aizawl stands out. It is the only time in our history where we used our Air Force to bomb our own people. [Many] innocent civilians lost their lives. We have no count of how many people died. It is all anecdotal evidence. We denied this bombing completely for the longest time.

But it is not just the bombing. The other terrible thing that happened was this concept of progressive villages―where over 80 per cent of the Mizo population were, at the barrel of the gun, relocated. These villages [were] nothing but internment camps, along the highways and behind barbed-wire fences. Traditional villages were just burned to the ground. We don’t talk about it. We don’t write about it. It doesn’t feature anywhere. It’s like, it didn’t happen.

That is dangerous because history is not always glorious and wonderful. There are things that have happened that, as a people, we should not forget. If you forget, you tend to repeat the same mistakes again.

Q/ Do you see a parallel with what happened then and what is happening in the northeast now? This idea that there is this conflict still burning at the edge of India, and we don’t understand it.

A/ The most important commonality between these different incidents is a lack of dialogue. The Mizo insurgency could have been averted well before 1966. There was resentment. There was anger. They felt they were being taken for granted. Their voice was not being listened to. No one really paid attention. The insurgency finally got resolved with the Indian government conceding that there was a lack of dialogue.

These problems have been simmering for a long time in Manipur. There has been very little dialogue, little attempt to get both sides to the table to sit down and resolve differences peacefully. It will take years now to heal the wounds of [what happened] last year. We will need to give people an opportunity to be heard, to listen to those voices. Not from a perspective of tokenism, but actually listen, which means engaging in a meaningful dialogue.

Q/ You talk about meeting insurgents as a child and being struck by their sadness and sense of loss.

A/ As a child, I didn’t really understand these concepts. I knew that there was trouble. I knew that there had been violence. I had listened to conversations because of my mother’s work, I [used] to meet some former insurgents who had come out of the so-called underground and into the political mainstream.

They had stories to tell. Some of them would be lighthearted and funny, but with this underlying sadness for the number of years lost to violence. I picked up emotions―sadness, the feeling of betrayal―without fully understanding the intellectual and ideological side of what actually happened.

The intention is not to make [the novel] political, but to say that violence impacts regular people who are trying to lead perfectly normal lives. They get caught up in a swirl of events, and their lives get shaped by them.

if-i-have-to-be-a-soldier-nikhil-alva-book

Sat Mar 09 11:52:59 IST 2024

Every half century or so, a cyclic ecological phenomenon sees the whole of Mizoram (and many parts of the northeast and Myanmar) awash with the flowering of the mautak (bamboo species). Old-timers say that when the mautak flowers, mautam (bamboo death) follows close behind, bringing with it untold misery, death and destruction.

On the face of it, TV producer and entrepreneur Nikhil Alva’s impressive debut novel―If I Have To Be A Soldier―is a love story―boy meets girl, falls in love, but they are forced to separate over a misunderstanding. But simplifying this story to just that is akin to saying James Cameron’s Titanic is merely the story of Jack and Rose. For it isn’t love, or the bamboo, that blossom here―Alva adds to it the heft of history. Looming in the background, nay foreground, is history, politics, even geography, as a series of events unwrap to take potshots at the star-crossed lovers and the world around them.

Delhi-bred, Kannadiga-born Nikhil, the son of Congress leader Margaret Alva―who was in news for his social media makeover of Rahul Gandhi―dextrously positions his tale in the salubrious environs of the Mizo hills. But the timing isn’t all that breezy. The year is 1966, the mau (bamboo) has blossomed, and tam (death) is not far behind. Greater Mizoram is burning, with the Mizo National Front (MNF) calling for independence and prime minister Indira Gandhi swearing to crush the armed rebellion by sending in Delhi’s military might.

In the massacre and mayhem that follow―including the shocking instance of India bombing its own citizens in Aizawl on March 5, 1966―loyalties are tested and resolves are broken, as Alva’s fictional hero Sammy, a captain in the Army, finds himself on the run with dreaded MNF commander ‘Che’ Sena he was supposed to interrogate. Only, Sena is his childhood friend-turned-foe (and insurgent) and the brother of the love of his life.

As inculcated doctrines of a national narrative, jingoism and military discipline stare in the face of cultural identity, human bonding and, above all, love; often there are no victors, only victims. That is the reality the Sammy-Sena combine has to come to terms with when they get swept away in the great power play in motion, even as it forces them to confront demons, both personal and the political, along the way.

Considering that this is Alva’s first book, it ticks all the right boxes. The book is also an enchanting eye-opener into the rich tapestry of the Mizo way of life and history.

Alva’s prose is ironically matter-of-fact and non-judgemental, letting the reader form their opinions.

The scale of the story is grandly visual, and it is no accident considering that Alva initially wrote it as a screenplay, before he felt “only a novel could do justice”. The action, and the bodycount, is relentless, especially once Sammy and Sena go on the run, offering possibilities for a web series if not a twin-part movie. Throw in the human element of love and loss, and this becomes a screen wannabe. The story of India’s secret war in Mizoram, and how its stoic populace met it with dignity and resilience, is a tale that needs to be told.

IF I HAVE TO BE A SOLDIER

Author: Nikhil J. Alva

Publisher: HarperCollins India

Price: Rs499; pages: 318

crime-grime-and-gumption-case-files-of-an-ips-officer-o-p-singh-book

Sat Mar 09 11:49:37 IST 2024

Temperatures (and tempers) are going to rise this summer in the north, as it will soon be soaked in the dust and heat of electioneering. As Uttar Pradesh, the most powerful state electorally, prepares for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, it will be yet another test for police officers who will be fighting crime and more to pave way for a smooth election of the political executive. The very same executive that makes the police “subordinate”, but not “subservient”, points out O.P Singh in his memoir. Singh oversaw the smooth conduct of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as chief of Uttar Pradesh Police―the country’s largest police force―till he hung up his boots in January 2020.

“If the management of law and order during Kumbh Mela of 2019 was not enough of a responsibility, the Lok Sabha election in the months of April and May further stretched the capacity of the UP police,” Singh writes in Crime, Grime and Gumption. The book is more than a memoir, as it delves into the case files of an IPS officer who fights the “chakravyuh” or trap of caste, underworld and politics to earn the trust of the political executive in a way that he could roll out measures for strengthening the state’s policing system.

Singh spent 37 years in service, commanding three police organisations, but the time spent in his “karmabhoomi” in Uttar Pradesh, he says, took him on a journey like no other. His early khaki days saw him sailing through the “tsunami years” of the Bahujan Samaj Party-Samajwadi Party coalition government. Apart from ensuring law and order during the Kumbh Mela, one of the biggest gatherings in the world, Singh came up with a proactive policing strategy during the Supreme Court’s Ayodhya temple verdict, which came close on the heels of the revocation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir. He also established the long-awaited police commissionerate system in Uttar Pradesh under the Yogi Adityanath government. Each of these events was a challenge, writes Singh.

Ahead of the Ayodhya verdict, Singh recalls getting a call from the office of then chief justice of India Ranjan Gogoi. “This was an unprecedented move, never before had the court directed UP DGP for such a briefing,” he writes.

Singh was born in the serene town of Gaya, where his father Sheo Dhari Singh was popularly known as “barrister saab” for his qualifications from the prestigious Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court in London. He, however, lost his father when he was 14. He left the hamlet of Mira Bigha, and moved to Delhi for higher studies. He prepared for the civil services and finally entered the Uttar Pradesh cadre, where, like a senior police officer had told him, he had his “baptism by fire”. He was Lucknow’s senior superintendent of police during the SP-BSP regime. BSP’s Kanshi Ram and Mayawati demanded his resignation over the killing of Mahendra Fauji, a terror in western Uttar Pradesh, but Samajwadi’s Mulayam Singh Yadav refused them. But he eventually had to budge. Barely had he spent 37 days in office when Singh was called to Yadav’s residence. “You are not being suspended, but being transferred,” said Yadav, not meeting Singh’s eyes. Singh had never seen a powerful leader in such a hapless state. “I felt flattered and bemused at the same time to become a potential reason for the fall of a government,” he writes.

Before Singh’s tenure ended, the Yogi Adityanath government announced the commissionerate system in Lucknow and Noida. “I used the chief minister’s trust for wresting benefits for the UP police, system building and strengthening the institution of the DGP,” he writes.

Singh’s accounts and personal experiences make the book a must-read for police officers and aspiring civil servants, even as it enthrals readers with his evocative writing.

CRIME, GRIME AND GUMPTION: CASE FILES OF AN IPS OFFICER

Author: O.P. Singh

Publisher: Penguin Random House India

Price: Rs499; pages: 256

golden-eye-chef-cooking-contest-for-the-visually-challenged

Sun Mar 03 08:41:44 IST 2024

Esref Armagan was born blind, but boy can he ‘see’!

Born in 1953 into an impoverished family in Istanbul, Armagan paints, in colours, shapes and shades. His art―rarely abstract, mostly landscape―has astounded many, particularly because his paintings have the right scale and perspective. He has even been the subject of a 2008 study by the University of Toronto and Harvard University. Researchers monitored his brain and found his visual cortex lighting up as he sketched, just as it does for people with sight. Armagan and his art challenge our ideas about colour and understanding of sight. It took him decades of work and perseverance to master the method of using his fingertips and mind as visual aids. And yet, some critics have discredited his work―exhibited in Turkey, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic―as not his own. Armagan’s amazing ability has been often dwarfed by his disability. And, he is not alone.

Participants of Golden Eye Chef 2023, an annual cooking contest for the blind since 2019, know what it means to have your identity distilled down to your disability. “When we held the competition in 2019, we went live on YouTube, and one of the first comments we received was ‘even they feel the need to cook now? They are blind, how do they even eat?’” recalls Akhil Srivastava, managing trustee of NGO Antardrishti and the brain behind the competition. “People do not know what they are capable of. We realised that more than motivating blind people, we need to create awareness among the sighted.”

The 2019 event was held in Agra, where Srivastava is based, and was restricted to participants in India. In 2020, the pandemic struck and the competition went online―participants were asked to send videos of them cooking a dish, and were judged on parameters like how well the recipe went with the theme of the competition, how accessible the kitchen was, how the participants had arranged the ingredients and how skilful they were, says chef V.K. Iyer, who has been part of the jury for the last three editions. In 2022, the contest went international, with five overseas participants sending in videos. Last year, there were 32 participants, 11 of whom were from countries like the US, Uruguay, Mauritius and North Macedonia. Unfortunately, prejudice knows no borders.

Poland-born, Mexico-based Katarzyna Agnieszka Bukowska, 46, would know. The former languages teacher (Polish, English and German) has been asked some very inane questions―how do you brush your teeth? Why get married when you cannot see your husband? That is why she started her own YouTube channel “to try to overcome this kind of prejudice”.

Bukowska won the jury award for best recipe among the totally blind. She was born with visual impairment, but could read with help of glasses. “As a teenager, I developed glaucoma,” she says, “and then as an adult, I lost sight completely.” Keeping with the theme of the 2023 contest―traditional recipe with locally sourced ingredients―she made green salsa chicken tamales, a Mexican dish.

Bukowska has been living in Mexico for 18 years with her husband, Juan, who helped record the video, dog Imbir (meaning ginger in Polish), and cat Nebbiolo, named so after the Italian wine. Around the time she was finishing her master’s in English philology, with specialisation in cognitive linguistics, she wanted to move out of the family home in Mlawa, Poland, and was wondering what to do and where to go next. “Around that time, I was Skyping a lot with people and that is how I met my husband,” she recalls. “After finishing my master’s thesis, I felt like I needed some kind of reward and went to Mexico on vacation.” Mexico was warm and welcoming, and she just stayed put.

Bukowska’s love for cooking comes from her mother. As a child, she went to boarding school, but would visit home on weekends, most of which were spent observing her mother whip up a yummy cake with just some flour, eggs and butter. “I thought, ‘This is magic’,” she says. She baked her first cake when she was 11 under her mother’s supervision and has not looked back since.

If cooking is magical for Bukowska, it is an adventure for Daniel Aronoff, 44. He won the people’s choice award for best recipe and was the second runner-up in the jury award for the same among the totally blind. He lost his eyes to a tumour around the optic nerve, which first showed up when he was all of three.

As far as he can remember, Aronoff has always loved cooking. He wanted to be a chef when he was 20, but admits that he did not have the skills for it then. “It has taken years of trial and error,” says Aronoff, who had a website, called the Blind Taste Test, where he would post restaurant reviews. “My wife [Ania] is from the Basque Country in Spain, I am from New York. Just having that relationship, learning about new food, it inspired me to do more―to try different cuisines, do more cooking of my own.”

Ania, adds Aronoff, has been a constant source of inspiration. It was Ania who encouraged him to participate in the contest, even as he was following its social media handle and retweeting its posts. And his dish―hake (a local fish in Basque Country) in green sauce (made from parsley) reflects his admiration and gratitude for his wife. Aronoff met Ania online in 2011. “She had questions about cupcakes in America and places to eat in New York,” says Aronoff, who has a double master’s degree in social work and visual rehabilitation therapy. “And then we met the next year in person and got married two years later.” They have a four-year-old son, Mikel.

Aronoff, who now lives in Basque Country with his wife and son, finds it frustrating when someone asks who cooks for him. “Excuse me? I have a million gadgets in my kitchen. I use my stove with my iPhone. I have talking thermometers,” says Aronoff, who now teaches English online. He says he cannot understand why people think blind people cannot cook when there are so many good cooks like Christine Ha, the first-ever blind person to win the MasterChef title. “Obviously, taste is very important to us,” he says. “It is one of those senses that we use a lot. With our four senses we do what you can with five.” It might take them some time, some different trials, different alternative techniques, he says, but they can do what they set their mind to.

Aronoff’s parents are chuffed about their son’s cooking skills. “They actually exaggerate to their friends,” says Aronoff, laughing. “They say, ‘Our son is doing gourmet things in the kitchen.’ And I am like, I am making a piece of fish; it is not gourmet.”

Not all parents are as encouraging though, at least not initially. Annpurna Kaur, 28, was 13 when she first made a dish on her own. Her parents and sisters were away when she made aloo ki sabzi (a side dish made of potatoes). The dish turned out okay, but she got an earful for cooking when there was no one at home. “But slowly my father supported me,” says Kaur, who won the jury award for best recipe among the partially blind. “Whenever he would cook, he would make me sit next to him.”

Kaur was born with visual impairment and underwent a surgery at three that gave her partial vision. She made vegetarian momos, her speciality, for the competition. She has her own restaurant called Krafty Momos near Delhi University’s north campus. She never saw cooking as a challenge, she says. “Initially, it took me time to distinguish between the masalas, but I figured it out,” she says. “It was more difficult to convince my parents and society.”

The reluctance to let visually challenged people cook or do just about anything on their own largely stems from safety concerns. Navina Gyawali, 33, from Kathmandu was often dissuaded from cooking for fear of sustaining burns or injuries. “I then asked my family, ‘You can also get burns, right? How is it any different from when I get them? I get burns not because I am blind, but because I am not mindful,” says Gyawali, who was born blind. “I need to cook to survive, right?”

Her family finally saw reason in her argument. Today, when there is a puja at her house, it is a given that she will make the pickles and side dishes. Her cooking skills improved when she went to the US to study international relations and US history at the University of Southern Indiana on a Fulbright scholarship. She was living alone there and missing Nepali food, so she got cooking. Convincing her family that she can cook and also teaching her blind husband to cook have been her biggest achievements, says Gyawali.

For the Golden Eye Chef, she made dhido (black millet porridge) and gundruk (fermented leafy vegetable). But what probably got her the jury award for the most creative recipe among the totally blind was the effort she put in to make it as traditional as possible. Dhido and gundruk were staples almost a century ago when people did not have enough to eat, says Gyawali. She not only dressed like a woman of that time but also travelled 300km to cook in a mud house with a chulha (earthen stove). That is why, she says, she was expecting an award for her creativity.

But David Bogacz, 66, from Montevideo, Uruguay, was not even sure he would participate in the contest. He always loved cooking but never had a chance to learn it. Last March, the now retired neurophysiologist began taking cooking classes, and it was his teacher there who pushed him to participate. “My family (wife Mariella, a psychologist and theatre actor, and two sons) was surprised with my decision to participate,” he says. “They were very happy when I won [the jury award for most creative recipe and the people’s choice award in best recipe among the partially blind]. They are happy not just for the prize but for the fact that I am able to accept the challenge.”

Bogacz, who makes a mean pizza that he learnt from his mother, made Kenny’s Lamb for the competition. “I wanted to cook something that was relatively new, with some ingredients that were typical to my country. I discussed it with my friend Kenny, who is a good cook but not a professional,” says Bogacz, who developed vision problems in 2001. In 2009, he lost vision in the right eye and then began to have problems in the left eye, too.

Bogacz wants to continue cooking and try his hand at making Indian dishes, as do Bukowska and Aronoff. Bukowska is hoping she can travel to India this year as the competition may have an offline edition. Aronoff is a huge Julia Child fan and is exploring French cuisine through her shows, videos and books. Kaur, meanwhile, wants to employ other blind people at her restaurant to create awareness in society and also provide job opportunities to those like her. Gyawali, who runs a small kitchen called Tick Tick Bites in Kathmandu (tick tick comes from the sound the white cane used by the blind makes), wants to open a restaurant run fully by the blind and expand the work of her NGO Supportive Action Towards Humanity (SATH).

“I think making all these videos [for the contest] gives people a glimpse into our kitchen, into our lives,” says Aronoff. “It shows them that we are no different from the next person.”

Clearly, the competition will have a ripple effect, at least in the community. As for the society, Gyawali has a request: “Please do not connect everything with my blindness. My blindness comes with me, not before me.”

grammy-winner-rakesh-chaurasia-and-his-flute-are-teaching-the-world-many-a-new-tune

Sat Mar 02 11:36:45 IST 2024

Rakesh Chaurasia was not expecting the Grammy. In fact, with just minutes left for the ceremony, the virtuoso flautist was not even sure if his troupe had reached the venue. Tabla maestro Zakir Hussain had just flown in after a concert and, fighting jet lag, reached just in time. “My family was expecting it, but not me,” said Chaurasia, who won two Grammys on the night―one for the track ‘Pashto’ (Best Global Music Performance) and As We Speak (Contemporary Instrumental Album). “I was wondering how I would face my family if I lost. Until the moment I got it, I did not know the Grammys were so huge.”

He had flown from Mumbai to Los Angeles alone to “play it safe”. “I did not want to make a mockery of myself in front of my family,” the 53-year-old said with a laugh. A few minutes after winning, Chaurasia had called one of his disciples, Bharat Raj B., and asked him how his practice was going. “There he was, at the biggest stage in the world for music, and yet, there was no over-the-top excitement in his voice,” said Bharat. “It was as if, in a fraction of a second, he had already moved on, and was thinking about getting on with more practice to polish himself further.”

Listening to As We Speak, it feels as if the quartet―Chaurasia on flute, Hussain on tabla, the Americans Bela Fleck and Edgar Meyer on the banjo and the double bass―is talking to each other through their instruments. Across a dozen songs, they take the listener on an immersive journey that shifts between the complexities of Indian ragas and the high-octave beats of bluesy bass lines.

For Chaurasia, As We Speak was a stroke of serendipity. While he was on tour in the US with Hussain, whom he calls Zakir bhai, the latter was scheduled to meet Fleck and Meyer. “He suggested that as I was there, I should meet them,” he said. “So we were at Zakir bhai’s home in San Francisco and we all kept jamming together from 10am to 7pm.”

The trio, which had already earned global fame, was figuring out if the flute could be part of their music. Chaurasia, though, simply could not understand their music―their instruments were constantly singing while he needed gaps to breathe while playing. “My flute was a contrast to their instruments, which I realised was exactly what they were looking for,” he said.

They then called him on stage during a bluegrass festival in San Francisco, as a guest, only for two songs. “I was surprised to see close to 70,000 people for this kind of music, which we are not too familiar with in India,” said Chaurasia. “But there, things are different. In Hindustani music, we are trained to improvise, as if we have been given the Google Map showing us the way, and it depends on us which route or detour we choose to reach the destination. But there, the room for improvisation is limited.”

The group toured for a year before they decided to cut an album―12 songs in two days. So, in between tours, in Fleck’s huge studio in Nashville, Tennessee, the group recorded the album with zero post production. Everything was live. For someone who had spent more than half his life practising under the tutelage of his legendary uncle, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, aka Pandit ji, this was not a problem. “Yet, I have only reached up to his knees as a flautist,” he said. “He always has something new to give as a performer. When I used to accompany him on stage, I remember how he would change the plan as per the audience profile, and that was entirely different to what we had discussed in the green room.”

Both Chaurasias have long collaborated with Hussain, with Rakesh accompanying his uncle for many performances as a child. The first time he played solo with Hussain was in Scotland, about a decade ago. “Bhaiya (Chaurasia) was very nervous; he told us he closed his eyes and played just about 10 minutes with the tabla as he was that scared. Then Zakir came to him and said, ‘Don’t you like to play with me?’... that is how it started,” said Bharat.

And now, in a recent tour, he did 17 concerts in 20 days with Hussain and the group. They travelled in a trailer with no stopovers, covering 1,500 miles. “Their work ethic is crazy,” said Bharat. “They can afford to take a gap of one month between each concert, but even after achieving everything that a musician can think of, they are like, ‘Why waste time, let us do more’.”

We are at Chaurasia’s duplex in Mumbai. White is the dominant colour. A temple on level one with a Saraswati idol and Krishna holding the bansuri adds a sense of calm. Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia’s unpolished 42-inch bamboo flute adorns the wall. Chaurasia’s wife, Nandani, is busy arranging the bouquets that had come home the previous evening when the society threw him a celebration. “We have never had so many flowers before. I just do not know what to do,” she said.

Continued Chaurasia: “I am very low profile. I have never tried for any Indian award either. Many still consider me a child who is vying for the limelight in the shadow of his uncle.... They even remarked on how we could get a Grammy. But now, I am realising the importance of knowing how to market and sell yourself.”

This is evident in the way he functions―there is no PR or secretary. His disciples read his emails and messages, and his son teaches him the tricks of technology; he struggles with social media. Bharat, an IT engineer from Mysuru who handles the flautist’s communications, once told him he had replied to 7,500 messages on the maestro’s behalf, to which Chaurasia cheekily replied, “Send me the bill.” “All I know is how to play the flute and that I think should suffice,” he said with a smile.

To that end, he looks after his fitness with rigour. “After all, it is in the genes,” he said. “I cannot remain without a good workout whenever possible.” The Chaurasias are known to have been a wrestling family, with the senior Chaurasia being the first to turn to music. “Once, I was with Rakesh bhaiya in a hotel and was nicely hogging,” said Bharat. “I saw him eating only a single serving of upma. He said if you keep eating loads as a performing artist, your health will go for a toss and there will be no stamina to perform. He eats only two meals a day. One meal is only fruits, and one complete meal.”

Like his uncle, Chaurasia has also been in tune with Bollywood. Aur Pyaar Ho Gaya, the 1997 film starring Aishwarya Rai and Bobby Deol, was a landmark in Chaurasia’s career because he established, alongside Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, his own trademark style of playing the flute in Bollywood.

However, he said he misses the spark of the old stuff. “It has become monotonous,” he said. “Music should be situation-based, which used to happen earlier. There is a missing link between the film and the songs.”

Bollywood aside, the two Chaurasias have a lot in common. “Both are lefties, both begin practice early in the morning and go on for hours, both tell disciples to have a Plan B ready before taking up music, and both believe in saving money and never indulge in self pity,” said Bharat.

Chaurasia has told both his sons about having a Plan B, too. He himself never thought of it as a career himself. “I did it for sheer passion,” he said. “I would just copy my babuji. I would wear a kurta, take my position on stage, and spray water on myself to show off my sweat, similar to his. Each time, he would tell me to not leave my job. Sleep less if you must, but do not leave the job for music.” That is the advice he gives his disciples, too. The Chaurasias run a gurukul in Mumbai where they mentor a limited number of students in a five-year residency programme.

“Once, when I told him that I am not playing to my heart’s content, he told me about how Pandit ji would leave Bombay at 5am, reach Chennai to record with Illaiyaraaja and others, reach Hyderabad for another recording before moving on to Bangalore for a 4pm recording and then end with a 10pm stint with Bollywood composers,” said Bharat.

That work ethic is ingrained in Chaurasia. In fact, he is still uneasy and restless and yearns for more. “Some time ago, he told me he was contemplating going on chilla (spiritual practice of solitude) for 40 days because his practice was not up to his expectations,” said Bharat. “Imagine!”

the-real-story-behind-the-amazon-prime-series-poacher

Sat Mar 02 11:29:53 IST 2024

It all began in May 2015, when an emaciated man walked into a forest office in Kerala and confessed to a crime. He was part of a gang of ivory poachers with links to middlemen of an international ivory trading racket.

Kunjumon became Aruku in Emmy-winning filmmaker Richie Mehta's hard-hitting show Poacher, which released on Amazon Prime Video on February 23, and has Alia Bhatt as executive producer. Mehta, however, has remained true to the story and as a result, the show is receiving rave reviews.

The suicide of a prime accused at a pineapple plantation, a race against time, inter-departmental squabbles, the country's largest ivory raid at a secret location in Delhi―these are all fiction rooted in fact, says Jayan Menon, the reporter who exposed the racket on the front page of the Malayala Manorama on June 29, 2015. Menon sketched out how 20 wild elephants were killed by poachers in the forests of Kerala. Here, he tells THE WEEK what really transpired, and how, sometimes, the truth really is more gripping than its own dramatisation.

Poacher, the web series on Amazon Prime Video, comes at a time when several man-animal conflicts are being reported from Wayanad in north Kerala. The story of the large-scale poaching in the forests of Kerala in 2015 was broken by me when I was the Malayala Manorama's chief reporter in Thiruvananthapuram. As depicted in the series, it all started with a physically and mentally broken man―Kalarikudiyil Kunjumon, 62―approaching the Karimbani forest station in Kerala with a confession that he was the cook in an ivory poaching gang. He said they went hunting five times, killed seven elephants and extracted their tusks on four occasions, which were then sold to a person from Thiruvananthapuram. He was paid Rs57,000 by the gang.

The officers at the forest station, however, did not believe him and thought he was deranged. He then went to another forest station with his confession. When the forest officials conducted a preliminary search, they found the remains of an elephant at the spot shown by Kunjumon. A court remanded him in custody for 18 days. Though he gave the mobile numbers of seven culprits, no detailed inquiry was conducted.

Then came an honest forest officer, whose sincerity and commitment to the truth are proof that even hardened elephant poachers can be brought to their knees by the efforts of one man. When forester N. Sivakumar of the Perumbavoor Flying Squad came to know of what was happening, he alerted me. In fact, his role has been taken out of the show and that, according to me, is its one missing link. Unlike in the show, Nimisha Sajayan's character came into the picture much later. But other than this, the show is spot-on in portraying the reality, except for some obvious dramatic elements, like a love interest and a cancer diagnosis.

Sivakumar told me that nothing had been confirmed and the investigation had just begun. Both of us tracked the leads for days. Two weeks later, he came to see me in Thiruvananthapuram with Kunjumon's recorded statement. He was disappointed at the apathy of top forest department officers, three of whom had dismissed his conclusions, despite him providing concrete proof.

After the Malayala Manorama broke the story of large-scale elephant poaching in Kerala, efforts were made to suspend Sivakumar for bringing the forest department into disrepute by colluding with the media, but the authorities were left helpless as each poaching incident was brought to light through the newspaper.

Thiruvanchoor Radhakrishnan, who was the Kerala forest minister at the time, ordered an investigation, and one by one the ivory poachers were trapped. Following the news, the forest department launched a high-level inquiry into the killing and dehorning of 20 wild elephants from the Vazhachal and Athirapilli forest areas in Kerala. The investigation was led by Surendra Kumar, additional principal chief conservator of forest vigilance. The forest guards searched the valley in three teams. The gang members mentioned in Kunjumon's statement were taken into custody. The forest guards went into the “unexplored forest” with them.The remains of five wild elephants―mostly bones and teeth―were found. These samples were sent for testing.

Even though there were efforts from within the forest department to thwart the investigation, ultimately nine people were arrested after Preston Silva, who bought ivory from the poachers, and a few of the gang members surrendered before forest vigilance. Then it was discovered that the racket extended internationally, after the investigators found out about a Kolkata woman, Thenkachi, who was smuggling the tusks abroad. Currently, she is still at large.

Another middleman in the ivory trade was Umesh Agarwal, who was arrested from a four-storey house in Delhi's swanky Shakarpur area by a team of forest rangers, members of the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau and the Delhi Police as part of 'Operation Shikar'. Within 24 hours, Agarwal was brought and remanded in the Muvattupuzha court. The call records of Aji Bright, Preston and Eagle Rajan, who were arrested from Thiruvananthapuram, helped nab Agarwal. He had bought ivory from them, carved it into sculptures and smuggled them to countries like China, Japan and Nepal. The workshop operated from the ground floor of his house. He had been trading in ivory since 1990, but this was the first time he had been caught.

In August, the government handed over the probe to the CBI, as there was inter-state and international involvement. But the CBI did not find anything more than what was found by the forest department. Nineteen cases initiated by the forest department are still in court. Kunjumon, who gave the first statement and became a prime witness in the case, died in 2022. A case that would have ended with the arrest of one man finally led to the arrest of 73 people and the recovery of ivory worth around Rs25 crore, thanks to the intervention of a forest employee and a journalist. A pen, sometimes, is mightier than a poacher's gun.

Menon is currently chief of bureau of the Malayala Manorama in Kozhikode, Kerala

arisi-rice-grains-of-life-dance-show-throws-light-on-the-role-of-rice-in-the-life-of-asians

Sat Mar 02 14:45:58 IST 2024

Tell an Asian to exercise, and she will probably hear it as ‘extra rice’. There is more than a grain of truth in that old joke. For Asians, rice is life.

So it came as a shock for Aravinth Kumarasamy, artistic director of Apsaras Arts Dance Academy, Singapore, when his friend, a schoolteacher, told him that students in his class thought that rice came “from a packet in the supermarket”. He was taken aback by the fact that in a country where rice is a staple, students had no clue about its origin. A few days later, he visited an Indian school in Singapore. He noticed a patch of paddy on the campus, and asked the principal about it. “The children think that rice comes from the supermarket,” said the principal. Hence the show and tell.

That is when Kumarasamy thought that the younger generation needs to be educated on rice. He did not want to be preachy, and so Arisi: Rice-Grains of Life―a multidisciplinary dance show involving bharatnatyam and Balinese dancers―took form.

Rice is the staple food for at least half the world’s population, connecting cultures and civilisations. “I thought that this should be a subtle message and the main show should talk about the rice cycle and the rice culture,” says Kumarasamy, a Sri Lankan based in Singapore. He sat down to write the script with that one-liner in mind. But before that, he travelled the world, researching the significance of rice in the life of Asians. So, Arisi takes you through the paddy fields of Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur to Indonesia’s Bali, weaving in the traditions, festivals and celebrations rooted in and around rice.

The diversity shows through in the production, too. Kumarasamy brought together creative minds like Mohanapriyan Thavarajah of Apsaras Arts, Balinese arts Prof I. Wayan Dibia and dramaturg Lim Ho Ngean for choreography and other aspects of the production. In November 2022, bharatnatyam dancers from India and Singapore, Balinese dancers, dramaturgy experts from Singapore, lighting and set designers, and members of the Singapore-Chinese orchestra came together for the first show in Singapore. Today, the 75-minute dance show, tracing the journey of a new generation farmer from Thanjavur to Singapore, has been performed in rice bowls across the world.

In Chennai, 20 dancers―seven from Bali and the rest from India and Singapore―performed the show during the Margazhi music season in January. Singaporean Wong Chee Wai put up a unique set with around 600 rice stalks, each about 1.6m tall. “This is played around with to show a paddy field, a decorative element and rainfall,” said Kumarasamy.

Apart from the props, what made the stage come truly alive was the music. At one point, a baby’s cry rent the air. For a while, the audience thought there was a toddler among them. But then the curtains went up, and it was clear the baby’s cry, signifying the connection between rice and childbirth, came from the stage.

The music was by Indian composer Rajkumar Bharathi, who blended his compositions with Balinese instruments. The lyrics have elements from the works of Tamil poets like Manickavasagar, Kambar and Subrahmanya Bharathi. “We had to work through several challenges, such as integrating Chinese notes, western music and Indian ragas,” said Bharathi. “I was very particular that we should not mimic each other's genre and worked towards getting a perfect synergy. The whole production was a surreal experience, and I wanted the audience to experience a seven-dimensional sound with both recorded music and live orchestra.” Ace music producer Sai Shravanam was in charge of the engineering and sound design, and light design was by Gyandev Singh from India.

Sound? Check. Lights? Check. All set, it was a moonwalk (figuratively, of course) for the dancers. But why combine bharatnatyam and Balinese dance? “The southeast Asian-Indian link has always fascinated me,” says Kumarasamy, who has trained in bharatnatyam from Kalakshetra in Chennai. “Bharatnatyam and Balinese dance are rooted in natyasasthra. Also, Bali’s rice culture is very strong―Indonesia was the first country to export rice in the 10th century BCE.”

There may be several cross-cultural references in the production, but it all comes down to this core idea that Kumarasamy had―“I only want to tell people how rice is rich in culture and tradition,” he said, “and how it is something more than a grain.”

herpetologist-rom-whitaker-s-new-memoir-is-a-rollicking-ride-through-his-early-adventures

Sat Feb 24 15:21:39 IST 2024

If Rom Whitaker had his way, the serpent would not be frolicking in the Garden of Eden. He would have caught it with a hook, scooped it up gently and put it in a pillowcase―as he did all his life with his mother’s linen―and studied it.

Whitaker was four when he realised he would always be Team Serpent. Turning over a rock to look for earthworms to use as bait, he and his buddies once encountered a snake. “Snake!” they yelled, and pounded it to death with stones.

“Not having seen one before, I was fascinated but afraid. After the boys stepped back, I squatted near the battered creature and examined it. I carried it home on the end of a stick against their advice,” he writes in his memoir Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: My Early Years. His mother looked at the snake and told him that it was a harmless garter snake and made him promise that he would never kill a snake. Breezy―as his mother called him (his sister was Gail)―readily agreed and his life changed.

“That was the bane of my mother’s existence, because I used all her pillowcases to put snakes in,” says Whitaker, in a Zoom interview. “But she was so instrumental in this whole evolution of my life, in terms of loving wildlife and loving creatures, as she had the same feeling that I do about creatures, but perhaps not snakes. But suddenly, I started bringing snakes home when I was four or five years old. And so, like it or not, she got into it. And she just encouraged me all the way. Which mother would do that? Which mother would be crazy enough to let her kid bring home snakes?”

His mother, Doris, was an artist, and after she and Whitaker’s father were divorced in the US, she remarried and moved to India.

The first snake Whitaker brought home was a milk snake. His mother took a photograph of it with him. As a teen, he acquired a pet python bought by his mother’s friend at Crawford Market in Mumbai. “And they remained friends,” said Janaki Lenin, laughing. Lenin―author, conservationist and Whitaker’s wife―co-wrote the memoir.

Whitaker’s pet python brought him adventures that possibly tested the friendship. It almost ate Trichy, Doris’s pet cat. (He had rescued it from a train station.) The python also lived with him in his school dorm at Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu. He kept it under the bed of a truck, feeding it rats.

Everyone thought he would outgrow snakes, he writes, especially in his teenage years, when he loved motorbikes. But the love for snakes never waned; it grew instead. He learnt the proper way to catch a snake. “When you pick up a snake, you usually look at both ends,” he says. “One end is the sharp end, so to speak, which can bite you… so usually you would put a hand around the cloaca, which is near the tail. So you don’t get crap all over. But sometimes it does, of course.”

By 15, Whitaker had a sand boa, water snake and Russell’s viper as pets. Apart from the pet python in school, he also had parakeets.

Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll is the first of three volumes, and it offers a rollicking journey through Whitaker’s life till he turns 24. Vivid, funny and evocative, the memoir captures not only Whitaker’s unusual love, but also a life that possibly could not have been lived today. “I yearn for that time gone by,” he says. “Everything was seemingly so much simpler, and less complex and less threatening.”

The memoir is brilliantly told, and written almost tenderly, with adjectives not usually used for reptiles. The ring-necked milk snake, for instance, is described as “gorgeously patterned”. “The eastern diamondback rattlesnake in the US actually has quite a sweet smell,” he says. “I even thought of putting it into a perfume. Can you imagine?”

The memoir offers a delightful, ringside view of his family. His stepfather, Ram Chattopadhyay, was the son of social reformer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. “I kind of regret not knowing her much,” he says.

From a childhood where he learnt to fish, shoot, stuff birds, catch snakes and experiment with fireworks, to his military stint in Vietnam, his days in Lovedale in the Nilgiris (which he hated) and encountering snakes in America, Whitaker has had an extraordinary life pursuing his unusual passion. So has this rubbed off on Janaki? “I didn’t think about snakes before I met Rom,” she says. “Obviously, they weren’t in my world. The thing is, his enthusiasm is infectious. We were living in the Crocodile Bank, and you are surrounded by these captive creatures that you are taking care of. I was a filmmaker at that time. And I was always wondering what is that cobra thinking? How is it perceiving the world? It is so alien. I don’t think, in a million years, we will ever be able to figure out how the snake sees us and the world.”

It is, well, hiss story worth reading. “I just lucked out,” says Whitaker. “I didn’t mess with the hard snakes till I was 12 or 13. By then, of course, you know everything. You know exactly what to do. Let’s put it this way: I am probably lucky to be alive.”

Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: My Early Years

By Romulus Whitaker

Published by HarperCollins India

Pages 400; price Rs699

jairam-n-menon-s-debut-book-masala-chai-for-the-soul-is-delightfully-tongue-in-cheek

Sat Feb 24 11:15:16 IST 2024

In the realm of literary concoctions, Jairam N. Menon's debut book, Masala Chai for the Soul, is a delightful blend of wit, humour and insightful observations on the quirks of human nature. Menon's ability to capture the essence of mundane moments and elevate them to comic or catastrophic heights is reminiscent of the legendary P.G. Wodehouse.

I remember reading Menon's witty contributions in THE WEEK. I am sure that like me many readers must have relished his selection of topics and the ease with which he expressed his thoughts. Masala Chai for the Soul is a testament to Menon's ability to transport readers to savour prose in slow motion. He effortlessly expands characters, trivialities and plots to create a tapestry of humour.

Menon's facility to make words dance to his bidding, the eloquent turns of phrase and a profound understanding of human foibles are evident throughout the book. Each chapter is a testament to his storytelling prowess, making the reader laugh, ponder and nod in agreement.

One of the standout features of the book is Menon's ability to infuse wisdom seamlessly into his narratives. In a chapter on quotation marks, he humorously suggests that to clinch arguments or to appear knowledgeable, borrowed wisdom is your best ally.

Menon's writing transcends the boundaries of a typical humour book, offering readers not just laughter, but a profound understanding of human nature.

MASALA CHAI FOR THE SOUL

By Jairam N. Menon

Published by Rupa Publications

Pages 224; price Rs295

indian-actress-janhvi-kapoor-about-her-movies

Thu Feb 22 16:14:31 IST 2024

This has to be the year of Janhvi Kapoor. The actor, who made her debut with Dharma Productions’ Dhadak in 2018, has three films releasing in 2024. This is unusual, especially for Kapoor, as all her films have seen her play the lead role or the protagonist, and not just a love interest.

And yet, when we meet at her Bandra home, the 26-year-old actor says she is not having the best day. “I just received the dialogues of Devara last night, and all I want to do is sit in my room and learn my lines,” she scowls.

The Telugu film Devara is unarguably the biggest film she has been signed for. It is a major production―an action film directed by Koratala Siva―and she stars opposite the celebrated N.T. Rama Rao Jr. One would think it ironic that Telugu lines make her nervous, since she is the daughter of India’s first female superstar Sridevi, who frontlined Hindi as well as every south language film. “I never learned Telugu and it is something I am ashamed of,” she says. “I can understand it phonetically, but I can’t speak it. Yes, it is one of my biggest regrets.” Now, she feels the film is bringing her closer to her south Indian roots. “This part of me had been dormant for a while. But the Devara team is very patient and helpful. They are working with such stalwarts and I am so grateful they are just a call away to help me with my lines,” she smiles. The film also co-stars Saif Ali Khan and Prashant Raj.

The other two films releasing this year are Mr and Mrs Mahi, in which she is again cast opposite her Roohi hero Rajkummar Rao, and a political thriller called Ulajh. “Sharan Sharma, the director of Mr and Mrs Mahi, discussed the film with me while we were shooting for Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, which he had directed, too,” Kapoor says. “So I feel it has been a long time coming. He had this idea of a romantic film sprinkled with cricket. I fell in love with it. Its casting had its own journey, but I feel I have almost willed it back into my life,” she smiles. Kapoor adds the film has been trying; she lost nine kilos and dislocated both her shoulders training for it. “The process was long and strenuous, but I’m so proud of it,” she says. The film releases in April. Ulajh, she says, also borrows greatly from Kapoor’s life experiences and personality.

She has also recently been signed on for four new films, all of which will release in 2024 or early 2025. She has been cast opposite two southern mega stars: Ram Charan for RC 16, and Suriya for Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Karna, a two-part mythological drama where she plays Draupadi. She is also said to have been signed on for Shashank Khaitan’s next under Dharma Productions, alongside Varun Dhawan. There are rumours of yet another major film being signed on for Dharma.

“My father (Hindi film producer Boney Kapoor) has gone and made some announcement, and I don’t know what he has said. It’s too early to talk about the other films. My father has definitely not spoken to me or my producers,” she laughs. “I wish I belonged to a universe where you just shoot films, you didn’t have to announce, clarify or deny them.”

What Kapoor will discuss is how excited she is about the many collaborations between Bollywood and films from the south. She is working in three. “As an artist, I have always been an advocate of Indian cinema. We have diverse cultures and a diverse audience. Regional cinema is also Indian cinema and we have seen them do the kind of businesses that mainstream cinema does. That says where we are culturally, as a society: we seek truth, we seek new ideas and honesty in our art. The pan-India format allows us to do all of this. Look at Kantara,” she says of Rishab Shetty’s Kannada film of 2022, that was made on a meagre budget and went on to make nearly Rs400 crores globally. “I don’t think this is a phase. I think we are stronger together. Cinema brings us together. It is amazing that we could, hypothetically, have a film with Allu Arjun acting, Sanjay Leela Bhansali directing, and have Sai Pallavi or Roshan Mathew, or some amazing Bengali actors in it. The possibilities are endless.”

Inter-state films dipping into each other’s fan base is a big plus, too. “The south industry has been cultivating its audiences for a very long time. Telugu and Tamil films dubbed in Hindi have been getting great ratings,” she explains.

Kapoor has starred in six films in five years―Dhadak (2018), Gunjan Saxena and a short in Ghost Stories (2020), Roohi (2021), Good Luck Jerry and Mili (2022), and Bawaal (2023). None of these have fared well at the box office, save her debut. But almost each one has seen her receive rave reviews for her performance. She was even nominated for two Filmfare awards for best actress (Gunjan Saxena, Mili).

Does the blockbuster film elude her? “I think a box office success would have made a difference to me and to my producers to get bigger budgets for their films. But I am fortunate they signed me for my talent. That said, nothing feels as good as people filling the theatres. No review or critical acclaim can match that,” she says.

There is always so much talk around kids of actors or industry folk, but Kapoor has taken her career very seriously―she moved to California to Lee Strasberg’s film institute to hone her craft. “Can I be honest? I learned nothing there,” she says. “I’m often told I am too honest for Bollywood and that has burnt me. But at least I sleep well at night. The thrill of moving to California was in the anonymity it gave me. I was not someone’s daughter for once, and that was so refreshing. But the school’s format was so rooted in Hollywood and approaching its casting agents. I actually realised I am not a method actor. Secondly, I wish I had spent more time with my people and in my language. I am telling stories from India and I need to relate to Indians. Sitting in LA and going to Malibu on weekends actually made me feel more detached.”

Kapoor’s public image is far removed from the characters she plays. She portrays herself as a glamorous girl, working out in the gym, practising kathak, painting, or making awesome comedy reels. What is her relationship with her image like? “I enjoy social media, but there is nothing I enjoy more than being on a film set,” she says. “I haven’t been on one in a month now and it is driving me crazy. Getting my dialogues yesterday was like getting a life jacket thrown at you. I don’t want anything to dilute my art.”

There are also rumours of a budding romance with Shikhar Pahariya; she almost admitted to having him on her speed dial on Karan Johar’s talk show. “I even have my manager on my speed dial,” is all she’s willing to admit.

She will admit, however, that she loves her younger sister Khushi Kapoor’s debut, The Archies (2023). “I thought she had a very likable, soft and honest energy on screen. She is an internal actor, not a demonstrative one. I told her there would be a lot of instructions thrown at her for not fitting into a conventional mould,” says Kapoor.

She would know, she has been making and breaking moulds for a few years already.

the-ultimate-restaurant-ratings-might-be-india-s-answer-to-michelin

Sat Feb 17 10:17:52 IST 2024

A cursory glance at author and award-winning journalist Vir Sanghvi’s food writing shows fervour and flavour. A piece on why leftover food tastes better the next day? The nation wants to know. Another on why the world of seafood is so mystifying? Yes! (And you thought you were the only one who did not know the difference between crayfish and lobster.) A story on why Gujarati food does not get the respect it deserves? Hit us with it.

That’s why Sanghvi is probably the right person to helm India’s first annual star rating system for restaurants. “The majority of restaurant awards in India is done on a sponsorship basis,” he says. “Often many of them will charge you for the award, and accept sponsorships from restaurant companies, so there will be people who are getting awards who will be listed as sponsors, the hotel where the awards are held complimentary will be called hospitality partner, and the airline will be called airline partner, so there is a problem with the credibility of these awards.” Ultimate Restaurant Ratings, on the other hand, were established “with a mission to recognise and award culinary excellence without any form of outside influence”.

And when the foodie is ready, the financier appears. Sanghvi met Sameer Sain, co-founder and CEO of the Everstone Group, before the pandemic and together, they founded Culinary Culture, which they describe as “the country’s only authoritative culinary movement”. Other than the Ultimate Restaurant Ratings, Culinary Culture has a few intellectual properties―like the Gourmet Delivery Awards for food delivery and Food Superstars to rate India’s top chefs.

The Ultimate Restaurant Ratings were roughly modelled after the Michelin. To judge the best restaurants in the country, 50 ‘food hunters’― mostly food writers, critics and bloggers―were selected to anonymously rate over 3,000 restaurants in six locations: Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Goa and Kolkata. The shortlisted restaurants were visited by a member of the jury (Culinary Culture prefers to keep details of the food hunters and the jury confidential) and their decision ratified by Sanghvi and Sain. “We rarely interfere, but if there is a major dispute, then we may adjudicate,” says Sanghvi. The process began in 2020, and the awards―where over 50 restaurants were given three, four or five stars based on the criteria of taste, technique, presentation, and service―were announced this month.

There were surprises. And a few quibbles from social media users: Why was Lupa in the list? Bomras should have received four or five stars. Sublime in Goa should have been included. But as Sanghvi intimated, rating food will always be subjective and there are bound to be disagreements.

Sanghvi himself was surprised by some of the findings. “The highest number of three-star restaurants were from Mumbai, and I thought Delhi would do better,” he says. “Also, in Mumbai, most of the restaurants that made it were non-hotel restaurants. There was a time when hotel restaurants had the best chefs and used the best ingredients. I think that has changed. Also, many of the Michelin-starred restaurants in Asian cities specialise in European food. That’s not the case in India. Of the three restaurants which got the five-star rating in India, Avartana in Chennai does modern south Indian food, Farmlore in Bengaluru does ingredient-based food with south Indian influences and Indian Accent in Delhi again does modern Indian food. It is interesting that we are developing an Indian restaurant cuisine that is independent of tandoori chicken, that is innovative and is being accepted by audiences and markets.”

Even as Culinary Culture aims to expand the list to 10 cities in the next edition, which will probably include Amritsar, Hyderabad and Kochi, THE WEEK spoke to the chefs behind the three five-star restaurants in the country. After all, no one has boiled, broiled or braised India as these chefs are doing.

Farmlore, Bengaluru

Waiter, there is a fire ant on my plate!

Many of the dishes at Bengaluru’s Farmlore do not just tell a story, they make a statement. Take the seataphor―a dish that is a metaphor for how we destroy our oceans with plastic and oil spills. It is made with Kochi snapper, a blue algae called spirulina, coconut, which reached various shores through ships, and edible plastic, made with potato starch. “One has discovered that when ocean ecosystems are given time and space to recover from detrimental human activities, they can rebound at an astonishing rate, so it is never too late [to save them],” says Chef Johnson Ebenezer, co-founder and chef patron at the 18-seater restaurant, located on a 37-acre farm.

In fact, the ocean has a special significance for Ebenezer. He started his career working with Carnival Cruise Line in Miami. “My uncle used to work for cruises, and he used to send me postcards from different parts of the world,” he says. “Seeing them, I too decided I wanted to travel around the world. But my father is an ordinary cop who did not take bribes, so he could just afford to give me a normal education. That’s how I thought of going outside India to make money. Once I started travelling, I started understanding different cultures and foods, and soon, cooking became a passion.”

Ebenezer started Farmlore with Kaushik Raju, the COO of the Atria Group, in 2019, after helming Nadodi, a celebrated restaurant in Malaysia. The menu at Farmlore changes every day and is dictated by what is produced on the farm. He refuses to let his cuisine be defined by any specific category and describes it as “eclectic with locavore sensibilities”.

“When you say farm-to-table, the food sometimes tends to look boring,” he says. “We did not want that. We wanted to have fun with our dishes.”

And that’s where the fire ants and the gin gummy bears come in. “We collected fire ant nests from the mango and citrus trees in the farm, crushed the ants, added some Teja chilli and shallots and made a chutney out of them,” he says. Just as playful is the gin and whiskey gummy bears. “These are locally made whiskey and gin,” he says. “We give them as a takeaway as well. They are very cute and when you see them, you feel like popping them into your mouth.”

But at Farmlore, the fun is never frivolous. “The dish should make sense in terms of flavour pairings,” says Ebenezer. “I could never do something that is completely eccentric. It has to appeal to the senses―to the eye and most importantly, to the palate.” Well, mission accomplished! All the Farmlore creations on its Instagram page―the pork belly with mustard espuma and charred purple cabbage, the poached egg with moringa, turmeric and crispy seaweed, the Christmas pudding with pine needle ice-cream―look like they could be framed and hung on a wall.

And if the Valentine’s Day specials were anything to go by, they might have tickled your literary sensibilities as well. The theme was Cupid taking revenge on Shakespeare for all his tragedies. An innovative spin was given to references like the quote on garlic and cheese in Shakespeare’s play, Henry IV. So if you were served crispy cheddar pork chops with garlic at FarmLore on February 14, you have King Henry to blame.

Indian Accent, Delhi

The Maggi man who makes a mean dal Moradabadi

Chef Manish Mehrotra of Indian Accent grew up in Patna in a vegetarian household. His father and grandmother never allowed even onion and garlic in the dishes. His mother used to feed them eggs, but only on the terrace, on separate sets of crockery. Living in a household without onion, garlic or any non-vegetarian food did leave an impact on the celebrated chef. It taught him that you only need few ingredients to cook delicious food.

And that, in a nutshell, is the culinary ethos at Indian Accent―simple flavour profiles with innovations that do not compromise on taste. There are certain rules Mehrotra follows while experimenting on new dishes. First, he will not mix two Indian cuisines in one dish. At Indian Accent, you will never find a paneer chettinad or idli in Kashmiri spices.

Then, he gives international classics an Indian twist. “For example, pork ribs will always go with something sweet and sticky, whether it is the South East Asian version or the Texas version,” he says. “So I thought, why not pair it with a sweet mango pickle sauce? This dish has been a best-seller at the restaurant from the day we opened. Or take bread and cheese, which is again a classic combination. So we decided to try out a blue cheese naan. Blue cheese is a bit of a wild flavour for the Indian palate, and that’s why we toned it down by stuffing it in hot naan. After getting cooked in tandoor, there is a hint of blue cheese, but it is not too overwhelming for the Indian palate.”

Indian Accent, now with three outposts in Delhi, New York, and Mumbai, is no stranger to awards and acclamation. It has been on Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list since 2015. It was recognized by Time magazine as being one of the world’s 100 greatest places to visit and was voted the no.1 restaurant in India by Conde Nast Traveller. The five-star recognition by Culinary Culture is the icing on its cake.

The Indian Accent in Delhi is completing 15 years this year. “Yes, there is pressure to maintain the quality,” says Mehrotra. “You must be on your toes all the time. There are legendary restaurants like Bukhara (in ITC Maurya, Delhi) where the menu has remained unchanged for the last 35 years. They don’t need to, because they have specialised so well in certain dishes. That’s not the case with Indian Accent, where we keep innovating and experimenting and providing our guests with new experiences regularly.”

And for Mehrotra, innovation comes from travelling, visiting relatives all over the country to learn more about eclectic Indian dishes and poring over cookbooks―he has over 1,200 of them and he says every two months, he searches out new ones. It began from the time he shifted from pan-Asian cuisine (while working with Oriental Octopus at the India Habitat Centre) to modern Indian food when he started Indian Accent in 2009. “It was really difficult to make the shift. I researched, practised and studied so much. If I had studied half as much in school, my parents would have been very happy, and I would have become a doctor, engineer or scientist,” he quips.

And what is the go-to food for the chef extraordinaire, whose doda burfi treacle tart, pulled pork phulka tacos and galautis stuffed with foie gras are now the stuff of culinary legend? “I’m more of a 2am Maggi kind of guy,” he says with a laugh.

Avartana, Chennai

Put your mouth where the south is

If James Bond had asked for a martini at Chennai’s Avartana, he would have been in for a surprise. For instead of “three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka and half a measure of Kina Lillet”, he would have been served an ancient potion said to have been brought to Madurai by the Saurashtrians in the 16th century―distilled tomato rasam.

Sure, the rasam at the modern south Indian restaurant, served in a martini glass, has been given a sexy facelift―it is made over two days with bruised tomatoes hung from a muslin cloth for several hours for the flavour to drip through. But at its heart, it is still the soothing concoction that even our colonisers could not resist (they renamed it as mulligatawny in an attempt to anglicise it).

The story of rasam is also the story of Avartana―authentic south Indian flavours creatively reimagined. So, there are dumplings inspired by the famous ‘kozhikatai’, yogurt spheres in crispy chili potato and multi-layered panna cotta coated with pulled sugar. There is also the famous sago yogurt, one of the first dishes created even before the opening of the restaurant, inspired by a well-known family of gourmands in Chennai.

Somebody once said that order exists so that good things can run wild. Whether it is the jackfruit seed fritters and potato crackers or the butter toffee wrapped with beetroot and spiced aubergine sheet, there is discipline in the playfulness, effort in the effortlessness.

Avartana, which opened at the ITC Grand Chola in 2017, now has two more outposts in Kolkata and Mumbai. Guests are offered a range of seven to 13 tasting menus. Interestingly, the person behind the restaurant’s success is not south Indian. Chef Nikhil Nagpal, executive chef and brand custodian at Avartana, was born in Kolkata. “Having travelled to multiple cities in my childhood gave me a varied experience of flavours and dishes,” he says. “I decided to be a chef in high school and since then have been inspired by food cultures across the world. Over the years, I have loved to travel and soak in experiences from various cities around the globe.”

For someone who could not boil rice without burning it in college, Nagpal sure has come a long way.

a-clutch-of-war-writers-at-the-jaipur-literature-festival-spoke-about-finding-hope-amidst-hopelessness

Sat Feb 10 14:59:36 IST 2024

On June 17, 1987, American journalist Charles Glass was seized in Lebanon by 10 Hezbollah men with Kalashnikovs. When he tried to escape, they clubbed him with their rifle butts. He was held captive for 62 days, during which he would push notes for help in English, French and Arabic through a bathroom window. Two months after being chained by his ankle and wrist, he managed to escape.

“When captors pick you up, you disappear,” Glass later wrote. “You are vulnerable to whims and caprice. People from your country and the other side are making deals you know nothing about. You are expendable. Whether you die or achieve your liberty is someone else’s decision. Your impotence is total. Except over your thoughts. The Israeli-Palestinian poet and former political prisoner Fouzi al-Asmar wrote: ‘With all the might of their hatred that tears this life apart/They cannot put my mind in jail.’ You listen for clues―as if a guard’s tone of voice will tell you if he is going to kill you or let you go. Your senses are sharpened. You escape in sleep and dreams, remembering your life and imagining your life to come, if it is to come.”

Glass, who has covered wars in Syria, Somalia, Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina, was at the Jaipur Literature Festival from February 1 to 5 to promote his latest book, Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry and Mental Illness During the First World War. Elaborating on the difference between writing a book and covering war, he told THE WEEK, “A book is basically a long article. So, you just have to do more research, more interviews, and go through more archives, to be able to tell a story at length, which is a great luxury. Often, when you have the deadline pressure of daily journalism you cannot do that. It is probably a more interesting, but less exciting activity.”

Glass was not the only one. At a time when the world is witnessing two wars―Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas―a number of war writers at the JLF spoke about what it is like to cover conflicts in the most dangerous parts of the world, of living with fear and of witnessing the most extremes of human nature.

“There is no point in hiding that there is fear,” said Pulitzer prize-winning war reporter, Roger Cohen, during a session on war moderated by Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, president (international), of The New York Times Company. “The anticipation is the worst.” He talks about the uncertainty of deciding whether to go somewhere or not. For example, he was planning on visiting the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv the day it got badly shelled. “Should I go or shouldn’t I go, I wondered,” says Cohen. “You don’t need good luck in war, you need the absence of bad luck, because shrapnel can fly anywhere.”

Cohen, currently the Paris bureau chief of The New York Times, has worked for the Times for 33 years as a foreign correspondent, foreign editor and an opinion columnist, and has authored five books. According to him, war can never be looked at through an objective lens. It is always personal. “We are human beings,” he said. “Each of us brings our sentiments, feelings, and who we are into what we write. So, objectivity is a long word that I think is impossible and probably not even desirable to attain.”

Ukrainian historian and writer Olesya Khromeychuk would agree. After all, it does not get more personal than writing a book on losing a brother to war. “My book, [The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister], is about my brother who volunteered to fight in the Ukrainian armed forces back in 2015, and was killed in action in 2017,” she said at a session. “This was at a time when Ukraine was entirely forgotten, and the war there was not seen as a war, but as an internal conflict. It was claiming thousands of lives, but the number of deaths matters when it comes to making headline news, so it wasn’t claiming enough lives to get global attention. I was living in London―where life went on as usual―and grieving for a brother who was killed in the frontline on the other side of Europe. I was looking to explain the situation in a way that others would know and care. I could not find that way as a historian, but I found it as a grieving sister. So, I decided to tell the personal story of grief for my brother, which people can relate to, and through that tell the story of the larger historical and political context of this war.”

Khromeychuk says that until February 2022, when the war escalated, the story of Ukraine was told either through Russia’s propaganda machine or by international observers who did not know the country well. “So, we found ourselves being portrayed as a small nation of 40 million people with no clear identity, and that is exactly how the Russians wanted the world to see us,” she says. “The story of how Russian imperialism and cultural violence then led to physical and military violence needed to be explained to a wider audience.”

According to these writers, war exposes humanity at its most naked. You see extremes of courage and cruelty, and it always leaves a mark on you. Cohen describes children in Beirut not being able to sleep unless they heard the sound of shelling (“silence was terrifying to them”), observing a waiter folding and refolding napkins and arranging them on the table elegantly while war raged around him, and women in Sarajevo walking around in high heels and makeup as a sign of protest at the height of the siege. “I remember going out on the fourth day after 9/11 and seeing these photographs of missing people,” he says. “A woman had put up her ultrasound, and written beneath: Looking for the father of this baby. Seeing that, I broke down. Sometimes it is hard to contain the emotion that we experience.”

But in the depths of hopelessness, there is always hope, says award-winning Indian journalist Anjan Sundaram, who has reported mostly from the Congo and the Central African Republic, and has written three memoirs―Stringer, Bad News and Breakup. He studied mathematics at Yale, but shifted to journalism when he saw a report in The New York Times, buried somewhere on the fourth page, about four million people having died in the war in Congo. It shocked him, and he wondered why it did not make front page news. Finding mathematics too abstract and removed from the real world, Sundaram pivoted to war reporting, so that he could more directly impact people’s lives.

“In all the darkest places I go to, I find the most inspiring people,” Sundaram told THE WEEK. He narrates the story of finding a Polish abbot in the Central African Republic who was on his way to a church located in an extremely dangerous rebel territory. The church was attacked by the government who stole its door, leaving the altar exposed. The priest was now sleeping in the open. The abbot was going there to get the door replaced as a mark of protest. Sundaram asked if he could tag along, and at every village where they stopped, the abbot would honk and someone would run out of the forest, where the villagers were hiding, and thrust a piece of paper into the car. On it would be the names of all the people who were sick in the village and what medicines and other assistance they required. The abbot would pass on these slips of paper to the NGOs in the main city. “Collecting information by hand when the telephone antennae had been destroyed was an incredibly brave thing to do,” says Sundaram. “In the 21st century, where we think we have access to too much information through social media and other means, this is still how information is collected in a war zone.”

It is a hard life, and often these writers must live with the guilt of surviving when so many others did not. Yet, they say they would not give it up for anything. Said Cohen, “If somebody were to put a gun to my head and ask what were you put on this earth to do, it would be to be a foreign correspondent, arriving somewhere you don’t know, somewhere completely new, and just trying to understand―seeing, feeling, smelling, intuiting. There is no substitute for boots on the ground.”

rajen-mehra-s-never-out-of-print-is-a-memoir-of-not-just-a-man-but-also-rupa-publications-and-the-growth-of-indian-publishing

Fri Feb 09 15:03:01 IST 2024

It is a freezing day in Delhi’s winter that has outlived its novelty. The door of the Rupa office in the chaotic grey of Yusuf Sarai, with endless rows of shops, opens and music from the newly opened coffee shop wafts in.

Rajen Mehra arrives right on time. “I am actually two minutes early,”he says. At 77, Mehra is spry, with the restless energy of a self-made man. At 22, Mehra travelled across India on a train to learn about publishing, a journey that changed his life. He was waiting to join a management school, but the train journey from then Calcutta to Kerala taught him much more than he would ever learn in books. He would, however, sell them.

Never Out of Print is a memoir of not just a man but also Rupa Publications and the growth of Indian publishing. This book or the idea of it started when he was in hospital for severe breathlessness in 2010. When he got home, he wrote. He first faced rejection from a friend, till the book emerged in this form―breezy, interspersed with pictures, memories and vignettes of his life.

His great-grandmother had told his granduncle, who started Rupa, that if his first customer was a Muslim, his business would thrive. As it happened, the man who stopped to buy the Collins English Dictionary on August 17, 1936, at his stall was Humayun Kabir. “At auspicious occasions, I will always invite a Muslim to do that,” says Mehra. “People get upset about it. What is to get upset about? They are humans, we are humans.”

Mehra recounts the journey of Rupa from its Kolkata home near the coffee house to Delhi. The coffee house was where the city’s brightest gathered for adda. Mehra once got a cigarette for Kanu Sanyal, founder-member of the naxalite movement: “He paid for it,”says Mehra, smiling. Satyajit Ray, another visitor to the coffee house, designed the first Rupa logo.

Rupa has now become a much-established name in India’s thriving publishing scene under Mehra. It moved from being the distributor for giants like Penguin and HarperCollins to publishing. “We expanded into nonfiction, and nonfiction in an area Penguin would not get into and not get, like food,” he says. Over the years, this expanded to include big politicians like L.K. Advani to cricketers like Sunil Gavaskar―each of them having been scouted by Mehra.

“I shot the picture for the cover for [Gavaskar’s] second book, Idols,” says Mehra. “We had no budget. The company was going through the traumatic effect of leaving Calcutta. Photographers were not willing. Once they heard it was Sunil, they wanted to charge Rs10,000. So I took him to the DGCA ground and he was practising and I took some photos.”

The story of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is well known. But Mehra has his own. “The manuscript was with Penguin and they gave it to me to read,” he says. “They were worried about some passages in the book. I gave it to two of my trusted Muslims; they were highly literate people. They said there is nothing in this.” So Rupa imported 500 copies. “The next day, (journalist and newsreader) Tejeshwar Singh called to say, ‘The book may be banned.’ Our office was in the Jama Masjid area. He was very concerned. I said, ‘We will see what happens.’ At 9pm, I was listening to the news. And Tejeshwar announced the book was banned.”

The next day, Mehra got to office early. “I used to drive an Ambassador car, and I put all my stocks into the car,” he recalls. “The first call came at 9am. Mr Sham Lal, editor of the Times of India, wanted five copies.” By the end of the evening, 400 copies were sold. “I had ordered 10,000 copies with special permission to import. But it had to be stopped at Heathrow,” he says.

Everything Mehra has learnt is through grit, hard work and enterprise. “Publishing takes years to build,” he says. “It is very difficult to destroy, because if you have good literature, you cannot destroy it.”

NEVER OUT OF PRINT: THE RUPA STORY: THE JOURNEY OF AN INDEPENDENT INDIAN PUBLISHER

Author: Rajen Mehra

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Pages: 504; price: Rs500

talat-mahmood-the-definitive-biography-is-a-befitting-introduction-to-a-singing-genius

Sat Feb 03 11:26:57 IST 2024

To encapsulate the life of a man often described the ‘King of Ghazals’, though he was much more than that, is no easy task. Just for attempting that, Sahar Zaman deserves applause.

Talat Mahmood, born in Lucknow and trained at what was then the Marris College of Music (now Bhatkhande Sanskriti Vishwavidyalaya) was a singer unlike any other. His natural velvet voice bore a slight quiver. It is a quiver which singers take years to cultivate. Musically termed vibrato, this quick and subtle change of voice between notes which are pitched very closely conveys emotions more powerfully than lyrics. When used without dedicated cultivation, a vibrato sounds contrived and the unevenness of breath can be made out by the trained ear; but when it comes naturally, it is as smooth as the wax and wane of emotion. Yet, in his early years in Mumbai, Mahmood strove to hide this unique quality, attempting often to sing in the nasal tones of his idol K.L. Saigal. This would not last long as Anil Biswas, a composer he had worked with for long, angrily walked out of a recording studio asking Mahmood to return only when the real Talat was found.

Ghazals came first to Mahmood because of his affinity with Urdu, and also because of the cultural bearings at home. His father, Manzoor Mahmood, who was a member of the Indian Medical Mission to Ottoman, would often sing to pep up his fellow travellers, while his sisters were flawless renderers of the nath (songs in praise of the Prophet), and his elder brother, Kamal, too, had a rich singing voice. While everyone in the family had strong voices with good throws, Mahmood’s was tuned differently. It was far gentler, almost like a dewdrop caressing a rosebud. It was the kind of voice that could dull the impact of the unkindest of blows. In the 2022 release Gangubai Kathiawadi, for instance, when the lead character learns of being sold to a brothel by her boyfriend, there is a snippet of a song that plays in the background. Mahmood's voice is like a gentle nuzzle that softens the harsh truth.

Pathos was the most marked emotion of Mahmood’s voice. It was the embodiment of a disembodied, deep sadness. No wonder then that ‘Tragedy King’Dilip Kumar spoke of him as the ‘true musical speaker of my soul’.

Mahmood’s musical life was a rich amalgamation of traditions and languages. Under the name Tapan Kumar, he was a leading voice of the modern Bengal Music movement in which lyrics became as important as the music. He sang in 16 languages including Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada. And while you can close your eyes and imagine him most readily as a dejected Dilip Kumar pictured behind gauzy, fluttering curtains singing ‘Shaam-e-Gham ki qasam’ (On the promise of this sadness soaked evening), close them for some more time and you will just as easily picture him as a boyish Raj Kapoor singing ‘Main dil hun ek armaan bhara’ (I am a heart full of desires), a song that lends itself most readily to the waltz.

As a singer he had many firsts to his name, including being the pioneer of world tours. His pleasant face (which incidentally is also the meaning of Talat) made him a singing-actor and he also dabbled in composition. To audiences in the USA, he was introduced as the Frank Sinatra of India. He became a recognised voice, courtesy All India Radio, at just the age of 16. The book records a delightful incident in which the young Mahmood was accosted by a group of girls in Lucknow to sing as he cycled his way to his music college. Among that gaggle of fans was Qurratulain Hyder, who would go on to become a famed Urdu writer.

He was also a man deeply devoted to the larger cause of his art. He raised his voice for the payment of royalties to singers and also became a part of programmes to raise funds for senior, out-of-work artists. He joyfully gave away songs to Mukesh when he was going through a rough patch. His delight in singing for troops and in encouraging new talent all made him a perfect gentleman, a word often used in the book to describe him.

Biographies can never be divorced from the times that their subjects lived in. Thus, we read in bits about the decline of the film industry in Kolkata after the partition of Bengal, the government’s press for the Bhoodan movement, for which Mahmood sang; the start of recordings in sound-proof rooms; the introduction of multi-instrument orchestra for playback singing; and the rise of version songs. We also read of how the Partition tore apart Mahmood’s family. In a particularly poignant recollection, his father asked his elder son who would water the plants in the courtyard if he left for Pakistan (he did anyway).

The book at places digresses from a linear telling of Mahmood’s story and moves to talking about other stars of the time. This could appear jarring to some, but it is perhaps inevitable given that Mahmood’s journey was intertwined with those of others. One example being that of the actor Shyam, whose death resulting from an accident on a film set is talked about in some detail, to later merge it with the fact that his last three songs, sung by Mahmood, became ‘locked’in his voice.

If you are looking for a book which offers an undeviating narrative of Mahmood’s life, this perhaps is not it. This book reads more like a collection of anecdotes―some known, some not so well known. His gentleness is a quality emphasised throughout the book. He earned it perhaps from spending his formative years with his paternal aunt Mahlaqa Begum. We also come to know that he was a keeper of his words―both to friends and the girlfriend he left in Kolkata.

To those who have known the music of Mahmood, this book is a ready reckoner of his songs and will send you to listen to those you have loved and search for those you have forgotten. To those who do not know the music of Mahmood, take this as a befitting introduction to a singing genius. To do both in under 500 pages, in easy language, peppered with countless photos of the handsome Mahmood, is Zaman’s biggest achievement.

TALAT MAHMOOD: THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY

Author: Sahar Zaman

Pages: 480

kiran-rao-second-film-laapataa-ladies-kindling-productions-divorce-with-aamir-khan

Fri Feb 02 16:14:46 IST 2024

It has been 13 years since her last film release, but Kiran Rao has proved to be worth the wait. Her second film as director, Laapataa Ladies, releases on March 1, and has already won a standing ovation at September’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Rao, 50, says it’s just the kind of response she needed after not showing a film to an audience for over 10 years. “I was nervous,” she says of the Toronto screenings. “A lot of the film’s humour is in its dialect, in its cadence of writing. Plus Bhojpuri is such a sweet language, I wasn’t sure how all of this would translate via subtitles and we would lose the rural flavour. This was a paying audience, so I felt very validated.”

We are sitting at an office of Aamir Khan Productions in Mumbai’s Bandra. The same building houses Khan and his extended family. The film has just been privately screened for THE WEEK and we are probably the first people outside the office to have watched it. It’s an endearing tale of two brides getting swapped on a train in rural India, only to discover themselves and their personal goals, all along questioning their misleading veils, patriarchy, and dropping empowerment quips and tips. It stars newbies Pratibha Ranta, Nitanshi Goel and Sparsh Srivastav in lead roles, along with Ravi Kishan.

“When Aamir first told me about the story, I thought the hook was delicious,” Rao lets in. The film is based on a screenplay writer Biplab Goswami had submitted in a competition where Khan was a judge. “In a sense it is a coming-of-age film, with a little mystery about how things would unfold. I read the story and I thought the women characters could be developed a little more. It could have been a dark film, but we wanted it to be more of a fun comedy,” she says.

Rao’s favourite scene is one where the women of a family are sitting together and having a giggle as friends. “Let’s not be relatives,” one of them says, “Let’s be friends”. Another favourite is a song by the river that has been edited out of the film. “I hope I can turn it into a music video and release it. It’s shot on a river with drones, and shows a newly-wed couple with the river as a metaphor for life,” she says.

Was the decision not to have any established actors deliberate? “Yes, and Aamir was very supportive. The story needed to be rooted and authentic, and the faces needed to be believable,” Rao explains.

Aamir is not playing a cameo either. “Aamir actually did a look test with hair and makeup for the part of the slimy cop. He actually auditioned for the role, and Aamir being Aamir was really good at it. We even had a long discussion on how much he wanted to play this character. But when we saw Ravi Kishan’s audition, I thought he was apt for the role. He brought a certain juiciness to the part. Aamir sort of sets up expectations for the character. So yeah, I rejected Aamir Khan,” she laughs. “But by the end of it Aamir agreed with me.”

Most of the film is filled with actors from theatre groups across Indore, Jabalpur and Bhopal. “I wanted everyone to feel that a place called Nirmal Pradesh (the fictional state where the film is set) really exists. We wanted people to be comfortable with the dialect and the families to look like families.”

Kiran’s first film, Dhobi Ghat, was set in Mumbai. It was a big-city film, with snatches of class interdependence and creative professionals dealing with urban existence. Laapataa Ladies is as rural as it can get. “I wanted to speak to a broader audience, and still keep my aesthetic,” she says. “I felt like someone had tossed me a challenge. The hard part was actually making a comedy, because I thought I was good at drama. So editing the film and hitting the right notes of a situational comedy was not easy.” Rao says a lot of things can happen to women who end up in places they don’t expect to be, but she wanted the story to be one of hope and optimism.

Why has it taken her so long to release her second film? “I was writing and producing, I was quite involved with Dangal and Secret Superstar. I also gave a lot of time to my family and enjoyed raising Azad (her son with Aamir, now 12). I had a child at a stage when I knew I wanted one. He’s a great kid and a companion for life. The writing was slow and subconsciously I wasn’t ready. That said, I started writing Laapataa in 2020.”

Rao has also launched her own production company Kindling Productions. “I am still an adviser in Aamir Khan Productions and I will always have strong ties with it,” she says. “But Kindling is my own imprint. It has all the projects I’ve been developing for the last decade. We are working on two series. One is a contemporary comedy about two women. The other is a historical, set in Kolkata and Darjeeling, involving three generations of women with the whole geopolitical backdrop of the Anglo-Burmese and Bengalis.”

Rao is also a founder at Paani Foundation, along with Khan, his first wife Reena Dutta and Satyajit Bhatkal. It offers solutions to Maharashtra’s drought crisis. “We are at an exciting juncture where 75 talukas have just competed for a water management prize called the Water Cup,” she says. “We find that as soon as villages have sufficient water, they start growing commercial but water-intensive crops like sugarcane again, and the cycle continues. We’ve realised that farmers need to work collectively with the best practices to be ecologically and economically sustainable. We hope to close the loop between producers and sellers and turn farmers into entrepreneurs. Our pilot Farmer Cup is between farmer collectives, and many all-women collectives are being formed, too.”

Rao says she is still “hung over” from Aamir’s daughter Ira’s wedding, which concluded just two weeks back. “The wedding was so beautifully curated by Ira and Popeye (her fiance Nupur Shikare), keeping each of us in mind,” she says. “We are a large family with varied interests, like music and sports. So we had an obstacle course, and a sangeet where we teased each other.”

Ira also had personalised gifts for her family. “She gave me a little oil painting of me on a street in Berlin,” she says. “I thought that was so special to make, in the middle of planning her wedding.”

Visuals of Aamir Khan, with his two former wives, make a modern, happy divorce a very practical, respectful idea. “We are all naturally inclusive. We all get together for dinners on Monday nights. We live in a community and our homes are all in the same housing society. I hang out with Reena (Aamir’s ex wife) and Nuzhat (Aamir’s cousin) independently of Aamir, too. These are relationships you shouldn’t lose if you get divorced. Aamir and I didn’t have an acrimonious divorce; we may have parted as a couple but we are very much a family,” she smiles. “Even at the end of a marriage, you’ve put so many years in a relationship and that should count for something.”

adman-prahlad-kakar-s-memoir-is-no-malicious-but-delicious-read

Sat Jan 27 11:40:08 IST 2024

Not many know that it was a short ad film, barely four seconds long, shot by a maverick adman that led to the discovery of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. It was the early 1990s―a time when ads were not skipped but etched in our memories, thanks to catchy slogans and jingles―and a young Prahlad Kakar was looking for a face for his next Pepsi commercial. That’s when Aishwarya, then a student of architecture, and her male colleague walked into his office, with a fat portfolio in hand. The duo had come to consult Kakar’s wife, Mitali, when his assistant spotted Aishwarya. “What struck me first were her grey-green eyes, which would change colour depending on her mood…. Even now when she is angry, they become green. When she is happy, they become grey-green,” writes Kakar in his latest book Adman Madman: Unapologetically Prahlad. Many years later when they became friends, Kakar brought her a pair of jade earrings from Myanmar that matched the colour of her eyes.

Aishwarya’s first ad shoot was anything but easy―20 takes to say one line: “Hi, I am Sanju. Got another Pepsi?” He narrates how they did a free hair and a wet hair look. He wanted her body language to be just right, hence the many takes. “She was close to tears,” writes Kakar. “She was very young, and very inexperienced, protected, studious and had never even dated. I wanted her to get a room full of guys to fall for her but the problem was that Aishwarya herself wasn’t convinced that she was good looking enough to get a room full of men to fall for her. And then, when she delivered, destinies, both hers and ours, changed forever.”

It is noon on a weekend when we meet Kakar at his home in suburban Mumbai. He is at the dining table, nursing a glass of what looks like carrot-and-beetroot juice. He is warm and welcoming and breaks into an animated chatter the moment I ask him to sign a copy of his book. “Isn’t it unputdownable?” asks Kakar, 75. I say it is. “We ad people have so much to say; for every project, there is an entire story behind a story which can become a film in itself,” he says, as a domestic help combs his signature salt-and-pepper locks.

His latest book is a compendium of his years as an ad filmmaker―close to four decades―with anecdotes from some of the most memorable campaigns he has done for prestigious clients and corporates. The book is divided into chapters that begin from his early “mad hostel years” to training under a “reluctant mentor like Shyam Benegal”, whom he credits for teaching him the art of storytelling and how to capture it on celluloid, to his time at Genesis, an ad firm he cofounded, and everything in between. Tell him what a fat book he has penned and he says, “Not fat enough. I left [out] so much of what I had to say. I think I will have to write another one now.”

The book is a breezy read, peppered with his irreverent humour and sarcasm. “As far as I can remember, I have always―without exception―been thrown out of respectable institutions for being at the right place at the wrong time, and for not being able to keep my mouth shut,” writes Kakar. “The glee I got from it came much later when I decided to have fun while being thrown out.”

And, he has been thrown out of hostels and paying guest accommodations, of course, but he has also gate-crashed his then girlfriend’s wedding, trying (and failing) to elope with her and gifting her a mangalsutra as a parting gift in front of the full gathering. So, does he find himself at the right place at the right time now? “Well, now I have started enjoying needling the establishment,” he says, laughing. “It is like, ‘let’s see what it takes to get thrown out.’ I think that has been my evolution. Occasionally, I must be thrown out of places, otherwise they will call me old and that I have lost the plot.”

The 1990s saw an abundance of memorable ads, and Kakar was at the peak of his career then. “My clients kept coming back to me for 25 years on the trot,” he says. “I worked with Pepsi for 15 years, with Nestle for 25 years on Maggi. So the bar of the industry was raised entirely by Genesis. The 1990s was the time when the best work came out of this country in advertising.”

The success of Pepsi has been close to his heart. “Nobody ever looked at a Pepsi film and said this is not about Pepsi but about Amitabh Bachchan or Shah Rukh [Khan] or Sachin [Tendulkar],” says Kakar. “It always was a Pepsi film.”

How did he ace the 30-second ad filmmaking? “Purely by gut reaction, instinct,” says Kakar. “I would close my eyes and try and visualise it. But they never understood that and thought I was being arrogant…. Filmmakers should be able to read scripts and see the film. Because if he cannot see the film, he is the wrong person to make the film.”

Called Indian ad industry’s feared and beloved leprechaun, Kakar was also known to change scripts. He writes about an ad he had to do for P&G, which he found “crushingly boring and atrocious”. So he “would shoot it their way, get it out of the way and then shoot it my way”. “Sometimes the client would hate his version and end up liking mine,” he says. “Right now nobody does two films. They only do it for the client and the money that comes with it. They all forget about their own brand and only remember the star as against in films that we used to do―the star was always the second lead; the brand was the main [lead]. And, scripts were written around the brand.”

Ads of today are only mediocre, says Kakar. “It is evident from the consumer reaction to ads nowadays,” he says. “During our time, they would prefer watching the ads over the content. But now it is the reverse. Ads have become irritating for the viewer and she is opting for content without ads by paying extra. Unfortunately, clients are not understanding this.”

But the free hand he had at Genesis would have been restrained if not for the “iron fist in a velvet glove”―his wife, Mitali. They got married when he was 36 and she 22 and have three sons. “The first thing she did after our wedding was to take over the finances of Genesis, leaving me free to dream and create. She even put me on a stipend so that I wouldn’t run the company into the ground,” he writes. She seems to have forgiven him for having forgotten about their wedding even as the preparations for the same were on.

Kakar is now associated with quite a few OTT projects, and is also mentoring a production house and vetting their scripts to “see whether they are worth making or not”.

So, what makes Kakar rock after all these years? “I have no filters,” he says. “I don’t need them. I say it the way it is and you take it the way you want to. I have no malice towards anyone because I see people in shades of grey.”

Adman Madman: Unapologetically Prahlad

By Prahlad Kakar with Rupangi Sharma

Published by HarperCollins India

Price Rs799; pages 526

13-ad-rock-band-in-kerala

Sat Jan 27 11:34:30 IST 2024

Cochin, 1993.

I was pedalling along a dark, deserted Shanmugham Road, with the nightly power cut adding to the sense of desolation. My bicycle chain was squeaky enough to spook a solitary man who, on his way back from a local cinema, was relieving himself on the wall of the police commissioner’s office.

In the distance, beyond a bridge, I could see Marine Drive lit up by lamps. The shining promenade made me feel like I was in a rock concert―stage lights streaming into the dark concert hall. I pedalled till I reached a footpath lined with Ambassador cars on Marine Drive. No dark concert hall here, nor any rockers.

There was a behemoth of a building, though―Hotel Sealord. A few cabbies were huddled together outside, smoking a joint and waiting for a drunk patron or five, preferably white, to saunter out and hire a ride.

I stationed myself on the footpath near the hotel and listened. Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’ wafted out of the Princess restaurant on the first floor. As the song slowly faded, a hand fell on my shoulder. It was a long-haired cabbie, with a weather-beaten face and a beedi between his lips. He wanted to know why, for the past few days, a 16-year-old was waiting outside Hotel Sealord at 9pm.

“Chettah, I’m standing here so I can hear the band,” I said.

His wrinkly face broke into a pleasant smile. People sitting on the pavement, and leaning against lampposts and cars, turned to me. They were complete strangers, but with a nod of their head, they acknowledged me as someone of their kind. The kind that could not afford to pay the cover charge of Rs75 (fully redeemable) at the restaurant to listen to the one and only legendary band of our times, 13AD.

This was the ‘empty wallet’ brotherhood, and I was part of it.

The band, 13AD, was born in 1977, and it was not until 1992, when my elder brother was roped in as its lead singer, that I was introduced to the fine men who were at the height of their rock 'n' roll fame by that time, with two albums released and constant tours of the country. Hotel Sealord was their base in Cochin. Getting into the restaurant where they regularly performed, and experiencing the band as they held the platform, was something that only the fortunate among the music-hungry rockers across Kerala could afford.

A good portion of the platform was occupied by a massive drum-kit that came to life the moment the mighty Pinson Correia took his throne behind it. To his left stood the powerhouse of the band, Paul the bassist and singer, with fingers sculpting bass lines on those thick strings, getting them locked in with the bass drum. It was upon this foundation that the keyboard wizard Jackson Aruja kept himself busy, adding the sonic equivalent of the icing on a cake, which in turn allowed the phenomenal Eloy Isaacs, the band’s founder, reveal his immaculate guitar skills. Together, they created a hallowed ground for George Peter, my brother and the band’s youngest recruit who with his voice, stunned and transformed his audience into his obedient subjects.

After 8pm, when Marine Drive would be deserted, their glorious music streamed down to the street, where us empty wallets stood.

There was an interlude, and I could hear someone shouting, “Ground Zero!” Soon there were more voices demanding 13AD’s most famous composition. The band obliged. As the band called out those who were ‘filled with the vision of nuclear fission’, a relatively young member of our brotherhood offered me a plastic glass with something that looked both sinful and delightful, to keep me warm against the cold air. The long-haired cabbie immediately intervened, and after a quick stare-down at the guy who now slunk back to where he was sitting, offered me a cup of tea.

As we stood there sipping from our cups, he enlightened me about the song. “Ground Zero was written by George Thomas Jr, who passed away in the Teekoy tragedy,” he said. George, he explained, had gone to an estate in Teekoy in Kottayam district with six friends. They were at a waterfall when a flash flood caught them unawares. He was among the four who died.

It started to drizzle. I could now lie to my mother that my ‘cycling exercise’ was interrupted by the rain and spend some extra time on the pavement. By then, a crowd had gathered outside the hotel, seeking shelter from the rain. As if on cue, the band started performing ‘November Rain’ by Guns N’ Roses, which was quite popular on MTV. Some of us sang along. A police jeep passed by, slowing down to assess whether we were trouble. Realising this was just a group of harmless music aficionados, the police went their way.

Before cellphones and the internet, 13AD stood out for their near-perfect rendition of songs by artistes on both sides of the Atlantic. With no recourse to YouTube tutorials, or other such to understand the method to making music, the band figured out how to perform those songs. They had two generations of music lovers hooked on to them.

The rain subsided, and the long-haired cabbie decided that it was too late for someone my age to be hanging around there. He told me to scoot. Convinced he was acting in my best interests, I started for home. On my way back, I thought how rich I was to be in this empty-wallets brotherhood.

Thirty-two years later, as I use a laptop to latch on to those memories, my beeping cellphone distracts me. It is announcing the arrival of video clips of a special, sold-out concert that took place in Kochi on January 11―a single-night reunion of 13AD after a long hiatus, specially for their fans from the 1990s.

I don’t recall the names of the long-haired cabbie or anyone in the empty-wallets brotherhood. For me, it was somewhat like a train journey, where you meet and connect with people, but forget the moment you disembark. It was music that brought us together―we were all lucky to have been 13AD fans in the 1990s.

And, I am lucky to have lived long enough to see the band come together one more time.

chef-garima-arora-talks-about-winning-second-michelin-star-for-her-restaurant-gaa

Sat Jan 27 11:29:23 IST 2024

There are many people who have turned Garima Arora, who recently won the second Michelin for her restaurant Gaa in Bangkok, into the chef she is today. First, there is her grandmother. Arora took her toddler steps in cooking with a milk cake, made with semolina in the pressure cooker, that her grandmother taught her. The real pleasure was not the end but the means―cooking with her grandmother.

Her grandmother used to make white butter, which Arora used to eat with 'gobi ka paratha' or 'methi ka paratha'. Today, it is a signature at her restaurant. In fact, many of her early food memories are plated and served at Gaa. “We used to make a dish called kanjak with halwa, chane and poori during Navratri,” she says. “That was something I used to look forward to all year. That combination of savoury and sweet eaten together has shaped my palate and the way I cook.”

Gaa was launched in 2017 as a modern Indian fine-dining restaurant offering a 12-course tasting menu, turning Arora―the only Indian woman to have won two Michelins―into an overnight sensation. However, starting it was not an overnight process. It took years of hard work, dedication, and a little nudge from chefs like Rene Redzepi, the wizard behind Copenhagen’s Noma.

Redzepi is one of the chefs she worked with after completing her course in Paris’s Le Cordon Bleu. Arora says her time at Noma gave her structure and discipline. And Redzepi gave her the best piece of advice. “He told me to make sure I do business only with the right people,” says Arora. “Finding a life partner is easier than finding a good business partner. Those were wise words."

She also says that her time at Noma taught her not to take her cooking too seriously, and to have fun in the process. But no one could ‘out-fun’ Redzepi like two madcap tricksters-turned-tasters―Chefs Ranveer Brar and Vikas Khanna―her co-judges on season 7 of MasterChef India. Both of them, Arora was to find out, could give you as good a laugh as a lasagna. "They are my two favourite humans ever," says Arora. Whether it was playing ‘food charades’ or crowning Queen Garima with marigold flowers, the three had a blast on the sets of the show. As Brar said, “Growing up is overrated.”

But there is one thing that Brar and Khanna could not give her―magic. Because there could be only one magician in her life: her father. He inspired her love for food when he experimented with all sorts of dishes in her childhood. He was making risottos and hummus when no one in India had even heard of them. But what confounded her was a banana upside-down cake that was his specialty. For the longest time she could not figure out how the banana got inside the cake. Her father would tell her it was magic, and he would make a ‘poof’ sound, and Arora was mesmerised. “That shaped my relationship with food, when the mystery surrounding it was ignited,” she says.

When the magic drizzled away, the magician turned into mentor and best friend. The two have taken holidays together to Spain, Paris and Vietnam, wining, dining and wisecracking. There is nothing she cannot tell him. He also has another role at Gaa―as master taster. Everything must pass the acid test of his discerning palate, whether it is the famed jaggery butter and caviar on crispy buckwheat, or the fermented rice cake stuffed with spinach and topped with tomato chutney.

And no prizes for guessing who was the first person she called upon hearing of the second Michelin.

conservation-architect-abha-narain-lambah-interview

Fri Jan 19 15:13:00 IST 2024

Interview/ Abha Narain Lambah,conservation architect

When Abha Narain Lambah came to Mumbai as a young architect, the first building she prepared a conservation plan for was the David Sassoon Library and Reading Room in Kala Ghoda, an area known for its Victorian, Gothic and art deco buildings. That time they did not have enough funds, so she had to turn her attention instead to the India Habitat Centre in Delhi, which was the first building she restored in 1993.

The allure of the David Sassoon library, which turns 157 this year, remained though, and she finally got her chance in 2022, when the library signed an MoU with the JSW Foundation to restore and conserve it. The first thing she felt had to go was the RCC slab that replaced the main roof of the building. “We now have a sloping roof, exactly the way it was in the original structure,” she told THE WEEK. “Likewise, the windows, the Minton tiles―everything was restored to its past glory.”

On a busy January evening, when the city is chugging along at full speed, the library offers an oasis of calm. An ornate chandelier in the centre gives the space a regal feel. After having lost close to 7,000 books, the library’s restored a rich collection of almost 28,000 books across five languages. There are banker’s lamps on the huge mahogany tables. Outside on the veranda, the planter’s chairs have been repaired, and one can comfortably settle in them and watch Mumbai in action.

Last December, Lambah received the UNESCO Asia-Pacific award for cultural heritage conservation for restoration of the David Sassoon library and the Bikaner House in Delhi. These are not the only ones though. Lambah’s firm, Abha Narain Lambah Associates, has won 13 UNESCO awards and undertaken projects as varied as the Maitreya Buddha Temple in Ladakh, the Ajanta Caves of Maharashtra, the Raj Bhavan in Kolkata, the Hampi temples of Karnataka and the Opera House in Mumbai. Her ongoing projects include restoration of Shalimar Bagh in Kashmir, redevelopment of Crawford Market in Mumbai and conservation of Victoria Hall in Chennai.

Excerpts from an interview:

Q/ Did you expect the two awards?

A/ Yes. Especially for Bikaner House, because it was the culmination of many years of work. It changed the narrative of government buildings in Delhi. This was a bus adda with paan stains and loosely hanging wires. When Vasundhara Raje was the chief minister, it was her vision to transform the place into a cultural hub and to turn it into a visiting card for Rajasthan in Delhi. That was precisely what we did in very little time. The place is now a buzzing art space, and can host cultural events from flamenco dance performances to food festivals and book releases.

Q/ What has been your driving force as a conservation architect?

A/ When I became a conservation architect, people did not know what it meant. It was a completely new field and in India we had this notion that it was an elitist occupation. This is why my career growth did not start with restoring a palace or a monument; rather, it was grass-roots and mainstream―a historical building which is a part of the public memory. Yet, what bothered me was that despite historical public landmarks becoming an inherent part of our collective memory, we were always reluctant to fund their restoration and conservation. So, that is what has driven my entire career―making people participate in conservation. My first few projects were as founding member of Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda Association, where we raised funds through public support and restored some of the most prominent landmarks, like Elphinstone College and Mumbai University.

Q/ How crucial is it to go back to traditional knowledge systems for conserving heritage?

A/ It is extremely crucial. So when we were working on the temple in Ladakh, we went to senior Ladakhi villagers on how to mix two types of clay, on where to get the ancient local grass, yagzas, and more. We used traditional techniques that have lasted for a century, rather than getting contemporary things. In Punjab, I worked on the Qila Mubarak in Patiala and the Mughal Serai in Doraha. Seventy years after independence, there had been no conservation at all in those towns. Punjab was all about new buildings and industry. There I found two craftsmen in their 80s who knew how to work with lime to train the younger guys, because they could provide us with the right knowledge on the materials used back in the day.

Q/ Do you feel we have not yet mastered contextual design in India?

A/ In India, we either completely copy the old buildings and make a fake new one, like we did with Mumbai’s Gateway of India which had a mini Gateway of India with a fake arch that was a toilet. Or we make really bad new buildings that have no idea of scale. I learnt from my first boss, Joseph Allen Stein (known for the India International Centre and Ford Foundation at Lodhi Gardens, among others), that good architecture is built with context. So even if you build at the Lodhi gardens, don’t make fake Lodhi arches. Make a completely contemporary building, but with due regard to the original structure. In India, there are very few architects who can strike a balance between the new and the old.

Q/ Which Indian city is an example of an ideal, well-planned city in India?

A/ Jaipur for me is a well-planned city, with courtyards that bring in passive cooling and thick walls. There is strong facade and signage regulations and a mixed land use. Elsewhere in India, this whole concept of the demarcation between the residential and business area is quite bizarre. For me, mixed land use is extremely crucial―where business, homes, shops and craftspeople form a micro community within each mohalla. That was how the traditional Indian set-up was. What we have lost because of European planning are buildings which lack identity. So if you see an old city like Jodhpur or Udaipur, a material palette was ingrained in their design. Which means all of Jodhpur used the same material and every [building] had the same height and fenestration, thereby giving a uniform identity to the entire town. Today, that is missing, with everyone building in their own way.

Q/ Do you think we have lost Mumbai to bad planning and greed?

A/ The Backbay Reclamation Scheme of Marine Drive reclaimed a lot of land and created a strong urban design. I worked on making Marine Drive a world heritage site. What is so special about it is that there is this strong massing, every building is of the same height and there is an overarching urban design statement. And then you look at Andheri and Lokhandwala, where there are pockets of isolated planning by individuals. So, in a way, the planners and the government just lost the plot and only cared about the development fees. There was just no planning.

Q/ You say conservation is forensic in technique. Please explain.

A/ Just like in forensics, you need proof to make decisions. Conservation is a lot like that. When we take on a project, we go into the archival history, look at the drawings, and the archival photographs. We found old photographs of side balconies at the Opera House, which at the time had been removed. Also, we found proof that the interiors were baroque and not art-deco. Because when I found it, it had an art-deco interior which had been redone at some point. So it was very important to establish at what time they changed it and what were the colour schemes used, because black-and-white photographs don’t reveal the colour. So we had to go through an old film starring Rajesh Khanna, the climax of which was shot in the Opera House, and that showed us the design of the balcony and the colour scheme then. When I was restoring the Mani Bhavan in 2004, all images were in black-and-white. So I went to a house across where an old man remembered the [erstwhile] colour scheme.

the-indentured-and-their-route-a-relentless-quest-for-identity-book-review

Fri Jan 19 15:06:24 IST 2024

Forty years ago, I was doing a master’s course at the University of Leeds. A couple of my good friends were from Pakistan. We noticed that almost every third person on Oxford Street and Piccadilly was a person of colour, with a preponderance of South Asians. A Pakistani friend―a Pathan with a great sense of humour―joked about the few white men we saw, “Humne Hindustan, Pakistan se inhe bhaga diya, ab englistan se bhi bhagayenge [We drove them out of Hindustan and Pakistan, now we shall drive them out of England].” We did not drive anyone out; instead, we assimilated, learnt from them and taught them.

Former diplomat Bhaswati Mukherjee, in her fourth book, The Indentured and their Route: A Relentless Quest for Identity, tells the poignant story of indentured labour from India, forced to go to the West Indies, Mauritius, Suriname, Reunion and Fiji islands as a consequence of famine and poverty, a harsh foreign regime in India and alluring promises that never materialised. This story is a work of great scholarship, based on a study of multiple books and documents.

From 1834 to 1917, 1.3 million Indians left as indentured labour. Only 21 per cent returned; the rest either died or settled in the lands of their forced exile. Two factors contributed to the growth of indentured labour. One, the end of the Mughal empire and the rise of British colonialism brought about a big change in the living conditions in the subcontinent. While the Mughals were conscious of the conditions of the peasantry, and adopted administrative systems that were sensitive to their needs, the British and other European colonial powers exploited their colony for the enrichment of their distant homeland. They raised revenue shares to about 60 per cent. Millions of famine deaths occurred, yet the exploitation continued relentlessly.

Two, the movement against slavery threatened the supply of cheap labour to the plantations. The indenture system was a kind of agreement with the helpless and illiterate labour force, called girmit in its Indianised form, thus leading to the expression ‘girmitiyas’ for indentured labour. Middlemen promised girmitiyas relief from abject poverty, and obtained their thumb impressions and herded them into ships, with paltry rations. On the way, many died of cholera and smallpox. The planters, however, found that their slaves had been replaced by even cheaper labour. “One of the first planters to employ indenture confided in 1835 to an associate that ‘their cost is half that of a slave’,” writes Mukherjee.

While girmitiyas were initially men, women soon joined them. The arrival of women and the formation of families changed the character of indenture. They became productive workers, rather than exploited labour. A political movement against indenture also emerged, supported by Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the Indian National Congress.

Generations later, descendants of the girmitiyas were fully assimilated into the culture and politics of the foreign lands. Their influence and position in society varied from place to place, strong in Mauritius and weak in Fiji. Yet, they retained their affinity towards India, as did India with them. UNESCO’s Indentured Labour Route Project, initiated by Africa and led by Mauritius, was strongly supported by India. The UNESCO recognised Aapravasi Ghat and Le Morne Cultural Landscape in Mauritius as world heritage sites.

Overall, a tragic, compelling story with a happy ending, told with empathy and skill.

Chandrasekhar is former Union cabinet secretary.

THE INDENTURED AND THEIR ROUTE: A RELENTLESS QUEST FOR IDENTITY

Author: Bhaswati Mukherjee

Publisher: Rupa Publications India

Pages: 232; price: Rs595

goat-days-a-book-about-a-man-forced-into-slavery-in-saudi-arabia-is-getting-a-film-adaptation

Thu Mar 28 19:06:43 IST 2024

Most pan-Indian mega-hits from the south have something in common―a super-human alpha male who has conquered every weakness. Be it the ex-cop who can decapitate people with a single swing of the machete (Jailer), or the gangster who goes on a rampage inside the Parliament to avenge his dead wife (KGF 2), or the prince who breaches the heavily-guarded fort of an evil king by single-handedly catapulting palm trees at it (Baahubali 2). The protagonist is too macho for cheap sentimentality, and any tear he sheds is amply compensated by the blood of the enemy.

Enter Najeeb Muhammed, the hero of writer Benyamin's 2008 book Goat Days (Aadujeevitham in Malayalam). He is an ordinary man who lands in Saudi Arabia with the hope of a better life for his family. In the dunes of 'the Gulf', he is subjected to unimaginable misery when he is forced into slavery as a goatherd by a cruel master, with little chance of ever meeting his family again. The novel, based on real-life events, is one of the top sellers in Malayalam. Penguin described it as “a universal tale of loneliness and alienation”. It is just this universality that will underpin the success of The Goat Life, the book's pan-Indian, multi-language film adaptation, feels Benyamin.

“Because suffering is the same everywhere,” he says.

The survival drama, to be directed by national award-winning filmmaker Blessy, hits the theatres on March 28. It stars Prithviraj Sukumaran, who was last seen in the Prabhas-starrer Salaar, as Najeeb. Set to release in five languages, The Goat Life aims to become a trend-setter across India while staying loyal to the 'realistically grand' brand of filmmaking the Malayalam film industry is known for.

But, can a story of tears and suffering compete with the gun-slinging, over-the-top spectacle of films like Pathaan and Jailer? Benyamin is sure it will. Language, he feels, will not be a barrier. “We are narrating the ordeal of a man who is trapped with an 'Arbab' (boss), the only human around him,” he says. “Najeeb cannot even speak his language. So language becomes least important when we are telling such a tale. Instead, action, pain and silence take centre-stage. Thus, any person around the world can relate to the movie.”

In fact, the silences in the film speak louder than words, and elements like music, to punctuate the mood, become very important. That's why it was so advantageous to have A.R. Rahman and Resul Pookutty onboard to “create and capture the emptiness of the vast desert, the loneliness that haunts the lead and his trauma”, says Benyamin.

The same goes for the VFX. To capture desert life with all its sundry sounds and sights―the hissing rattlesnakes and crawling camel spiders―demanded top-notch VFX. According to Blessy, the visual effects display Hollywood-level perfection and was meticulously crafted over a year and a half. The trailer, with stunning visuals of bleeding purple skies and swirling sandstorms, bears witness to this. “The film's substantial budget served as a cornerstone,” says Blessy. “The strive for an unparalleled cinematic experience did yield results.”

Benyamin says that Blessy has made the story his own. “The challenge before him was to translate Najeeb's trauma and thoughts into pictures,” says the writer. “He studied in detail how loneliness changed Najeeb's mannerisms. He delved deep into the novel to understand the mental and physical changes Najeeb underwent, and then he discussed them with me, Prithviraj and the real Najeeb.”

Blessy elaborates further on his interaction with the real Najeeb: ''Before the shoot began, Benyamin, Najeeb, and I had an extensive conversation. It was my first encounter with Najeeb, whose real name is Shukoor. [He assumed the name Najeeb after the success of the book]. Najeeb shared more about his experiences beyond the novel―his initial hardships, silent struggles, and tearful moments. When I inquired about his response to his master's cruelty, he revealed that crying continuously prevented him from meeting the Arbab's eyes.”

Both Benyamin and Blessy vouch for Prithviraj's talent and commitment to the role. (The actor lost 30kg to transform into Najeeb.) “Prithviraj's dynamic involvement as a director, actor, and producer unfolded as a testament to his profound dedication to embodying Najeeb's character,” says Blessy. “His transformative journey went beyond the realms of conventional acting and evolved into a lived experience. His unique and immersive approach imbued the narrative with an unparalleled depth and authenticity. This was an extraordinary contribution to the cinematic portrayal of Najeeb's compelling journey.”

For fans of the novel, the movie promises to take the story forward. Benyamin says that Blessy has introduced a new visual language while staying connected to the novel. “It is Blessy's movie,” he says. According to the director, the screen deserved more emphasis on how the indescribable torture transformed the man physically. “Because details matter in visuals,” says Blessy. “Portraying Najeeb demanded surpassing the narrative constraints of the novel. The actor abstaining from food and drink for a rigorous two-day period was an intense approach to authentically capture the nuances of the character's journey. This made it possible to elevate the movie into a palpable experience for the audience surpassing the confines of the written word.”

The film does not just illuminate suffering; it is also a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. And perhaps there is no one like Blessy―known for his poignant filmmaking that mines hope from the depths of hopelessness―who can bring Benyamin's story to life.

stories-of-inspiring-lesser-known-indian-women-are-being-told-by-women-authors

Sat Jan 13 11:43:56 IST 2024

It is noon. The sky outside the window is a dusty, December barely-blue. Lieutenant Bharati ‘Asha’ Sahay Choudhry emerges from the warmth of her thick quilt―post her morning nap in her Patna home―in a white patterned kimono. Her hair, the colour of the moon, is held back neatly with four clips. Her hands, which once held a rifle as part of her training with the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, now holds a walker.

At 95, she is one of the oldest published writers in India. The War Diary of Asha-san chronicles the life of a girl growing up in war-torn Japan, fighting her own battle for the freedom of her country. “Ma would not let me sleep if I had not written in my diary,” she says. “We could not only write the good. You had to write the good and the bad.” Written in Japanese, on scraps of paper, and translated into English by Tanvi Srivastava (her great granddaughter-in-law), it has been published by Harper Collins India. Ask her what was the bad that the diary chronicled and she smiles: “We used to lie to ma. When enemy aircraft swarmed, ma would tell us to go into the trench. We would not listen and [instead] watched the dog fight. When American [aircraft] fell, we would celebrate. They were our enemies then. How to kill the British was the motto.”

On June 15, 1943, a red-letter Tuesday in her diary, she met Subhas Chandra Bose and her life changed. “Netaji was in Japan,” she says. “I wanted to meet him. It was forbidden to go out at night, but we went at midnight. We reached the Imperial Hotel. He was standing there. I bent down to touch his feet. He told me that I should never bend. ‘You stand up and say Jai Hind. We have always bent under the British. Now, no more bowing. You have to fight for independence.’’’

This is a story that she has narrated countless times. And one that has been passed down as a family heirloom, lovingly polished each time. “It was a personal journey for me as well,’’ says Srivastava. “Before I read the diary of Asha San, I had heard her stories. But, when I read the diary and the everyday details, I got goosebumps.”

Over 80 years later, Asha’s passion is still palpable. Her eyes are clear, her voice thinner with age, but her spirit is still very much of the teen that signed up to train to kill. “Nothing was ever difficult,’’ she says. “I was happy that we could use the rifle and learn it. We used to march and hold the rifle”. Her bayonet eviscerated Winston Churchill. (Not the man, but an effigy made of sack. The Ranis’ training included running 10 steps and on the eleventh shouting Jai Hind while piercing the effigy). “I learnt the bayonet but didn’t get the opportunity to use it,” she says.

Her diary―lyrical, vivid and engaging―is the coming-of-age story of a girl who trained to fight, “to look the enemy in the eye’’, but her “war ended before it began’’. “My rifle did not fire any bullets, my bayonet did not slash the arteries of any enemies,’’ she says. The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese surrender and the death of Bose ended the mission.

At the time Bose suggested the idea of women in combat, it was nothing short of radical. If Mahatma Gandhi pushed women out of homes to free India, Bose went further―to the frontier. The Ranis were trained in handling rifles, anti-aircraft guns, and methods of warfare, including guerrilla warfare. “I return home at seven in the evening,” writes Asha. “Ma doesn’t give me any work anymore. ‘Arrey baba, if you cut your hand here, how will you work there? Netaji’s soldier will hold a gun in her hand, not a flower.’’’

The war for India’s freedom was also a personal battle for freedom. Even if she did not know it then. “No one forced me,’’ she says. “I said I wanted to go.’’ After Japan’s surrender, Asha was imprisoned in Singapore. “There was no trouble in jail,” she says. “We used to laugh and sing ‘Kadam Kadam’. The Indians who came would send us food.” The song would become the bedtime song for her kids and even years later her voice may crack on the high notes.

Asha may not have found a place in history, but her diary has found its way to bookshelves and has carved out space to accommodate women like her. While history books still have men as the heroes and women as supporting actors, big publishing companies are at the heart of independent stories like Asha’s and are adding furiously to them. This year alone, the space has been widened to include a whole spectrum.

Sara Rai’s Raw Umber―the story of her family set in Allahabad, where the presence of her grandfather, writer Premchand, remained―was evocative and intimate. Meeran Chadha Borwankar’s Madam Commissioner recounts the memories of being the only woman officer in her batch of 1981 and of tackling the underworld. The upcoming biography of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit―a diplomat and very much a woman about town, admired even by Marlon Brando―by Manu Bhargavan adds to this growing trend. But it goes beyond just conventional history.

Fabulous Feasts, Fables and Family by Tabinda Jalil-Burney is about food, growing up in Aligarh where kebabs made memories and stories. The book is about recipes, but also about childhood.

Then there is Ritu Menon’s India on Their Minds―8 Women, 8 Ideas of India. In a slim volume, Menon tells the story of women who witnessed the independence struggle, participated in it and shaped it―whether it was through their writing, like Ismat Chughtai, Attia Hosain, Nayantara Sahgal and Qurratulain Hyder, or directly, as Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, Kamlaben Patel, Rashid Jahan and Sarla Devi Chaudhurani did. Each of these women grappled with freedom as they fought for it. As publisher to all of them, Menon’s book is intimate as well as essential, especially at a time when the idea of India is being pitted against Bharat.

After translating Asha’s story, Srivastava is now rescuing the story of Asha’s mother, Sati Sen. The niece of freedom fighter and barrister C.R. Das had rebellion in her blood. In school, she was sent home by the nuns for singing God Shave the King. She blamed it on her Bengali accent. She married Anand Mohan Sahay. It was a love marriage, amid opposition. The two moved to Japan to fight for the revolution. In Kobe, when Indians decided to hoist the tricolour on January 26, 1935, Sati found that three Indian houses had chosen to fly the Union Jack. She set off with matches and set them on fire. The Japanese refused to arrest her saying that she was a patriot.

“Even her husband in his memoirs just mentions her in passing,’’ says Srivastava, who is researching her story in archives to find the Indian National Army files. “I found her diary,’’ she says. “Here was this woman who was away in Japan but was connected to India. She writes about Jallianwala Bagh in 1922, and even though she was far away, she felt so strongly. You can feel the power.”

Like Srivastava, Anita Mani, too, has tried to flesh out women who are often only footnotes. Her book, Women in the Wild: Stories of India’s Most Brilliant Women Wildlife Marine Biologists, has brought to life the remarkable story of Jamal Ara―possibly the first Asian woman ornithologist. Ara, who studied only till class 10, wrote a book which is very much a bible for bird watchers. But, apart from the name little was known about her. “We did not even know she was a woman,’’ says Mani. But, a piece by a young essayist helped connect her story. If Ara had been lost in time, others in Mani’s book are pioneers who have never been acknowledged, like J. Vijaya, India’s first female herpetologist and turtle field biologist, who died at 28. Viji, as she was known, was ahead of her times―a tom boy who carried a bag of crocodile scat in a bus. “The trigger for me was Viji,’’ says Mani. “It took a while to piece together her life.” But now that it is out there, like Asha’s, it is impossible to erase.

why-lakshmi-puri-s-debut-novel-swallowing-the-sun-is-part-life-part-invention

Sat Jan 13 11:32:47 IST 2024

It was 1999. Aishwarya Rai had stepped into the world of acting. Akshaye Khanna was very much in his prime. Kevin Spacey had just won his second Academy Award. As a young diplomat, Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri was in Hungary, the year the country opened a new chapter to enter NATO. Hope was everywhere, as the world stepped into another millennium.

That was when Puri began writing a story that she had lived with―one that she had grown up listening to. But it took a lifetime to complete. “I started writing when I was ambassador in Budapest, from 1999 to 2002,” she says.

It is the dying days of December 2023 in Delhi. Puri is at her home, having taken a leap into fiction from the matter-of-fact world of diplomacy. “After about 43 years in what I call the pantomime of diplomacy, I really wanted to indulge in an act of creation,” she says.

Puri is at her desk, with an assortment of books in the background. All around her are gods―Guru Nanak on the desk, Shiva on the shelf and Krishna on the wall. “I wrote only 100 pages. After that, I got busy with work, and also had a block. I don’t know what happened. Over the years, I still kept reminding myself―that’s an unfinished project.”

It was only after 18 years―half of it in Geneva, and half in New York―that Puri resumed writing. Covid had the world on pause. “I worked 10 hours a day those days,” she smiles. “There was a kind of vacuum. That is what was needed. I think my external world was too busy.”

The result, Swallowing the Sun, is an ambitious novel. Especially for a first-time writer. Her canvas is vast, as is her cast of characters. The novel, which stretches across the tumultuous decades of the freedom struggle, follows the journey of Malati (rebellious, outspoken and feisty) and her sister Kamala (tamer, but cut from the same cloth)―from a village in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, where they were born, to a boarding school in Indore, and to Bombay and Banaras. The independence movement, which they become part of, forms the backdrop that shape their worlds, ideas and lives.

“As someone said to me, this is not only their romance, but their romance with the idea of India,” she says. “I romance the idea of remaking India and India’s advance to greatness. My characters are not Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru, or Sarojini Naidu or Annie Besant. [My characters] are the unsung heroes and heroines.”

The book is as much a story about India as it is a love story. It combines the earthiness of the Maharashtrian landscape―with the sweetness of mangoes―with the political ferment of a time when India was filled with ideas. The book is as much a multigenerational family story, as it is a ‘coming of age’ story. And it is populated with not just feisty women as Malati and Kamala, but also determined men as Baba, the patriarch who fights to educate his daughters, and Guru Kopikar, the hero who is loyal, determined and in love with Malati. There is also Malak, the wealthy brother-in-law and Mohan Kaka, the uncle who was a revolutionary.

At the heart of the story are the lives of Puri’s parents―Malati Desai and B.G Murdeshwar. They were in their 40s when Puri was born. They were both passionate and committed to the idea of India. Years later, Puri has chosen to chart out their journey―fictionally. Their presence is palpable in the book, as in her home. Her father’s books, hardbound and their spines embossed with gold, the birth chart her mother made for Puri on her wall and, in a corner, the sitar she encouraged her to play.

“It was a story waiting to be told, but not in an autobiographical way,” says Puri. “I am always reminded of Somerset Maugham, who was asked whether Of Human Bondage was autobiographical, and he said, ‘It is part life and part invention.’ I did want Swallowing the Sun to be both.”

Sprinkled across the book are abhangs (devotional poetry) that she grew up listening to. Abhangs were part of the fabric of her life, which is why she stitched them into the book in English, without losing their Indian heart.

“Initially, one or two editors who read my script said, ‘Oh, but this doesn’t happen. It is not normal that people talk in poetry or insert poetry into their speech.’ I said, ‘You should have seen my parents,’” she says, laughing. “There was so much talk about books and literature and poetry. My father used to recite poetry every evening to us. I have tried to sing it like he did. So, that is in the weft and waft of the novel….”

The sweep of Swallowing the Sun captures the growing freedom and ambitions of women. The love letters that Guru writes to Malati are very much carved out of what her father wrote to her mother.

“I have something like 148 love letters,” says Puri. “Written to my mother, when she had to be separated from him. During that period, I find that there are very few letters of hers. ‘You don’t express your love,’ my father complains all the time. I was fascinated by the medium of letters. It’s a medium of not only communication, but also expressing love, maintaining love, and evolving love.”

Swallowing the Sun

By Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri

Published by Aleph Book Company

Price Rs899; pages 424

ai-assistants-are-efficient-and-helpful-but-a-privacy-nightmare

Sat Jan 13 11:27:42 IST 2024

It is no secret that Microsoft is betting big on artificial intelligence. But its decision to add a key to summon Copilot, its AI bot, on the Windows keyboard shows how big the stakes are. The last time Microsoft changed the keyboard was some 30 years ago, when it added the Windows key next to the spacebar.

Copilot is already there in many avatars on your Windows computer. By default, you see the button on the taskbar if you are running the latest version of the OS. It has a chat mode, powered by Bing chat, which is another version of Open AI’s ChatGPT, and can help you with anything from composing an article to change into dark mode.

Copilot can do a bit of coding as well. Just tell it what you want your code to do and it will give you formatted code. You can edit or tweak it as well. And, thanks to Dall-E integration, it can generate images―just tell it what you want and you get four options.

Most these options are already available on Bing Chat, but there is more that Copilot can offer. Like summoning an app. Just type, or say after clicking the mic button in dialogue box, ‘Open Spotify’, or ‘Turn off dark mode’. It can also help you with troubleshooting apps.

However, there are only a handful of programs that Copilot is integrated with. Edge, the browser, and Microsoft 365 have their own Copilots, and they are somewhat deeply integrated. But Copilot cannot do much inside most programs, even the ones developed by Microsoft. And until it is capable of doing stuff inside apps, it has limited use as a digital AI assistant and is no more than a party trick.

But again, giving a program access to everything on your computer is a privacy nightmare. For Copilot to be as efficient as it is designed to be, it needs access to a lot of data. Many of you would not want anything to be able to read your email or remember your photos, however helpful that thing be in getting things done.

You might already know how large tech companies use your data for targeted advertisement. They also use your data to train their AI models. That is a lot more terrifying than being spammed by ads. These AI models are powerful―they can hurt you with the same efficiency with which they help you.

british-american-author-jhumpa-lahiri-interview

Sat Jan 06 13:57:37 IST 2024

Interview / Jhumpa Lahiri, author

There are few writers that publishing pauses for; Jhumpa Lahiri is one of them. She burst on to the literary scene with Interpreter of Maladies 25 years ago. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, changing her life, publishing and the immigrant experience in English forever. Lahiri, however, has only grown since then. She migrated from English to Italian with Whereabouts (2018). She is back with Roman Stories—short stories written in Italian—that are evocative, elegant, intimate and, like with Lahiri, difficult to forget.

Her canvas is vast. There is the true-blue Italian—in ‘P’s Parties’, a short story in the collection; the immigrant—the one looking to build a new home, and who will always be an intruder; the one who left Rome after an attack; and the woman who returns. Lahiri conjures up a city that is changing. Her Rome is not only of the sunny piazzas but of the shadows as well. And it is in these dark places that Lahiri’s writing shines. As she says in an interview with THE WEEK, “But every love story is so much more complicated than that wedding moment. That’s why we are sort of so obsessed culturally with weddings because it is this moment of pure joy, and we are not thinking about the shadows.” Excerpts:

Can you talk briefly about writing again in Italian?

The books are all glued together at the same time. They were siblings growing up at the same time. One follows the other in publication reality. I started writing these stories early on in the experiment of writing in Italian, and some of them predate the writing of Whereabouts.

Is it now the language that you are going to write in? How is it different from writing in English?

It is a language I have chosen now to work in for the past decade or so. But no one knows the future.

It happened. I was inspired to do so. I continue to work in Italian as a writer, and as a thinker. The factors that led me to move out of English and into Italian are constantly in evolution. Italian represents other things, new things, different things, not the same thing. But in general, what I will say is that there is such a glut of literature [being] produced in English today that to be able to write in another as a sort of point of departure from my writing is attractive to me, because it just allows me to say, ‘Okay, I am leaving the big city to go to a language that is comparatively less trafficked on a global scale’.

In the book, many characters are middle-aged, looking at life through a certain perspective. You claimed Italian at a certain point in your life, where you are looking to reinvent yourself. Is the Jhumpa in Italian different from the one in English?

Life is all about learning how to do things, never getting entirely comfortable. I like to challenge myself. That is the most exciting aspect of living in a way, to think about what is slightly beyond your grasp, and how you can get closer, get a bit better at something, whatever it is, whether it is a language or just being a human being. There is always so much room for improvement—in terms of our being, our bodies, our states of health, our attitudes toward ourselves and the universe.

Part of the narrative of my moving into Italian is [that] Jhumpa Lahiri is moving out of her comfort zone. My response to that would be, ‘what is my comfort zone?’ I have never had a comfort zone. I have never been comfortable really ever in my life. I was raised feeling extremely uncomfortable for a whole host of reasons. My earlier work points to that general discomfort of what it means to be an outsider, what it means to be raised neither here nor there, not having specific cultural, linguistic frames of reference. What does it mean to be the child of immigrants? These things are not comfortable things. These are not suitable experiences. I am moving from sort of one zone of discomfort to another, shall we say?

My father chose to leave India. He felt the impulse to explore outside of the place he was born [in]. That is what led to my entire existence and the circumstances of my upbringing. I did that on a slightly later clock. I was already married and had my two children, and then I decided to go to another place for the impulse of it. But in my case, the language also entered it, as a creative component.

You also talk about the fact that a lot of people told you, you don't need to do this. There was a lot of resistance.

Not so much [like] you don’t need to do that, [but more like] you shouldn’t do it, sort of like this is a really bad idea. Now 12 years later, I find it really fascinating—these reactions and admonitions and resistance to a writer or to an artist changing instruments. I am bewildered, given how much the artists I know and admire have moved, pushed, refused to sit still and crossed new boundaries in their creative trajectories.

Do you think that superstardom of writers—where they have to interact through social media and be part of that space—sort of restricts writers from doing something that is without a readership or without an audience? Do you think that the idea of what a writer should do does not allow you to go off on adventures like this?

This is an interesting question. There is an abyss from my point of view between who I am as a person, how I approach my day, my life, my work, a page and sort of what can potentially happen to a writer in terms of acknowledgment to the audience. Maybe [that’s] because I was met very early on with intense scrutiny and the gaze of the world because of the recognition of my first book. I was very young. I was young as an artist. There was a moment the spotlight was on me. I realised very early how fundamentally unrelated that is to what I do and who I am and to my work, and the apprehension of how that kind of attention could be quite damaging for someone trying to just sit in a quiet room and produce work with some of the imagination.

The fact is that I really don’t want to do anything with my day, but read books. I always sort of worked to keep all of that noise at bay. I thought about it as little as possible. I would go out when they asked me to, and I would do the events, and I would sign the books, and I would [pull] through the pictures and things like that but as soon as it was over it didn’t exist anymore. It was like being on a course of antibiotics. That’s how it was for me. It is how it has remained for me. I am not on any kind of social media. I have always been on a different speed. But I feel now more than ever that I am still kind of like riding the bicycle and everybody else is zipping around high school.

The book is also about outsiders. In one story, the outsider feels like an intruder. How much of this aspect of your being an immigrant is different or similar? In Italy, you are no longer the intruder; you are a writer, right?

The artist is, by definition, an outsider. That is the only position in which art can be made—from the margins and from the outside. That is one premise.

But I have always felt like an intruder. I always felt that my family was sort of intruding into the landscape of the place where I was raised, where, incidentally, I am right now as I am speaking to you. I am here at my father's house. It is impossible for me to come back to this place even today and not recall. Yesterday, I was taking a walk. It is impossible for me to completely set aside a slight apprehension of someone looking at me and saying, “What is she doing here?” I literally cannot divorce that apprehension from my state of mind. We are made in our childhood. We are sort of formed in ways that we carry with us.

A lot has been made of my moving to Italy—she is in love with Italy, she is in love, whatever. It is a clever narrative for a headline. But every love story is so much more complicated than that wedding moment. That is why we are sort of so like obsessed culturally with weddings, because it is this moment of pure joy, and we are not thinking about the shadows. That is what the stuff of my books has always been—looking at the shadows, looking at the reality, looking at the underside of the pretty surface.

Rome is an amazingly inspiring city, because it is so intensely beautiful, physically beautiful and powerful. And it is sort of historical resonance. But at the same time, it is complicated—there are so many things that, of course, the tourist who seeks only the sunny piazza is never going to seek out. They are actually not going to read the newspaper.

On the one hand, I did arrive as a writer, so I have my status as a kind of a writer that enabled me to meet certain people. But on the other hand, when I am walking through the streets, just going to a doctor's appointment, there is not a sign around my neck saying that she is a well-known writer. I am just a person who is brown walking through the space. That is also an education.

And you always will be a person who is brown, right?

I am. Regardless of where I go, I am that. So depending on where I am, that is going to be part of the reality of any given moment, also the apprehension.

In the book, there are stories about children and their loss. In ‘P’s Parties’, the narrator is torn about his son growing up. His wife, however, can’t wait for him to grow up. Could you talk about having children and being a writer?

It was more of a logistical challenge. For women, writing with children historically has been a challenge. Compromises have to be made. In the ideal world, you have the whole day to yourself, you can run to your desk or whatever. So many writers in the past were men, and usually very wealthy men. It is a hard thing to do when you have other responsibilities, whether the responsibilities are holding down another job or raising children. But fortunately, for me and for my generation, there were many examples of women who had figured out a way.

It is the discipline alongside some of the smaller sacrifices that, I think, allow that balance. Balance is a false word. Life is very tricky and out of balance most of the time. We have to kind of acknowledge that. I learned growing up as an artist, as a parent that it is not always going to be a great writing day. It is not always going to be a great writing month, or even a great writing year, because things happen in life that are going to make demands on your time. Whether they are wonderful things like raising two children who are small and who need to be taken care of, and they have been fed and played with and held, things like that, or whether it is the more unpleasant, inevitable experiences of life that take you away from things. You have faith that the writing will happen. After the rainstorms, the skies will settle, and it will be possible, again, to make the journey.

Roman Stories

By Jhumpa Lahiri

Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz

Published by Penguin Random House India

Price Rs499; pages 224

why-zeba-heroine-of-huma-qureshi-s-new-book-is-the-badass-version-of-huma

Sat Jan 06 13:54:12 IST 2024

Actor Huma Qureshi has written a book―Zeba, an Accidental Superhero―and much like our heroine, there is that which is accidental about the book. It was not a planned masterpiece, but a zig-zaggy tour through Huma’s imagination. All themes in the book, she says, are accidental, and she gives the reader full rights of interpretation. “I invite all readers to draw their own inferences from what they feel about it,” she says.

In essence, she is telling us to make of it what we will, and so, that is exactly what we are going to do. Zeba, we deduct, is the badass version of Huma. She is Huma on steroids, Huma in high-resolution, Huma in a cape (pick the metaphor of your preference). For those of you who have not read Zeba, it is about a second-generation American immigrant who is the “chosen one” (kind of the female sum of the parts of Neo, Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter) to save the people living in the fictional kingdom of Khudir ruled by an evil dictator, the Great Khan.

So why do we say that Zeba is Huma 2.0? For one, she is the fulfilment of Huma’s deepest wishes. Like flying. There are two things in Huma’s bucket list currently: make her book into a film and learn flying. And guess what? Zeba is a certified flyer. She has passed every exam with flying colours―written, oral and practical. See a pattern here?

Huma disagrees with our hypothesis that her creation is a glorified version of herself, but there are those who would agree. (Like Freud, for one.) Here is the second reason why we think so. Huma, like the rest of us, lives in a reality that is too realistic for its own good. After all, she made her film debut with Gangs of Wasseypur, which is the antithesis of fantasy. The film portrays life at its darkest and grittiest. It is only natural that when Huma writes a book, she would make it flighty and fanciful, her own way of rebelling against the humdrum league of realists. It is also telling that her favourite superhero is Deadpool, the most wisecracking of them all who his writers described as “fun to hang out with… in short doses”.

Huma is at her most adventurous, not just in the creation of Zeba, but also in the structuring of the novel. In writing Zeba, she breaks all rules of writing. She mixes the real with the fictional, bringing in things like a performance by Beyonce at a royal wedding in Khudir, with her “long, cascading hair” and “thighs that evoked lust and dreams of earth-shattering orgasms among all genders.” (Wouldn’t you just love to see the Queen Bey raise her sculpted eyebrows at reading this?) Often, Huma ambles into her story with humorous asides, much like Shakespeare walking into his play and asking Hamlet to get his act together.

There are post-its and illustrations strewn throughout the book. In fact, Huma says her favourite part of the novel is a post-it that comes right after Zeba gives a formal introduction of herself, and says: “Everything you will read in the following pages is fiction. Do not believe anything you read here.”

Finally, the reason why Zeba is the Freudian dream version of Huma? Because after all, who would not want to be Zeba, the pot-smoking, protein shake-guzzling superhero, who secretly wishes that the joint she flicks over the rooftop will fall on someone’s blond hair extension and set their clothes on fire. And has heady sex with a Bollywood heartthrob, with bonus post-coital snuggling included. And can zap a field of soldiers frozen with a single icy stare. Literally.

Zeba, an Accidental Superhero

By Huma S. Qureshi

Published by HarperCollins

Price Rs499; pages 187

polish-filmmaker-krzysztof-zanussi-s-distinctive-filmography-over-five-decades-has-influenced-many-generations

Sat Jan 06 13:53:08 IST 2024

Even now, at 84, acclaimed Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi frequently gets inquiries about a nostalgic ‘unrequited first love’ from his early years. When pressed on the matter by this reporter, the auteur openly confessed his feelings. “I still love physics, though physics did not fall in love with me,” he said. “I was mediocre and I discovered it after studying the subject for four years [at the University of Warsaw]. But the whole field of ‘exact science’ is the basis of my life’s outlook and orientation.” His distinctive filmography over five decades―inspired by his own life, its dilemmas and anxieties―has influenced multiple generations.

Recently, Zanussi―who played an active role in the Solidarity Movement leading to the downfall of the communist dictatorship in Poland in the 1980s―was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK). This is ironic, since the state is run by a communist government. Nevertheless, Zanussi is adept at navigating the ironies of life through filmmaking, employing wisdom tinged with dry wit.

But he is not hesitant to criticise when warranted. Twenty-five years ago, during an open forum session at IFFK, Zanussi engaged in a verbal altercation with the late CPI(M) ideologue P. Govindapillai. At that time, the filmmaker boldly declared, “I come from a country that was the victim of communism”, in response to P.G. ridiculing Poland for rejecting Marxism. That spat had attracted international media attention then.

During the recently concluded IFFK, P.G.’s children, M.G. Radhakrishnan and R. Parvathy Devi, presented the filmmaker with the English-translated version of Gramscian Chinthakal, a Malayalam book co-authored by P.G. and former Kerala chief minister E.M.S. Namboothiripad, about the ideas of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. However, Zanussi revealed a little secret to THE WEEK: after the closing ceremony of the IFFK, he discovered that the book was missing from his belongings. Without hiding his frustration over the loss, he remarked, “Maybe it’s a sign.”

Zanussi attributes his openness and curiosity about the mysteries of the material world to his short but influential years in the company of people of science. “I believe that people of science are years ahead of the rest of society, because they understand the material world much better,” he said. “The material world is full of mysteries which are not explained. Maybe some of them will never be explained. The people of science know better about our limits, and I think the public in developed countries lost this sense of limitation in the 19th century itself.” A stint with philosophy following his physics days aided his filmmaking since 1969 on the limitations and imperfections of the human race and society.

Zanussi was born in 1939, the year Poland was invaded by the Nazis. He grew up in a country that was ruled by a puppet communist government under Stalinist dictatorship. Those early memories of living under an oppressive regime are most reflected in his tragicomedy At Full Gallop (1996), which is considered to be one of his most autobiographical works.

“The [Stalinist] period was really dramatic and is seen from the perspective of a child [in the film],” he says. “It was almost comical, and that is why I made the film a comedy. For instance, horse riding was [restricted in Poland] back then, could you believe that?” The regime considered it a hobby associated with the former aristocratic class. Interestingly, in At Full Gallop, Zanussi narrates the tale of a young boy sent to live with an ‘aunt’ (actually an old family friend) as his family falls under communist suspicion. This ‘aunt’, who shares her passion of horse riding with the boy, had many fake identities to survive the communist regime.

Zanussi said that this ‘aunt’ was based on a real-life eccentric woman who used to take care of him in his childhood. “After World War II, identification cards had to be reissued [for many] because many parishes and offices were destroyed in the war,” he said. “This ‘aunt’ had the crazy idea to create two identity cards instead of one, pretending to have a twin sister, because she knew that she would have to accept many moral and political compromises. So, she [made] this non-existing twin sister a party member. And in that crazy system it was possible to live [these fake lives]…. The whole idea of reality being not real is an essence of communism, or the essence of life under pressure or oppression.”

Zanussi recognised this disparity between communist ideals and reality at an early phase of his film career. And, that made him the pioneer of an influential Polish film movement of the late 1970s―the cinema of moral anxiety. A protagonist facing a conflict of values became the pivotal theme in his critically acclaimed films like Camouflage (1977) and The Constant Fear (1980). The movement abruptly ended in 1981 after martial law was introduced in Poland.

“Many of the ideals of communism―social justice, economic equality and so on―were positive,” said Zanussi. “But they did not match reality, and this whole discrepancy [created] the cinema of moral anxiety. [We were having] an absolutist government, so public debate was not possible. It was possible only through allusions in films, and that is what we were doing.”

The filmmaker faced enough communist censorship in his creative life. Interestingly, in 1981, when Zanussi worked on a biography of Pope John Paul II―whom he had known since the time he was a bishop―he had to deal with censorship from the Vatican, too. Around 30 objections were raised on his script, and Zanussi took a flight to the Vatican to say that if the church, too, wanted to impose censorship, he did not want to continue. As it happened, the Pope fell ill that day. Cancelling all appointments, he had the time to read the screenplay which an influential priest from Poland, coincidentally on the same flight as Zanussi, delivered to him. Consequently, all the “objections” disappeared.

Over the past five decades, Zanussi has helmed around 40 films, with the last one, Eter, releasing in 2018. Despite having opportunities to collaborate with prominent Hollywood stars and production houses, he opted for a “more sophisticated dialogue with a very demanding public”.

Today, with the dominance of social media and audiovisual content, Zanussi still believes that there is room for philosophical reflection. “As printed matter becomes less significant in our public life, with people reading less, we must find a way to convey more sophisticated ideas through audiovisuals,” he advises the younger generation of creators.

writer-and-translator-damion-searls-exclusive-interview

Mon Jan 01 17:02:30 IST 2024

Damion Searls, a Harvard educated writer and translator, first read a novel by 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse around 20 years ago. He read the German version of Melancholy as he did not then know Norwegian. Searls found the book brilliant and decided it was time to learn Norwegian. He enlisted help from a Norwegian-born co-translator and translated the book into English.

He has since translated multiple works of Fosse, including Septology, a novel in seven parts, published in three volumes.

Fosse is not the first Nobel laureate he has translated―Searls says Fosse was the eighth. The other seven were Patrick Modiano, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, Elfriede Jelinek, Peter Handke and Gunter Grass (short pieces by the last two). But, Fosse is the one Searls has worked longest and closest with. Searls, who has a PhD in English, is known for his strong grasp of German, Norwegian, French and Dutch. He has written a book on Hermann Rorschach, who created the inkblot test, and has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Ingeborg Bachmann and Alfred Döblin.

Interestingly, the man who has received writing and translating awards from global institutions and universities, and from the Austrian, Belgian and Dutch governments, went to college to be a physics major. He ended up majoring in philosophy and then went to graduate school for English. Translation was how he pivoted into writing, but it was never something he formally studied.

He has about 10 finished translations coming out soon, including a debutante Swiss novelist (her book is called Overstaying and it is hilarious, he says). Then, the next couple of years will be spent on Fosse’s backlist, he says. These include early novels, children’s books, poetry, and a new trilogy of novels.

Searls says that Fosse had been rumoured to be a frontrunner for the Nobel for years and in 2023 it seemed likely. So, he was watching the live stream at 6am in the US. “I understand enough Swedish that when the head of the academy said ‘Norwegian writer’ I knew it was Fosse a second before he said the name,” he says.

In an exclusive interview, Searls shares his learnings and the experience of translating Nobel winners. Excerpts:

Q\Your book, The Philosophy of Translation, is due for publication. Could you tell us about your evolution as a translator?

A\ My ideas about translation have not changed much, though I think I am a better translator than I used to be, because I am a better writer. I do not translate in an intellectual, analytical way. I just try to make the sentences sound good. The Philosophy of Translation does talk about translation in a more conceptual way. But it is all after-the-fact―the act of translation itself is quite intuitive.

Q\ How did you first read Jon Fosse’s work and what was your impression of him?

A\ It was just a job. This publisher who had heard about Fosse did not have anyone to read Norwegian. But, the book had been translated into German, so they sent me the German translation of Melancholy. I was solely a translator from German at the time. It was a very good translation. I read the book and said it was total genius; you should absolutely publish it. The publisher said: ‘Thank you very much. Here is your hundred bucks,and we are not, in fact, going to do it.’ Which is usually what happens. I asked them if I could take the project elsewhere else, and found a US publisher, found a co-translator and learned Norwegian in the process of doing this book together.

The co-translator, Grethe Kvernes, who is a native speaker of Fosse’s version of Norwegian, did a first draft―Norwegian to English―and I sat there with the English and the Norwegian. I knew what the Norwegian said because I had the English. When I could not figure out how they went together, I could triangulate with German as Norwegian is a Germanic language. At first, I was worried that I would not have anything to do besides editing it a little bit, and I did not want to claim to be a co-translator if all I am doing is touching it up. But actually, I ended up making hundreds of changes on every page in terms of getting the rhythm, and we went through seven or eight rounds together. I do think it is fair to call it a co-translation, and that is how I learned Fosse’s Norwegian.

Q\ It is often said that the essence or flavour of a work is “lost in translation”. How do you make sure this does not happen?

A\ This is a needlessly pessimistic way to think about it. And I also do not think it is true to how anyone, except the most uptight reader, actually reads. We all get to know the essences and flavours of world literature in translation and few people feel that because of translation they are totally cut off from the wider world. On the contrary, we feel that translation works. It is thanks to translation that we can read Homer and Kafka and Tolstoy and Cervantes and Ernaux and the Bible and the Ramayan. No one reads everything in the original. A translated work is different from the original. The words are different, but, by definition, it gains as much as it loses (if it loses all the Norwegian words, it gains all the English words).

Q\ How did you become multilingual?

A\ Some people learn by conversation―to learn Spanish or Catalan they go to Barcelona and head out to a nightclub―but I learn by reading. Wanting to read something is what motivates me to look up vocabulary, decode syntax and figure it all out. I do not fluently speak all the languages I translate from, but I read them well. It is being a good reader that taught me the languages, not the other way around.

Q\ Could you share some anecdotes from your interactions with Fosse?

A\ He has always been responsive, kind and a great correspondent by email, which is how I communicate with him. He is widely translated and is a translator into Norwegian himself. So he understands how translation works and knows he has to trust translators to make their own decisions. He does not micromanage anything, but he has always been there to answer any questions I had. The trust he has in me is something I really treasure.

I have told this story before, but my favourite communication from him was about the title of his novel Aliss at the Fire. The Norwegian title is Det er Ales, which means ‘that is Ales’ or ‘it is Ales’; the woman’s name in the original is Ales. Unfortunately, this is a word in English, and we could not call the novel ‘It is Beer!’ So I emailed Fosse to ask two questions: What did the name Ales mean to him and what did he want the title to convey? I had noticed that the book’s first burst of short sentences, after 40 or so pages flowing by without a full stop, included the sentence ‘det er Ales’. So the title should refer to that moment in the book, but what else? Fosse told me that Ales was a very old-fashioned name, “Maybe your grandmother might have known an old woman named Ales.” He had a great-great-grandmother named Ales who was known as a “wise woman”, a healer, who got into trouble with the local priest at one point, but avoided punishment. About the title, Fosse said: “It means Ales is spreading out over the whole universe.” I love these answers, especially the second answer―they are like how I imagine a genius director does not tell actors what to do, just offers some comment that makes the actors realise they already know. I realised the character’s name should be recognisably a name, but unusual, mysterious, with a certain aura―not contemporary like Alice or Alissa. And the title should be something archetypal: a universal moment or image from that burst of short sentences.

We did not actually meet in person until May 2022, when we were finalists for the International Booker Prize and we both went to London. I think we slipped quite easily into in-person conversation, since we had understood and liked each other for so long already.

He is a big fan and collector of fountain pens, different kinds of ink, and so on. So most of the time we talked about that.

Q\ You say Fosse’s writing speaks to everyone. Please elaborate.

A\ He is the most produced living playwright in the world, with something like a thousand productions in 50 languages. I think in English we tend to assume that if writing is not populist and trashy, then it must be elitist and difficult. But, Fosse is not creating intellectual puzzles or mysterious artefacts for academics to analyse. He is writing books about people for people to read. He is often compared to [Samuel] Beckett, and I think that is true of Beckett, too, by the way―you can try to say Beckett is ‘difficult’, but people love his work. I think journalists who emphasise, ‘OMG it is a 700-page book with no full stops’ are being more misleading than anything. I have heard from lots of readers who tell me ‘I was scared off by the reviews, but when I read it, it was great’. That “700-page book with no full stops” has characters, scenes and dialogue. It is not all philosophical, though there is some of that, too. His dialogue is moving and funny. I think it is amazing. What the characters say shifts our sense of them, it is surprising. It is never just stating information but always revealing how this person exists in the world. I think it is Fosse’s playwriting chops that let him do that.

Q\ How much time does it take you to finish a book by Fosse?

A\ It depends. His new book, A Shining, is 50 pages long, while Septology is close to 700. You cannot help but read slowly when you are translating. There is no skimming. You need to put in the time on every sentence, look up every word you do not know, decide how you are going to resolve every ambiguity. (I do not mean simplifying the text and removing ambiguity; I mean deciding which possible option in English you are going to use.) I do not read the books in advance. I translate as I go along, so that means I always read Fosse slowly. Which I think works well with his writing, luckily!

Q\ How are you celebrating the Nobel Prize?

A\ I got to go to Stockholm and even bring my son to the Nobel ceremony and banquet! It was the experience of a lifetime, something even my teenage son eventually had to admit.

making-music-is-an-intensely-spiritual-experience-for-anoushka-shankar

Fri Dec 29 15:11:03 IST 2023

Three years ago, sitarist Anoushka Shankar, daughter of the legendary Pandit Ravi Shankar, released her EP, Love Letters. Its music was drenched in pain, coming as it did after her divorce from filmmaker husband Joe Wright, her anxiety over being a single mother to her two sons and health issues following painful surgeries, including one to remove abdominal tumours. “Am I still loveable if you stop loving me?” she sings about heartbreak in one of the songs. But there is also strength in the music―she is not voicing the pain as much as exorcising it. The album, in that sense, is almost a catharsis.

She’s written before about dredging music from this place of pain. “I’ve been struggling to write music lately and today, I’ve realised it is quite simply because, once again, I’ve been afraid that feeling too deeply will cause me to lose myself―that I will be engulfed by a pain I don’t want to touch or dive into,” she once shared. “Even though from experience I know it’s precisely that self-losing that allows me to change and heal.”

And now, with her latest mini album, Chapter 1: Forever, For Now―the first of a planned trilogy of mini albums―she is more confident in revealing that vulnerability. In the “self-losing” that she spoke of, it is clear that she has found herself. There is something organic about the music in Chapter 1, as though it is an expression, rather than a creation. Its four songs were recorded at Berlin’s Leiter studio, and produced by Grammy-winner Arooj Aftab. My favourite was the opener, ‘Daydreaming’, featuring Nils Frahm on the piano. It is based on an old Carnatic lullaby that Anoushka’s mother and grandmother used to sing to her. One day, while rocking her sons to sleep, she strummed the tune to them, and memories started tumbling out.

“I have always loved the song, but usually when I have heard it performed it is quite dynamic,” Shankar tells THE WEEK over a Zoom conversation. “So, there is a whole percussion accompaniment and solos and a bit more buoyancy to the song. Whereas I wanted to bring out that lullaby flavour, that relaxing, hazy kind of feel.”

Leaning back against comfy green pillows and sipping coffee, occasionally putting her feet up, Anoushka seems as relaxed as the mood she is trying to create in her song. When she smiles, the resemblance to her father is inescapable. This is the 10th year since she came out with Traces of You, her seventh studio album in which she pays homage to her father, who had died in 2012. (The album also features vocals by her half-sister Norah Jones.) She says that what she misses most about him is his laugh, which is fitting since Shankar used to laugh a lot. In her biography on her father, Anoushka recalls how he used to find humour in everything. She remembers a time he was in hospital and in a lot of pain. When they visited him, he told them that the monitor attached to his finger looked like a little ET and made it wiggle a ‘hello’ at them. He shot off a couple of spontaneous jokes and impersonated a nurse with a strange accent.

Often, he would joke with his audience at concerts, sometimes introduce Anoushka as his mother, wink at her in between songs, and occasionally announce a piece and then confess he had no idea what he was going to play next. “If there is one thing that Bapi has taught me about performing, it is that it has to be fun,” writes Anoushka. And it is, most of the time. Sometimes, though, it is not. In a social media post, Anoushka reminisces about playing on the closing night of the Edinburgh International Festival in August while suffering from migraine. Right beforehand, she was vomiting and in searing pain, “hiding in a dark room with every part of me pleading not to have to go out into the lights and loud sound”. But she had to go out and play as though everything was alright.

“A lot of what artists do is quite invisible,” she says. “If you are getting up there night after night, you are getting up there through all your life events. My marriage broke when I was in the middle of a tour, and I was going onstage every day sticking a smile on my face, but my life was falling apart. It is not something you can share with your audience; they are just there for the show. On the one side, there is something transcendent about it―it is beautiful that music can lift you out of that difficulty. On the other side, it is something artistes do that goes unnoticed that is quite amazing, but also a little unfair.”

But for the most part, she loves touring, even though it means leaving her sons for long stretches of time. (“Why are you gone so much? You just came back,” is their constant complaint.) And now, she will be touring India in January, including a performance at the Lollapalooza music festival in Mumbai. She says India holds a special place in her heart, because it is where her music and instrument come from. It is also where she held her first concert at the age of 13. That same year, she entered the recording studio for the first time, for her father’s album In Celebration. Two years later, she helped as conductor with her father and George Harrison of The Beatles, on their 1997 release, Chants of India. It was not always smooth sailing, as she remembers being quite the brat then.

“I was convinced that something wasn’t working,” she says. “There was a shloka that my dad wanted everyone to do, but it was out of rhythm, and I was like: ‘This song is not working. We should move on.’ I was overstepping a bit. I was a kid and I was my father’s daughter. That time, Uncle George told me, ‘You must give it time. If you want to make something work, you have to find a way.' It was a real learning for a 15-year-old.” Since then, she says, she has learnt something from everyone she has collaborated with, from Sting to the Dalai Lama. But her best teacher remains her father.

“In a way I am lucky, because I get to hear him whenever I want,” she says with a wistful smile. But even without the music, the memories are vivid: Teaching him how to blow bubbles because he said he had never done it as a child, being gifted four party dresses on her fourth birthday, him cringing at her “black lipstick” phase, playing Holi together…. She often wonders about what he would have said regarding many things in her life today. As she says, “It would have been lovely to continue the conversation.”

pablo-cesar-s-rich-filmography-brings-to-life-the-myths-beliefs-and-forgotten-histories-of-diverse-lands

Fri Dec 29 15:08:47 IST 2023

Pablo Cesar’s calling card is a work of beauty. It resembles a 35mm film gauge―appropriate, since the veteran Argentine filmmaker entered the world of cinema in the 1970s, when 35mm was the standard gauge and digital filmmaking did not exist. His pathbreaking films were all shot on film, and he continues to use it even today.

Pablo, 61, was a jury member in the ‘international competition’ category at the recently concluded International Film Festival of Kerala. He started his film journey in 1975, when his stepbrother José Maria gifted him a Kodak Super 8 camera. With José’s support, he made his first short film in just months. “It was an eight-minute animation film named La Diversión Del Rey,” says Pablo.

In 1976, the military captured power in Argentina, essentially “stealing” Pablo’s adolescence (he lost the opportunity to enrol in film school), but not deterring his passion for filmmaking. He produced seven short films in 1977, overcoming the ban on filming on streets by turning to parks and holiday houses as alternative locations. At 14, his hunger for adventure had him sneaking into an Air France Boeing 747, capturing footage with his Super 8, and leaving undetected. The following week, he attempted a repeat of it with his schoolmates, but they were caught and detained for four hours.

Pablo lost his father when he was young. His mother, Martha Elena, chose not to remarry and devoted herself to taking care of Pablo and his younger brother Miguel. In many ways, Martha shaped his journey as a filmmaker. “I once created a short film titled The Machine (1977), about a robot spiralling out of control and hurting people. During a party at home, I asked all the guests to play characters who fall victim to the rogue robot,” says Pablo. The most memorable scene turned out to be an unscripted one. “I needed to show the machine falling from a height,” he says. “My mother, without hesitation, threw the dummy machine out the window [of our apartment], and it landed on top of a police car parked in the street. My mother had to put on an act to avert trouble.”

Pablo’s 2003 film Sangre―about a filmmaker seeking inspiration while dealing with a sick mother―depicts the deep emotional connection he had with his mother.

The experimental short Del Génesis (1980), which portrayed an apocalypse and a quest for a better world (a parable about Argentina’s yearning to break free from military dictatorship), was Pablo’s first award-winning work. In 1983, he produced his first feature film, De las caras del Espejo. Shot on a Super 8, it bagged multiple awards, including one for best photography.

The year also marked Argentina’s return to democracy. Pablo began learning Russian at the Argentine Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR. In 1985, De las caras del Espejo was showcased in Moscow and other European cities.

In 1989, Pablo was selected as a jury member of the Kélibia International Film Festival in Tunisia. For Pablo, Tunisia offered an entirely different cultural landscape. “I heard azaan for the first time in my life, and I rushed out of the hotel where I was staying. I thought it was an emergency call. It was only later that I found out that it was a beautiful call for prayer,” he says. Pablo’s discovery of Sufi culture, North African myths and mysticism marked a transformative moment in his career.

The following year, he signed a coproduction agreement with the Tunisian Federation of Filmmakers for producing Equinoccio, el jardín de las rosas (Equinox, the rose garden)―about five fables narrated by a young angel in five distinct towns. Equinoccio marked the first instance of a Latin American filmmaker directing an African coproduction in Africa. In the next three decades, Pablo was part of many coproductions that brought myths and beliefs in Benin, Mali, Angola, Namibia, Ethiopia and Morocco to the screen.

In 1994, his third feature, Fuego gris, was screened at the International Film Festival of India. It was during a dinner with filmmakers Pino Solanas of Argentina and Michelangelo Antonioni of Italy at the Taj Bengal in Calcutta that he discovered the location for his next feature, Unicornio, el jardín de las frutas (Unicorn, the fruit garden), “My original plan was to shoot it in Morocco, but Antonioni suggested that I shoot in India, explaining the vastness and diversity of the country,” says Pablo.

Unicornio (1996), shot in Rajasthan, became the first Indian-Argentinian coproduction. He collaborated with filmmaker Murali Nair to explore five distinct stories that had themes ranging from transsexualism to alchemy, slavery and the exploration of heaven and hell.

There was a two-decade hiatus before Pablo returned with his second Argentina-India coproduction. In 2018, he released Pensando en él (Thinking of Him), depicting the meeting between Rabindranath Tagore and Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo in 1924.

The gap does not imply that Pablo lost his connection with India; quite the opposite. His affinity for India deepened over the years, and he even learnt to play the sitar―a gift from R. Viswanathan, former Indian ambassador to Argentina and an occasional columnist for THE WEEK. “His only condition was that I should learn it,” Pablo says. “I learned it and, at a farewell gathering before his return to India, played the rag Khamaj on the sitar.”

Last year, Pablo released his first feature-length documentary―Macongo, la Córdoba Africana, on the systematic erasure of African cultures from Argentina’s collective consciousness. The documentary challenges prevailing narratives in Argentina about people whose ancestors were brought to Latin America as slaves. “Córdoba was a province that had more than 50 per cent Afro population around 1850,” says Pablo. “Even today, the province retains traces of African heritage in the names of towns like Macongo, Tulumba, Candonga, Cabinda and Cabalango.”

physician-and-author-dr-abraham-verghese-interview

Sat Dec 23 19:16:00 IST 2023

Interview/ Dr Abraham Verghese / physician and author

The first thing you notice about a person says a lot more about you.

For Dr Abraham Verghese, it is shoes. They help put himself in the shoes of the patient he is seeing. “We all are supposed to do that, to try to do that. A part of you has to be objective and yet you have to sort of try to imagine what [the patient] is going through,” he tells THE WEEK over Zoom from Texas, where he is attending a book fest, in early November.

His latest book―The Covenant of Water―has made him put on his travel shoes more often this year. A week or so before the interview, he was in Spain to promote the book’s Spanish edition. While his previous three books, too, had done well, the latest one is seeing success on a whole different scale―the book has made it to many a ‘best books of 2023’ list, is the 101st pick of Oprah’s Book Club and has already sold more than a million copies.

It has been a whirlwind year for him, no doubt. But he seems untouched by the busyness that surrounds him when he sits down for the interview at 7am, Texas time. He speaks in a calm, unhurried tone, with not even a hint of irritability or discomfort despite nursing a cold. Even when the audio acts up at our end, he is patient. These are qualities that show up in and at his work―both as author and physician. (He is professor and Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane provostial professor, and vice chair for the theory and practice of medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University, California.) Be it the creative or the clinical side, he is, as Stanford Magazine describes him, the human whisperer.

In an hour-long conversation, Verghese talks about his early life in Addis Ababa, his Madras days, his life and medical practice in the US and what it means to be a writer. Excerpts:

Q/ Why do you write, Dr Verghese?

A/ I began writing first to tell the story of something that I was living through, which at the time was very unusual. I thought I was living in a small town in Tennessee as an infectious disease specialist and everybody expected that I would see, in 1985, maybe one patient with HIV every other year because it was considered an urban disease, you know, more a function of big cities. But in a few years, I had about a hundred people with HIV infection that I was caring for, which was much more than anybody predicted. And it turned out to be a story that I thought was happening all over America. And it represented boys who had grown up in that town, who left for the big city and lived there for decades. And at some point the virus found them and now they were coming back to their hometowns because they were sick. So I wrote a scientific paper describing that, but then I felt that the language of science didn’t begin to capture the heartache of the families, the tragedy of that whole journey. That was the moment I became a writer. (His first book―My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story―came out in 1994.) And then I just sort of have kept going, I have kept writing ever since then. I think partly it is because I love to read. I came to medicine because of certain books, certain novels that inspired me. And so once I published that first book, I had this ambition to write the kind of novel that would inspire another generation of readers to go into medicine.

Q/ I read that writing became an escape for you while treating patients with HIV. Is it still an escape? Or, is it something else now?

A/ Yeah, I think when I first started writing about HIV, I was writing fiction, short stories. And it was a kind of escape. In my fiction, I was able to do the things I couldn’t do in reality, which is turn back time and get into people’s heads. I think it is still sort of an escape. I think what happens is once you have published a book and it has been recognised, then you become more self-conscious. So it becomes less of an escape and you become more mannered, if you like. But yeah, it is a bit of an escape. Mostly it is a pleasure. Sometimes, it feels like a lot of work.

Q/ How do you see art or literature? As escapism? Entertainment? Education?

A/ Well, all of it, but I actually think that fiction, especially reading novels, has an important function in people’s lives. I think when a book is a book that we find deeply meaningful and that we remember and that is important to us, it is usually because it resonates with some truths that we already recognise. [Marcel] Proust, the French writer, said that every book, every novel becomes an optical instrument by which we examine ourselves. So every reader frames the book in terms of [his/her] own personality. I am struck by the kind of responses I am getting from readers about my book. It is very individual. Every reader makes their own mental movie of the book from the words. So I think fiction has an important role in our lives. And I worry that when your attention span is confined to Instagram and short bursts like that, and when it is all visual and when you don’t have the experience of taking words and making pictures in your head, then a part of your brain just doesn’t get exercised. And I think you lose something.

Q/ You said in an interview that Covid-19 had echoes of the epidemic―AIDS―that made you a writer. So what effect has Covid-19 had on you?

A/ I think Covid-19 had a lot of influence on all of us. But the difference was that I was much older than when HIV came along. And I was not so much on the frontline as my younger colleagues in the ICU and in the emergency room [were]. Even though I was caring for patients, I didn’t feel quite the way I did during HIV when I thought I was very much on the frontline. And also, I don’t think that Covid had the same sort of social prejudice that HIV had in the early years. So I think it was very poignant. It was very sad to see the extent of it, to see people dying with this illness and not having their family members be able to come close because of masking and all that. So it affected us all very deeply. But I think it shaped the younger generation more than anything. But it had echoes for me of the early years that shaped my medical career.

Q/ Your experience with treating HIV patients brought you face to face with what you call the conceit of cure. You have also said that HIV humbled you. How does a doctor come to terms with the limitations of his profession?

A/ When you are a young physician, you are full of yourself. And you just assume that you can fix most things. And if you can’t, it is not your fault. It is [because] the patient came too late (laughs). There is an arrogance of youth. And I think that was especially true in my speciality―infectious disease…. People went into the speciality because it was all about cure. You could really make a dramatic difference if you made the right diagnosis, I don’t know, in a bone marrow transplant patient with an infection and so on. And then HIV came along and for many, many years, we had no treatment, no cure. And I think it humbled many of us. And it helped us understand that even when you couldn’t cure, you still had an important role. And I think that is still true. It has taken a lot of time to really grasp that life is a terminal condition. Nobody survives. And so in that sense, we have to have a role that is larger than just making people better because we can’t do it all the time.

Q/ Did that in any way make you lean towards bedside medicine?

A/ Actually, what led me to bedside medicine was the wonderful training I had in India. So I had my medical education in two places―in Ethiopia to begin with and then when the civil war broke out there, I eventually finished in India [Madras Medical College]. But in both cases, there was a British system of education that put great emphasis on learning to read the body as a text. It is an art that is dying, that is not done very well anymore. But I loved it. And I had the most wonderful teachers, unforgettable people who were incredibly skilled at reading the body. And so I sort of really fell in love with that. And it is ironic that my reputation in America in academic medicine has a lot to do with bedside medicine (laughs). And yet it is not as though I learned some special skills in my postgraduate years. I am calling on my memory of my wonderful teachers in Madras, whose lessons are still with me. I can hear their voice.

Q/ You mentioned your experience of civil unrest in Ethiopia, and later you were a nursing assistant in the US, both of which have shaped you, your life and your work. Could you elaborate on that?

A/ I think they were all very influential. I was of Indian origin, but born in Ethiopia, and I still speak the language very well. On the other hand, there was a big community of Malayali teachers hired from the same place, largely Christians, Syrian Christians. So the paradox of growing up in a St Thomas Christian community while being in another land, which I suppose is not that different from kids who are growing up these days in the Gulf, Dubai―they are very much in the Malayali community, but they are elsewhere.

And then the civil war was very dislocating. It was very traumatic. I think there were 30 of us or less than that in our medical school class, and some of them were arrested and tortured, and many of them became guerrilla fighters for the other side, so to speak. One of them, after 22 years of being a guerrilla fighter, became the prime minister of Ethiopia, and I had the opportunity to interview him for a magazine many years later. So, it was a tremendously impactful occurrence in my life to be displaced like that.

And I wound up coming to America and working as a nurse’s helper for one and a half years before I was able to transfer to a medical school in Madras because the Indian government took me in. So all those things are hugely influential.

I think, as a writer, I often feel that I am always on the outside looking in. Whether I was in Africa, even when I was in India, I was very, very comfortable in Madras and had all my great friendships and relatives there. But even there, at some level, I didn’t have quite their experience because I wasn’t born there. I wasn’t as fluent as they were. And of course, in America, I am an immigrant. I am an American citizen, but still, at some level in my head, I feel I am an outsider looking in, which is a great perspective to have as a writer. It’s not a bad thing, necessarily.

Q/ Why did you decide to take time off medicine and then go for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?

A/ I think I felt that that was the lesson that my patients were teaching me, that if you want to do something, don’t postpone your dreams, don’t take forever to do that. I was also getting quite burnt out being the only person providing HIV care in that town. I felt that I wanted to keep doing this, but in order to do it and not get totally burnt out, I needed to take some kind of a break. So I wanted to tell the story, and I applied to the Iowa University Writers’ Workshop. The only criteria for admission are two short stories. Nothing else really matters. When they took me, I decided to go. If they hadn’t taken me, I was still planning to give up my tenured position and take a year off to write this story while working in emergency rooms or whatever else I could do to make money.

Q/ How did the workshop help?

A/ It is a very interesting place. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was one of the first to offer a master’s degree or a PhD where your thesis was a collection of short stories or a novel or a chapbook of poetry. Over the years, it has turned out some wonderful American writers, from Flannery O’Connor to John Irving to Tracy Kidder. But the Iowa method, which is still the method they use there now, and it is widely emulated, is very simply you met once a week and you discussed two of the students’ stories. When your story came up, you kept quiet while your fellow students and the writer-in-residence discussed it. You very quickly found out that the kind of story that Ammachi [grandmother] thinks is cute and your spouse thinks is so nice doesn’t usually fly there. In fact, the moment that your spouse or your Ammachi doesn’t like your story (laughs), you probably have found your voice. But the most important thing Iowa did, I think, is it gave you the time, because you only met once a week and the rest of the time was yours to read, to find your voice, to write. And I knew that I would not have that kind of time again, and I had never had that kind of time. So I took full advantage of it. I think I was in my mid-30s. By contrast, I think many of the students were straight out of college. They were in their mid-20s and they were too young to appreciate how precious this time was. But I wasn’t. I was very conscious of it.

Q/ Your second book, The Tennis Partner (1997), was also nonfiction and personal. Your fiction, be it Cutting for Stone (2009) or The Covenant of Water, also comes from a personal space. Does it come easy to you, opening up a part of yourself like that?

A/ I think the second book, as you said, was nonfiction, but I wrote it somewhat reluctantly. I mean, the first book about HIV, I thought I was going to do that as a novel (laughs). It turned out to be better told as nonfiction. Nonfiction, at least in America, outsells fiction five to one, ten to one. For some reason, if something really happened, readers are more interested in it than if you make it up. So in general, even though novels make a lot of splash, nonfiction makes money for publishers. So there was a lot of pressure for me to write another nonfiction story. And I had just lived through another experience with the death of a friend.

But I was really keen to write fiction because I think it is very liberating. My fiction, I mean, even though it draws on things I know, it draws on my experience, I don’t think it is autobiographical in the sort of broadest sense. But I do write about what I know. So the first novel was set in Ethiopia and the character goes to medical school. But that’s about the only resemblance―I didn’t have a twin, my mother was not a nun.

Q/ With The Covenant of Water, you said you wanted to write about the landscape. Did the geographical aspect come to you first or the characters?

A/ First of all, it is not as though I am a novelist with 20 books. And so I can say this is my rule. I am just telling you how these things happen. But for me, it seems the most important decision is geography―where you locate the book. So my first [novel] was located in Ethiopia. It would not be the same book if I located it in New Jersey or somewhere else. Similarly, I think making the decision to put the novel in Kerala is huge because I think geography affects everything. Napoleon said that geography is destiny. And that is certainly true in my life. Every change of geography has changed my destiny.

But I had hesitated [to set my novel in Kerala] even though I was very familiar with Kerala, coming there every summer for vacation. As I mentioned, growing up in a Malayali household and community, I didn’t have quite the familiarity perhaps that you do or someone born there does. So I hesitated. But ultimately, my mother had written this wonderful longhand document for my niece, her granddaughter, because her granddaughter asked her, ‘What was it like when you were a little girl?’ And seeing that manuscript with all its illustrations reminded me how rich it would be to set a novel in the unique era of the 1900s in Kerala with all its wonderful rituals, particularly the rituals of the St Thomas Christian community that are not that well-known to people certainly outside of India, but even within India. I am not sure that they are all that well-known.

Q/ You doodle. You had a whiteboard when you were writing The Covenant of Water. You also sculpted a clay model of the ‘Stone Woman’ (an artwork that appears in the novel). How are these processes essential to your writing?

A/ I think they are ways of you thinking aloud. Even though I wanted [the whiteboard] to be kind of the whole architecture of the novel, like a house plan, like a blueprint, [it] never quite worked out [that way]. Once [you] start building, you suddenly feel like, ‘Oh, well, the veranda doesn’t belong here, the sun comes that direction (laughs)’. I kept changing the plan. So I look at them now as just artefacts of the creative process. They weren’t the causative agents that made me write in a certain way. They were just part of the process.

Q/ The Covenant of Water was unputdownable. Do you write with that intention―to make a book that is unputdownable?

A/ Yeah, I suppose. When you write fiction, as opposed to nonfiction, you really have to work very hard to get the reader to suspend their disbelief in the first few pages. You want them to forget that they are sitting in a hot room and that they are unhappy with their mother-in-law and that there’s work tomorrow. You want them to forget all that and enter this world in two or three pages. And then you have to work very, very hard to keep them in this fictional dream with their disbelief suspended. So I think it is much harder to write fiction than nonfiction because when something really happens, we have an inherent interest in it. But when you write fiction, I think you just have to work very hard. So I am not sure about my goal being to make it unputdownable as much as to make it a very believable world and to make the reader want to keep turning the page to have this urge of, ‘Well, what happened next? What happened next?’ Not quite in the sense of a murder mystery where the ‘what happened next’ is pretty compelling. Somebody has been killed, and you have to find out who did it. I think with literary fiction, it is a different kind of ‘what happened next’. But yeah, it is very much on my mind.

Q/ I wanted to talk about the women characters in The Covenant of Water. I thought you wrote them with understanding and empathy, and I think it is rare when it comes to male writers. Did it come naturally to you?

A/ Does it come naturally for a middle-aged male to enter a woman’s head? (Laughs.) No, I don’t think it comes naturally. But I think I have been blessed to have had some very strong and charismatic women in my life. Both my grandmothers were, in their own way, quietly heroic women―the kind of heroism that the world will never know. Those ammachis who labour away, and they are so critical to the welfare of a family. And they suffer a lot. They have gone through a lot of hardship. But their faith is so strong. They just keep going on. So I think that was my role model. First of all, the two of them, because they had both been through considerable adversity―losing a child. Each of them had lost an adolescent boy. One to typhoid, one to rabies. And they lived in the confines of the house that they married into. I don’t think they had ever travelled far from it. And to me, they were so noble, despite not having the trappings of what we would consider power.

And I think my mother was also tremendously influential. She was very brave to set off in the 1940s, just after independence, reading this ad in the newspaper, and went off to Ethiopia in a sari, a single woman. Can you imagine? In a place that she never knew anything about, had to look up on a map. I think that I have been surrounded by strong women role models, if you like, of the kind of women I wanted to put in my fiction.

Q/ Love and loss are two prominent themes in The Covenant of Water. What does love mean to you, and what does loss?

A/ It is funny when people ask me questions like that. I am always destined to disappoint them with the answer. Because when I am writing, I am not thinking of themes. It is like when you were studying in college, and you get these questions, what is the theme of the novel? What is the underlying operating archetype? I think when you are a writer, you are just trying to tell a good story. So I think it is after the fact that readers impose these sort of meta constructs on a book about themes. So I am not sure that I had any agenda around love and loss, except that as a physician, I think I am much more conscious of mortality than perhaps many people are. I am not being morbid. I feel I am accurately portraying the kind of death and carnage that was pretty common in the era I was describing. People died from infectious disease. They died from drowning. They died from trauma. Whereas I think most lay people are in a bit of a denial about their mortality. I am not, and I think that because I am not, I am also more in awe of life. I think we are all living on borrowed time. This is not a permanent state we are in. This is an ephemeral conversation; it will disappear one day. Or, we will, the conversation might linger. So I think that sensibility does come into my writing, but not consciously like that. It is not my agenda that I am going to write about loss, I am going to write about love. I think the things that move me in life are love, are loss, just like they move all of us. So it is nothing special.

Q/ How much do you love your characters?

A/ Well, I grew to love them. I think initially they are two-dimensional constructs, but then as you revise and revise and revise, they become very, very real to you. Big Ammachi [from The Covenant of Water] became as real as one of my grandparents. So they all become very real. One of the criticisms (laughs) of my book was that my characters are all too nice. I didn’t have anybody who was bad. But in a way, that’s my view of how we are. I really don’t think there are very many people who are inherently evil. There are, but not many. Most of us are trying to do our best, and sometimes we have made terrible mistakes, and we are trying to find redemption. In a sense, I have always had trouble with the Christian theme of we are sinners and we have to confess. But in a funny way, I think I have echoed that theme with my characters, because I do think that people are mostly good and trying to do good and often have made mistakes that they are trying to compensate for.

Q/ Did you have to ‘kill your darlings’ in the book?

A/ Yeah (laughs), I think that’s a famous saying in writing that you have to kill your darlings. But when they say kill your darlings, it doesn’t mean killing your favourite characters, by the way. What it means is, as you know, if you think a piece of writing is very, very cute, you have written 10 pages, but you love this one paragraph, that’s the paragraph your editor and you, if you have some wisdom, are going to realise that it is just not working.

Q/ Was it difficult to do that?

A/ I think as a writer, I have always been very conscious that I cannot be objective about my writing. I think most readers don’t realise how critical an editor is to the process. I actually think editors should be listed on the book, because honestly, you have to trust someone experienced who has the ability to say, ‘This section is lovely, but it doesn’t belong in this book. This section is great, but you should expand on it.’ You lose all objectivity. You are no longer able to see.

Q/ There is tragedy in The Covenant of Water, but there is also hope. Do you think art has to be hopeful?

A/ Well, again, I am not starting out with an agenda of themes, like I want to bring hope to this, but I think hope is a necessary human quality for us to go on, to wake up every day and despite whatever trials we are facing, the desire to go on is because, I think, one clings to some hope that if things are not good, that they will be better. I don’t think I was consciously trying to impose hope on my world or anything like that.

Q/ We talked about mortality and how you view it. There is a lot of research happening on reversing age and attaining immortality. What is your view on that?

A/ I think the biggest things we can do to live longer are actually things that are not as sexy as creams that we apply or injections we take. It is much more going to be about very simple things, like diet and exercise will prolong life a lot more than many other things. I think it is interesting. It is very human to want to live longer, and we are living long. I think, in general, people are healthier for the most part. And, medical technology is advanced to the point where things we might have died of―like the two things I mentioned my uncles who I never met died from―they are both eminently treatable conditions. So I am interested in longevity from that point of view. I think there is a lot of other stuff out there that is yet to be proven.

Q/ Do you identify yourself as a physician first and then a writer?

A/ I know this sounds a bit disingenuous, but I think of myself as all-physician. And I am looking out at the world through the lens of a physician. And when I approach the writing, it is very much the same lens and I am looking at human beings in some detail. But unlike in my day job, I am also allowed to get into their heads and allowed to imagine things about them. But it is the same lens. I always resisted when people try and [make] me wear two hats―a writer hat or a physician hat. I certainly don’t feel that way, I don’t feel quite so schizophrenic.

Q/ You wrote an interesting paper―Culture shock: Patient as icon and icon as patients―where you contend that the patient in the hospital bed gets less attention than the patient data on the computer. Do you think we are too much in awe of technology?

A/ I think there is a great danger, both in India and elsewhere, any place that has access to sophisticated medicine. We are getting so enamoured with the data, the images, the CAT scan, the MRI. But sometimes we can lose sight of the human being and sometimes you could wind up spending people’s money in a way that is so destructive. When what they really need is something simpler and they need to be listened to, they need to be cared for. But a lot of medicine, both here certainly and also in India, has become very much like a business machine, trying to improve the bottom line, which is understandable to some degree. But it has really changed the practice of medicine.

Q/ I read that you first look at the patient’s shoes. Is that true?

A/ We all are supposed to do that, to try to do that. A part of you has to be objective and yet you have to sort of try to imagine what [the patient] is going through. One of the hardest things that happens to physicians is that we can get so disease-focused that we forget about the individual who has a disease. A very famous American physician who died in 1919 used to say, ‘It is much more important to know what patient has the disease than what disease the patient has.’ I think that remains true. I think it is much less about specific diagnosis than it is about getting to know this person in front of you and the illness that they have and sometimes the outcome depends much less on the nature of the illness than on the nature of the patient.

Q/ Do you think AI will take over our jobs?

A/ I think AI is going to do a lot of things (laughs). But there is a big misconception about AI; it is neither artificial, nor is it intelligent. It is actually parasitising material already existing in the world by writers like me. In fact, there is a movement afoot to try and make sure that AI pays us for poring through our novels and coming up with ways to imitate us. So I think it is an interesting phenomenon, it will generate a lot of interesting quasi art. But ultimately, we respond to human beings, individuals making art. I am not sure whether we are moved by, except in the abstracts, technology creating art even if it has some similitude where it feels real. Even so, I don’t think it is quite the same thing.

Q/ There is a thinking that science and technology have shaped the world today. Where do you think art stands in what is being called the age of AI?

A/ Art gives meaning to our lives. If we were mechanical creatures, then we wouldn’t need art. But art is in a way tapping into our subconscious and tapping into our complex motivations. I mentioned Proust talking about novels being an optical instrument that allows you to look into yourself. Similarly, I like a lot of modern art, but it is very subjective. The artist presents you something and you bring your life history and your biography and your eyes and you look at this thing and you tell yourself a certain story. My belief is that we need art to make meaning of our lives. We need technology to boil our coffee and to allow us to talk on Zoom, but it doesn’t necessarily give us meaning.

Q/ There is this notion that fiction is somehow less important than nonfiction, that there is little you can learn from it. I know you don’t agree with that. But why do you think people see it like that?

A/ It is really puzzling to me. We raise our children with stories. We use stories from the very earliest stage. If you think about your own childhood, it is a succession of small stories that impacted you. And it is always puzzling to me why people stop reading fiction, to their great detriment. At least in America, the majority of readers are women. One could argue that they have perhaps more time. That’s not a really good argument, but it’s being made. Very often, especially in medicine, I find my colleagues have this sense, ‘Oh well, I am a serious kind of person, so I don’t read fiction; I read biography, I read memoir.’ I am always struck by that, because fiction, time and time again, has the ability to change societies. You think about Uncle Tom’s Cabin in America. That novel ended slavery in America. One book captured the public’s imagination and made slavery unpalatable. Similarly, in the UK, one book―The Citadel by A.J. Cronin―depicting medicine and health care in a small Welsh mining town created the National Health Service. It caused such a public sentiment.

When fiction sweeps through society, it has a particular role in shaping us. And, a part of the reason that to me medicine feels very unimaginative at times in terms of the way people seem to understand it is because we have become so left-brained in our orientation. And we are not tapping into the right brain and all its wonderful mystical associations. All the stuff that Freud and everyone else would tell us is terribly important in driving us.

Q/ What is your next book going to be? Fiction or nonfiction?

A/ I am not even thinking about a next book right now. One of the common things is that when you have done something, then it is assumed that you are going to keep doing it. You are going to create another one, another one. And with every book, I have always felt that I have nothing more to say, that I put everything I know into it. And, I think when you do something that’s worked well, there is immediately the sense of, ‘Oh, what’s next? You’re gonna do this again. When will you do it again?’ And I must say, I feel free of that pressure. So that’s probably why it took 14 years between the last book and this book.

It is not that I don’t want to create these works, but it is not easy for me to do that. And I can’t just do it on demand. It has to sort of come organically, because I feel I have something to say, and there is a story that’s compelling. So I am not in any rush to write another one right away. I probably will write. I enjoy writing. But I don’t feel compelled to churn out another bestseller, first of all, because it is impossible to do. I think it is incredibly lucky to have had one novel do well, and then to have a second one do even better. There is no formula. With every book, you start from zero. And it is long, tortuous. This book especially was really, really hard. I actually had to switch publishers, because they were impatient with me, and I thought that they didn’t get the story. So at some great financial peril, I had to return the money they advanced me, find a new publisher. So, I would be very, very cautious about jumping in to do this again, unless I felt compelled to.

Q/ You received the National Humanities Medal from former president Barack Obama in 2015. When Obama, the first black president was sworn in, there was a feeling that America had come of age. And then Donald Trump came to power. Did we celebrate too soon? Or, were we naive enough to think that America had moved beyond race and colour?

A/ It has been a very curious time. I am a great fan of Obama. I thought he was remarkably articulate. But that said, he had a hard time being effective. And I don’t know if that was his failing or his inability to build consensus, or it was just the determined opposition to someone like him. Donald Trump has been a very curious phenomenon. As a writer, you sit back and observe all these things. But it is not just America. You look around the world, in India, everywhere, there is sort of shocking polarities in the way countries are moving that are unexpected. You sort of assume progress comes with open-mindedness and generosity of spirit and inclusion rather than exclusion. But that is not the case. And as a writer, you just come back to the sense that, well, we are human, and we are infinitely more complex than anyone can outline on a piece of paper.

Q/ You are a physician, professor, writer. How do you find time to do all this?

A/ Well, I take my time, I am very slow. Fourteen years to produce another book is a long time (laughs). I am not in any great hurry. I love my day job. I love teaching medical students. I love practising medicine. I love writing, too. But thank God, I don’t have to use the writing to pay the bills. I am doing it out of love, and when it does well and it is successful, it is always a tremendous delight. People assume that I am juggling all these things at the same time, but it is really not quite like that. I don’t play golf, I don’t watch a lot of TV, so I suppose that frees up a lot of time.

the-nadaswaram-has-been-a-constant-note-in-yazhpanam-p-s-balamurugan-s-life

Fri Dec 15 18:35:49 IST 2023

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. Upon the willows in the midst of it, we hung our harps.

The poignant verses from Psalm 137 in the Bible’s Old Testament echo the lament of men, women and children forced to leave their homes centuries ago. Like the lamentations in the psalm, nadaswaram maestro Yazhpanam P.S. Balamurugan was also forcefully displaced once.

As a teenager, he, too, had shed tears, wondering whether a curse hung over him and his people―the Sri Lankan Tamils. However, even while growing up during the civil war, Balamurugan never hung up his double reed wind instrument.

“When I was 15, our family had to flee our house in Nallur,”recalls Balamurugan. “For nearly six months, we lived in a place that was 30km away from our village. We lived in temporary sheds; we did not have any money, and had almost nothing to eat.” Even in that situation, his father, Suppuswami Pillai, insisted that he practise the nadaswaram. “He believed that if I managed to stay alive, this music would be the key to sustaining myself and making a living,” he says. “I obeyed him.”

Born in 1980, Balamurugan belongs to a generation that bore the brunt of the devastating civil war in the island nation. Witnessing death and bloodshed was almost a daily affair. For the first 22 years of his life, he hardly travelled outside Jaffna. Today, he is a globetrotter and one of the most sought-after musicians worldwide. He has a soft corner for south India for its knowledge and appreciation of Carnatic music.

“Nadaswaram is not at all an easy instrument to master,” says S.P. Sreekumar, principal of Kshetra Kalapeedam, Vaikom. “In the contemporary musical world, there is hardly any other nadaswaram artist who has earned such a legendary status at such a comparatively young age (43)…. A lot of nadaswaram players play the instrument, focusing only on swaras (notations). But Balamurugan is one of those artists who learn and play nadaswaram without mutilating the beauty of sahitya (lyrics) of a keerthana. That is one reason why we can just keep listening to his music for hours.”

And that was evident when he performed during the annual 13-day Ashtami festivities at the renowned Vaikom Mahadeva Temple in Kerala in early December. On the 11th day of the festival, Balamurugan’s music created the divine ambience for the hours-long Sribali and Vilakku rituals. On the 12th day, he conducted a four-hour-long concert. His son, P.S. Sarang, 21, joined him with the nadaswaram, whereas Kovilur K.G. Kalyanasundaram, Mettupalayam M.S. Ravikumar and Eguvarpalayam E.M. Ganapathy set the rhythm with their thavil. Balamurugan enthralled the audience with raga vistharam (slow and rhythmically free improvisation that sets the mood for the subsequent composition) in Kokilapriya ragam. He then proceeded to play mano dharma―an on-the-spot improvisation while adhering to the musical grammar―in Shuddha Saveri, a raga that is also used in music therapy for alleviating depression and instilling a positive outlook. That same night, Balamurugan enthralled a larger audience with his hours-long performance for the Ashtami Vilakku ritual.

Like his music, there is something calming about Balamurugan, thanks to his humility and ready smile. When THE WEEK visited him in Vaikom, he was taking a nap to get over the jet lag from his long flight (Germany-Colombo-Thiruvananthapuram). But when Kavalam Sreekumar, a thavil expert from Kerala who collaborates with him, told him that we were there to interview him, he promptly joined us. He sat for the interview without a shirt on, just like he does in his performances. “I started playing the nadaswaram at the age of five,” he says. “My appa, who was an aasthana vidhwan (a recognised musician) of the Nallur Kandaswamy Kovil for 40 years, was my first guru.”

Music runs in his family. Balamurugan’s grandfather, Ponnuswami, had moved to Jaffna from Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu in the first half of the last century, looking for opportunities to play the nadaswaram. Meanwhile, Balamurugan’s maternal grandfather was a mrudangam expert. Apart from the nadaswaram, Suppuswami could play the thavil, nattuvangam, ghatam and ganjira. As a child, Balamurugan was more inclined to play the thavil, a barrel-shaped percussion instrument, but his father insisted he concentrate on the nadaswaram. Occasionally, he would play the thavil at a temple without his father’s knowledge, and would end up getting an earful when he came to know about it.

Balamurugan studied only till class four, but his musical training continued for long because of his father. At eight, he was first sent to study the nadaswaram in the gurukulam tradition, which required him to reside at the guru’s house. Over the next four years, he studied under esteemed teachers like Shivaswami Pillai, Maapettapuram Shanmukhanadan Pillai and Thururaaja Pillai. When he was not training, he would repeatedly listen to tapes featuring maestros such as Maharajapuram Santhanam and Madurai Somu. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, when power supply was erratic in his village and battery sales were restricted over concerns of misuse in bomb-making, Balamurugan ingeniously overcame the challenge. He connected his audio cassette player to the dynamo wires of his bicycle, pedalling nonstop to keep the music on.

For a brief period, Balamurugan stayed at home. But when he was 13, Suppuswami again sent him for training, this time to the house of renowned maestro Alaveddy N.K. Padmanathan in Yazhpanam. “My guru came to Yazhpanam after the Indian Peace Keeping Force killed his son in Alaveddy,”recalls Balamurugan. He barely learned four varnams and seven or eight kritis there, but the life lessons he acquired and the techniques he mastered, including the art of blowing the nadaswaram from his lower belly, have stayed with him. “I used to serve at his home, closely observing his daily routine and noting the specific activities he engaged in throughout the day. His day typically began at 4am, and even when he was over 60, he maintained a disciplined practice routine. The sound of his practice served as my morning alarm,” he recalls. “There were no structured classes. When he felt like giving a lesson, he would call, ‘thambi inke vaa (come here, child).’He didn’t repeat instructions, and I had to be always prepared for an impromptu lesson.”

At 15, Balamurugan was home again. However, as the civil war escalated, his family, like many others, had to flee the village. “People abandoned the village, carrying whatever belongings they had in a desperate attempt to stay alive,” he says. “We all moved together like a procession along the Jaffna Road. There were deliberate attacks against those of us who were fleeing.” He remembers a girl walking ahead with her family. “Holding a tiffin box in her hand, she cried due to hunger, and her parents reassured her that they would eat soon,” he says. “Tragically, just a few minutes later, she died in an explosion right before our eyes. The most horrifying part was that we were unable to help them or anyone else, as we were also running for our lives.”

While living as refugees, Balamurugan’s family, comprising his parents and four siblings, slept in a trench within their makeshift shelter. “Every other family did the same to mitigate the impact in case of a bomb blast,” he says. “I distinctly remember how, during bombings and firings, my parents would gather us children in the middle and embrace us, hoping to shield us. Despite selling all our belongings, my father remained steadfast in his commitment to ensuring my musical education.” A nadaswaram master named Inavil Balakrishnan was also seeking shelter in a temporary shed. And, Suppuswami requested him to teach Balamurugan some keerthanams.

Nearly six months after leaving the village, the Sri Lankan army recaptured the region, and all those who were living in shelters started their journey back home. “We once again covered the entire distance of more than 30km to return to Nallur,” he recounts. “My father resumed working at the Murugan temple, occasionally sending me to play there. Soon, invitations from other temples started pouring in, and from 1997 onwards, I began participating in major festivals at nearby temples.”

Even at the age of 17, his father continued to make decisions for him. “There was a renowned musical duo named Ganamurthy-Panchamurthy. When Panchamurthy relocated to Colombo, Ganamurthy needed a nadaswaram artist for a concert and reached out to me,”recalls Balamurugan. “During that period, I was unable to make decisions independently. So I directed him to seek approval from my father. Consequently, I joined Ganamurthy and played alongside him for nearly five years. This opportunity allowed me to meet and interact with various masters and experts, listening to their conversations and musical performances.”

In 2003, he received his first international invitation from Singapore to perform at a temple. “Until then, my knowledge of the world was confined to a mere 30km radius,” he says, chuckling. Within a couple of years, Tamil expatriates began reaching out to him from various countries, including the UK, US and Australia.

Following the conversation with THE WEEK, Balamurugan got ready for a performance at the Vaikom temple. When he emerged, he was adorned with jewellery and resembled a deity. And that imagery showed he could embody the utmost divinity through his music, while embracing profound humanity in his everyday life.

―with B. Manojkumar

two-movies-animal-and-sam-bahadur-with-radically-different-male-leads-makes-us-question-the-meaning-of-heroism

Fri Dec 15 18:30:25 IST 2023

Who is a hero? Is it someone who performs an act of valour? Or is it someone who inspires adulation in others? Opinions differ widely. A Byronic hero, for example, is a “melancholy and rebellious young man, distressed by a terrible wrong he committed in the past”. To American poet Walt Whitman, a hero is someone who does a good deed to make the world more beautiful.

But, perhaps, the definition of a hero is not as fixed as these bards believed it to be. Historian Marshall Fishwick might have been closer to the mark when he said that the hero is always a barometer to the national climate of opinion. “Every hero mirrors the time and place in which he lives,” he said. This might explain why a movie with a toxic 'alpha male' as its hero is doing significantly better than another about a decorated war hero. After all, we live in times when trolls are the most vocal 'aficionados' on most subjects, and words like 'dystopian' and 'deep-fake' are the most searched words of the year.

Two movies which released on the same day (December 1) feature radically different heroes: Animal, a fictional story about Ranvijay, a man determined to avenge his father's attackers; and Sam Bahadur, inspired by the true story of India's first field marshal, Sam Manekshaw. It is telling that even before the release of the films, trade experts predicted that Animal, directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga and starring Ranbir Kapoor as Ranvijay, would earn more than Sam Bahadur, directed by Meghna Gulzar and starring Vicky Kaushal as Manekshaw.

And that is exactly what happened. Animal, made on a budget of Rs100 crore, grossed Rs700 crore worldwide in 10 days. Meanwhile, Sam Bahadur, made on a budget of Rs55 crore, grossed Rs75 crore worldwide. The opening figures, too, were higher for Animal than Sam Bahadur, thereby sparking a debate about the contrasting ideas of manhood in Bollywood, with Animal's toxic masculinity having more takers than the larger-than-life portrayal of a hero in Sam Bahadur.

Trade analyst and industry tracker Ramesh Bala says, “Animal is a mass-oriented, youth-friendly commercial film, whereas Sam Bahadur is more of a niche movie. The trailers set the tone for what was to come. Animal has the right mix of everything―action, drama and hero worship. As against that, Sam Bahadur appeals to the slightly middle-aged and older generation which is nostalgic about the exploits of the field marshal. It is a multiplex-oriented niche film, compared with Animal, which is meant for the single-screen goer who enjoys a good masala film. This explains the wide gap in the box office collections of the two films.”

Experts attribute Animal's success to the close relationship between popular culture and society, with one feeding off the other. The ideas and attitudes we embrace as a society will make it into films like Animal, they say. “Animal―which appeals to the lowest common denominator and peddles the crudest representations of masculinity, along with a healthy dose of Islamophobia and an attack on all kinds of minorities―holds a mirror to our society, as popular culture always does,” says writer Jerry Pinto. “We have always been that kind of society. It is just that now, with the current dispensation at the Centre and with the trolls, there is a greater nakedness about our darker side. Feminism has always been a thorn for most men, and it takes a lot of effort for any man to give up power. So, any attempt at sharing it must be met with a backlash, and films like Animal are that backlash.”

It also speaks of what society wants to watch―like a man who makes his wife listen to a black box recording of the first time they had sex in his private jet. As against the chivalrous field marshal who charmingly woos his to-be wife and holds open car doors for the ladies. Vanga's earlier films like Arjun Reddy (2017) and its Hindi remake, Kabir Singh (2019), had exactly the same kind of protagonist, and they worked well, too. Kabir Singh, starring Shahid Kapoor, grossed over Rs370 crore, becoming the second-highest grossing Hindi film of 2019. Vanga stands by his characters. Justifying a scene where Kabir slaps his girlfriend Preeti, he had said, “There's love between the two. If you don't have the liberty of slapping each other, then I don't see anything there."

Arjun Reddy might also have given Vanga a "formula for success", which he then applied to both Kabir Singh and Animal―to appease and appeal to the chauvinistic male ego. "Vanga is not making these movies just for the sake of making them,” says Bala. “It is his conviction about his protagonists. Animal is also a part of the alternate fare that Vanga is providing the masses, who are now being bombarded with notions of feminism, liberalism and cerebral content. Vanga knows what works, and he is making it.”

Faiz Ullah, assistant professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, agrees. While conceding that other films have explored a range of masculinities and more nuanced representations of gender relations, even if less successfully, Ullah says that filmmakers like Vanga are “determined to reverse whatever little gains one has seen regarding gender inclusion and the complexity of representation in the recent past”. He calls it a “visceral reaction” to the traction that feminist and social justice movements have been able to create around issues of equality, inclusion, dignity and justice, most recently after #MeToo.

Not many people in the industry have openly appreciated the film. Actor and producer Ramesh Babu and filmmaker S.S. Rajamouli chose to remain silent after watching. Upon facing backlash, actor Trisha Krishnan had to delete her social media post which called Animal a cult film. Film critic C.S. Venkateswaran says that that post-Covid, many films have been displaying more violence of the “over-the-top, visceral, and graphic kind”. "It is reflective of the huge amount of hatred and misogyny in society, and these films are pandering to it and in turn magnifying it,” he says.

Yet, Pinto feels there is hope, because everything happens in waves. “In the 1970s and 1980s there was a lot of violent cinema, then in the 1990s there was romantic cinema and so, this is another such wave which will pass." As for who a hero really is, perhaps it is merely a matter of perspective. After all, for the mother in Siegfried Sassoon's poem, 'The Hero', her coward son who died in the war was a hero. And for many people today, the man in Animal who asked a woman to lick his shoe to prove her love is a hero.

kalyani-menon-cements-her-place-in-the-pantheon-of-indian-music-legends

Fri Dec 15 18:26:58 IST 2023

The video of the Maharaja Swathi Thirunal composition, ‘Alarshara Parithapam’, which released in October, opens with the photo of a young, sari-clad woman gazing into a future that only she can see. There is a purity about her, as though whatever dream she is dreaming is shielding her from reality. This photograph of singer Kalyani Menon, who died two years ago at the age of 80, was taken in 1983 by her son, cinematographer Rajiv Menon, when he was first experimenting with window light.

“There was a kind of uniqueness in the way amma sang,” says Rajiv. “She had a quiet ownership of her art.”

He recalls that dinner table discussions always revolved around the arts when she was there. She wanted to sensitise her sons, Rajiv and Karun, to the arts from a young age. When Rajiv took to photography―the baby steps that took him to cinematography―his mother always posed for him. This latest music video―titled ‘In search of the dark lord’―is the second Swathi Thirunal composition sung by Kalyani to be video-graphed. The first, ‘Aliveni Enthu Cheyvu’, released in 2017, and has got over three million views on YouTube.

Like that one, this, too, is given a contemporary treatment with a new-age twist while remaining true to its classical roots. The song features Kalyani’s granddaughters, Lakshmi and Saraswati, as they search for their elusive Lord. The music was produced and composed by Mahesh Raghavan, who is known for his fusion works, like the viral Carnatic version of Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’.

“When I came down once to Chennai from Dubai, where I was living, Jayaram [Ramachandran, who directed the video] took me to Kalyani aunty, who had a special affinity for Swathi Thirunal compositions,” says Raghavan. “We were sitting around the dining table at her house and talking. We decided to casually record with a mobile recorder. She sang [both compositions] in just one take―’Aliveni Enthu Cheyvu’ in kurunji raga and ‘Alarshara Parithapam’ in suruti raga. That day, Jayaram and I decided that we would definitely have to release them as music videos.”

Born to Balakrishnan and Rajamma Menon in Kerala, Kalyani was first musically trained under the famous guru, Cherthala Sivaraman Nair, who, incidentally, also trained singer K.J. Yesudas around the same time. She first sang for the Malayalam film, Abala (1973). Her first Tamil movie was Nallathoru Kudumbam (1979), with music by Ilaiyaraja. But it was her song, ‘Nee Varuvai Ena Naan Irunthen’, in the Tamil film Sujatha (1980), that catapulted Kalyani to musical royalty. Tragically, this song of melancholy and longing was recorded a few months after the sudden death of her husband, naval officer K.K. Menon, at the age of 40.

For a long time, Kalyani dedicated herself to devotionals, until Indian music’s Mozart A.R. Rahman brought her back to the world of films with a song in Kadhalan (1994). Kalyani worked extensively with Rahman in several films like Muthu (1995), Alai Payuthey (2000) and Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa (2010).

Kalyani had a great following among music lovers, with her pure and pristine renditions that could touch your soul. Even in her death, her voice lives on, welcoming a new generation into its lyrical depths.